By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What History Reveals About Authoritarianism’s Animating Force

The decision to publish this deep dive into the modern history of authoritarianism, going as far back as Mussolini and Hitler, was initially inspired by a February 6 publication in Le Monde pointing to metrics by which democracy is starting to decline again seriously. What History Reveals About Authoritarianism’s Animating Force.

Even in the U.S. currently, during Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism.

A massive victory in a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism leads to a wave of new democracies, especially in central and eastern Europe. The United States’ brand of aggressive and innovative capitalism reigns, setting the terms of the world economy. But triumph soon gives way to dissatisfaction, and with it, the first signs of collapse. Authoritarian governments reemerge in the new democracies, plunging both democracy and capitalism into a potentially terminal crisis.

This sequence could just as easily describe the two decades between World War I and World War II as it could recent history since the end of the Cold War. In the former, the dominance of the Western capitalist model, coupled with Wilsonian universalizing democratic political claims, provoked a desperate backlash from authoritarian movements in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. In the latter, the triumph of the Western bloc and demise of the primary challenger to liberal democracy and capitalism have again produced a resistance from authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders who claim to stand for those whose interests are disregarded under the dominant order, in places such as Hungary, Russia, and even the United States.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were fascist dictators who formed the core of the Axis powers in WWII, linked by shared anti-democratic, nationalist ideologies and a desire to expand their empires, though their relationship was complex, with Hitler initially idolizing Mussolini as a political model before becoming the dominant partner, culminating in a military alliance and a pact against communism and liberalism, leading Europe into devastating war.

The cycle of democratization and rising authoritarianism in the early twentieth century holds lessons—and a warning - for policymakers in the early twenty-first. Then as now, the rise of right-wing authoritarianism is due in no small part to a pervasive sense of humiliation felt by those left behind by the emerging political and economic order. In the interwar period, the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, the settlement of the war, and the triumph of globalizing Western capitalism stimulated bitter resentments that crystallized into fascist movements across Europe. At the end of the Cold War, painful economic transitions in Russia and other former Soviet states, as well as unemployment from technological change and job outsourcing across the Western world, fed anger directed at domestic elites and foreign migrants, which authoritarian leaders have exploited.

The failure of Western leaders to recognize and address these sources of humiliation a century ago led to global cataclysm. Without a plan to address the grievances festering today, the world could be headed down a similar path.

Below, Hitler is standing next to Mussolini

 

Coalition of the Losing

As the historian Robert Paxton has written, the success of fascist movements in interwar Europe was highly correlated with a country’s defeat in World War I. Hungary lost the largest share of prewar territory of any of the defeated Central Powers, and in 1919 it became the first to develop a right-wing authoritarian regime. Austria followed suit in the late 1920s. Although Italy ultimately joined the victorious Allied powers during the war, Benito Mussolini’s regime, the first to call itself fascist, capitalized on Italians’ feeling that the denial of former Austrian territory promised by the United Kingdom and France in 1915 in return for Italy’s entry into the war on the Allied side constituted a “mutilated victory.”

First World War revanchist politics were intense desires, particularly in defeated nations like Germany and Hungary, to reclaim lost territories and national status, fueled by humiliation and economic hardship from treaties (like Versailles and Trianon). This politics, characterized by extreme nationalism and irredentism, sought revenge and territorial revision, leading to the rise of aggressive nationalist movements and ultimately contributing to the tensions that caused World War II.

Across Europe, perceived humiliation at the hands of the victorious peacemakers and their business leaders fueled a highly nationalist, revanchist politics, aimed partly at crushing internal “enemies” supposedly in league with the foreign oppressors so that revived authoritarian states could more effectively fight external enemies in the next war. As the Nazi movement rose to power, Eventual German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, for example, alternated between railing against the “November criminals” - the democratic politicians who he claimed had betrayed Germany to the Allies - and criticizing the manifestations of globalization, including the outsourcing of jobs to China by German companies.

