Read on Twitter
Good Morning! My book is published today in both the US and the UK. The publishers could not agree on the title - for a moment there, it even got ugly - and so it is called TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY but with different subtitles...
in the US, it is called Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. You can buy it here, or in any decent independent bookstore https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621076/twilight-of-democracy-by-anne-applebaum/">https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621...
in the UK it is called Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/315239/friends-and-autocrats/9780241419717.html">https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/315...
The title problem illustrates something important about the book: This isn& #39;t a political science tract, and it doesn& #39;t recommend any policies. It& #39;s about people who used to be on the center-right, three decades ago, and who are now on the nationalist/radical/far-right...
...but it doesn& #39;t offer a single explanation or a definitive theory - because people are complicated! This has already annoyed some reviewers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/books/review/twilight-of-democracy-anne-applebaum.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/1...
Nor is this a book about "why voters voted for Trump" or "why Brexit happened" - this is a book about intellectuals, spin-doctors, journalists and the ideas that motivated them - and how those ideas shaped politics.
anyway, after 20 years of writing books based on archival research, books that tried to tell big stories from many different points of view, this book is the opposite of that: It& #39;s my subjective interpretation of some events that I lived through myself. And it& #39;s very short!
I talked to David Runciman about the book and the ideas behind it here: https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2020/267-twilight-of-democracy">https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2020...
