Those who believe in liberalism must now fight for it

I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen, the collapse of the political centre, the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. Even more worryingly, there is the same sense of hurtling towards global conflagration.

The similarities begin with the disintegration of the international order. In the 1920s and 1930s, order collapsed because Britain no longer had the economic might to continue as the global liberal hegemon – a role that it had played with such brilliance in the Victorian era – and the US was not yet willing to assume the mantle. Woodrow Wilson sailed to the Versailles Peace Conference with noble dreams of creating a new world order through the League of Nations, telling his staff that ‘liberalism is the only thing that can save civilisation from chaos, from a flood of ultra-radicalism that will swamp the world’.

But Republicans in Congress refused to play along. The patrician Henry Cabot Lodge spoke for the majority when he said: ‘I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a League.’ A succession of Republican presidents, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, retreated inwards. America became, in Harold Nicolson’s phrase, the ‘ghost at all our feasts’.

Today the US is not so much a ghost at our feasts as a drunk and disorderly guest 

Today the US is not so much a ghost at our feasts as a drunk and disorderly guest. America’s retreat into unilateralism is destabilising a world order that was carefully constructed after the second world war to replace Pax Britannia with Pax Americana. Then there’s the question of trade. The American Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 set off a tit-for-tat cycle, shrinking the global economy and adding to political instability. Now Donald Trump is resorting to the same discredited mechanism – only this time with a lack of predictability that makes the Smoot-Hawley regime look benign.

Another comparison is the multiplication of strongmen. After Lenin established the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in 1917 and Mussolini marched on Rome (or rather took a first-class train carriage while his underlings marched) in 1922, the 1930s saw a succession of them come to power across Europe: in Portugal in 1932, Germany and Austria in 1933, Bulgaria and Latvia in 1934, Greece in 1935 and Spain in 1936.

In our own era, Vladimir Putin played the role of both Lenin and Mussolini when he slithered into power in 2000. Since then, a conga line of strongmen have danced across our global politics: Putin-style mini-mes in Chechnya, Belarus and Kazakhstan – but also democratic strongmen such as Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump in the US.

A striking number of these have Mussolini’s taste for displays of strength and violence. Putin likes to pose bare-chested, Modi boasts about swimming with crocodiles and Trump has a portrait of himself fashioned out of bullet casings – a gift from the ‘Trump of the tropics’, Bolsonaro.

These strongmen profit from a combination of polarisation and the fashion for illiberal ideas. In 1930, the Spanish essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset worried about the arrival of a ‘raving, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge’, a style that resulted in shouting matches, angry marches and, inevitably, head-breaking. That style of politics is on the up once again. Trump was able to come to power in a political system designed by James Madison to prevent the rise of strongmen. There is a strong likelihood that Marine Le Pen or her protégé Jordan Bardella will perform the same trick in France next year.

Mussolini led a revolt against liberal ideas as well as liberal practice. ‘The liberal state is destined to perish,’ he declared. ‘All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.’ A striking number of leading thinkers agreed with him. The futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti glorified war as ‘the world’s only hygiene’. Oswald Spengler argued that liberalism, a creed that ‘detests every kind of greatness’, was leading to the decline of the West. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the man who invented the phrase ‘the Third Reich’, complained that ‘liberalism has undermined cultures. It has annihilated religions. It has destroyed nations. It is the self-dissolution of humanity.’ Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favourite legal theorist and a man who criticised the Führer for burning too few books, dismissed the twin liberal ideals of compromise and the division of powers. In Schmitt’s theories, the only distinction that matters in politics is the distinction between a friend and an enemy, and the most important political weapon is the ability to declare an emergency.

This anti-liberal turn was far more pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon world than we remember today. In England, Wyndham Lewis praised Hitler for his unassuming lifestyle and clean-living ways (non-smoking, non-drinking, vegetarian); after meeting Stalin in 1934, H.G. Wells declared that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest… no one is afraid of him, and everybody trusts him’. George Kennan, later the architect of post-war containment, urged the US in 1938 to travel ‘along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state’. Walter Lippmann, the greatest liberal columnist of his generation, mused that in Hitler one could hear ‘the authentic voice of a genuinely civilised people’. ‘You’re the top. You’re Mussolini,’ sang Cole Porter in the original (later modified) version of his famous song.

What is grandly called ‘post-liberalism’ is back in fashion in the West, particularly in the US. But a growing number of Europeans are sounding similar themes. Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, praises ‘illiberal democracy’. At a 2024 gathering in Rome a thinktank linked to Georgia Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, displayed images of both the Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. In Britain, James Orr, a professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Danny Kruger, a Reform MP and leading policy advisor to Nigel Farage, are trying to develop a new kind of faith-and-flag nationalism. As for Hitler’s favourite jurist, Schmitt is back in fashion on both the right and the left.

The West’s growing polarisation is a gift to the authoritarian world. Putin denounces the West as ‘Satanic’ and argues that liberalism inevitably brings with it ‘perversions that lead to degradation and extinction’. His war propaganda has reached such a frenzied pitch that prams are done up to look like tanks and schoolchildren dress in military uniforms and learn how to assemble and strip down automatic rifles. In China, Xi Jinping is engaged in the biggest military buildup since the 1930s, with a navy that’s already bigger and newer than America’s and a plan to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. Any foreign power that tries to ‘bully, oppress or enslave us’ will ‘be battered and blooded from colliding with a great wall of steel forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people using flesh and blood’, he warned in one of his many Fuhrer-flavoured speeches.

Historians will no doubt find numerous reasons for the return of the 1930s, but two already stand out: our tendency to forget lessons with the passage of time and our over-willingness to take things for granted.

The return of extremism can be prevented only by the vigorous application of liberal principle 

After the second world war, liberal politicians and sages created a golden straitjacket to imprison bestial passions. The Founding Fathers of Europe created a European Union to constrain nationalism. The US wise men created a rules-based international order backed up by the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and a global trade bureaucracy. Centrist politicians constructed welfare states and managerial capitalism. The overriding aim of John Maynard Keynes’s new system was ‘the euthanasia of politics’.

Forgetting then did its terrible work. The European project was perhaps the most striking example of this: a project that was originally designed to prevent the return of war to the European continent forgot that the locus of threat can change, from Europe’s centre to its periphery, Russia; and a project intended to prevent the return of ethnic tensions instead stored them up by insisting on freedom of movement. The UN became at best a self-indulgent talking shop and at worse a Trojan horse for illiberal nations, not least China.

Forgetting is a function of a bigger failure: that over-willingness, after decades of relative peace and prosperity, to take things for granted. We assume certain liberal verities – the division of powers, tolerance of dissenting opinion, peaceful coexistence as the norm – are part of the natural order. We forget that we had to wade through rivers of blood to establish tolerance and the division of powers. And we forget that liberal regimes are created and preserved through constant vigilance.

The best resource we have in preventing a return of the 1930s is the memory of the 1930s. We know how extremism leads not to correction but to further extremism. We know how polarisation leads to yet more polarisation. And we know that the return of extremism can be prevented only by the vigorous application of liberal principle: ideally an appeal for calm when people start shouting at each other, but, if that doesn’t work, and without waiting too long, a muscular defence of fundamental values. We all know what happened last time that liberals dithered while strongmen had their way.