In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Birtherism surely increased Americans’ distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Italians have famously low levels of trust in their government, and a tradition of medical hoaxes. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
In the United States, the world’s most important democracy, Congress seems permanently deadlocked, in hock to moneyed interests, unable to grapple with the big issues of climate change, technological change, the information revolution. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’ isn’t just a song lyric; it’s an expression of something fundamental about the human brain. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Like wealth, or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don’t value if they’ve always had it. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Americans might not want to intervene in the outside world, but the outside world will still want to intervene in America. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
Quite a lot has been written, including by me, about the effect of social media on politics, and in particular the way in which the algorithms built into Facebook and YouTube are more likely to spread angry, extremist and deliberately provocative political language. Anne Applebaum Read Quote
