{"id":118535,"date":"2018-09-17T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=118535"},"modified":"2018-09-24T09:34:07","modified_gmt":"2018-09-24T08:34:07","slug":"a-warning-from-europe-the-worst-is-yet-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/09\/a-warning-from-europe-the-worst-is-yet-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come"},"content":{"rendered":"

Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Illustration: Mike McQuade; Janek Skarzynski \/ AFP \/ Getty; Kacper Pempel \/ Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

October 2018 Issue – <\/em>On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon\u2014perfect for a party.<\/p>\n

The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too\u2014none then particularly famous\u2014along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.<\/p>\n

You could have lumped the majority of them, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right\u2014the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of my guests liberals\u2014free-market liberals, or classical liberals\u2014or maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about economics certainly believed in democracy, in the rule of law, and in a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to joining the European Union\u2014an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being \u201con the right\u201d meant.<\/p>\n

As parties go, it was a little scrappy. There was no such thing as catering in rural Poland in the 1990s, so my mother-in-law and I made vats of beef stew and roasted beets. There were no hotels, either, so our 100-odd guests stayed in local farmhouses or with friends in the nearby town. I kept a list of who was staying where, but nevertheless, a couple of people wound up sleeping on a sofa in our basement. The music\u2014mixtapes, made in an era before Spotify\u2014created the only serious cultural divide of the evening: The songs that my American friends remembered from college were not the same as the songs that the Poles remembered from college, so it was hard to get everybody to dance at the same time. At one point I went upstairs, learned that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper, then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.<\/p>\n

It was that kind of party. It lasted all night, continued into \u201cbrunch\u201d the following afternoon, and was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We had rebuilt our house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. I have a particularly clear memory of a walk in the snow\u2014maybe it was the day before the party, maybe the day after\u2014with a bilingual group, everybody chattering at once, English and Polish mingling and echoing through the birch forest. At that moment, when Poland was on the cusp of joining the West, it felt as if we were all on the same team. We agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way things were going.<\/p>\n

That moment has passed. Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year\u2019s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too.<\/p>\n

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of my New Year\u2019s Eve guests continued, as my husband and I did, to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center-right\u2014remaining in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of Germany and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some now consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place, supporting a nativist party called Law and Justice\u2014a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland), from 2005 to 2010.<\/p>\n

Since then, Law and Justice has embraced a new set of ideas, not just xenophobic and deeply suspicious of the rest of Europe but also openly authoritarian<\/a>. After the party won a slim parliamentary majority in 2015, its leaders violated the constitution<\/a> by appointing new judges<\/a> to the constitutional court. Later, it used a similarly unconstitutional playbook to attempt to pack the Polish Supreme Court<\/a>. It took over the state public broadcaster, Telewizja Polska; fired popular presenters; and began running unabashed propaganda<\/a>, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers\u2019 expense. The government earned international notoriety<\/a> when it adopted a law curtailing public debate about the Holocaust<\/a>. Although the law was eventually changed under American pressure, it enjoyed broad support by Law and Justice\u2019s ideological base\u2014the journalists, writers, and thinkers, including some of my party guests, who believe anti-Polish forces seek to blame Poland<\/a> for Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

These kinds of views make it difficult for me and some of my New Year\u2019s guests to speak about anything at all. I have not, for example, had a single conversation with a woman who was once one of my closest friends, the godmother of one of my children\u2014let\u2019s call her Marta\u2014since a hysterical phone call in April 2010, a couple of days after a plane carrying the then-president crashed near Smolensk, in Russia. In the intervening years, Marta has grown close to Jaros\u0142aw Kaczy\u0144ski, the leader of Law and Justice and the late president\u2019s twin brother. She regularly hosts lunches for him at her apartment and discusses whom he should appoint to his cabinet. I tried to see her recently in Warsaw, but she refused. \u201cWhat would we talk about?\u201d she texted me, and then went silent.<\/p>\n

Another of my guests\u2014the one who shot the pistol in the air\u2014eventually separated from her British husband. She now appears to spend her days as a full-time internet troll, fanatically promoting a whole range of conspiracy theories, many of them virulently anti-Semitic. She tweets about Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust; she once posted an image of an English medieval painting depicting a boy supposedly crucified by Jews, with the commentary \u201cAnd they were surprised that they were expelled.\u201d She follows and amplifies the leading lights of the American \u201calt-right,\u201d whose language she repeats.<\/p>\n

