...the better book to buy for insight into what Trump's rise and rule really mean—here and abroad—for democracy in our time ... Applebaum brings to these judgments the gravitas of a historian, winner of the Pulitzer Prize ... Given all this weighty material, it is remarkable that Applebaum can make her treatment of it edifying. Yet it is as smoothly readable and impressively reasoned as her columns from 17 years at The Washington Post and her more recent writing in The Atlantic ... we can find both cause for concern and a reason to hope.

... an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War. It can be read with profit even if you disagree, as I do, with the thesis it is wrapped up in ... This is an angry book ... Applebaum’s favourite explanation, at least for the rise of deviant populist leaders, is personal inadequacy and resentment of the successful, competent meritocrats of mainstream politics...This is all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish. She details the lies and exaggerations of the Brexit camp without mentioning the lies and exaggerations promoted by Remainers – most conspicuously, forecasts of economic collapse – which had the backing of the state machine. She also promotes that old canard that Brexit was driven by imperial nostalgia and a longing for ‘a world in which England made the rules’. That may have been true of a few eccentric figures hanging around The Spectator in the 1990s, but one of the striking things about postwar British history is precisely the lack of nostalgia for empire on the Right, thanks in part to the absence of significant settler populations in Britain’s colonies (unlike in France’s) ... a highly readable example of the new genre of liberal catastrophism. Like others who write in this manner, Applebaum is not careful enough to distinguish between genuine social conservatives and the authoritarians and bigots who inhabit the fringes of the new conservative movements ... She also turns a blind eye to the failings of her own tribe.

Her historical expertise and knowledge of contemporary Europe and the United States illuminate what is eternal and distinctive about the political perils facing us today ... Twilight of Democracy offers many lessons on the long-standing struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But perhaps the most important is how fragile democracy is: Its survival depends on choices made every day by elites and ordinary people.

... engrossing ... This is a political book; it is also intensely personal, and the more powerful for it ... My empathy with the author takes a dip when she turns her attention to Britain and a dinner she had with Boris Johnson, when he was mayor of London...why was she friends with him in the first place? It was clear from the get-go what Johnson was – a charlatan. Why were people on the centre-right so titillated by him and his set?

For Applebaum, the question is how her peers—all of whom, at the turn of the century, supported 'the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market' consensus that dominated not only center-right but also most center-left politics after the fall of communism—have come to avow reactionary conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia and to show a slavish loyalty to demagogues like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Twilight of Democracy is her attempt at an answer; in other words, it is Applebaum’s effort to explain why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists ... Insofar as the book offers intimate portraits of the sorts of intellectuals who have ended up working to empower the far right, it’s a valuable document ... Applebaum makes explicit that she is not setting out to explain what makes today’s populist strongmen tick nor what makes ordinary voters support them, but specifically why some in her orbit—all highly educated, urbane, cosmopolitan journalists, academics, and political operatives—have joined their cause. Up to a point, her main argument is persuasive: that her former friends are motivated less by ideological conviction or material suffering than by humiliation and resentment. In particular, they are driven by a sense that their natural talents have been inadequately recognized and rewarded under the supposedly meritocratic rules of a liberal elite that has dismissed them as mediocrities. They are the losers of liberalism’s cultural hegemony—or so they claim—and in the illiberal politics of the far right, they have found a way to win. It’s a plausible theory, but implicit within it is an unexamined assumption that liberal meritocracy has worked and will continue to work on its own terms. Applebaum’s blind faith in the center-right strains of neoliberalism and meritocratic mobility also conveniently absolves her and her remaining friends of any responsibility for the present crisis.

Are these enablers true believers or just cynical opportunists? Do they believe the lies they tell and the conspiracies they invent or are they simply greedy for wealth and power? The answers she reaches are frankly equivocal, which in our era of dueling absolutes is commendable if sometimes a little frustrating ... less substantial, a magazine essay expanded into a book that is part rumination, part memoir ... A recurring problem in this book is that most of the clercs refuse to talk to Applebaum, leaving her dependent on the public record and the wisdom of mutual acquaintances. But she makes the best of what she’s got. She is most sure-footed when appraising intellectuals who have lived in, and escaped, the Soviet orbit ... apparently was supposed to have finished with a hopeful appraisal of her children’s generation, but that finale was interrupted by the coronavirus, and it leaves her — like the rest of us — at a loss.

