Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Are We The Baddies

Applebaum's been paid well for decades to explain things to us, and she apparently believed all the bullshit everyone she knew told her!
In “Twilight of Democracy,” Applebaum tries to understand why so many of her old friends — conservatives who once fancied themselves champions of democracy and classical liberalism — have become paranoid right-wing populists. “Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians?” she asks. “Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?”
To Applebaum, today’s right, in both America and Europe, “has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War.” Until recently, she writes, the right was “dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and speech, economic integration, international institutions, the trans-Atlantic alliance and a political idea of ‘the West.’” What happened?
Imagine thinking the "throw leftists from helicopters" crowd actually believed all these things. Well, don't worry, you can continue to enrich Anne buy buying her book and also you can hear her talk to David Frum, for another episode of "we are truly stupid assholes with odious opinions and friends but wow you should give us more money and keep listening to our sage advice, because the one thing we refuse learn is that we are evil dumdums who no one should listen to."

Oh my old friends were just seduced by that slutty bitch authoritarianism! Led astray by its siren song! It couldn't possibly be that their lifelong project was to implement it.

I hate these people.

Free Polanski!