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.

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.

The Diary of a CEOMay 11, 202633 min read