It was 1935, and Lawrence Dennis was sure that fascism was coming to America. He couldn’t wait.

Dennis, a diplomat turned public intellectual, had just published an article in a leading political science journal titled “Fascism for America.” In his mind, the Great Depression was proof that liberalism had run its course — its emphasis on free markets and individual liberty unable to cope with the complexities of a modern economy. With liberal democracy doomed, the only question was whether communism or fascism would win the future. And Dennis was rooting for the latter.

“I should like to see our two major political parties accept the major fascist premises,” he wrote. “Whether our coming fascism is more or less humane and decent will depend largely on the contributions our humane elite can make to it in time.”

His case for fascism, made at book length in 1936’s The Coming American Fascism, felt persuasive to many at the time. A contemporary review of the book in The Atlantic wrote that “its arraignment of liberal leadership is unanswerable”; he was well-regarded enough to advise leading isolationist Charles Lindbergh and meet with elites on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from sitting senators to Adolf Hitler himself.

I first encountered Dennis researching my feature on liberalism and its critics (which has just emerged from the Highlight’s paywall). In the piece, I use him to show that liberalism’s enemies have long predicted its inevitable doom.

But the more I’ve thought about Dennis, the more I’ve realized how much we have to learn from him today. There are striking parallels between Dennis’s fascist attack on liberalism and the arguments made by its current right-wing critics. And given that Dennis’s arguments proved so badly wrong, his fate should be a warning against accepting similar predictions of inevitable liberal doom from his modern heirs.

There are, I think, two central errors in Dennis’s work that have direct parallels in the arguments made by contemporary illiberal radicals. I’ve termed them “anti-liberal traps,” and I think many are falling into them today.

What Lawrence Dennis believed

Dennis came to fascism through a peculiar route. A Black man who passed for white for nearly his entire life, he was openly critical of Jim Crow and American racism — almost, his biographer Gerald Horne theorizes, as if he wanted people to know who he truly was. Horne further suggests that Dennis’s embrace of fascism was motivated in part by disgust with the racism of the median American voter. Dennis, Horne intimates, may have been so disgusted with racist rule of “the people” that he embraced rule-by-elite as an alternative.

But while he did discuss race, Dennis’s arguments in The Coming American Fascism were primarily economic. In his view, the Great Depression was not an isolated crisis but rather a sign of the current political order’s structural failures.

Dennis believed that capitalism depended on several key factors to deliver economic growth — including continued acquisition of new territory, a growing population, and debt-financed business expansion. By the 1930s, he believed that these factors had reached a dead end: that the US could not feasibly acquire new territory, that its population would level off thanks to immigration restrictionism and birth control, and that private debt had reached wholly unsustainable levels.

The Depression, he argued, was a symptom of these structural failings coming to a head.

In........

© Vox