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Twilight Of Democracy
''Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism'' is a 2020 book by Anne Applebaum that discusses democratic decline and the rise of right-wing populist politics with authoritarian tendencies, with three main case studies: Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The book also includes a discussion of Hungary. Appelbaum's analysis focuses in particular on the intellectuals, whom she labels "clercs", who provide the intellectual justifications for a descent into authoritarianism. Content Applebaum, an American journalist who lives partly in Poland, opens the book with a 1999 party she held in Poland, attended by center-right proponents of democracy and " free-market liberal sm, from which she traces the evolution of the attendees to the modern day. According to Applebaum, over the years some of the attendees came to embrace right-wing populism and authoritarianism (with some even promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories), while others continued to b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked at ''The Economist'' and ''The Spectator'', and was a member of the editorial board of ''The Washington Post'' (2002–2006). Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for '' Gulag: A History'' published the previous year. She is a staff writer for ''The Atlantic'' and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Early life and education Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reformed" Jewish family. Her ancestors came to America from what is now Belarus. She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, ''summa cum laude'', in history and literature from Yale University, where she attended the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rafael Bardají
Rafael Luis Bardají López (born Badajoz, 1959) is a Spanish author, sociologist and former national security advisor to the Spanish government who researches the fields of neoconservatism and international politics. He was the founder of the ''Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos'' (Strategic Studies Group) think-tank. Biography Bardaji graduated with degrees in political science and sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He became a researcher into American neoconservative politics under the George W. Bush administration and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Along with other academics, military figures and politicians, he founded the centre-right Strategic Studies Group which aims to provide research on defense and security. The group maintains informal ties to the Spanish People's Party. Bardaji also worked as a policy advisor to People's Party defense ministers Eduardo Serra Rexach and Federico Trillo. Bardaji has also written in support of Israel and is a member of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viktor Orbán
Viktor Mihály Orbán (; born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian politician who has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has presided over Fidesz since 1993, with a brief break between 2000 and 2003. Orbán studied at the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University and briefly at the University of Oxford before entering politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989. He headed the reformist student movement the Alliance of Young Democrats (), the nascent Fidesz. Orbán became nationally known after giving a speech in 1989 in which he openly demanded that Soviet troops leave the country. After the end of Communism in Hungary in 1989 and the country's transition to multiparty democracy the following year, he was elected to the National Assembly and led Fidesz's parliamentary caucus until 1993. Under his leadership, Fidesz shifted away from its original centre-right, classical liberal, pro-European platform toward right ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fidesz
Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance (; hu, Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség) is a right-wing populist and national-conservative political party in Hungary, led by Viktor Orbán. It was formed in 1988 under the name of Alliance of Young Democrats () as a centre-left and liberal activist movement that opposed the ruling Marxist–Leninist government. It was registered as a political party in 1990, with Orbán as its leader. It entered the National Assembly following the 1990 parliamentary election, although, it lost two seats after the 1994 election. Following the election, it adopted liberal-conservatism which caused liberal members to leave and to join the Alliance of Free Democrats. It then sought to form a connection with other conservative parties, and after the 1998 election, it successfully formed a centre-right government. It adopted nationalism in the early 2000s, but its popularity slightly declined due to corruption scandals. It served in the opposition betw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Law And Justice
Law and Justice ( pl, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , PiS) is a right-wing populist and national-conservative political party in Poland. Its chairman is Jarosław Kaczyński. It was founded in 2001 by Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński as a direct successor of the Centre Agreement after it split from the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS). It managed to win the 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections, after which Lech became the president of Poland. It headed a parliamentary coalition with the League of Polish Families and Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland between 2005 and the 2007 election. It placed second and they remained in the parliamentary opposition until 2015. It regained the presidency in the 2015 election, and later won a majority of seats in the parliamentary election. They retained the positions following the 2019 and 2020 election. During its foundation, it sought to position itself as a centrist Christian democratic party, although shortly after, it ad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soft Dictatorship
''Dictablanda'' is a dictatorship in which civil liberties are allegedly preserved rather than destroyed. The word ''dictablanda'' is a pun on the Spanish word ''dictadura'' ("dictatorship"), replacing ''dura'', which by itself is a word meaning "hard", with ''blanda'', meaning "soft". The term was first used in Spain in 1930 when Dámaso Berenguer replaced Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja as the head of the ruling dictatorial government and attempted to reduce tensions in the country by repealing some of the harsher measures that had been introduced by the latter. It was also used to refer to the latter years of Francisco Franco's Spanish State, and to the hegemonic 70-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, or by Augusto Pinochet when he was asked about his regime and the accusations about his government. Analogously, the same pun is made in Portuguese as ''ditabranda'' or ''ditamole''. In February 2009, the Brazilian newspaper '' Folha de S.Pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meritocracy
Meritocracy (''merit'', from Latin , and ''-cracy'', from Ancient Greek 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the first known use of the term was by sociologist Alan Fox in the journal ''Socialist Commentary'' in 1956. It was then popularized by sociologist Michael Dunlop Young, who used the term in his dystopian political and satirical book ''The Rise of the Meritocracy'' in 1958. Definitions Early definitions Meritocracy was most famously argued by Plato, in his book '' The Republic'' and stood to become one of the foundations of politics in the Western world. The "most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collapse Of Communism
The Revolutions of 1989, also known as the Fall of Communism, was a revolutionary wave that resulted in the end of most communist states in the world. Sometimes this revolutionary wave is also called the Fall of Nations or the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. It also led to the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union—the world's largest communist state—and the abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. The events, especially the fall of the Soviet Union, drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War era. The earliest recorded protests were started in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1986 with the student demonstrations — the last chapter of these revolutions is considered to be in 1993 when Cambodia enacted a new Constitution in whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Authoritarian Personality
The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect. Conceptually, the term ''authoritarian personality'' originated from the writings of Erich Fromm, and usually is applied to men and women who exhibit a strict and oppressive personality towards their subordinates. Historical origins In ''The Authoritarian Personality'' (1950), Theodor W. Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford proposed a personality type that involved the "potentially fascistic individual." The historical background that influenced the theoretical development of the authoritarian personality included the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War (1939–1945), and the Holocaust, which indicated that the fascistic individual was psychologically susceptible to the ideology of anti-Semitism and to the emotional appeal of anti-democratic politics. Known as the Berkeley studies, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elite
In political and sociological theory, the elite (french: élite, from la, eligere, to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the ''Cambridge Dictionary'', the "elite" are "those people or organizations that are considered the best or most powerful compared to others of a similar type." American sociologist C. Wright Mills states that members of the elite accept their fellows' position of importance in society. "As a rule, 'they accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work, and to think, if not together at least alike'." It is a well-regulated existence where education plays a critical role. Universities in the US Youthful upper-class members attend prominent preparatory schools, which not only open doors to such elite universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, but also to the universit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mária Schmidt
Mária Schmidt (born 10 October 1953) is a Hungarian historian and university lecturer. In 2016 she holds the office of the Government Commissioner of the Memorial Year of the 1956 Revolution, Director-General of the 20th Century Institute, the 21st Century Institute and the House of Terror Museum. Career She was born in 1953. She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University as a secondary school teacher of History and German language and literature. She earned her doctorate in 1985 and subsequently her PhD in 1999. From 1996 she worked as the assistant professor of Pázmány Péter Catholic University where she became an associate professor in 2000, and she earned her habilitated doctoral degree in 2005. She has been a university full professor since 2010. As a holder of postgraduate research scholarships and visiting professorships, Dr. Schmidt has spent time at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck, Oxford, Paris, the Berlin Technische Universität, Tel-Aviv, as well as at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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