The new breed of authoritarian nationalist politicians often borrowed the political and economic rhetoric of the left. Mussolini, a renegade socialist, referred to postwar Italy as the proletarian nation among the capitalist victors. Hitler began his political career as an activist on the far left rather than the far right: a 1919 photograph appears to show him, wearing a red armband, marching in the funeral procession for murdered Bavarian socialist premier Kurt Eisner. Fascist tracts were often indistinguishable from those of the left, especially in their strident denunciations of the “bourgeoisie.” The lines between the movements were muddled, too. Brownshirt Horst Wessel became a martyr for the Nazis when he was murdered by a Communist Party member in 1930, but before that, he wrote that the Nazis he met in Vienna did not understand his “radical socialist” politics and considered him a “half-Communist.” Berlin storm troop commander Karl Ernst showed considerable respect for communists: “Their idea is good,” he said once, but “ours is better.”

Scholars gave an intellectual patina to the sentiments invoked by street activists such as Wessel and Ernst. German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, in his book of essays Positions and Concepts in the Struggle against Weimar-Geneva-Versailles, linked the democracy of the Weimar Republic to the League of Nations, based in Geneva, and the Treaty of Versailles, which most Germans perceived as an unjust imposition by the Western democracies. Schmitt thought that the liberal world order, which he believed to be dominated by Jews, should be replaced by a collection of Grossräume, or “great spaces,” dominated by a major power. He considered the United States’ Monroe Doctrine to be a model for a future German-dominated Grossräume.

Authoritarian political aspirants ran with these military-economic critiques. In 1932, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels advocated “building a wall” of tariff barriers around Germany. Reichstag deputy Gregor Strasser, the only Nazi politician to enjoy significant respect from members of other German parties, spoke of an “anticapitalist yearning” shared by 95 percent of the German people, and called for a “break with the demons of gold, the world economy, [and] materialism.”

Their arguments proved effective at the ballot box. The Nazis first achieved significant electoral breakthroughs in state elections in the late 1920s, in rural northern and eastern Germany, largely Protestant regions that bore the brunt of the war and of the economic changes that followed. Young men from rural areas were more likely to have served in the army and more likely to have been killed than their urban counterparts. Lower tariffs, coupled with fierce competition from new large-scale grain farms in Argentina, Canada, and the United States, had contributed to a crisis in rural areas: farms went bankrupt, and many owners and workers on those farms lost their livelihoods. The Nazis were the first party to position themselves successfully as staunchly nationalist defenders of the rural middle class, which felt victimized by the new economic and political order and resentful of comparatively diverse, left-leaning Berlin. The Bavarian writer Ludwig Thoma insisted that “Berlin is not Germany,” because it was “corrupted and polluted with Galician filth,” an antisemitic dog whistle. The journalist Wilhelm Stapel complained that “all too many Slavs and all too many altogether uninhibited East European Jews have been mixed into the population of Berlin,” but what really angered him was the “insolent self-righteousness and endless cackle of irony” of these non-German Berliners and the arrogance of urban intellectuals he accused of plotting to “Berlinerize” the countryside.

Also referred to as the "Third Position," it is, in short, a leftist National Socialist ideology, emphasizing both race and class. Its roots are in the left wing of early Italian fascism and the leftist National Socialism of the German brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser. The Strasser brothers advocated a kind of national bolshevism, founded on class struggle, back-to-nature ideals, and voelkish national romanticism, and criticized Hitler for his increasingly more far-right position. 

German defeat in World War I had led not just to economic humiliation; the disaffected middle classes felt the end of the German empire as a religious humiliation, as well. Many German Protestants felt that the old regime had been their regime: it was an expressly Protestant state for which many worked, and those who did derived a great deal of status from service to the King and Kaiser, however remote that service might be. The new, post–World War I democracy, by contrast, was shaped largely by Catholic and working-class socialist parties, creating a system in which the Protestant middle classes felt homeless.

The Nazis’ assertion of national pride against a perceived oppressive, arrogant world and of class, ethnic, and religious pride against perceived internal enemies was powerful. But in Germany and elsewhere, popular appeal alone did not put far-right parties or movements into power. Populist authoritarians needed to accommodate themselves to traditional elites first. Mussolini won early support from the large landowners of the Po Valley, and came to power at the invitation of King Victor Emmanuel III; Hitler allied himself with the army and big business to win the favor of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. Radical leaders and their movements offered these establishment figures a way out of political crises. Italian liberal politicians sought to break through the deadlock caused by the mutual intransigence of Catholic and socialist parties. German businessmen were frustrated by the democratic state’s regulatory web, and military men were angered by the refusal to fund rearmament.

