The Rise of Fascism

Between 1919 and 1933, democratic governments spread across Europe at a rate that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. The German Empire became the Weimar Republic. The Austro-Hungarian patchwork dissolved into a half-dozen parliamentary states. Poland, Finland, the Baltic nations, even Turkey adopted constitutions with elected legislatures. Liberal democracy appeared to have won the argument.

It hadn't. Within fifteen years, most of these democracies were dead. Not conquered from the outside but dismantled from within, by leaders who used democratic mechanisms to destroy democracy itself. Italy fell first, in 1922. Germany followed in 1933. Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece: by the late 1930s, authoritarian regimes governed most of the European continent. The democratic wave had been a brief anomaly. The authoritarian undertow pulled nearly everything back.

The question is not why fascism existed. Aggressive nationalism, contempt for parliamentary deliberation, worship of strong leadership: none of these sentiments were new in the 1920s. The question is why these sentiments found such fertile soil, why millions of ordinary people actively chose to surrender their political rights to men who promised them national greatness in exchange.