What factors led to so many totalitarian governments taking over in the 1930s?
1 Answer
The First World War and the Great Depression shattered confidence in the old order.
Explanation:
The currents of human intellectual thought and its outcomes move slowly, especially so in the days before electronic mass media. However, late 19th Century Europe and America was largely shaped by the thinking of the 18th Century Enlightenment and the Classic Liberalism that sprang from it. Society was ordered, progress inevitable, education and careful legislation could solve most ills.
The strength of this set of beliefs had long resisted the Romanticism begun in the very beginning of the 19th Century, including ideas such as that an individual could submerge himself in something greater and transform both himself and the world. This is the well-spring of ultra nationalism, of socialism, and of other ideologies that spread out in the 19th Century but which proved largely unable to throw over the older tradition on their own merits.
The First World War changed all that as the obscenity of the trenches blew apart the old order. It is worth remembering that the 18th Century Enlightenment was set most deeply in the United Kingdom and the United States and that their armies never mutinied or collapsed during the war, while those of Austria, France (briefly), Germany, Italy, and Russia did. Yet everywhere, the unshaken faith in the old order was ruptured, often fatally, and the new ideologies were set loose.
Yet even then, other than in the murderous regime of the Soviet Union or the less violent turbulence of Fascist Italy, the old order had not fully lost its grip until the economic collapse of the markets ushered in the Great Depression. After that, it was easy for the Angry to make the case that democracy had failed, that society was in the hands of hopelessly inept and corrupt and that the future should belong to those with the vision to see it and will to seize it.