I happen to know that both of these women are estranged from their children because of their political views. But that, too, is typical\u2014this line of division runs through families as well as groups of friends. We have a neighbor near Chobielin whose parents listen to a progovernment, Catholic-conspiratorial radio station<\/a> called Radio Maryja. They repeat its mantras, make its enemies their enemies. \u201cI\u2019ve lost my mother,\u201d my neighbor told me. \u201cShe lives in another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be clear about my interests and biases here, I should explain that some of this conspiratorial thinking is focused on me. My husband was the Polish defense minister for a year and a half, in a coalition government led by Law and Justice during its first, brief experience of power; later, he broke with that party and was for seven years the foreign minister in another coalition government, this one led by the center-right party Civic Platform; in 2015 he didn\u2019t run for office. As a journalist and his American-born wife, I have always attracted some press interest. But after Law and Justice won that year, I was featured on the covers of two pro-regime magazines, wSieci<\/em><\/a> and Do Rzeczy<\/em><\/a>\u2014former friends of ours work at both\u2014as the clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland. Similar stories have appeared<\/a> on Telewizja Polska\u2019s evening news.<\/p>\n

Eventually, they stopped writing about me: Negative international press coverage of Poland has grown much too widespread for a single person, even a single Jewish person, to coordinate all by herself. Though naturally the theme recurs on social media from time to time.<\/p>\n

In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans\u2014admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris\u2014and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. \u201cIs friendship possible,\u201d he wondered in 1937, \u201cwith people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings\u2014so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired. And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland\u2019s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What\u2019s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.<\/p>\n

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad\u2014just like Sebastian\u2019s friends in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

What has caused this transformation? Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades? My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.<\/p>\n

Before I continue, here\u2019s a parenthesis, and a reminder: All of this has happened before. Profound political shifts\u2014events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances\u2014do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown. Not nearly enough attention has been paid in recent years to a late-19th-century French controversy that prefigured many of the debates of the 20th century, and has some clear echoes in the present.<\/p>\n

The Dreyfus affair was triggered in 1894, when a traitor was discovered in the French army: Somebody had been passing information to Germany, which had defeated France a quarter century earlier and occupied Alsace-Lorraine. French military intelligence investigated and claimed that it had found the culprit. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was an Alsatian, spoke with a German accent, and was a Jew\u2014and therefore, in the eyes of some, not a real Frenchman. As it would turn out, he was also innocent. But French army investigators created fake evidence and gave false testimony; as a result, Dreyfus was court-martialed, found guilty, and sent into solitary confinement on Devil\u2019s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.<\/p>\n

The ensuing controversy divided French society along now-familiar lines. Those who maintained Dreyfus\u2019s guilt were the alt-right\u2014or the Law and Justice Party, or the National Front\u2014of their time. They pushed a conspiracy theory. They were backed up by screaming headlines in France\u2019s right-wing yellow press, the 19th-century version of a far-right trolling operation. Their leaders lied to uphold the honor of the army; adherents clung to their belief in Dreyfus\u2019s guilt\u2014and their absolute loyalty to the nation\u2014even when this fakery was revealed.<\/p>\n

Dreyfus was not a spy. To prove the unprovable, the anti-Dreyfusards had to disparage evidence, law, and even rational thought. Science itself was suspect, both because it was modern and universal and because it came into conflict with the emotional cult of ancestry and place. \u201cIn every scientific work,\u201d wrote one anti-Dreyfusard, there is something \u201cprecarious\u201d and \u201ccontingent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dreyfusards, meanwhile, argued that some principles are higher than national honor, and that it mattered whether Dreyfus was guilty or not. Above all, they argued, the French state had an obligation to treat all citizens equally, whatever their religion. They too were patriots, but of a different sort. They conceived of the nation not as an ethnic clan but as the embodiment of a set of ideals: justice, honesty, the neutrality of the courts. This was a more cerebral vision, more abstract and harder to grasp, but not without an appeal of its own.<\/p>\n

Those two visions of the nation split France right down the middle. Tempers flared. Quarrels broke out in the dining rooms of Paris. Family members stopped speaking to one another, sometimes for more than a generation. The divide continued to be felt in 20th-century politics, in the different ideologies of Vichy France and the resistance. It persists today, in the struggle between Marine Le Pen\u2019s \u201cFrance for the French\u201d nationalism and Emmanuel Macron\u2019s broader vision of a France that stands for a set of abstract values: justice, honesty, and the neutrality of courts, as well as globalization and integration.<\/p>\n

From my point of view, the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. Just one court case\u2014one disputed trial\u2014plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by \u201cFrance\u201d were already there, waiting to be discovered. Two decades ago, different understandings of \u201cPoland\u201d must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is unsurprising. All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled\u2014but why should they ever be?<\/p>\n

Monarchy, <\/em>tyranny, oligarchy, democracy\u2014these were all familiar to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world\u2014think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe\u2014was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union\u2019s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization. It is the model that many of the world\u2019s budding autocrats use today.<\/p>\n

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite\u2014the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite. In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets. Old-fashioned social hierarchies are usually part of the mix, but in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.<\/p>\n

