Anne Applebaum

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

Birtherism surely increased Americans' distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death.

The anti-European Tories were a fringe group - until they took over their whole party.

The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

Like wealth, or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don't value if they've always had it.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.

Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.

Many Americans, but Republicans in particular, long opposed the nationalization of industry and state-controlled companies that are more common in Europe. Instead, they were proud of the American commitment to both economic and political freedom.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.

Of course, isolationism will not keep America isolated.

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

Elections are always a Rorschach test - people look at the results and see what they want to see.