Quotes from Anne Applebaum

At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.

Elections are always a Rorschach test - people look at the results and see what they want to see.

Just about every single person who visits me in Poland tells me that everything here is better than they thought it would be - especially the food.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions.

For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.

The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities - quite the contrary.

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?

Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare - these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world.

The most important funder of the British Brexit campaign had odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers in Poland's supposedly anti-Russian, hard-right government, elected after a campaign marked by online disinformation in 2015.

Birtherism surely increased Americans' distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death.

The Occupy movement flared and then seemed to fizzle out - until it re-emerged in the form of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and in the far-left surge that made Jeremy Corbyn leader of the British Labour Party.

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

Like wealth, or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don't value if they've always had it.

As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary?

Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are taken in by Russian tactics.

What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were 'historically obsolete' and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.

Democracy in some ways is a very illogical political system. When you win an election, you have to preserve the institutions that would make it possible for your political enemies to win next time. If you think about it, that's almost antithetical to human nature.