Some will sympathise with [Applebaum's] dismay at these former comrades’ abandonment of political pluralism, and her anger at their toleration of state-sanctioned antisemitism. Others will instead see only the bewilderment of an entitled liberal elite that has suddenly discovered that it can no longer take its own ascendancy for granted ... [Applebaum] deploys the roles of both historian and hostess to impressive effect. She does not spare her own conservative tribe ... the most intriguing narrative here is of the emerging Leninism of the right in Europe and America ... The fact that no one in this group seems to understand why they keep losing elections to populists, left and right, is in itself revealing. However, it would be a mistake to see this book simply as a socialite’s plea for moderation. Nothing so anodyne. Twilight of Democracy is, if anything, a rather penetrating work of ethnography, a novel study of the intellectual tribe to which the author belongs.

... [Applebaum] joins her professional skills to her personal experiences, producing an often sobering, sometimes shocking, but never despairing account of the rise of authoritarianism in the West ... One of the many welcome aspects to her book is its acknowledgment that democracy, like any other form of government, is not forever. It cannot be a machine that would go of itself; it is a machine that, instead, goes only as long as its users care for it ... Applebaum provides a tour of the gallery of rogues who have commandeered the machine. Her portraits are always sharp and often lethal ... Applebaum rightly refuses a one-size-fits-all theory to explain why individuals like Polish journalist Jacek Kurski and Hungarian historian María Schmidt not only drank the Kool-Aid of authoritarianism, but now gladly serve it up to others ... Inevitably, Applebaum sometimes too quickly jogs past individuals, tossing them a glance that neglects more than it nets.

The language of British politics has changed. But it is a step too far to equate the voters and those committed to exit as authoritarian or participating in the 'twilight of democracy' ... This points to a dilemma in assessing the health of democracies. A majority of voters have supported the regimes that are a cause of such concern in this book. Their voice, they may contend, is now vented and recognised by governments they elected after decades of exclusion. These voters and their leaders could declare that democracy is finally working ... This is where Twilight of Democracy is of real value. The author warns of the use of technologies that are fundamentally changing the practice of politics and advocacy ... The personal nature of this book does not always sit easily with the universal nature of its warnings and prophesies ... The risk of twilight of our western democratic model, the uncertainty of what may follow – a brighter dawn or a darker night – require that all warnings be urgently considered. This book demands such consideration.

... compelling ... There is no single reason that liberal democracy is in such a precarious state, Applebaum notes. In crisp, elegant prose, she explores several explanations, some of which readers may find familiar.

If anyone is well-placed to write about the global rise of authoritarian regimes and their polarization of society, it is Applebaum. I thought this would be a meaty book, but I was surprised that the slim volume read more like a longer version of one of her Atlantic Magazine articles ... Toggling back and forth from gossipy vignettes to weighty historical allusions to contemporary political analysis, her narrative reads more like an unusually intelligent and international dinner party conversation than a serious book ... Despite Applebaum’s very personal beginning, the reader doesn’t get to know anyone at the parties, including the author, in any depth ... What Twilight of Democracy lacks in depth, however, it makes up for in breadth. This slender book highlights ideas about political matters from Plato to historian Timothy Snyder, who distinguishes between Orwell’s Big Lie and the Medium-Size lie ... a highly readable extended essay that leaves her basic questions unanswered.

Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today’s authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone ... Sometimes too discursive, sometimes overlong (as on Laura Ingraham), the book is nevertheless critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks—and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author’s views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico ... The author is highly instructive on what is happening in the increasingly grim realm of the far right: a hardening of bitterness and unreasoning vengefulness and a resulting shift of the spectrum that puts a growing number of conservatives like Applebaum in the center ... A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities.

... deeply personal ... Her armchair psychologizing—as when she suggests that the 'loud advocacy' of Ingraham and other Trump boosters may help 'to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump'—sometimes feels too glib and dismissive of the divisive issues that energize populist movements. Still, this anguished and forceful jeremiad crystallizes right-of-center dismay at the betrayal of the conservative tradition.