Centrists Are Pining for a Golden Age that Never Was
As the political center has withered in recent years, self-described moderates have often expressed nostalgia for the "normal" politics of the 1990s. But the era of Blair and Clinton really wasn't a golden age of progress — and it brought a wave of market fundamentalism still sowing havoc today.
Hillary Clinton and former first lady Michelle Obama in Washington, DC, 2010. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
For Anne Applebaum, whose work on Soviet-era history is so respected it landed her the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, it is not the past which is a foreign country, but the present. Her latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, offers a snapshot of a political center in disintegration.
The book takes the form of a memoir peppered with present-day interviews, Applebaum navigating former friends and milieus to make sense of shifts in the political tectonics of Europe and the United States.
The first recollection to surface is New Year’s Eve, 1999, as the author and her husband — member of European parliament and one-time Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski — hold a party at their home in northwest Poland to welcome the new millennium.
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