Lenin\u2019s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership. Though those rules were different at different times, they were consistent in certain ways. They usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups. They favored the children of the working class. Above all, they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm. Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: True believers can advance. As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state \u201cinvariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lenin\u2019s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press \u201cis a deception.\u201d He mocked freedom of assembly as a \u201chollow phrase.\u201d As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than \u201ca machine for the suppression of the working class.\u201d In the Bolshevik imagination, the press could be free, and public institutions could be fair, only once they were controlled by the working class\u2014via the party.<\/p>\n

This mockery of the competitive institutions of \u201cbourgeois democracy\u201d and capitalism has long had a right-wing version, too. Hitler\u2019s Germany is the example usually given. But there are many others. Apartheid South Africa was a de facto one-party state that corrupted its press and its judiciary to eliminate blacks from political life and promote the interests of Afrikaners, white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers, who were not succeeding in the capitalist economy created by the British empire.<\/p>\n

In Europe, two such illiberal parties are now in power: Law and Justice, in Poland, and Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s Fidesz party, in Hungary. Others, in Austria and Italy, are part of government coalitions or enjoy wide support. These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents\u2019 ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in \u201copposition\u201d\u2014by which they mean illegitimate\u2014media.<\/p>\n

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Illustration: Mike McQuade; Dundanim \/ Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

Notably, one of the Law and Justice government\u2019s first acts, in early 2016, was to change the civil-service law<\/a>, making it easier to fire professionals and hire party hacks. The Polish foreign service also wants to drop its requirement that diplomats know two foreign languages, a bar that was too high for favored candidates to meet.* The government fired heads of Polish state companies. Previously, the people in these roles had had at least some government or business experience. Now these jobs are largely filled by Law and Justice Party members, as well as their friends and relatives. Typical is Janina Goss, an old friend of Kaczy\u0144ski\u2019s from whom the former prime minister once borrowed a large sum of money, apparently to pay for a medical treatment for his mother. Goss, an avid maker of jams and preserves, is now on the board of directors of Polska Grupa Energetyczna, the largest power company in Poland, an employer of 40,000 people.<\/p>\n

You can call this sort of thing by many names: nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn\u2019t your primary interest, then what\u2019s wrong with it?<\/p>\n

If you believe, as my old friends now believe, that Poland will be better off if it is ruled by people who deserve to rule\u2014because they loudly proclaim a certain kind of patriotism, because they are loyal to the party leader, or because they are, echoing the words of Kaczy\u0144ski himself, a \u201cbetter sort of Pole\u201d\u2014then a one-party state is actually more<\/em> fair than a competitive democracy. Why should different parties be allowed to compete on an even playing field if only one of them has the moral right to form the government? Why should businesses be allowed to compete in a free market if only some of them are loyal to the party and therefore deserving of wealth?<\/p>\n

This impulse is reinforced, in Poland as well as in Hungary and many other formerly Communist countries, by the widespread feeling that the rules of competition are flawed because the reforms of the 1990s were unfair. Specifically, they allowed too many former Communists to recycle their political power into economic power.<\/p>\n

But this argument, which felt so important a quarter century ago, seems thin and superficial now. Since at least 2005, Poland has been led solely by presidents and prime ministers whose political biographies began in the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. And there is no powerful ex-Communist business monopoly in Poland either\u2014at least not at the national level, where plenty of people have made money without special political connections. Poignantly, the most prominent former Communist in Polish politics right now is Stanis\u0142aw Piotrowicz, a Law and Justice member of parliament who is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a great enemy of judicial independence.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, this argument about the continuing influence of Communism retains an appeal for the right-wing political intellectuals of my generation. For some of them, it seems to explain their personal failures, or just their bad luck. Not everybody who was a dissident in the 1970s got to become the prime minister, or a best-selling writer, or a respected public intellectual, after 1989. And for many this is a source of burning resentment. If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the \u201csystem\u201d is unfair\u2014these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that the illiberal state lacks a genuine appeal. But it is also good for some of its proponents personally\u2014so much so that picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That\u2019s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jaros\u0142aw Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n

To understand the Kurski brothers, it\u2019s important to understand where they came from: the port city of Gda\u0144sk, on the Baltic Sea, where shipyard cranes loom like giant storks over Hanseatic street facades. The Kurskis came of age there in the early 1980s, when Gda\u0144sk was both the hub of anti-Communist activity in Poland and a shabby backwater, a place where intrigue and boredom were measured out in equal doses.<\/p>\n

At that particular moment, in that particular place, the Kurski brothers stood out. Senator Bogdan Borusewicz, one of the most important underground trade-union activists from the time, told me that their school was widely known to be \u201czrewoltowane<\/em>\u201d\u2014in revolt against the Communist system. Jaros\u0142aw represented his class in the school parliament and was part of a group that read conservative history and literature. Jacek, slightly younger, was less interested in the intellectual battle against Communism, and thought of himself as an activist and a radical. In the immediate wake of martial law, both brothers went to marches, shouted slogans, waved banners. Both worked first on the illegal school newspaper and then on Solidarno\u015b\u0107<\/em>, the illegal opposition newspaper of Solidarity, the trade union in Gda\u0144sk.<\/p>\n

