What visions of national identity hold sway at any given moment, and why and how do those visions shift? How is ‘we’ defined in an age of increasingly granular division? Applebaum’s is the latest in a long line of books and articles that deplore the intransigent polarisation of contemporary political and cultural debate. Despite her reputation as a conservative historian, most of her targets here are on the right, as she ponders how some of her closest conservative friends in Europe and the United States have drifted, over the past two decades, from sober conservatism to conspiracy theories and contempt for democracy. Notwithstanding obvious examples of highly centralising, authoritarian, left-wing political systems that disregard democracy – the Venezuelan regime comes to mind, as does the little cousin it has spawned in Spain’s Podemos – Applebaum focuses on Trump’s America, Johnson’s Brexit-addled Britain, Orbán’s Hungary, the Poland of Duda and Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party, and the Spanish far-right formation Vox.

Three decades ago, liberal democracy seemed to be on an inevitable trajectory towards both broader representation and greater prosperity for all in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and its ideological companions. Yet history is nothing if not circular; perhaps ‘we’ in the comfortable West have enjoyed, since 1945, three generations of well-being that in historical terms was exceedingly rare. Is the heyday of democracy, with its will to consensus politics, receding into the past? When people increasingly refer to ‘late capitalism’, what exactly do they mean, and what exactly do they envisage might replace that economic system that has so often, if not always, accompanied democracy?

Much of Applebaum’s work has served as a warning against a complacent forgetting of the darker past; her books on the Soviet gulag and the genocidal engineering of the Ukraine famine are both riveting and appalling. Twilight of Democracy is another vertiginous read. As the title suggests, the sense of an ending pervades the book, along with a deep anxiety about the future. A relatively clear, mapped future was the promise of the twentieth century’s postwar democracies; such promises sound hollow now as democracy and its key institutions, undermined and under attack, begin to collapse.

By whom, and how? Applebaum locates the ongoing collapse of faith in democracy in the way new technologies of communication allow what she terms ‘cascades of falsehood’. Lying without adverse electoral consequences is thriving; it feeds political extremism. In polity after polity, falsehoods increasingly form the basis for popular support. How do simple untruths or wild conspiracy theories spread among populations that are mostly safe, comfortable, and employed? Why do more and more citizens in Western democracies consider themselves oppressed or under threat, despite their comparative prosperity? All of us are to some extent ‘radicalised by algorithms’, trapped in self-reinforcing loops of bias and falsehood. The idea of a ‘common narrative’ has vanished, though this is precisely what the authoritarian mindset, of both far right and far left, offers: moral surety and correction. ‘Anger,’ writes Applebaum, ‘becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.’ The resulting hyper-partisanship is at the root of new forms of distrust: of institutions, of experts, of establishment politicians, of the judiciary. In this confused world, everyone is jumping at shadows. Is it any wonder that the erstwhile orderliness of democracy seems old-fashioned, a relic from a previous time no longer up to the task of serving the needs of angry, fearful citizens?

‘How vulnerable democracy is,’ wrote Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left.’ In their different ways, what Applebaum refers to as ‘the millenarianism of the far right and the revolutionary nihilism of the far left’ are both disenchanted with the failures of liberal democracy: for the right, a moral depravity and decline brought on by secularism, multiculturalism, and sexual diversity; for the left, the moral bankruptcy of capitalist-driven racism and structural inequality. Both angry visions contain elements of paranoia and fantasy; both manifest their rejection of democracy by a resort to authoritarianism. These extremes offer an intellectual and cultural narrowing in thought and deed; both make use of a performative and self-righteous anger; both are convinced of their mission of moral pedagogy. Both have expanding influence over public debate, yet both lack two elements necessary for social consensus: generosity and compassion. Neither – and this goes to the nub of Applebaum’s analysis – has much faith in orderly democracy.

This lack of a shared moral purpose, Applebaum argues, serves to undermine and delegitimise democratic institutions; a mutually held and cynical belief that these institutions are fundamentally corrupt leads to ‘cultural despair’. Applebaum emphasises this sleepwalk into authoritarianism does not happen without a cadre of what Julien Benda called ‘clercs’ – intellectuals, journalists, scriptwriters, and others happy to serve the interests of demagogues. Demagogues well know how to exploit the restless, paranoid fears of the right, or the urgent desire of the left to atone for the ‘errors’ of history. Both extremes meet in a common belief in the power of manipulation: of the media, and of objective realities.

It takes little historical knowledge or imagination to fear, as Applebaum does, where this disenchantment may lead. New brooms tend to sweep violence into play. ‘Revolution is often rash in its generosity,’ warned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ‘It is in a hurry to disown so much.’ We might be careful what we wish for.