Where does Anne Applebaum belong?

We should value our morally tainted narrators

Historian Anne Applebaum is the media’s go-to expert on authoritarian statecraft and geopolitics. She’s achieved this thanks to Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). More than her follow-up books or her popular Autocracy in America podcast and Open Letters Substack newsletter, her global intellectual superstardom is largely thanks to Twilight.

Twilight begins by describing a party Applebaum threw for her friends in 1999. In the 1990s, Applebaum’s friend group included the world’s leading center-right intellectuals. They had been idealists of free markets, open borders, and democracy. While she stayed true to these moral principles, Applebaum insists, the friends switched sides. They now work for the world’s worst autocrats, advocate isolationism, and excuse the worst type of high-level corruption. (Her book’s original subtitle was, The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.)

But there are curious ambiguities in Applebaum’s historical account of her role in this slice of the conservative intellectual elite. She’s always there for important gatherings where she gains insight into the worldview of future authoritarian intellectuals. She sits in on editorial meetings and planning sessions. She goes to their weddings and parties. She’s granted privileged access and discovers crucial gossip, but at the same time Applebaum insists she never quite belonged. She was never really part of this group and in the end only knew them “slightly.”

What to make of these self-contradictions? Why this pattern of prevarication?