In October 1989, Jaros\u0142aw went to work as the press secretary to Lech Wa\u0142\u0119sa, the leader of Solidarity, who, after the election of Poland\u2019s first non-Communist government, felt out of sorts and ignored; in the chaos created by revolutionary economic reforms and rapid political change, there was no obvious role for him. Eventually, in late 1990, Wa\u0142\u0119sa ran for president and won, by galvanizing people who already resented the compromises that had accompanied the negotiated collapse of Communism in Poland (the decision not to jail or punish former Communists, for example). The experience made Jaros\u0142aw realize that he didn\u2019t like politics, especially not the politics of resentment: \u201cI saw what doing politics was really about \u2026 awful intrigues, searching for dirt, smear campaigns.\u201d That was also his first encounter with Kaczy\u0144ski, \u201ca master of that. In his political thinking, there is no such thing as an accident \u2026 If something happened, it was the machination of an outsider. Conspiracy<\/em> is his favorite word.\u201d (Unlike Jaros\u0142aw, Jacek would not speak with me. A mutual friend gave me his private cellphone number; I texted, and then called a couple of times and left messages. I called again and someone cackled when I stated my name, repeated it loudly, and said, \u201cOf course, of course\u201d\u2014naturally the chairman of Polish television would return my call. But he never did.)<\/p>\n

Eventually Jaros\u0142aw quit and joined Gazeta Wyborcza<\/em>, the newspaper founded at the time of Poland\u2019s first partially free elections, in 1989. In the new Poland, he could help build something, create a free press, he told me, and that was enough for him. Jacek went in precisely the opposite direction. \u201cYou are an idiot,\u201d he told his brother when he learned he had quit working for Wa\u0142\u0119sa. Although he was still in high school, Jacek was already interested in a political career himself, and even suggested that he take over his brother\u2019s job, on the grounds that no one would notice. He was\u2014in his brother\u2019s description\u2014always \u201cfascinated\u201d by the Kaczy\u0144ski brothers, by the plots, the schemes, the conspiracies. Although he was on the right, he was not particularly interested in the trappings of Polish conservatism, in the books or the debates that had captivated his brother. A friend of both brothers told me she didn\u2019t think Jacek had any real political philosophy at all. \u201cIs he a conservative? I don\u2019t think so, at least not in the strict definition of conservatism. He\u2019s a person who wants to be on top.\u201d And from the late 1980s onward, that was where he aimed to be.<\/p>\n

The complete story of what Jacek did next would require more than a single magazine article to describe. He eventually turned against Wa\u0142\u0119sa, perhaps because Wa\u0142\u0119sa didn\u2019t give him the job he thought he deserved. He married and divorced; he sued his brother\u2019s newspaper several times, and the newspaper sued him back. He co-authored a fiery book and made a conspiratorial film about the secret forces lined up against the Polish right. He was a member, at different times, of different parties or factions, sometimes quite marginal and sometimes more centrist. He became a member of the European Parliament. He came to specialize in so-called black PR. Famously, he helped torpedo the presidential campaign of Donald Tusk (who eventually became prime minister), in part by spreading the rumor that Tusk had a grandfather who had voluntarily joined the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army. Asked about this invention, Jacek reportedly told a small group of journalists that of course it wasn\u2019t true, but \u201cCiemny lud to kupi<\/em>\u201d\u2014which, roughly translated, means \u201cThe ignorant peasants will buy it.\u201d Borusewicz describes him as \u201cwithout scruples.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacek did not win the popular acclaim he thought a teenage Solidarity activist was entitled to. And this was a huge disappointment. Jaros\u0142aw says of his brother: \u201cAll of his life, he believed that he is owed a great career \u2026 that he will be prime minister, that he is predestined to do something great. Yet fate dictated that he failed over and over again \u2026 He concluded that this was a great injustice.\u201d And of course, Jaros\u0142aw was successful, a member of the establishment.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Kaczy\u0144ski plucked Jacek out of the relative obscurity of fringe politics and made him the director of state television. Since his arrival at Telewizja Polska, the younger Kurski has changed the station beyond recognition, firing the best-known journalists and radically reorienting its politics. Although the station is funded by taxpayers, the news broadcasts no longer make any pretense of objectivity or neutrality. In April of this year, for example, the station made an advertisement for itself. It showed a clip from a press conference; the leader of the opposition party, Grzegorz Schetyna, is asked what his party achieved during its eight years in government, from 2007 to 2015. Schetyna pauses and frowns; the video slows down and then ends. It\u2019s as if he had nothing to say.<\/p>\n

