Twilight of Democracy Quotes

“Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“To some, the precariousness of the current moment seems frightening, and yet this uncertainty has always been there. The liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, or Václav Havel never promised anything permanent. The checks and balances of Western constitutional democracies never guaranteed stability. Liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens: participation, argument, effort, struggle. They always required some tolerance for cacophony and chaos, as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Plato feared the “false and braggart words” of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be “complex and frightening,” as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The point of all of these changes was not to make government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group—all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people:”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too. Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“When people say they are angry about “immigration,” in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“If the left located its gloom in the destructive force of capitalism, the power of racism, and the presence of the U.S. military abroad, the Christian right located its disappointment in what it perceived as the moral depravity, the decadence, the racial mixing, and above all the irreversible secularism of modern America.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Modern democratic institutions, built for an era with very different information technology, provide little comfort for those who are angered by the dissonance. Voting, campaigning, the formation of coalitions—all of this seems retrograde in a world where other things happen so quickly.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“in most Western countries, most of the time, there was a single, national debate. Opinions differed, but at least most people were arguing within agreed parameters. That world has vanished.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster—also in violation of the constitution—firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers’ expense.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“This is not to say that immigration and economic pain are irrelevant to the current crisis: clearly they are genuine sources of anger, distress, discomfort, and division. But as a complete explanation for political change—as an explanation for the emergence of whole new classes of political actors—they are insufficient. Something else is going on right now, something that is affecting very different democracies, with very different economics and very different demographics, all over the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“the “authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The founders themselves were not so certain: their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Over a crackly video link between Australia and Poland, she reminded me that the “authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them; the dullness, by contrast, of the bureaucracy and the courts; all of this has unnerved that part of the population that prefers unity and homogeneity. Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism