Twilight of Democracy

Those are the conclusions of historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum in an essay for The Atlantic entitled Empire of Grift, How MAGA is Making the World Safe for Corruption.

She has written several books and columns on history, diplomacy, and foreign affairs, including Autocracy, Inc., and Twilight of Democracy.

She is also a senior fellow at the S&G Agora Foundation at Johns Hopkins.

Anne, welcome to Think.

Anne Applebaum wrote Empire of Grift, how MAGA is making the world safe for corruption.

She wrote that for The Atlantic.

She's a columnist, a historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several books, among them Autocracy, Inc., and Twilight of Democracy.

And thanks for being with us today.

She went on to be deputy editor at The Spectator and a columnist at The Washington Post.

Her book Gulag, A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and Iron Curtain, Red Famine, and The Twilight of Democracy followed.

In 2024, she won the Peace Prize of the German book trade.

She is now a Polish citizen and is married to Poland's Foreign Minister Władysław Sikorski.

I'm not sure I pronounced their names right, but I tried.

The journalist Anne Applebaum, who's written two books on this, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Incorporated, and Timothy Snyder, the historian who wrote a very short, very practical book called On Tyranny.

There are, of course, many other people who have written on this topic you could also study, so I'm not claiming this is fully comprehensive, but I do share book recommendations, my thoughts, citations, etc.

all on Patreon, patreon.com slash wiserworldpodcast.

And Applebaum looks at the problem from a totally different angle.

I think it's so fascinating.

In Twilight of Democracy, she focuses on the people around authoritarian leaders.

So this would be the writers, the politicians, the intellectuals, the party insiders, the journalists.