It was 1935, and Lawrence Dennis was certain that fascism was coming to America. He couldn’t wait.
Dennis, a diplomat turned public mental, had simply revealed an article in a number one political science journal titled “Fascism for America.” In his thoughts, the Nice Despair was proof that liberalism had run its course — its emphasis on free markets and particular person liberty unable to deal with the complexities of a contemporary financial system. With liberal democracy doomed, the one query was whether or not communism or fascism would win the longer term. And Dennis was rooting for the latter.
“I ought to prefer to see our two main political events settle for the main fascist premises,” he wrote. “Whether or not our coming fascism is kind of humane and respectable will rely largely on the contributions our humane elite could make to it in time.”
His case for fascism, made at e-book size in 1936’s The Coming American Fascism, felt persuasive to many on the time. A recent assessment of the e-book in The Atlantic wrote that “its arraignment of liberal management is unanswerable”; he was well-regarded sufficient to advise main isolationist Charles Lindbergh and meet with elites on either side of the Atlantic, starting from sitting senators to Adolf Hitler himself.
I first encountered Dennis researching my characteristic on liberalism and its critics (which has simply emerged from The Spotlight’s paywall). Within the piece, I take advantage of him to point out that liberalism’s enemies have lengthy predicted its inevitable doom.
However the extra I’ve thought of Dennis, the extra I’ve realized how a lot we now have to study from him right this moment. There are putting parallels between Dennis’s fascist assault on liberalism and the arguments made by its present right-wing critics. And on condition that Dennis’s arguments proved so badly mistaken, his destiny ought to be a warning towards accepting comparable predictions of inevitable liberal doom from his fashionable heirs.
There are, I believe, two central errors in Dennis’s work which have direct parallels within the arguments made by modern intolerant radicals. I’ve termed them “anti-liberal traps,” and I believe many are falling into them right this moment.
What Lawrence Dennis believed
Dennis got here to fascism by means of a peculiar route. A Black man who handed for white for almost his whole life, he was overtly important of Jim Crow and American racism — virtually, his biographer Gerald Horne theorizes, as if he needed individuals to know who he really was. Horne additional means that Dennis’s embrace of fascism was motivated partly by disgust with the racism of the median American voter. Dennis, Horne intimates, might have been so disgusted with racist rule of “the individuals” that he embraced rule-by-elite as a substitute.
However whereas he did talk about race, Dennis’s arguments in The Coming American Fascism had been primarily financial. In his view, the Nice Despair was not an remoted disaster however relatively an indication of the present political order’s structural failures.
Dennis believed that capitalism trusted a number of key components to ship financial progress — together with continued acquisition of recent territory, a rising inhabitants, and debt-financed enterprise growth. By the Nineteen Thirties, he believed that these components had reached a useless finish: that the US couldn’t feasibly purchase new territory, that its inhabitants would degree off due to immigration restrictionism and contraception, and that personal debt had reached wholly unsustainable ranges.
The Despair, he argued, was a symptom of those structural failings coming to a head.
In Dennis’s view, American liberal democracy didn’t have the instruments to restore the failings within the capitalist system. Liberalism was, he believed, joined inevitably to laissez-faire economics. Its deference to non-public property was so complete, its establishments so dominated by the pursuits of the rich, that it could be unattainable for even a frontrunner as bold as then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make severe inside changes.
“The options of the liberal system we at the moment are discussing are basic. It’s continually forgotten that the quintessence of liberalism and liberal liberties underneath a structure is the upkeep of a regime of particular or exceptionally favorable concerns for personal property,” Dennis writes. “A sequence of majority votes arrived at by the parliamentary or Congressional strategies of majority group pressures, lobbying, and the person pursuit of reelection by a whole lot of workplace holders, don’t represent a guiding hand. And a political system of checks and balances is just not coordinated management.”
This final line hints at Dennis’s fascist imaginative and prescient: a system during which liberal democracy is changed by the rule of a handful of enlightened elites, who develop a complete plan for the financial system relatively than leaving issues as much as the whims of personal house owners. Solely state management over financial affairs, together with nationalization of the banking system, may restore the malfunctioning financial system and put the US on the pathway to prosperity.
