The book begins with Applebaum’s description of a 1999 New Year’s Eve party she helped host in rural Poland. The guests were mostly Polish, and many were colleagues of the author’s husband, Radek Sikorski, a center-right Polish politician. Applebaum notes that she and her guests would have been center-right or center-left and all generally “agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way things were going” (3). However, now most of her Polish guests support a right-wing, nativist party that currently controls the Polish government, the Law and Justice party. In contrast to the democratic principles Applebaum feels her guests once held, the Law and Justice party they support demonizes Muslims and the LGBT community and has replaced many civil servants, administrators, and judges with party loyalists (5-6). These guests no longer associate with Applebaum, including a former close friend and her daughter’s godmother, Ania Bielecka (8). They have also developed conspiratorial and antisemitic views and, purely because of their politics, have become estranged from their own children.

Applebaum describes how the Law and Justice party tried without success to pass a law that would have limited historical discussion of the Holocaust and entered a dispute with the government of Israel (7).