Could the United States had followed Germany and France down the path to fascism in the 1930s? Consider the dark logic of Lawrence Dennis, the failures of liberal reform, and the contingent heroism that kept America on a different course. The 1930s were a hinge in world history, and Lawrence Dennis was the Cassandra of American collapse. His warnings, his authoritarian prescriptions, and the counterfactuals of FDR’s survival all force us to ask: how close did we come to the abyss?…
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This AM the very sharp Zack Beauchamp gets into the WAYBACK machine and gives us a tour back to 1935, and the extremely interesting Lawrence Dennis. He was a brilliant and deeply complicated figure, who diagnosed the Great Depression as the death knell of liberal capitalism and offered a chillingly candid blueprint for American fascist reform, critiquing parliamentary drift, calling for antrammeled unitary technocratic executive, envisioning a “middle-class revolution” that would subordinate property and liberty to the needs of the state.
Consider the failures of German and French social democracy, the near-misses of American history in 1933, and the ever-present temptation of the engineer-dictator. I think we need to take Lawrence Dennis at least as seriously now as people did then. Dennis then saw only three possible futures for America: communism, chaos, or authoritarian reorganization. Reading Dennis makes us confront the limits of pluralism, the dangers of elite despair, and the persistent allure of strongman solutions in times of economic and political breakdown. For the 1930s were a crucible for democracy, and Lawrence Dennis was its most unsettling American prophet.
I still have my Dennis notes from Slouching Towards Utopia here on my hard disk!
Even though not a single word about Dennis made it into the final book!
So let me drag my notes out!
Now let me dust them off:
Lawrence Dennis (1893–1977) was raised in Atlanta as an evangelical child prodigy—he was preaching sermons before he was ten. He went on to Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, served as a captain commanding a military police company in France and World War I, and held posts in the U.S. diplomatic service in Central America. He quit the diplomatic service because he objected to the U.S.’s opposition to the Sandanistas.
In the 1930s,, surveying the wreckage of the Great Depression, he concluded that liberal capitalism was not merely ailing but terminal. Dennis became the country’s foremost homegrown theorist of fascism, arguing—first in The Coming American Fascism (1936), then in The Dynamics of War and Revolution (1940)—that the United States required a centralized, technocratic state to manage its economic affairs, and that the old verities of constitutional government and individual rights were, at best, quaint relics of the eighteenth century. Put on trial for sedition during World War II (the judge died of a heart attack, and the new judge declared a mistrial),
Dennis spent his later years as a consultant and writer, largely shunned by polite society.
That he was also Black “passing”—itself a thing that is a very weird facet of American one-drop anti-Black racism—added yet another layer to the life of an already very complicated man
Dennis back in 1935 saw three and only paths for America going forward:
But why?
Why couldn’t the system that had developed and worked moderately well in western Europe from 1849 to 1914 and in the United States from 1865 to 1929—the Belle Époque-Gilded Age pseudo-classical semi-liberal order—have been raised from the briny deep, put into drydock, structurally repaired, given a fresh coat of paint, and sent back out to sea?
Because, Dennis explained, the liberal capitalist system simply could not be sustained:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America <https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000271623518000110>: ‘Fascis[m is]… the inevitable alternative to chaos or communism…. ‘The orderly processes of the liberal capitalist system call for adjustment of the financial difficulties through bankruptcy, mortgage foreclosures—putting the country through the legal wringer… adjustment of market, price, and wage[s]… without Government subsidy to production curtailment or to subsistence of the unemployed. There is not a serious-minded man in the country who would long keep his head on if he tried to put the country through the wringer of orderly capitalist readjustment. Therefore I say the system is doomed…. The plea of the conservatives for a return to the Constitution is absurd when the strict enforcement of constitutional property rights would precipitate civil war. Every economic adjustment today rests on Government interventions in new and innumerable forms…
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But couldn’t it be reformed to be workable via normal procedures?
Dennis thought not.
