Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán Twilight of Democracy: the failure of politics and the parting of friends
by Anne Applebaum (Allen Lane, £16.99)
Felix M. Larkin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western-style liberal democracy was in the ascendant as never before. During the previous two centuries, it had triumphed over monarchs and emperors, over American secessionists, over fascism and now over communism.
We were all confident back then that, to quote Lincoln, speaking extemporaneously during the Civil War, on the battle field of Gettysburg, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”.
We are not so confident today, and this book attempts to analyse how and why democracy is under challenge everywhere from the ‘new right’ – even in the US and in Britain, two polities with strong democratic traditions.
Historian
The author, Anne Applebaum, is an American journalist and historian who has also worked in Britain and is married to a former centre-right Minister for Foreign Affairs in Poland. She too would identify as centre-right in politics. Her conservatism is, however, that of Edmund Burke – which she defines as a “small c conservatism that is suspicious of rapid change in all its forms”.
Applebaum suggests that there is no single explanation – no ‘grand theory or a universal solution’w – for the rise of the ‘new right’”
But conservatism has now been hijacked by the ‘new right’ – and Applebaum argues that its gurus “want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists”.
They are, she says, “more Bolshevik than Burkean”.
She has watched the ‘new right’ take over in Poland and Hungary, and observed the rise of the ‘new right’ in France and Spain, and she writes eloquently about those movements as well as about the advent of Trump and Johnson.
And she writes with the benefit of past friendship with some of the politicians who have made the transition from centre-right to ‘new right’. Such is the passion – the intolerance – of the ‘new right’ that many of those friendships were sundered when Applebaum failed to embrace the new orthodoxy.
While politicians of the ‘new right’ in their various guises throughout Europe and in America operate perforce within the democratic system, they show scant respect for its conventions and rules – including freedom of speech and freedom of the press. They therefore represent, in Applebaum’s view, an existential threat to democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, our optimism about the democratic future post-1989 was naïve.
Conditions
Applebaum suggests that there is no single explanation – no “grand theory or a universal solution” – for the rise of the ‘new right’. It is, however, not without precedent. She reminds us in what is perhaps the starkest passage in her book: “Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”
The particular conditions that have now created opportunities for the ‘new right’ include, most obviously, immigration and the after-effects of the banking and economic crisis of 2008 and the following years.
Other factors identified by Applebaum are nostalgia for an idealised past, the culture of meritocracy that demoralises those who fail to make the grade (for example, in educational achievement), spurious conspiracy theories, a disregard for knowledge and expertise, and the contentious and polarised nature of political discourse in the media – especially the social media.
There is also the simple appeal of authoritarianism to, in Applebaum’s words, “people who cannot tolerate complexity…[or who are] suspicious of people with different ideas”.
What distinguishes the ‘new right’ from far-left movements is that, while both aim ‘to destroy what exists’, the ‘new right’ ideologues – unlike those on the far left – have no clear vision of what would replace the present order of society. Their impulses are fundamentally negative: against immigration, against socially liberal measures, against the European Union. The last of these is particularly bizarre since the European Union was the noble creation of centre-right Christian Democrats with a shared commitment to the preservation of peace and democratic values in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.
Such manifestations of positive conservatism are alien to the ‘new right’.