Finally, however, I was able to arrange a conversation with Ryszard Terlecki, the head of the party’s parliamentary caucus and one of Kaczynski’s small circle of confidants. When we met, late on a Sunday evening in the dark and deserted Parliament building, I learned that Terlecki belonged to a political category that I had never before encountered: ex-hippie anti-Communist hard-liner. Youthful dissolution had taken its toll. At 67, Terlecki is a prematurely played-out looking man, tall and gaunt, with graven cheeks, a grizzled chin and great bags beneath dark eyes.

“I’ve always been a member of right-wing parties,” he told me. He shared Kaczynski’s conspiratorial view of recent Polish history. The post-Solidarity elite, he assured me, made common cause with the Communists “because it was the only way they could stop the conservative Catholic movement that was rising up in Poland.” Terlecki said that he was not anti-Western. The difference between Law and Justice and the opposition, he said, was that “we don’t want a Poland that is a colony of the West.” Terlecki meant not only that Poland should not blindly follow Germany, as he accused the previous government of doing, but also that Poland should embrace its own values, above all the conservatism of the church and the belief in the sanctity of the family.

It was clear that Terlecki did not accept the difference between the ruling party and the state. For him, all institutions served as instruments of power either for his side or the other, and the other side was out to harm Poland. How then, I asked, could he possibly accept the idea of political compromise? Terlecki laughed dryly. “What kind of compromise do you mean?” he asked. “There’s no need for one.”

The rise of nativist, anti-liberal parties in Poland and elsewhere and the backlash against migrants and multiculturalism in the Brexit vote raise the question of what we mean when we talk about Europe. If we mean a particular piece of geography and demography — that is, the white, Christian culture that has flourished for most of the last millennium in the continent north of the Mediterranean and west of the Black Sea — then the rise of Law and Justice and kindred parties represents no threat to Europe. But if Europe is not just a place on a map but a community of values, the home of secularism, liberalism and tolerance, the answer is much less clear. For many Law and Justice supporters, “the West” means moral nihilism. Bronislaw Wildstein, a conservative political philosopher whose writings have provided intellectual rationale for Law and Justice policies, described himself to me as an admirer of Burke who saw individuals nested inside history, tradition and culture. “Across Western Europe,” he said, “the great word is ‘emancipation’: emancipation from family identity, emancipation from sexual identity. After all this emancipation, what is left? Nothingness.”

But Solidarity’s leaders did not risk their lives and livelihoods in order to bow before the authority of the church. And those figures are not so very old today: Walesa is 73; Michnik is 70. These founding fathers have called the new government a menace to Polish democracy. A new protest movement known as KOD — a conscious echo of KOR, the pre-Solidarity intellectuals’ movement — formed last year. In early May, a demonstration called by KOD in Warsaw brought out a crowd estimated by the city’s mayor at roughly 250,000 (and by the police at 45,000).

No one mistakes KOD for Solidarity. The movement has been limited to the big cities and attracts mostly older and better-educated people. Until recently, the inroads the government made on personal freedom felt abstract to most Poles. In early October, however, an estimated 100,000 people demonstrated against a new abortion law, strongly advocated by the Catholic Church, that would have subjected doctors and women seeking abortions to potentially long prison sentences. The government abruptly withdrew its support for the legislation. Activists hope that the mass protests will fan the embers of opposition.

Michnik feels as if he has seen this drama before. He is still the publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza, the daily newspaper he founded with other Solidarity leaders in 1989. Along with Vaclav Havel, Michnik defined the meaning of the anti-Soviet uprisings both for the people of the Eastern bloc and for readers in the West. Michnik stressed the idea that Solidarity must function not simply as an instrument for organization and negotiation but as an embodiment of another, better way to live: egalitarian, truthful, free from fear. He spent years in prison for his beliefs.