Pulitzer-winning author tracks down the political schisms that brought us populism

TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE FAILURE OF POLITICS

AND THE PARTING OF FRIENDS Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane, £16.99

IN Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum charts the fracturing of the Transatlantic right. The book is part-memoir, part-polemic. Over the past 20 years, the conservative movement has split into two factions, Applebaum contends: traditional neoliberals, who believe in free-markets, democratic institutions and the rule of law, and populists, who thrive on division, confusion, and nationalist paranoia.

Applebaum – a journalist and historian based variously, in Poland, Britain and the US – belongs to the first faction. A veteran contributor to the Spectator, Sunday Times and Washington Post, she has enjoyed access to rightwing elites for decades.

Until recently, she was on good terms with Boris Johnson, a man she now describes as an “all-consuming” narcissist with a “penchant for fabrication.” (“Nobody serious wants to leave the EU,” she quotes the future prime minister as saying in 2014. “Business doesn’t want it. The City doesn’t want it. It won’t happen.”)

In 2008 she broke with the Republican Party after John McCain added Sarah Palin – “a proto-Trump” – to his presidential ticket. McCain “never spoke to me again,” she writes. In Poland, Applebaum and her husband, the politician Radek Sikorski, have become targets of antiSemitic propaganda linked to the country’s ruling Law and Justice

Party. “Whether I like it or not, I am part of this story,” she laments.

Applebaum’s premise is mainstream conservatives – cautious, committed, above all, to the cause of individual freedom – have been sidelined by extremists. She is particularly interested in the so-called “clerks” of authoritarianism: the writers, bloggers, and intellectual agitators – think Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon – who spread disinformation to undermine democratic norms.

Applebaum’s narrative sweeps across Europe and North America. In Hungary, she meets Maria Schmidt, an anti-communist scholar turned cheerleader for the Orban regime. In Spain, she profiles Vox, a nationalist party cultivating a form of Trumpism.

In Britain, she interviews John Sullivan, who wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher but now thinks the break-up of the UK is a price worth paying for Brexit. And in the US, she explores the “dark pessimism” of Donald Trump’s media supporters, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who believes America is being destroyed by mass immigration.

The common theme uniting these disparate political threads, Applebaum says, is a desire for simplicity and the need to impose order on a disordered world. The end of the Thatcher and Reagan eras, coupled with the West’s triumph in the Cold War, left British and American conservatives with a deep sense of cultural despair, culminating in the revanchist campaigns of Brexit and Trump. In continental Europe, rightwing anxiety over the erosion of national borders produced new forms of militant euroscepticism, laced with Islamophobia.

Class and inequality aren’t major factors in the rise of the alt-right, Applebaum insists: “The vast majority of people [in the West] are not starving. If we describe them as ‘poor’, it’s because they lack things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago.” What matters is the growth of “anti-pluralism” and, in the age of social media echo-chambers, an aversion to “fierce debates.”

AT heart, Twilight of Democracy is a rallying cry for an embattled neoliberal establishment; a warning, directed at the centre of the political spectrum, about the fragility of modern democratic culture and its system of open government. Without constant vigilance, Applebaum concludes, that system may not survive the “precariousness” of our current moment. “Liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens: argument, effort, struggle,” she writes. “They required some tolerance for cacophony and chaos, as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos.”

As you might expect from a celebrated historian of Soviet power, Applebaum is a forceful and intelligent writer. The splintered conservative social milieu she depicts is fascinating, both for its autobiographical insights and as a record of the internecine battles that have taken place on the Anglo-American right in recent years.

Less convincing, however, is her account of the schism’s origins. The problem, she says, isn’t “closedmindedness.”

It is “simplemindedness.” Voters embrace authoritarian figureheads because they prefer unity over division and familiarity over the unknown. Demographic change is confusing, so it provokes a cultural backlash. Political discourse is contentious, so it is spurned in favour of more binary narratives. This logic is both reductive and self-serving: centrists can cope with the complexity of the 21st century, Applebaum – a centrist – says, but “simple-minded” populists can’t.

Applebaum also mistakes her sense of personal displacement for a fundamental shift in conservative ideology. Indeed, she overstates the extent of the rupture in rightwing politics and downplays key elements of continuity between different generations of conservative leaders.

APPLEBAUM assumes – and expects the reader to assume – that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were democrats in a way that Johnson and Trump aren’t. But Thatcher cleaved away entire layers of local government and used the police to suppress strikes.

Likewise, Trump may have entered the White House on a promise to “drain the swamp”, but he has governed as a relatively conventional Republican, cutting taxes for the rich, ditching vast swathes of federal environmental regulation and amplifying the grievances of white

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky, Pocket, £5.99

What is the book about?

The story takes place in a series of letters to an unknown figure by Charlie, a shy teenager with a deep love of books and music over the period of his first year at high school. He makes friends with a group of seniors and has a kind English teacher. It focuses on family, friendship, first love and the journey of recovery from mental health issue.

Who is it aimed at?

To those around 14 and 15 or older.

What was your favourite part?

I loved everything about Charlie’s character. Often coming of age novels are written from the perspective of those who are already bold at the beginning but this one is different. Watching someone develop into more of an active participant in their youth without changing themselves entirely to be more extroverted is refreshing.

What was your least favourite part?

It’s easy to get attached to the characters, and the downside is that with the heavier ideas of mental illness and abuse, come possibly a few tears.

Why should someone buy this book?

This book is in every way inspiring, emotional and insightful.

GEMMA McLAUGHLIN