Dennis asked his audience not to delude themselves. People needed to recognize that the endless parade of majority congressional votes—each wrangled from the machinery of procedure, lubricated by organized interest-group pressure, relentless lobbying, and the ceaseless jockeying for re-election among a multitude of anxious officeholders—did not, in aggregate, amount to anything like the necessary steady hand on the wheel of state. Checks-and-balances had Madisonian charm, but was not governance but rather drift, fragmentation, and paralysis. Congress was always be paralyzed by interest-group factions, corrupted by plutocratic money, with representatives cowering in fear of offending some key single-issue voters come the next election. The “playing politics” creaking Enlightenment-orrery mechanisms of representatives and votes and courts under liberal governance simply could not deliver the needed goods:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘Liberalism cannot achieve a governmental pattern of intervention which can… work… result[ing] mostly from the play of individual and competitive initiatives in a relatively free market… If Mr. Roosevelt is to play politics he cannot increase taxation and lower wages enough to put the unemployed to work…. He therefore rides the dollar toboggan of inflation, and goes on smiling and fishing with the Astors.… A state which has to fight minority group pressures in the electoral campaign and minority economic interests in the courts cannot plan orderly economic processes…. The result of the play of minority and private interests in the electoral and court games is not a conspiracy of welfare but a conspiracy of chaos….
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And this “toboggan of inflation” would end in a hyperinflationary crash, followed by, if not fascism, then chaos or communism.
And with respect to communism, Dennis said: no thanks, please!:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘Of the communist values… most important… is that human welfare demands the liquidation of the élite… a euphemism… being stood up before a Communist firing squad. I find the bourgeoisie of this country too numerous and too strong to be liquidated except in one of the bloodiest and most prolonged civil wars…. I should not like to be liquidated…. The liquidation of so large and useful a group of persons would be a greater loss to the rest of the community than the advantages any dictatorship of triumphant proletarian revolutionary leaders could possibly vouchsafe…
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So what was Dennis’s alternative?
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘The authoritarian scheme… [is] the planning of a central authority, which must always be really a council of persons, charged with this function…. The keynote is… centralization of control… scrapping… separation of power. Government… no longer… checking and balancing or playing a game of the individual versus a state… An executive council representing a mandate from the people to do a managing job.,,, The end of the… congressional system… [with] policies… the results of power group pressures…
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“Energy in the unitary executive” TO THE MAX! And to what end? This:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘Forc[ing] the insurance companies and the institutional investors to finance at low rates of interest a large part of the present capital-goods deficiency… [with a] government[al]… will and the power to levy a current income without borrowing to match its current outgo…. Success… in achieving sound financing… would depend largely on… state intervention… control…
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For under Lawrence’s fascism:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘A private property right is only a right to do what the state from day to day may decide may be done…. The investor could be assured of his principal… and whatever rate of interest, if any… secure[d] sufficient savings. The manager… could… retain something… as a bonus for efficient and successful management. Ownership and management would lose their present legal rights to win court victories over the state and to obstruct its policies, but in exchange they would derive… security from labor trouble and [ruinous predatory] competitive practices…
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And people should not worry about the “property rights” of investors. They would remain effectively untouched:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘As far as the millions of stockholders, bondholders, depositors, and insured having an interest in corporate affairs are concerned, fascism will not materially modify their rights or liberties, for the very good reason that, as it is, they have de facto no rights or liberties to be modified except the rights to sell their rights of ownership if they can find a buyer and to take what management gives them. These rights will undoubtedly be left to them…
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“Fascism” was thus, for Dennis, at bedrock the end of the false belief that government is founded upon possession of inalienable rights. Rights were damned alienable. Were alienable at government request. For the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
From the perspective of the courts, the contrast Dennis saw was most stark: Liberalism rested on the proposition that the welfare and security of the individual were best preserved by robust, vigilant courts—what Dennis likes to call “active and powerful judicial restraints”—standing ever-ready to check the ambitions of the state and shield private citizens from governmental overreach.
Fascism, by contrast, in Dennis’s telling, flipped the script: it held that the true guarantor of individual well-being is not the independence of the courts but the vigor, competence, and single-minded purpose of the state apparatus itself—the “strength, efficiency, and success of the State in the realization of the national plan.” In short: for the liberal, courts were the bulwark; for the fascist, it was the executive’s capacity to deliver on grand designs—to Make America Great Again.