In reality, Schetyna spoke for several minutes and listed a number of achievements, from the mass construction of roads to rural investments to advances in foreign policy. But this manipulated clip was deemed such a success that for several days, it remained pinned to the top of Telewizja Polska\u2019s Twitter feed. Under Law and Justice, state television doesn\u2019t just produce regime propaganda; it celebrates the fact that it is doing so. It doesn\u2019t just twist and contort information; it glories in deceit.<\/p>\n

Jacek\u2014deprived of respect for so many years\u2014is finally having his revenge. He is right where he thinks he should be: at the center of attention, the radical throwing figurative Molotov cocktails into the crowd. The illiberal one-party state suits him perfectly. And if Communism isn\u2019t really available anymore as a genuine enemy for him and his colleagues to fight, then new enemies will have to be found.<\/p>\n

From Orwell to Koestler, the European writers of the 20th century were obsessed with the idea of the Big Lie. The vast ideological constructs that were Communism and fascism, the posters demanding fealty to the Party or the Leader, the Brownshirts and Blackshirts marching in formation, the torch-lit parades, the terror police\u2014these Big Lies were so absurd and inhuman, they required prolonged violence to impose and the threat of violence to maintain. They required forced education, total control of all culture, the politicization of journalism, sports, literature, and the arts.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don\u2019t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don\u2019t require violence or terror police. They don\u2019t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don\u2019t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it\u2019s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.<\/p>\n

Americans are of course familiar with the ways a lie can increase polarization and inflame xenophobia: Donald Trump entered American politics on the back of birtherism, the false premise that President Barack Obama was not born in America\u2014a conspiracy theory whose power was seriously underestimated at the time, and that paved the way for other lies, from \u201cMexican rapists\u201d to \u201cPizzagate.\u201d But in Poland, and in Hungary too, we now have examples of what happens when a Medium-Size Lie\u2014a conspiracy theory\u2014is propagated first by a political party as the central plank of its election campaign, and then by a ruling party, with the full force of a modern, centralized state apparatus behind it.<\/p>\n

In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros<\/a>, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.<\/p>\n

In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president\u2019s plane in April 2010. The story has special force in Poland because the crash had eerie historical echoes. The president who died, Lech Kaczy\u0144ski, was on his way to an event commemorating the massacre in Katyn, the place where Stalin murdered more than 21,000 Poles\u2014a big chunk of the country\u2019s elite\u2014in 1940. Dozens of senior military figures and politicians were also on board, many of them friends of mine. My husband reckons that he knew everybody on the plane, including the flight attendants.<\/p>\n

A huge wave of emotion followed the accident. A kind of hysteria, something like the madness that took hold in the United States after 9\/11, engulfed the nation. Television announcers wore black mourning ties; friends gathered at our Warsaw apartment to talk about history repeating itself in that dark, damp Russian forest. At first the tragedy seemed to unify the country. After all, politicians from every major party had been on the plane, and huge funerals were held in many cities. Even Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister, seemed moved. He went to Smolensk to meet Tusk, then the Polish prime minister, on the evening of the crash. The next day, one of Russia\u2019s most-watched television channels broadcast Katyn<\/em>, an emotional and very anti-Soviet Polish film, directed by Andrzej Wajda, the country\u2019s greatest director. Nothing like it has ever been shown so widely in Russia, before or since.<\/p>\n

But the crash did not bring people together. Nor did the investigation into its cause.<\/p>\n

Teams of Polish experts were on the ground that same day. They did their best to identify bodies, many of which were nothing but ash. They examined the wreckage. Once the black box was found, they began to transcribe the cockpit tape. The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president\u2019s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. \u201cZmie\u015bcisz si\u0119 \u015bmia\u0142o<\/em>\u201d\u2014\u201cYou\u2019ll make it, be bold,\u201d he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.<\/p>\n

Initially, Jaros\u0142aw Kaczy\u0144ski seems to have believed that the crash was an accident. \u201cIt\u2019s your fault and the fault of the tabloids,\u201d he told my husband, then the foreign minister, who informed him of the crash. By that, he meant that it was the government\u2019s fault because, intimidated by populist journalism, it had refused to buy new airplanes. But as the investigation unfolded, its findings were not to his liking. There was nothing wrong with the plane.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, like so many people who rely on conspiracy theories to make sense of random tragedies, Kaczy\u0144ski simply couldn\u2019t accept that his beloved brother had died pointlessly; perhaps he could not accept the even more difficult fact that the evidence suggested Lech and his team had pressured the pilots to land, thus causing the crash. Or perhaps, like Donald Trump, he saw how a conspiracy theory could help him attain power.<\/p>\n

