Quotes from Anne Applebaum

The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving.

Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution: "As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.

Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came—and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire.

A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

It is an argument for moral equivalence, an argument that undermines faith, hope, and the belief that we can live up to the language of our Constitution.

This way of speaking—"Putin is a killer, but so are we all"—mirrors Putin's own propaganda, which often states, in so many words, "Okay, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else.

Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots

No hay una explicación única, y no voy a ofrecer aquí ni una gran teoría ni una solución universal. Pero sí hay un tema de fondo: dadas las condiciones adecuadas, cualquier sociedad puede dar la espalda a la democracia. De hecho, si nos hemos de guiar por la historia, a la larga todas nuestras sociedades lo harán.

The war ended the way a passage through a tunnel ends," wrote the Czech memoirist Heda Kovály. "From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage."8

El ruido de los debates, el constante rumor del desacuerdo, pueden irritar a aquellas personas que prefieren vivir en una sociedad unida por un solo relato. Esa marcada preferencia por la unidad, al menos entre una parte de la población, contribuye a explicar por qué numerosas revoluciones liberales o democráticas, desde 1789 en adelante, terminaron en dictaduras que gozaron de un amplio apoyo.

morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence.

Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid.

This new information world also provides a new set of tools and tactics that another generation of clercs can use to reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition. You can construct one in an office

Ten years before Stalin's Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass. If

The far left's mockery of the competitive institutions of "bourgeois democracy" and capitalism, its cynicism about the possibility of any objectivity in the media, the civil service, or the judiciary, has long had a right-wing version too.

Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again;

Whatever equilibrium your nation reaches, there is always someone, at home or abroad, who has reasons to upset it.

The mentality of a refugee, forcibly expelled from his home, is not that of an emigrant who leaves to seek his fortune: his very circumstances fostered dependency and a sense of helplessness he might never have known before. To

in an information sphere without authorities—political, cultural, moral—and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up.

Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age.

Lenin's vision of labor camps as a special form of punishment for a particular sort of bourgeois "enemy" sat well with his other beliefs about crime and criminals. On the one hand, the first Soviet leader felt ambivalent about the jailing and punishment of traditional criminals—thieves, pickpockets, murderers—whom he perceived as potential allies.

People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics.

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity. —Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs, 1927