Totalitarianism and war

The statement by Walter Lippmann quoted earlier suggests that even in the United States influential commentators were recognizing the need for a fundamental reorientation, even restructuring, of politics and society if the severe economic crisis were to be overcome. Lippmann was so much concerned with the crisis that at one point he went so far as to admit that only a dictatorship might save the nation. That even someone as committed to democracy and liberalism as Lippmann had been should feel this way reveals the profound despair felt in America about the ability of the existing institutions to cope with the crisis.

If some Americans responded in such fashion, it is not surprising that in other countries, less rooted in democracy, forces would develop that would transform their political systems into dictatorships.

The rise of modern totalitarianism should not, it is true, all be attributed to the Depression. Both the totaliarianism of the right (fascism) and of the left (communism) had existed before 1929. Even if we confine our discussion to the twentieth century, it is to be noted that fascism (which may be defined as a dictatorship of the state) had developed in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere in the wake of the Great War, where movements emerged that would challenge party politics, parliamentary democracy, and pluralistic ideologies and substitute for them a centralized system of political, economic, and social control under the state. Discontent with the results of the war, postwar inflation and unemployment, dissatisfaction with the mood of internationalism – all these played a role.