The decision to put a conspiracy theory at the heart of government policy was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much as Trump used birtherism and the fabricated threat of immigrant crime to motivate his core supporters, Kaczy\u0144ski has used the Smolensk tragedy to galvanize his followers, and convince them not to trust the government or the media. Sometimes he has implied that the Russian government downed the plane. At other times, he has blamed the former ruling party, now the largest opposition party, for his brother\u2019s death: \u201cYou destroyed him, you murdered him, you are scum!\u201d he once shouted in parliament.<\/p>\n

None of his accusations can be proved, however. Perhaps to distance himself somewhat from the lies that needed to be told, he gave the job of promoting the conspiracy theory to one of his oldest and strangest comrades. Antoni Macierewicz is a member of Kaczy\u0144ski\u2019s generation, a longtime anti-Communist, though one with some weird friends and habits. His odd stare and his obsessions\u2014he has said that he finds the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be a plausible document\u2014even led the Law and Justice Party to make an election promise in 2015: Macierewicz would definitely not be the defense minister.<\/p>\n

But as soon as the party won, Kaczy\u0144ski broke that promise and appointed Macierewicz. Immediately, Macierewicz began to institutionalize the Smolensk lie. He created a new investigation commission composed of cranks, among them an ethnomusicologist, a retired pilot, a psychologist, a Russian economist, and other people with no knowledge of air crashes. The previous official report was removed from a government website. Police entered the homes of the aviation experts who had testified during the original investigation, interrogated them, and confiscated their computers. When Macierewicz went to Washington, D.C., to meet his American counterparts at the Pentagon, the first thing he did was ask whether U.S. intelligence had any secret information on Smolensk. I\u2019m told that the reaction was widespread concern about the minister\u2019s mental state.<\/p>\n

When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn\u2019t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.<\/p>\n

Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything. They could accept, for example, the broken promise not to put Macierewicz in the government. They could accept\u2014even though Law and Justice is supposedly a \u201cpatriotic\u201d and anti-Russian party\u2014Macierewicz\u2019s decisions to fire many of the country\u2019s highest military commanders, to cancel weapons contracts, to promote people with odd Russian links, to raid a nato facility in Warsaw in the middle of the night. The lie also gave the foot soldiers of the far right an ideological basis for tolerating other offenses. Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the \u201ctruth\u201d about Smolensk would finally be told.<\/p>\n

The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country. More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot\u2014and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.<\/p>\n

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. But\u2014once again\u2014separating the appeal of conspiracy from the ways it affects the careers of those who promote it is very difficult. For those who become the one-party state\u2019s gatekeepers, for those who repeat and promote the official conspiracy theories, acceptance of these simple explanations also brings another reward: power.<\/p>\n

M\u00e1ria Schmidt wasn\u2019t at my New Year\u2019s Eve party, but I\u2019ve known her for a long time. She invited me to the opening of the Terror H\u00e1za<\/a>\u2014the House of Terror museum\u2014in Budapest in 2002, and I\u2019ve been more or less in communication with her ever since. The museum, which she directs, explores the history of totalitarianism in Hungary and, when it opened, was one of the most innovative new museums in the eastern half of Europe.<\/p>\n

From its opening day, it has also had harsh critics<\/a>. Many visitors didn\u2019t like the first room, which has a panel of televisions on one wall broadcasting Nazi propaganda, and a panel of televisions on the opposite wall broadcasting Communist propaganda. In 2002, it was still a shock to see the two regimes compared, though perhaps it is less so now. Others felt that the museum gave insufficient weight and space to the crimes of fascism, though Communists ran Hungary for far longer than the fascists did, so there is more to show. I liked the fact that the museum showed ordinary Hungarians collaborating with both regimes, which I thought might help Hungary understand its responsibility for its own politics, and avoid the narrow nationalist trap of blaming problems on outsiders.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mike McQuade<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet this is precisely the narrow nationalist trap into which Hungary has now fallen. Hungary\u2019s belated reckoning with its Communist past\u2014putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators\u2014did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism. On the contrary, 16 years after the Terror H\u00e1za\u2019s opening, Hungary\u2019s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orb\u00e1n. One Hungarian businessman who preferred not to be named told me that soon after Orb\u00e1n first took over the government, regime cronies demanded that the businessman sell them his company at a low price; when he refused, they arranged for \u201ctax inspections\u201d and other forms of harassment, as well as a campaign of intimidation that forced him to hire bodyguards. Eventually he sold his Hungarian property and left the country.<\/p>\n

Like the Polish government, the Hungarian state promotes a Medium-Size Lie: It pumps out propaganda blaming Hungary\u2019s problems on nonexistent Muslim migrants, the European Union, and, as noted, George Soros. Schmidt\u2014a historian, scholar, and museum curator\u2014is one of the primary authors of that lie. She periodically publishes long, angry blog posts fulminating against Soros; against Budapest\u2019s Central European University, originally founded with his money; and against \u201cleft intellectuals,\u201d by which she seems to mostly mean liberal democrats, from the center-left to the center-right.<\/p>\n

