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Anne Applebaums new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, begins cinematically, with a party she threw at a Polish manor house to mark the dawn of the new millennium.

Applebaums husband was then the deputy foreign minister in Polands center-right government; she was a right-leaning journalist who would go on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Soviet gulag. Many of the guests came from the cosmopolitan anti-Communist intelligentsia. About half of them, she writes, no longer speak to the other half.

In Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum tries to understand why so many of her old friends conservatives who once fancied themselves champions of democracy and classical liberalism have become paranoid right-wing populists. Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? she asks. Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?

To Applebaum, todays right, in both America and Europe, has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War. Until recently, she writes, the right was dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and speech, economic integration, international institutions, the trans-Atlantic alliance and a political idea of the West. What happened?

Like Applebaum, Im astonished to see erstwhile Cold Warriors abase themselves before Vladimir Putin. But I think shes working from a mistaken premise about what once constituted conservatism. Liberal democracy per se was never the animating passion of the trans-Atlantic right anti-Communism was. When the threat of Communist expansion disappeared, so did most of the rights commitment to a set of values that, its now evident, were purely instrumental.

Reading Applebaums book, I kept thinking of an infamous 1981 interview given by the Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater. In the 1950s, Atwater said, Southern conservatives would just repeat a vile racial slur. By 1968, that hurts you, backfires, he said. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. From there, right-wing politics grew even more abstract, so now youre talking about cutting taxes, and all these things youre talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites, he said.

There were always some American conservatives who really were in it for laissez-faire economics. But its now clear that those conservatives were wrong about their movements animating passion. So too with those on the center-right who thought their comrades were opposed to authoritarianism on principle.

Back when the idea of a President Trump still seemed an absurdist impossibility, the political theorist Corey Robin wrote, in his 2011 book The Reactionary Mind, about the recurring argument that conservatism had slipped its sober mooring to become populist and radical.

He saw this as a misunderstanding of the right. In his view, reaction has always had a revolutionary edge. Conservatism, he wrote, seeks to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses. Seen this way, corrupt autocratic populists like Trump and Viktor Orban of Hungary fit quite neatly into the tradition Applebaum was once part of.

In her book, Applebaum explores the purported ideological evolution of the Fox News host and Trump sycophant Laura Ingraham, an anti-immigrant demagogue who has three adopted immigrant children. In the 1990s, Applebaum associated Ingraham with a kind of post-Cold War optimism, an American conservatism that was energetic, reformist and generous.

But its hard to see what was ever reformist, never mind generous, about Ingraham. She first came to public notice as the editor of a conservative college newspaper who sent an undercover reporter to a meeting of a gay student group and published attendees intimate revelations.

Many adults, of course, transcend their college selves, but Ingraham never seemed to. It was 2003, not 2016, that Ingraham complained about police departments, hospitals, courts, schools and government agencies that now prefer hiring multilingual employees owing to the number of illegal and non-English-speaking immigrants in the community. Her conversion to Trumpism doesnt require much explanation.

Im genuinely grateful for the moral courage and concrete political work of anti-Trump conservatives. It cant be easy to break with the politics and the people that have defined ones life. Im aware, too, that the left has its own ingrained pathologies; Applebaums center-right views were shaped by the lived reality of Soviet Communism.

Twilight of Democracy is certainly worth reading. Applebaum has a keen understanding of how conspiracism and corruption intertwine to suffocate democracy. Her description of Polands Law and Justice government, which has put a fantasy at the heart of government policy, helps illuminate the role Trumps obsession with the deep state has played in our own rolling catastrophe.

But theres no mystery in the rights surrender to authoritarianism, because for many of the people Applebaum describes, it wasnt a surrender at all. It was a liberation.

Originally posted here:

Twilight of the Liberal Right - The New York Times