Anne Applebaum Quotes
-
Donald Trump may undermine some of the traditional checks on the presidency: the press in particular, but also the various government and Congressional ethics bodies, as well as the career civil service.
→ -
Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.
→ -
There will instead be a number of fake opposition figures, one of whom is now probably going to be Kseniya Sobchak, which is an absurd idea. I assume she's been chosen because just even the idea of her standing for liberals so makes fun of the idea of liberals and of liberal democracy.
→ -
The old battle between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is now meaningless, not least because the social structures that underlay those parties, the church and the unions, have faded away. Nationalists and populists understood this change earlier; now the rest of the political world needs to understand that the political lines have been redrawn and it's time to change.
→ -
Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, appears to imagine an alliance between Trump, Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage. Call it the populist international, a fraternal association of the nationalist right, binding people who want borders, across borders.
→ -
Though the poorest Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, many relatively wealthy people voted for Trump and generally it's a mistake to think that economics explains Trump. The US is doing relatively well, the economy has significantly recovered since 2008, unemployment rates are low. I would say rather that his appeal to the working class was cultural: "I'll bring back the kinds of jobs your fathers had," and, by implication, the whiter, simpler post-war world when America had no real economic competition.
→ -
We may be reaching the end of the liberal world order.
→ -
Think of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, Ciudadanos in Spain, Nowoczesna in Poland. These are early efforts to reimagine a liberalism which is neither right-wing nor left-wing in the traditional sense.
→ -
Globalization has genuinely drained power away from national politicians and people feel it. People in our fast digital age are also frustrated with the comparably slow democratic processes. Many young people - and some old people - want to know, Why does everything take so long? Why can't someone just decide and then move forward?
→ -
A lot of the Russian economy is built around people who are one way or another milking the state and taking money from the state and recycling it into their private bank accounts. And there are a lot of people who are taking advantage of that, so it's not just one person. It's a kind of web of people doing that, and that's how the system stays in power and how people stay in control.
→ -
What is the appeal of Trump, really? It's nostalgic: "Make America great again." Like European nationalists, he has a vision of a "real" America, one which predates globalization, immigration, feminism, the civil rights movement and technological change, an imaginary 1950s to which we can now return. That is actually not very different from the kind of language that Marine Le Pen uses, or parts of the Brexit movement.
→ -
I don't want to predict calamity. But I am afraid of a new Russian occupation of parts of Eastern Europe. Also of a new Russian campaign to exert influence in Germany or other parts Europe, aimed at making continental politics less democratic. I am afraid of a US trade war and even a shooting war with China.
→ -
European security may now depend on Germany, France, Britain and one or two others, and it's better to start planning now for the possibility of European-only cyber-defense, counter-terrorism, and conventional defense too.
→ -
Navalny is a blogger-turned-activist, but he finds stuff and he puts together these very, very clever, very high production value videos which underline the corruption at the top of the system, and there are millions of people who watch them. Some people think he must have some kind of protection inside the system because he hasn't yet been completely put out of commission; he's allowed to go on. He himself has said he wants to run for president.
→ -
Putin has made life difficult for a lot of Russia's richest men; they don't like the sanctions; they don't like the war with the West. Many of them have houses and families and businesses in the West, and so I can see them being unhappy. But at the moment, the political system is so constructed that it would be very difficult for them to leave. That's not saying it couldn't change.
→ -
The Russian economy is about the size of the Italian economy; it's very small, and Russia's military force is larger than it was, because Putin's been investing in it, but it still doesn't compare to that of the United States, and his reach and aim still don't compare.
→ -
I didn't like doing predictions. It's certainly true that right now - and this could change tomorrow - but, right now there is no clear way for Putin to lose power. There seems little chance that a street revolution could unseat him; that's just not how things are going to work in Russia. And it seems as if the very tiny number of people who control the economy and who control politics in Russia are loyal to him.
→ -
The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.
→ -
Putin saw the Ukrainian revolution as a challenge to him personally, and I think that's why he, in fact, over-reacted. I think his occupation of Crimea and then annexation for him was actually a mistake from Russia's point of view. And then his invasion of Eastern Ukraine was also a mistake. He imagined that he would invade Eastern Ukraine and then eventually split the country in half, and he discovered that in fact, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, and they didn't support him.
→ -
The world has always been a dangerous place. Now it is dangerous in a different way, because the world order that we've known since the end of the Cold War has been radically transformed. All of the institutions that preserved peace and promoted global trade will be weaker - NATO, the EU, NAFTA - and US relationships with other countries will change, too.
→ -
I don't think Americans realize the degree to which they are the main subject of Russian television news. Every night there's news from the United States and scandals about the United States, and every night the United States is shown to be an enemy of Russia over and over and over again. And this is, of course, useful to the Russian president, because it's, we have this big and important enemy - you need me here to fight back.
→ -
I don't think Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump really have friends. But Trump has openly admired Putin for many years, with no reservations. He even seems to idolize him. Neither his cabinet appointees nor the civil servants in the Pentagon and the State Department feel the same way, however, so we don't know what this admiration will bring.
→ -
Donald Trump has never tried to reach out to all the American people, he never uses the language of unity, he doesn't try to charm or persuade. He just says, thanks to the people who voted for me and the rest of you are losers.
→ -
If Putin decides to run, which we are assuming that he will, there really isn't anything that can stop him. He can manipulate the system so that he has not real opponents; he can manipulate the media so that nobody else gets any coverage. And then, if worse comes to worse, he can - as he has done in the past - just change the electoral results. So, it's not like it's going to be a very exciting election.
→ -
The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.
→ -
Putin imagined it would be different. So, like many Russian leaders before him, he imagined that Ukraine was basically Russia, but they speak with a funny accent. Actually, it's not Russia; it has a different identity. It has a very different language. Russians don't automatically understand Ukrainian. And, in particular, the way Ukraine has developed over the last two decades is different from the way Russia has developed.
→ -
High national emotions are permissible when a soccer team is playing precisely because they are impermissible at most other times. There aren't, simply, many other places where you can sing your national anthem until you lose your voice without causing a riot. In the context of soccer, flag-waving nationalism - even chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, flag-waving nationalism - is acceptable in Britain.
→ -
nothing happens in August - except when something really happens in August. World War I began in August, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait began in August, al Qaida was preparing to bring down the World Trade Center in August. August, in other words, is the time when all of us should prepare our backup plans, chart our reversals of course, [and] think through possible paradigm changes.
→ -
We can't continue assuming that politics is something which is decided elsewhere by distant leaders in a distant capital. Protest is insufficient too. If people who are willing to put time into demonstrations also prove willing to work on behalf of candidates in local elections - or to become candidates themselves - they will achieve far more. If all of this upheaval provokes more involvement, then we have a slim chance of ending up with more vibrant democracies eventually. The alternative, as you've hinted, is that democracy fails altogether.
→ -
What's interesting about Navalny is that he has run a - not so much a pro-democracy campaign in Russia, but an anti-corruption campaign. He seems to have access to quite a lot of information about very senior Russians, including Putin.
→
Related Authors
-
Joseph Stalin Former Premier of the Soviet Union -
Danielle Crittenden Author -
Mark Steyn Writer -
Antony Beevor Historian -
André Aciman Writer -
-
Robert Conquest Historian -
Julian Assange Journalist -
-
Tony Judt Historian -
David Pryce-Jones Author -
Varlam Shalamov Writer -
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Novelist -
Orlando Figes Historian -
Roger Kimball Editor -
Stephen F. Cohen Scholar -
Timothy Garton Ash Historian -
Norman Davies Historian -
Garry Kasparov Writer -
Hilton Kramer Art critic