Review of "Twilight of Democracy : The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends" by Anne Applebaum

 I hate this book so much it's hard to know where to start. It's ignorant - full of little factual errors like the suggestion - partly withdrawn, but still left hanging - that apartheid South Africa was a 'one-party state', or that Bolshevik Russia invented the one-party state (it didn't, that honour falls to Fascist Italy, which barely gets a mention in the book).  It's uninterested in any of the intellectual history or political theory with which anyone else has ever reflected on the issues she is touching on - Benda's Traison des Clercs gets mentioned all of the time, but there's no mention of Talmon's Origins of Totalitarian Democracy - not that I particularly like it, but it's a serious attempt to deal with the tension between democracy and liberty. This isn't. It's an annoying partisan rant, a whine that her kind of conservative is losing out to another kind.

She never finds it possible to talk about the excesses or crimes of the far right without talking about the far left, sometimes suggesting that the right have simply copied their bad practices and ideas from the left...as if two hundred years of lynchings and Jim Crow and massacres of Blacks by Whites is balanced by the pitiful armed struggle of the Weather Underground. She idealises Thatcher and Reagan, as if their regimes were characterised by a wise, balanced and generous liberalism. One of the things she doesn't like about the Law and Justice Party in Poland is its use of anti-gay prejudice to mobilise its base...conveniently forgetting who put the anti-gay Section 28 on the statute book in the UK. And Thatcher's description of the striking miners as The Enemy Within. And her abolition of the Greater London Council when it elected the wrong people. And her jailing of local councillors who stood up to her restriction of local authority budgets to make municipalities introduce service cuts. 

And the idea that Reagan was a generous, honest, optimistic conservative? Oliver North anyone? and Iran-Contra? And the CIA aid to Bin Laden in Afghanistan? 

There is, of course, no attempt to understand the way in globalisation has failed the people who are now turning to alternatives...I'm sorry that they are mainly turning to nationalist ones, but she doesn't have anything to say about what wasn't working before. The race to the bottom for wages and workers' rights, which has been a big part of why European businesses relocated to Poland. China doesn't even get a mention in the whole book, though Trump's opposition to trade deals with China is a big part of his appeal. 

Worst of all is that the book doesn't actually deal with the most important aspect of the people that she's talking about - how they've managed to create a 'democratic' version of authoritarianism. Law and Justice, and Orban in Poland, and Putin in Russia, have not created a classic fascist state with other parties banned and uniformed militias in the street. Instead they've got better at doing capitalist democracy than their centrist, soft-left and traditional Christian Democrat opponents. They tweak the rules of democracy to favour their parties, without needing to ban or even right elections. They take control of the media in their countries, but they mainly leave it in private hands rather than take it all under state control. Which means that it doesn't look all that different from say Tory Britain, or Berlusconi's Italy. In fact a proper analysis of the decline of democracy would spend a lot more time in Italy, looking at how private and state control of media interact, and 'reforms' of electoral law to favour the ruling party, have played out.

I'd like to mention in parting the Swiss-based Democracy Barometer, which has a much more sophisticated understanding of democracy than she does...it looks at the different aspects of how political democracies function, including the representativeness of their electoral systems, the funding of political parties and controls on election spending, the access to media...