Anne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism
About this episode
Klein speaks with Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Atlantic staff writer, using Hannah Arendt's 1951 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' as a window into the present. Arendt's central insight, Applebaum argues, is that loneliness — 'the experience of not belonging to the world at all' — leaves people vulnerable to mass movements, conspiracy theories and cynicism; the online world has made this worse. They discuss how populist-right figures from Trump to Hungary's Jobbik trade on the gleeful defiance of norms, why the founders understood the irrational side of human nature that postwar liberals forgot, and how technocratic politics (Blair, Clinton) failed to satisfy the human hunger for myth and sweeping purpose. Putin's war in Ukraine becomes an Arendtian case study — an invented enemy meant to sustain power that backfired — while Zelensky's example shows liberalism's need for a story bigger than technocratic management.