My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Since former Pres. Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, there have been a ton of books written regarding our current political moment. While many have of these books have been directed straight at former Pres. Trump, many others address Trumpism more tangentially, trying to explain the political and cultural forces that have made his rise possible. While these are valuable books about American politics, they fail to take into account that the rise of the extreme right is a global issue. In this book, not only does Mr. Applebaum provide an invaluable look at this global phenomenon, she also offers a different way to look at how these political forces are aided and abetted, and she offers a personal story of loss friendships that sound very familiar to many readers today.
As a historian of the Soviet era who is married to a Polish politician, Ms. Applebaum is well placed to comment on the rise of the extreme right in Europe and America. She specifically devotes time to the nations of the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Poland, and Hungary in her analysis and even American readers who are only familiar with the rise of Trumpism will get chills at how familiar much of the rhetoric is in these countries. Indeed, you could take the essence of former Pres. Trump’s “America First” message and adapt it to any one of these countries and the politicians trying to lead these extreme political movements. Thus, Ms. Applebaum makes a very strong case that the rise of extreme right political movements is cause for global concern.
One of the more valuable aspects of this book is that she doesn’t focus all of her energy on the leaders of these movements, like Donald Trump of Victor Orban. Instead, much of her attention is focused on middling politicians and intellectuals who aid and abet their rise whom she calls clercs. She sets up this argument in an explicit contrast to Hannah Arendt’s own analysis on totalitarianism in such classic works as The Banality of Evil. In this book, Ms. Applebaum argues that these clercs are not just “following orders” like German citizens were under Nazism. Instead, whether out of jealousy, thwarted ambition, sheer opportunism, or all of these things, these clercs provide the intellectual and political framework for the rise of extreme right politicians. It’s an intriguing look at our current political moment as well as a great critique of a famous political theory.
What makes Ms. Applebaum’s analysis of present day clercs intriguing though is that she is not examining them not just as an academic from afar. As a self-proclaimed center-right Reaganite, Ms. Applebaum has known and met many of these clercs. Some of them were her very good friends. Thus, she is not just speaking as an academic, she is speaking from personal experience seeing many of her friends succumb to the allure of extreme right politics. Her shock at seeing so many of her friends, who were staunch anti-communists and prominent politicians who took part in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, fall for propaganda, misinformation, and lies, or even propagate them, is evident. So too is her personal pain at losing these friends. This is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While her personal experience with many of these clercs aids this book, her pain is also palpable and at times she can’t stop herself from criticizing her former friends and the people they surround themselves with rather harshly. Granted, much of that criticism may be warranted, but this book does lurch from time to time into a screed of personal betrayal.
In conclusion, while there are plenty of Trump books or Trump-adjacent books out there, this is one of the few of those books that offers a truly global perspective. She may indulge in some rather harsh criticism, but Ms. Applebaum speaks as both an academic with unimpeachable credentials as well as from personal experience. If you’re still interested in reading Trump or Trump-adjacent books, I would highly recommend this book to you.
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