I New Year''s Eve On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one, and people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, a small manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier--­­for the price of the bricks--­­when it was a mildewed, uninhabitable ruin, unrenovated since the previous occupants fled the Red Army in 1945. We had restored the house, or most of it, though very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof as well as a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon, perfect for a party. The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Moscow, a few junior diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew over from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, Radek Sikorski, who was then a deputy foreign minister in a center-­­right Polish government.

There were local friends, some of Radek''s school friends, and a large group of cousins. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too--­­none then particularly famous--­­along with a few civil servants and one or two very junior members of the government. You could have lumped the majority of us, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right--­­the conservatives, the anti-­­Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of us liberals. Free-­­market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about the economics did believe in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances, and in a Poland that was a member of NATO and on its way to joining the European Union (EU), a Poland that was an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being "on the right" meant. As parties go, it was a little scrappy.

There was no such thing as catering in rural Poland in the 1990s, so my mother-­­in-­­law and I made vats of beef stew and roasted beets. There were no hotels, either, so our hundred-­­odd guests stayed in local farmhouses or with friends in the nearby town. I kept a list of who was staying where, but a couple of people still wound up sleeping on the floor in the basement. Late in the evening we set off fireworks--­­cheap ones, made in China, which had just become widely available and were probably extremely dangerous. The music--­­on cassette tapes, made in an era before Spotify--­­created the only serious cultural divide of the evening: the songs that my American friends remembered from college were not the same as the songs that the Poles remembered from college, so it was hard to get everybody to dance at the same time. At one point I went upstairs, learned that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper, then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance. It was that kind of party.

It lasted all night, continued into "brunch" the following afternoon, and was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We had rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. I have a particularly clear memory of a walk in the snow--­­maybe it was the day before the party, maybe the day after--­­with a bilingual group, everybody chattering at once, English and Polish mingling and echoing through the birch forest. At that moment, when Poland was on the cusp of joining the West, it felt as if we were all on the same team. We agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way things were going. That moment has passed. Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year''s Eve party.

They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too. Some of my New Year''s Eve guests--­­along with me and my husband--­­continued to support the pro-­­European, pro-­­rule-­­of-­­law, pro-­­market center right. We remained in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of France and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some of my guests consider themselves center-­­left. But others wound up in a different place.

They now support a nativist party called Law and Justice--­­a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland) from 2005 to 2010. In the years it was out of power, the leaders of Law and Justice and many of its supporters and promoters slowly came to embrace a different set of ideas, not just xenophobic and paranoid but openly authoritarian. To be fair to the electorate, not everybody could see this: Law and Justice ran a very moderate campaign in 2015 against a center-­­right party that had been in power for eight years--­­my husband was a member of that government, though he resigned before the election--­­and was in the final year headed by a weak and unimpressive prime minister. Understandably, Poles wanted a change. But after Law and Justice won a slim majority in 2015, its radicalism immediately became clear. The new government violated the constitution by improperly appointing new judges to the constitutional court. Later, it used an equally unconstitutional playbook in an attempt to pack the Polish Supreme Court and wrote a law designed to punish judges whose verdicts contradicted government policy. Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster--­­also in violation of the constitution--­­firing popular presenters and experienced reporters.

Their replacements, recruited from the far-­­right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-­party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers'' expense. State institutions were another target. Once in power, Law and Justice sacked thousands of civil servants, replacing them with party hacks, or else cousins and other relatives of party hacks. They fired army generals who had years of expensive training in Western academies. They fired diplomats with experience and linguistic skills. One by one, they wrecked cultural institutions too. The National Museum lost its excellent acting director, an internationally respected curator. He was replaced with an unknown academic, with no prior museum experience, whose first major decision was to dismantle the museum''s exhibition of modern and contemporary art.

A year later he would resign, leaving the museum in chaos. The director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews--­­an institution unique in Europe, opened with great fanfare only a few years earlier--­­was suspended from his job with no explanation, horrifying the museum''s international supporters and funders. Those stories were echoed by thousands of others that didn''t make headlines. A friend of ours lost her job in another state institution, for example, after she had completed too many projects too quickly. Her new and unqualified director seemed to perceive her as a threat. There was very little pretense about any of this. The point of all of these changes was not to make government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.

Or maybe we should call it, as we once did, the Party. They had no mandate to do this: Law and Justice was elected with a percentage of the vote that allowed them to rule but not to change the constitution. And so, in order to justify breaking the law, the party stopped using ordinary political arguments, and began identifying existential enemies instead. Some were old and familiar. After two decades of profound Polish-­­Jewish conversations and reconciliation--­­after thousands of books, films, and conferences, after the construction of that spectacular museum--­­the government earned international notoriety by adopting a law curtailing public debate about the Holocaust. Although they eventually changed the law under American pressure, it enjoyed broad support among the party''s ideological base--­­the journalists, writers, and thinkers, including some of my party guests, who now say they believe that anti-­­Polish forces are plotting to blame Poland instead of Germany for Auschwitz. Later, the party also involved itself in a pointless spat with the Israeli government, an argument that seemed designed to appeal both to Law and Justice''s angry, nationalist voters in Poland and Benjamin Netanyahu''s angry, nationalist voters in Israel. Some of the enemies were new.

After a brief period of attacking Islamic immigrants--difficult, in a country with almost no Islamic immigrants at all--the party focused its ire on homosexuals. A national weekly, Gazeta Polska --a couple of whose most prominent journalists were at my New Year''s Eve party--printed "LGBT Free Zone.