Ironies and paradoxes in her life story are plentiful. Schmidt is a prime beneficiary of Hungary\u2019s supposedly tainted transition; her late husband made a fortune in the post-Communist real-estate market, thanks to which she lives in a spectacular house in the Buda hills. Although she has led a publicity campaign designed to undermine Central European University, her son is a graduate. And although she knows very well what happened in her country in the 1940s, she followed, step by step, the Communist Party playbook when she took over<\/a> Figyel\u0151<\/em>, a respected Hungarian magazine: She pushed out the independent reporters and replaced them with reliably progovernment writers.<\/p>\n

Figyel\u0151<\/em> remains \u201cprivate property.\u201d But it\u2019s not hard to see who supports the magazine. An issue that featured an attack on Hungarian NGOs\u2014the cover visually equated them with the Islamic State\u2014also included a dozen pages of government-paid advertisements, for the Hungarian National Bank, the treasury, the state anti-Soros campaign. This is a modern reinvention of the progovernment, one-party-state press, complete with the same sneering, cynical tone that the Communist publications once used.<\/p>\n

Schmidt agreed to speak with me\u2014after calling me \u201carrogant and ignorant\u201d\u2014only if I would listen to her objections to an article I\u2019d just written for The Washington Post<\/em>. With this invitation, I flew to Budapest. Unsurprisingly, what I\u2019d hoped for\u2014an interesting conversation\u2014proved impossible. Schmidt speaks excellent English, but she told me that she wanted to use a translator. She produced a rather terrified young man who, judging by the transcripts, left out chunks of what she said. And though she has known me for nearly two decades, she plunked a tape recorder on the table, in what I took to be a sign of distrust.<\/p>\n

She then proceeded to repeat the same arguments that had appeared in her blog posts. As her main bit of evidence that George Soros \u201cowns\u201d the Democratic Party in the United States, she cited an episode of Saturday Night Live<\/em><\/a>. As proof that the U.S. is \u201ca hard-core ideologically based colonizing power,\u201d she cited a speech Barack Obama gave<\/a> in which he mentioned that a Hungarian foundation had proposed building a statue to honor B\u00e1lint H\u00f3man, the man who wrote Hungary\u2019s anti-Jewish laws in the \u201930s and \u201940s. She repeated her claim that immigration poses a dire threat to Hungary, and became annoyed when I asked, several times, where all the immigrants were. \u201cThey\u2019re in Germany,\u201d she finally snapped, asserting that the Germans will eventually force Hungary to take \u201cthese people back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to \u201cshake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,\u201d to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders. Schmidt told me that the Western media, presumably myself included, \u201ctalk down from above to those below like it used to be with colonies.\u201d Western talk of Hungarian anti-Semitism, corruption, and authoritarianism is \u201ccolonialism.\u201d Yet despite being dedicated to the uniqueness of Hungary and the promotion of \u201cHungarianness,\u201d she has borrowed much of her ideology wholesale from Breitbart News<\/em>, right down to the caricatured description of American universities and the sneering jokes about \u201ctranssexual bathrooms.\u201d She has even invited Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos<\/a> to Budapest.<\/p>\n

Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt\u2019s views \u201cchanged.\u201d She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty. And if national sovereignty takes the form of a state whose elite is defined not according to its talent but according to its \u201cpatriotism\u201d\u2014meaning, in practice, its willingness to toe Orb\u00e1n\u2019s line\u2014then she\u2019s fine with that.<\/p>\n

Her cynicism is profound. Soros\u2019s support for Syrian refugees cannot be philanthropy; it must come from a deep desire to destroy Hungary. Angela Merkel\u2019s refugee policy could not derive from a desire to help people either. \u201cI think it is just bullshit,\u201d Schmidt said. \u201cI would say she wanted to prove that Germans, this time, are the good people. And they can lecture everybody on humanism and morality. It doesn\u2019t matter for the Germans what they can lecture the rest of the world on; they just have to lecture someone.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orb\u00e1n<\/a>\u2014just as it has for Donald Trump\u2014if only because it focuses the world\u2019s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions. Schmidt and I spent most of our unpleasant two-hour conversation arguing about nonsensical questions: Does George Soros own the Democratic Party? Are nonexistent immigrants, who don\u2019t want to live in Hungary anyway, a threat to the nation? We spent no time at all discussing Russia\u2019s influence in Hungary, which is now very strong. We did not talk about corruption, or the myriad ways (documented by the Financial Times<\/em> and others) that Orb\u00e1n\u2019s friends have benefited from European subsidies and legislative sleight of hand. (A ruling party that has politicized its courts and suppressed the media is a party that finds it much easier to steal.)<\/p>\n

