Anne Applebaum
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and political writer; staff writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World and writes widely on democracy, authoritarianism, propaganda, and post-communist Europe.
A Democratic Midterm Win Would Not Restore Allied Trust in the United States
Historian Anne Applebaum argues that the US midterms will test whether voters and Congress can constrain an administration she says is weakening democratic checks at home and treating traditional allies as expendable abroad. A Democratic victory could show that Trump-aligned politics is not inevitable, she tells FT chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, but would not by itself restore the trust or reliability allies once associated with the United States.
Elected Leaders Can Hollow Out Democracy Without Abolishing Elections
Pulitzer-winning historian Anne Applebaum argues that the United States is entering the kind of democratic danger she once studied in Soviet and post-Soviet systems: not a sudden coup, but institutional capture by elected leaders who keep democratic rituals while changing the rules. In a conversation with Steven Bartlett, Applebaum says the warning signs are corruption, manipulated elections, loyalist personnel, information control and unaccountable coercive power — mechanisms that can turn a democracy into an unfair, one-party system before many citizens recognize the shift.