Dennis was no communist: He didn’t imagine within the full abolition of personal property. Reasonably, he believed that the state ought to be much more aggressive in dictating to non-public house owners — forcing them to make company choices primarily based not on the revenue motive however relatively on the nice of the collective, as outlined by the fascist governing class. This was the mannequin rising in Italy and Germany on the time he was writing, and one he believed would show vastly extra environment friendly and productive within the fashionable world than American-style liberal democratic capitalism.
“America can not perpetually stay seventeenth and 18th century in its legislation, and political and social concept and follow, whereas shifting within the vanguard of twentieth century technological progress. The defenders of 18th century Americanism are doomed to grow to be the laughing inventory of their very own countrymen,” he writes.
Dennis believed that liberalism’s sensible failings stemmed from its philosophical essence: that “the options of the liberal system we at the moment are discussing are basic.” The liberal obsession with particular person rights, be it personal property or free speech, made liberal democracies ideologically incapable of taking the financial steps mandatory to repair capitalism’s errors.
“The fascist State solely repudiates the liberal concept of battle of pursuits and rights as between the State and the person,” he writes. “Liberalism assumes that particular person welfare and safety is essentially a matter of getting lively and highly effective judicial restraints on governmental interference with the person; Fascism assumes that particular person welfare and safety is especially secured by the energy, effectivity, and success of the State within the realization of the nationwide plan.”
The apparent objection is that this fascist imaginative and prescient would result in terrifying mistreatment of residents. Dennis did enable that Germany had gone too far on this path by repressing the media and the church, however argued that “a fascinating type of fascism for People” may keep away from such “drastic measures.” Even Germany, Dennis believed, wouldn’t grow to be “a State and authorities…whose each act could be an abuse,” as “such an eventuality appears most unbelievable in any fashionable State.”
Although fascist ideology may outline the nationwide plan in a method that directed violence towards ethnic minorities, Dennis — ever the closeted Black man — believed that such racism might be excised from the fascist undertaking.
“If, on this dialogue, it’s assumed that certainly one of our values ought to be a sort of racism which excludes sure races from citizenship, then the plan of execution ought to present for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races,” he anxious. “If, quite the opposite, as I devoutly hope would be the case, the scheme of values will embody that of a nationwide citizenship during which race will probably be no qualifying or disqualifying situation, then the plan of realization should, in as far as race relations are involved, present for assimilation or lodging of race variations throughout the scheme of easily operating society.”
The anti-liberal traps, from 1936 to 2025
We now know that each single certainly one of Dennis’s arguments was terribly mistaken.
The New Deal labored; each the US and European democracy developed social fashions that reformed capitalism with out abandoning its essence. This political-economic system proved far more practical economically than both fascist or communist central planning. And fascism in follow dedicated each horrible abuse that its liberal critics warned of — and a few so terrible that nearly nobody imagined their risk prematurely.
Now, “Nineteen Thirties-era fascist was mistaken” is just not precisely breaking information. However what I discovered notable about Dennis is how intently his argument follows a normal sample of anti-liberal argument — one which many far-right intellectuals deploy right this moment of their critiques. It’s one centered on what I described earlier as the dual “anti-liberal traps.”
The primary anti-liberal entice is a declare {that a} latest disaster is a product of unchangeable and unreformable liberal philosophical commitments. It’s a perception that whereas liberal states nonetheless stand, the creator has seen their coming doom — and its causes align, simply completely, with the creator’s most popular view of the world.
Such claims not solely demand extraordinary proof, however threat being embarrassed when occasions on this planet start to shift.
Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, has put this mode of argument on the heart of his worldview. In two latest books, Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Deneen argues that the present rise of populist figures like Donald Trump augurs liberalism’s collapse — a collapse that’s, he believes, a mandatory product of liberalism’s philosophical commitments to meritocracy and individualism.
“Liberalism has careened in the direction of its inevitable failure,” he writes in Regime Change, as a result of “liberalism’s conception of liberty created each a brand new ruling class and degraded the lives of the lots.”
