Part memoir, part analysis, the book opens at a party the author threw on the eve of the millennium and asks why so many of the guests—writers, officials, friends—later split, with some embracing the authoritarian nationalism rising in Poland, Hungary, Britain, and the United States.
Applebaum's lens is the clerc: the intellectual who abandons independent judgment to serve a political cause in exchange for certainty, status, and belonging. She profiles the propagandists, media figures, and functionaries who supply authoritarian movements with the arguments and machinery they need to govern.
She examines the psychological pull that draws talented elites toward one-party thinking—nostalgia, resentment, disappointment with meritocracy, and the comfort of a single explanatory story—and the role of the binding conspiracy, like Poland's Smolensk myth, that turns a faction into a movement.
The book's warning is that democratic collapse depends less on a charismatic leader than on the willingness of capable insiders to build and staff the new order. It is a study of complicity, reported from inside the rooms where the quiet decisions get made.
People are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity.— Twilight of Democracy