Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 148 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism.
From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
Customer Reviews
Informative / Short / Insightful / Interesting / Somewhat Alarming
Put this one in your “must read asap” stack.
Well written skeed
The author is a fine writer, in fact I have very much enjoyed many of her other works. And at this book war what it claimed to be, an examination of what nation and country mean, it would likely be a fine work. But that is not what the author is up to.
For the first half of the book she sticks to a fairly genial tone explaining how she has diverged from the conservative friends of her youth. From there it turns into an anti-trump screed, and like most screeds it descends into baseless ad hominem attacks linking her enemies to every bad actor of the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is sad. This could have been a vehicle to explore the splintering of the western coalition that defeated the Soviet Union and its echo in the newly free East.