Anne Applebaum’s Dystopia of Rules

Review of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum (Penguin, 2024)

For some time now, Anne Applebaum, a journalist, public historian, and devoted anti-communist, has felt uncomfortable among her fellow right-wingers. In her last book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, she gave voice to a newfound discomfort around her erstwhile friends. Former heroes of liberal democracy, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have gone on to become leading lights of the new national conservative right and have been celebrated by respectable commentators. Meanwhile, Applebaum, a supporter of an independent judiciary and civil service — stacked, of course, in favor of the Right — has found herself drifting further and further away from her political home.

Already, four years ago, the suspicion began to dawn that, perhaps, it was she who had moved to the center rather than her comrades who had drifted right. John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and friend of Applebaum, put the point to her clearly: “The new right was not some aberration but in keeping with a long tradition. Orbán and Meloni, et al. were conservative in culture, classically liberal in economics, Atlanticist in foreign policy.”

Applebaum’s latest offering, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, is, in part, a quiet concession to this view. Not in the form of a critique of her former comrades, but as an attempt to redraw political fault lines. The liberal West is under threat. Its enemy: a collection of antidemocratic forces which Applebaum lumps together under the reductive moniker “Autocracy, Inc.”

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