Nor, in the end, did I learn much about Schmidt herself. Others in Budapest believe she is motivated by her own drive for wealth and power. Zsuzsanna Szel\u00e9nyi, a member of parliament who used to belong to Fidesz, Orb\u00e1n\u2019s party, but is now an independent, was one of several people who told me that \u201cnobody can be rich in Hungary without having some relation to the prime minister.\u201d Thanks to Orb\u00e1n, Schmidt oversees the museum and a couple of historical institutes, giving her a unique ability to shape how Hungarians remember their history, which she relishes. Maybe she really believes that Hungary is facing a dire, existential threat in the form of George Soros and some invisible Syrians. Or maybe she\u2019s just as cynical about her own side as she is about her opponents, and it\u2019s all an elaborate game.<\/p>\n

What happened after I interviewed her provides a clue: Without my permission, Schmidt published on her blog a heavily edited transcript, which was confusingly presented as her interview of me. The transcript also appeared<\/a> on the Hungarian government\u2019s official website, in English. (Try to imagine the White House publishing the transcript of a conversation between, say, the head of the Smithsonian Institution and a foreign critic of Trump and you\u2019ll understand how strange this is.) But, of course, the interview was not conducted for my benefit. It was a performance, designed to prove to other Hungarians that Schmidt is loyal to the regime and willing to defend it. Which she is.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, at a fish restaurant in an ugly square on a beautiful night in Athens, I described my 1999 New Year\u2019s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn\u2019t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. \u201cThe post-1989 liberal moment\u2014this was the exception,\u201d Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.<\/p>\n

Kalyvas is, among other things, the author of several well-known books about civil wars, including Greece\u2019s civil war, in the 1940s, one of many moments in European history when radically divergent political groups took up arms and started to kill one another. But civil war<\/em> and civil peace<\/em> are relative terms in Greece at the best of times. We were speaking just as some Greek intellectuals were having a centrist moment. It was suddenly fashionable to be \u201cliberal,\u201d lots of people in Athens told me, by which they meant neither Communist nor authoritarian, neither far-left, like the Syriza ruling party, nor far-right, like its nationalist coalition partner, the Independent Greeks. Cutting-edge young people were calling themselves \u201cneo-liberal,\u201d adopting a term that had been anathema only a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

But even the most optimistic centrists were not convinced that this change would last. \u201cWe survived the left-wing populists,\u201d several people told me gloomily, \u201cand now we are bracing for the right-wing populists.\u201d A nasty argument had long been brewing about the name and status of Macedonia, the ex\u2013Yugoslav republic neighboring Greece; soon after I left, the Greek government expelled some Russian diplomats for trying to foment anti-Macedonia hysteria in the northern part of the country. Whatever equilibrium your nation reaches, there is always someone, at home or abroad, who has reasons to upset it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a useful reminder. Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome. In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.<\/p>\n

History feels circular in other parts of Europe too. The divide that has shattered Poland is strikingly similar to the divide that split France in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. The language used by the European radical right\u2014the demand for \u201crevolution\u201d against \u201celites,\u201d the dreams of \u201ccleansing\u201d violence and an apocalyptic cultural clash\u2014is eerily similar to the language once used by the European radical left. The presence of dissatisfied, discontented intellectuals\u2014people who feel that the rules aren\u2019t fair and that the wrong people have influence\u2014isn\u2019t even uniquely European. Mois\u00e9s Na\u00edm, the Venezuelan writer, visited Warsaw a few months after the Law and Justice Party came to power. He asked me to describe the new Polish leaders: What were they like, as people? I gave him some adjectives\u2014angry<\/em>, vengeful<\/em>, resentful<\/em>. \u201cThey sound just like Chavistas,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God. Some of us, in Europe and North America, have settled on the idea that various forms of democratic and economic competition are the fairest alternative to inherited or ordained power.<\/p>\n

But we should not have been surprised\u2014I<\/em> should not have been surprised\u2014when the principles of meritocracy and competition were challenged. Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.<\/p>\n

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don\u2019t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community. The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state\u2014the one-party state, the illiberal state\u2014offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie. It may be that democracy has to be bent or business corrupted or court systems wrecked in order to achieve that state. But if you believe that you are one of those deserving people, you will do it.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Anne Applebaum<\/a> is a columnist for <\/em>The Washington Post and a professor of practice at the London School of Economics. Her latest book is<\/em> Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/em>This article originally stated that the Polish foreign service had already dropped its requirement that diplomats know two foreign languages. <\/em><\/p>\n

This article appears in the October 2018 print edition with the headline \u201cA Warning from Europe.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s Note: This article is part of a series<\/a> that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying? These stories appear in the October 2018 print edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theatlantic.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":118536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,65,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-anglo-america","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}