Ch. 2: Democracy and Authoritarianism

To the shock of many contemporary observers, liberal democracy – once hailed as humankind’s “last” socio-political system – began losing its appeal during the 1920s and 1930s, as authoritarian populisms in Italy, Germany, and Spain began filling the void left behind by the democratic (and capitalist) order.

Why did Liberal Democracy partially collapse during the interwar years? Why did entire societies, apparently, willingly engage in the Continent’s various authoritarian experiments? What were Bolshevism’s, Fascism’s, and Nazism’s allure, from the vantage point of the popular classes? What did those regimes purportedly offer to people, and in what particular contexts, which made Liberal Democracy appear like the political system of yesterday and its authoritarian challengers as offering the civilization of the Continent’s (and world’s) future? And what types of strategies did these regimes use to, as it were, “reach out to the people”? In other words, what were these dictatorships’ methods and strategies for spreading what historians have referred to as a “popular consensus” among the masses?