Particularly, he argues, liberalism’s dedication to liberating people to dwell the lives of their selecting has led to weakening of the ties that bind people collectively — with out which most will undergo so badly that the system can not lengthy survive.
“The advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, after which accelerating, weakening, redefinition, or overthrowing of many formative establishments and practices of human life, whether or not household, the neighborhood, an enormous array of associations, faculties and universities, structure, the humanities, and even the church buildings,” he writes.
Deneen’s evaluation is, in argumentative construction, terribly much like Dennis’s.
Each take latest occasions, be it the rise of Trump or the Despair, as proof that liberalism’s doom is just not merely probably however assured. Each argue that this inevitable collapse stems from liberalism’s unchangeable and unreformable philosophical essence.
And each, notably, find the failures in areas that align with their political pursuits. Deneen is a Catholic conservative who believes the state ought to advertise conservative spiritual values; Dennis was a fascist who believed in a state-structured financial system. Not coincidentally, they blame liberalism’s inevitable doom on (respectively) its social and financial failings.
In describing these similarities, I’m not making an attempt a complete rebuttal of Deneen’s arguments. The content material of their arguments are totally different sufficient, as are the circumstances. Maybe Dennis was mistaken and Deneen is correct. However there’s a tendency, amongst observers of all stripes, to overextrapolate from latest developments — usually in ways in which flatter their very own worldviews and biases.
The second anti-liberal entice represents an analogous type of wishful pondering. It’s an idealization of liberalism’s alternate options: a comparability of actually-existing liberalism both to theoretical fashions or whitewashed variations of its real-life rivals. To think about, in essence, Dennis’s anti-racist fascism or less-hateful Nazism.
You may see this, most clearly, within the latest right-wing vogue for Catholic integralism: a political mannequin during which the state could be tasked with utilizing its energy to additional the religious mission of the church.
Any such undertaking would require really extraordinary quantities of coercion to be carried out in a rustic that’s 20 p.c Catholic (and most American Catholics should not themselves far-right). Extra broadly, right-wing spiritual regimes have a poor monitor document in terms of defending the rights of non-believers.
But integralists reply to those claims both by deflection — liberal states coerce too! — or an assertion that their confessional state would absolutely be higher than the others. Recalling a dialog with a Jewish colleague about what would occur to this individual underneath integralism, Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule — a number one American integralist — described his reply in two glib phrases: “nothing dangerous.”
You additionally see parallels to Dennis in the best way that fashionable anti-liberals discuss modern Hungary, which has grow to be to the intolerant proper what the Nordic states are to the American left. Hungary is undeniably authoritarian, however its fashionable right-wing defenders angrily deny that its regime is something aside from a well-functioning democracy. Arduous proof on the contrary, equivalent to its repression of unbiased media or assaults on judicial independence, are dismissed as liberal propaganda or else no worse than what occurs right here in the US.
This false equivalence, by the way, was a favourite transfer of Dennis’s. In dismissing costs that fascism would trample on particular person rights the liberal state protects, he replied that each one states coerce, simply in numerous methods.
“The favored kind of denunciation of fascism on the bottom that it stands for State absolutism, or a State of limitless powers, as contrasted with the liberal State of restricted powers, relies on misrepresentation of the true nature of the liberal State,” he wrote. “The necessary variations between fascism and liberalism on this respect lie between these sure issues which every State, respectively, does with out limitation.”
Once more, the purpose is to not counsel full equivalence: Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is just not Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Reasonably, it’s to level out how comparable the arguments are structurally — how simple it’s, when ranging from some extent of hostility to liberalism, to handwave away criticisms of its alternate options by means of idealizations and tu quoques.
Lawrence Dennis was not a dumb man. After studying a lot of his writing, I’m assured of that. However his arguments, which appeared so persuasive to many on the time, proved to be mistaken in almost each explicit — a shortsighted extrapolation from latest proof that misinterpret each the politics of liberal democracies and liberalism’s philosophical adaptability to new circumstances.
It’s a lesson that radical anti-liberals right this moment should take to coronary heart.
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