This is not a book, but rather an Atlantic essay puffed into a $25 sale item with grotesquely large type and comically wide margins. The typography offends the eye almost as much as the content offends the mind. It is a barely coherent rant against ex-friends and political opponents. It is a tantrum from a liberal who expected a univeralist millennium after the fall of Communism and discovered to her horror that national identity still matters.
Half a century of Nazi and Communist occupation nearly crushed the spirit of the nations of Eastern Europe; a decade ago they approached the point of no return for demographic extinction. The new nationalists who now govern Hungary and Poland, the objects of Applebaum’s direst imprecations, have rebuilt vibrant economies, raised birth rates, and established viable democracies out of nearly-ruined Soviet colonies. Despite their missteps—which are frequent and sometimes grave—they have restored hope for the future to lands which not long ago seemed like a cemetary of the human spirit.
Anne Applebaum’s list of little Hitlers includes some ex-friends who came to her 1999 New Year’s Eve party in Poland, when her husband Radek Sikorski was a foreign ministry official, as well as former acquaintances like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The renegade party guests somehow morphed from democracy activists into Nazis, because they suffer from “authoritarian personalities,” Applebaum avers. Also on her list are “the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with differences, the British right and the American right, too.” It is hard to separate Applebaum’s ideological rancor at friends who moved away from the liberal dogmas of 1989 and her personal disappointment over her husband’s career.
Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to Applebaum’s opposition to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.
This account of Brexit, like everything else in the book, is utterly mendacious. Whatever one thinks of the “Leave” party’s case, Britain faced an authentic crisis over European Community-mandated immigration. Applebaum does not mention that Britain was inundated by 300,000 Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after those impoverished countries joined the EC in 2014, nor that Britain petitioned the EC in vain for relief from mass immigration. Democracy appeals to Applebaum only when people vote the way she thinks they should. In a textbook example of what William Empson called unintended irony, she champions the imperious, unelected bureaucracy of the European Community as the savior of democracy against alleged authoritarians who won a popular plebescite by a margin of 52 to 48 percent.
Leo Strauss ridiculed the sort of polemical caricature he dubbed reductio ad Hitlerum, and if it is possible to write a caricature of a caricature, Applebaum has managed it. She trots out Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “authoritarian personality,” that is a lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’” Along with Arendt, Applebaum quotes the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who claimed that a bias towards authoritarianism stemmed from such personality traits as repressed homosexuality. Whether one takes Arendt and Adorno seriously or not, when they used the term “authoritarian personality” they meant to reference actual supporters of Hitler and Stalin who murdered tens of millions of people.
Applebaum then substitutes the qualifier “illiberal” for “authoritarian,” expecting the reader to assume that they are the same thing. If that sounds incoherent, it is not my fault. What she means by an “illiberal” is someone who “wants to undermine courts in order to give himself more power.” This refers to Poland’s Law and Justice Party, which denied her husband Radek Sikorski a hoped-for ministerial position by the nefarious means of winning a popular election. The reader is expected to make the leap from Polish judicial reform to death camps.
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