In alliance with the conservative establishment, German and Italian fascists quickly lost their more populist, anticapitalist edge. But elites also overestimated their ability to control the leaders with whom they had cynically made common cause. In Germany, the military commanders and business leaders who smoothed Hitler’s path to the chancellery failed to grasp his ruthlessness, radicalism, and ability to secure a political hold on the German people. What they thought was a clever deal to secure their own interests led to the near-total destruction of Europe.

 

The Humiliated International

A century later, status anxiety remains a potent accelerant fueling populist authoritarianism across the world. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Georgia in 2008, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and many efforts to subvert Western democracies are rooted in the sense of humiliation at the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he famously called the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the twentieth century, and at the perceived encroachment of the West on formerly Russian lands. But the Cold War was not just a loss for Moscow. It was also, at best, a hollow victory for the many people in Western countries who saw no part of the spoils. After decades of postwar economic growth, all Western countries have experienced the same phenomenon: little to no real growth in incomes and living standards for the great majority of the population. Add to that the spectacular growth in elite income and substantial immigration, and the result is fertile ground for demagogic politics stressing, in a word, humiliation.

Among democratic allies of the United States, that sense of humiliation has animated the rise of far-right parties, particularly in economically depressed regions. In Germany, for example, electoral support for the far-right, pro-Russian, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has increased significantly since 2015, making it Germany’s most popular party in 2025. The party’s support is particularly concentrated in the former East Germany. Like Russia, East Germany “lost” the Cold War, and many eastern Germans consider the subsequent reunification a hostile takeover in which they have been serially insulted by the Wessis. Indeed, strong AfD support in recent elections maps almost perfectly onto the former East.

In the United Kingdom, the Brexit referendum provided another display of the powerful politics of humiliation. “Leave” voters were disproportionately concentrated in the former industrial north of the country, which for a century has lagged behind the growth of the more prosperous south. The “Leave” campaign, led in part by U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, stressed ethnic English nationalism, nativism, and hostility to migrants, and distrust of elites. Farage’s new party, Reform UK, has adopted these positions to great effect: Reform has led the polls in the past year.

The United States itself, the architect of the current economic order, has been transformed by the politics of humiliation. In his decade in U.S. politics, President Donald Trump has campaigned successfully on such slogans as “I am your retribution” and “Make America great again.” His second term, with its prosecutions, military deployments, and saber rattling, has so far been one great act of vengeance on those he feels have humiliated him and, by extension, his core supporters. Not even the undisputed victor of the Cold War and the main beneficiary of the world system that triumphed in its wake is immune to the powerful forces of grievance.

 

Care Economy

Years ago, the diplomatic historian Ernest May cautioned against the simplistic use of historical analogy. Policymakers, he said, “ordinarily use history badly,” applying “the first [analogy] that comes to mind,” without pausing to “analyze the case, test its fitness, or ask in what ways it might be misleading.” But if learning from historical examples is inevitably difficult, it is also urgently necessary. May also wrote that history is “an enormously rich resource for those who govern,” offering the prospect of better and more flexible thinking, especially when under pressure. Facing challenges from adversaries, including Russia and China, the potential fracturing of NATO, and a democratic crisis at home, the United States is in dire need of flexible thinking.

Stopping the rise of authoritarianism today will require the United States and its allies around the world to mitigate the causes of humiliation and status anxiety. Thankfully, history also provides successful examples of government efforts to prevent the return of a politics of humiliation. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, West Germany’s economic and social policies fostered growth, social welfare, and relative income equality, staving off the possibility of the return of a far-right movement of disgruntled veterans and former Nazis. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s administration offered a material basis for dignity, but also an implicit bargain to former Nazis: limiting prosecutions in return for political compliance. The Truman administration, meanwhile, launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild the physical and economic infrastructure of war-torn Europe and oversaw the reconstruction of Japan, complementing the domestic polices of Adenauer and other Western European leaders.

Today, no less of a transformation is necessary. In the United States, a domestic Marshall Plan to address economic inequality and the defects of the health-care system could shrink the pool of voters vulnerable to the appeal of a demagogue. If and when former supporters and political allies of Trump revert to support for constitutional democracy, they should be afforded the same implicit bargain that Adenauer offered in Germany. Policies that foster income equality and improve opportunity would materially improve the lives of the left behind, but, just as powerfully, would convey a deeper message: that the country’s leaders value all its citizens. Without them, the world will remain locked in an endless cycle between democracy and authoritarianism. An anti-humiliation agenda may be the only way out.

 

 

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