Anne Applebaum is an acerbic right-wing journalist who specializes in anti-communism. Titles like Gulag, Iron Curtain and Red Famine appear at regular intervals. Her latest book, however, is about her own tribe, the intellectual right, and perhaps more interesting. A Never Trumper, Applebaum is appalled at the role her erstwhile friends are playing as ideologues for the new right-wing forces that have entered office in the past decade. Back in the nineties, she writes of her extensive conservative milieu, ‘it felt we were all on the same team’. Today, former political allies cross the street to avoid speaking to each other. A profound divide runs through what used to be the right, she notes, in the us but also in Britain, France, Spain, Poland and Hungary. While some conservatives still support the political idea of the West and its international institutions, others actively oppose the liberal-democratic order. How to explain this transformation?

Twilight of Democracy’s answer draws heavily on Applebaum’s personal experience of right-wing intellectual circles in London, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and, latterly, Madrid. Born in 1964, the daughter of a wealthy dc lawyer and artistic mother, she was an ardent young Reaganite, educated at Yale, the lse and Oxford, and appointed as the Economist’s correspondent in Warsaw at the age of 24. In 1992 she married Radek Sikorski, son of right-wing émigré Poles and a Bullingdon Club chum of Boris Johnson’s, and returned to London to join the Spectator. There, under the ‘brilliant’ Dominic Lawson, she reports, the tone of every editorial meeting was ‘arch’, every office conversation amusing, coining headlines like ‘Gdansking on Thin Ice’. Enoch Powell was simultaneously a revered authority and a figure of fun. Admiration for Thatcher was universal. There were summer parties and lengthy lunches, champagne and oysters at the Savoy with the proprietor of the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black.

Applebaum became an honorary member of this post-Thatcherite group of ‘nostalgic conservatives’—nostalgic not so much for Empire, she writes, as for a world in which England made the rules. It included Simon Heffer, Roger Scruton and John O’Sullivan, Thatcher’s speechwriter, soon to become editor of the National Review, where he would hire Sikorski as a roving correspondent. Meanwhile Johnson, the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, was lobbing jolly stories of eu regulatory excesses into Tory circles, to enjoy the ‘amazing crash’ of greenhouse glass. Moving back to Poland in the late nineties—Sikorski was smoothing nato relations and launching a political career—Applebaum was again surrounded by fellow thinkers. Their party guests were journalists, diplomats, junior ministers, members of ‘what the Poles called the right’: conservatives and anti-communists, but also free-market liberals, ‘all believing in a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to integration in the eu’.

Back in Washington, where their good friend David Frum was crafting Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, Applebaum wrote for William Kristol’s Weekly Standard and Roger Kimball’s New Criterion. Sikorski ran a programme on the trans-Atlantic alliance for old and new nato members at the American Enterprise Institute, where Rafael Bardaji, a genial Spanish Zionist who, as Aznar’s security advisor, steered the country into the Iraq war, was a dinner guest. Meanwhile Applebaum was deepening her ties with anti-communist intellectuals in the now happily capitalist Eastern Europe. In Budapest, she applauded her friend Mária Schmidt’s newly opened House of Terror museum, whose first room justly had a screen of Nazi propaganda opposite a matching Soviet one.

Fast forward to 2020, and this happy scene has vanished. Schmidt has become an aficionada of Breitbart News. The proprietor of the storied weekly Figyelo˝, she assails anti-Orbán ngos as mercenaries for Soros and attacks Applebaum’s Washington Post pieces on Hungary as ‘arrogant and ignorant’. O’Sullivan is also in Budapest, installed at the Danube Institute—which he defends to Applebaum as ‘conservative in culture, classically liberal in economics, Atlanticist in foreign policy’—and escorting Orbán to international conferences of the intellectual new right. Back in London, Heffer has become an ardent Brexiteer, denouncing the eu as a foreign power which overrules Britain’s courts and elected government, and welcoming an upsurge in national consciousness that hadn’t been seen since the Blitz spirit of the Second World War. In England: An Elegy, Scruton has succumbed to cultural despair, blaming the eu for boarded-up town centres and wastelands of illuminated concrete. The Spectator under Fraser Nelson has gone soft on Orbán, too, staging a joint event with the Századvég Foundation, a Fidesz think tank. In the us, Kimball is churning out pro-Trump pieces for American Greatness and comparing congressional Democrats during the Trump impeachment to the mob that sided with Barabbas. Laura Ingraham, fondly remembered from the early nineties as a young Reaganite in a leopard-print mini-skirt, is the 45th President’s go-to interviewer on Fox News. And the jovial Bardaji is masterminding publicity for Vox, Spain’s new hard-right party, with help from Netanyahu’s spin doctors, who have also put him in touch with Trump’s short-lived national security advisors, Michael Flynn and H. R. McMaster. Bardaji proudly claims credit for a video of Vox leader Santiago Abascal fording rivers and scaling mountains, with a soundtrack of soaring music and the slogan, Hacer España Grande Otra Vez—Make Spain Great Again.

To make sense of this, Applebaum turns to Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals. In 1927, Benda saw the clercs of his time falling prey to political passions and betraying the central task of the intellectual, the search for truth. Though not strictly comparable to the rise of fascism, the 21st-century ‘twilight of democracy’ has parallels with it, Applebaum thinks. Similar treasonous intellectuals play an important role in undermining the values of the Western liberal order and envisaging new systems. In doing so, they exploit the ‘authoritarian predisposition’ of sections of the population that cannot tolerate the complexity of contemporary society: the shocks of the economic and refugee crises, but also the increasingly fragmented and cantankerous forms of political discourse.

In Applebaum’s view, only the latest revolution in the means of communication, comparable to that of Gutenberg, can explain the global rise of iconoclastic new rights in countries with widely varied economic cycles and political cultures—Brazil, the Philippines, Poland, the us. The post-war media of national broadcasting corporations and a centrist broadsheet press had created a ‘single national conversation’, a common debate with shared narratives, symbolized by fdr’s fireside chats. In the world of internet communications, political and moral authority is fragmented, while social-media algorithms actively distort perceptions of the world through confirmation bias and upgrade more emotive content. In this hyper-partisan environment, servants of the state are readily portrayed as having been ‘captured’ by political opponents. The new clercs—ideologues, journalists, spin doctors—are adept at deploying these social-media tools to reach those predisposed to authoritarianism and seeking certainties in complex times.