Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has won deserved acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for books focusing on the malign effects of the Soviet dictatorship on its own subjects and the peoples of neighboring lands, but of late she has turned her attention to sounding alarms against growing threats to democracy from other, newer, and more unexpected sources, conspicuous among them the Law and Justice government of Poland. Her latest, Twilight of Democracy, is an example of a genre of publication that has become a burgeoning industry since 2016—lamenting the rising tide of authoritarianism around the globe and advising what might be done to reverse it—but surely the only one that starts and ends with a party: first, the bash she and her husband Radek Sikorski threw on New Year's Eve 1999 at Chobielin, their restored Polish manor house. Their numerous guests were a multinational gathering of likeminded Cold-War democrats of moderately conservative stripe ready to greet the new millennium in a spirit of optimism that the wheel of history had turned in a way that decisively vindicated their shared political convictions. Now, two decades later, she says, many of them would cross the street to avoid one another. The cause of the falling out with those former friends, according to her, is their embrace of various strains of demagogic populism that go by different labels, but all are corrosive of, or openly hostile to the principles and practices of the democratic system whose triumph had been easy—too easy—to take for granted after the fall of the Berlin Wall.What are the titular attractions of autocracy that Applebaum blames for having enticed these estranged acquaintances to cross over to the political Dark Side? Some are motivated by ideological drift, some by impatience or disappointment with the results of democracy, or by opportunism or a sense of resentment at not having won, by election or renown, the rank or influence they think they deserve. Others make rabble rousing appeals to an illusory nostalgia to restore a lost greatness. Still others have given in to malice, or simply drunk the Kool-Aid of lunacy or cynically calculated that they can profit by peddling it. But all of them, she writes, “work to redefine their nations, to rewrite social contracts, and, sometimes, to alter the rules of democracy so that they never lose power” (p. 21).While other sections of the book take aim at such ripe targets as Brexit, the Hungary of Orbán, and the Trump presidency—and also make clear that Boris Johnson, Roger Kimball, and Laura Ingraham, among others, will not be showing up at any future Applebaum soirées— readers of the Review will be most interested in her extensive comments bearing on Poland, a country she knows close up, of course, and given prominence in her account as a case of democracy gone sour. Applebaum comes down hard on the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, its Polish allies, and those she regards as its enablers who have debased national civic culture—no surprise, as she has a long track record of doing so.1 In a chapter titled “How Demagogues Win,” the author scorns the origin and ethos of the PiS government that took office in 2015 as rooted in a cultlike devotion to false conspiracy theories that the 2010 plane crash that killed President Kaczyński and his entourage of Polish officials and notables was an act of sabotage and assassination, that the damning truth about it has been covered up, and that anyone who disagrees is no patriot. This she flatly calls “the Smolensk lie” (p. 44). It would be fair to object that Applebaum cannot be considered an impartial commentator on this disaster that has roiled and envenomed politics in the Third Republic ever since, or on the ongoing Polish partisan warfare, but the fact remains that no proof has turned up to show that she is wrong to call what happened at Smolensk a terrible accident, but nothing more nefarious.In another passage, Applebaum casts a cold eye on the speech President Trump delivered in the Polish capital in July 2017. She interprets its praise of the valor of the Warsaw Rising of 1944 as a call—her words, not his—for “a cleansing episode of violence” in the United States, that “patriots . . . will have to spill their blood in the coming battle to rescue America from its own decadence and corruption too” (pp. 153–154). Granted, one hesitates to dismiss this reading out of hand in the wake of the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, but it seems a stretch, nonetheless. The guess is that the same words spoken by another president whose commitment to democracy she trusts more than Trump's would not alarm her, though she might well reply that is precisely the point.The focus of Twilight is fixed on elites, mainly on public intellectuals and opinionmakers who have succumbed to the blandishments of illiberalism and given it service. In this the author acknowledges that she follows in the footsteps of Julien Benda's La trahison des clercs [The treason of the intellectuals, 1927]. The influence of Miłosz's Zniewolony umysł [The captive mind, 1953] is also clear, although the poet goes unmentioned, and the offenders are here called by their real names, not aliases.2 These are people Applebaum has known and made common cause (and supped) with, so the story of their defection to the camp of the populist menace is related in terms both accusatory and wistful: “Some of them used to be my friends” (p. 21). In addition, even those who side with her must admit she is very sure that she is the one who has kept the true democratic faith, and that those former colleagues she has parted ways with have betrayed or perverted it. That may be so, but it also leads her to lean on ad hominem explanations of their change of mind or heart as driven by envy, revenge, eccentricities, emotional distress, or other dubious or unattractive motives. Moreover, Applebaum shows great interest in the leaders of authoritarian, or authoritarian-light movements, but has little to say about their followers, who are, well, numerous. In other words, one can learn much in these pages about “how” demagogues win, but not about “why.” After all, these political bad actors—most of them, anyway—have had to win democratic elections in the first place to get into position to commence the dismantling of democracy from above and within that she laments. Little effort is made here to discuss the grievances and fears, some trumped up, to be sure, but others genuine enough, that have led millions of voters around the industrialized world to take a chance on the demagogue who promises to ease their afflictions and afflict those they believe are afflicting them. Applebaum might rightly point out that there are other books for that. The theme of this one is big enough, and then some: the jarring, sobering reminder, not original but timely, that “Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will” (p. 14).This raises an important question about the future, and Applebaum offers no easy, comforting answer. A concluding chapter, titled “The Unending of History,” with a skeptical nod to Fukuyama, admits that there cannot be any final victory of civic good over ill; that it is a constant struggle, beating on, as Fitzgerald put it, against the current, against the historical odds. The author finds hope, if not assurance, in another party she hosted at Chobielin in 2019. This time the guest list was very different and included her sons and their teenaged friends and university classmates she permits herself to imagine as “harbingers of something else, something better, something that we can't yet imagine,” a “world that is both more fair and more open” (pp. 181–182). Still, though Applebaum cannot quite bring herself to say it, one hard, inescapable lesson of her book is that this fresh generation too, and their times, will grow older, battered by life, and compromised, as did hers and mine. If we are now in a twilight of free government, then each twilight is followed by a new dawn, and day—and then twilight again. And so on. A second, more heartening lesson may be that while we cannot stop the diurnal rhythm of the cycle of history, with good will and good fortune we might find ways to sustain and lengthen the periods of democratic sunshine as best we can.