And this transformation would not have been seen as a loss:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘Individuals who have been beaten by the depression in the free market do not want liberal liberties to do things they cannot as a practical matter do, and liberal liberties for others to do things to them which the others can and actually do, and which the victims do not like to have done to them. The liberal critics of fascism are apt to stress the question of liberty…. The people who want a New Deal or a new system are not entirely enchanted with their present liberties. Liberty is a word to be used by people fighting for something they do not have; it is not a good propaganda word for people to play with who are fighting to keep something they have…
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And if you were a young whippersnapper wanting to rise and have a career, or an old fogey hoping for a comfortable retirement, you needed to get on the train:
Lawrence Dennis (1935): Fascism for America: ‘IThe élite of the present order can assure their leadership or liberties only by… joining the offensive on the technological problems of social organization and production. The political instrument of government must be directed by an executive council representing a mandate from the people to do a managing job… the end of the parliamentary or congressional system, under which governmental decisions and policies are the results of power group pressures…
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That was Dennis’s argument back in 1935. The people would elect a president who would run the executive as a plebiscitary dictator setting goals and directions for the country. Government would be done by councils of smart and capable technocrats telling the big corporations what they needed to do to Make America Great Again. The police would deal politely with anti-American non-public-spirited wannabe John-Galtish recalcitrants, while also providing security from labor trouble and ruinous predatory competitive practices. And all would be as well as it could be—certainly better than Soviet-style communism, or the interest-group court veto-driven paralysis of any attempt to continue the Gilded Age Order.
Zack comments this morning:
Zack Beauchamp: Fascism for America <https://link.vox.com/view/608adc2191954c3cef02cb34ocrry.dn9/84c0b10c>: ‘The Great Depression was proof that liberalism had run its course — its emphasis on free markets and individual liberty unable to cope…. Te only question was whether communism or fascism would win the future. And Dennis was rooting for the latter….
Two central errors in Dennis’s work that have direct parallels [today]….
The first… is a claim that a recent crisis is a product of unchangeable and unreformable liberal philosophical commitments…. Patrick Deneen… argues that the… rise of… Trump augurs liberalism’s collapse… that is, he believes, a necessary product of liberalism’s philosophical commitments to meritocracy and individualism… because “liberalism’s conception of liberty created both a new ruling class and degraded the lives of the masses”… [by] weakening of the ties that bind humans together….
The second… is an idealization of liberalism’s alternatives…. Catholic integralism… [with] the state… tasked with using its power to further the spiritual mission of the Church… requir[ing] truly extraordinary amounts of coercion to be implemented in a country that’s 20 percent Catholic (and most American Catholics are not themselves far-right)…. Right-wing religious regimes have a poor track record when it comes to protecting the rights of non-believers…
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Well, yes. Anti-liberal régimes have very poor records indeed—at the very least, records bad enough to make everyone except grifters and the delusionally insane cling to the liberalism of fear. It is not attractive to think of an America in which Adrian Vermeule and his peers cheer on:
the hunting-down and imprisoning of users of artificial birth control
(because they believe that back in 1968 that then-71 year-old grifter Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini had special insight into the Mind of The One Who Is, binding on all peoples of the world will-they nill-they),
and the close scrutinization of every single red-state miscarriage,
while trans people are beaten in the streets for the crime of existing,
and green-card holders, H1B visa holders, dreamers, and everyone else whose papers are not in perfect order—ahem, Elon Musk; ahem, Melanija Knavs—tread very warily indeed:
lest their employers drop a dime the day before payday and have Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem take action and deport them immediately.
You say we already have (3) through (6 here in this America today? I guess we do.
And as for the inability of the modern avatar of what has descended in the legitimate line from Enlightenment-Era liberalism to reform itself again, that does indeed hang in the balance. I note that we did it in the 1930s: constructed the social-democratic New Deal Order that had a powerful affinity with the mass-production mode of societal organization and that drove the greatest boom generation after World War II that the world had ever seen. Can we do it again? It is in our hands.
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I will point out that Dennis’s judgment in the 1930s that the Belle Époque Order as reconstructed after WWI could not reform itself, and that fascism was its future destiny, was correct for Germany and correct for France.
German social democracy could not reform itself to deal with the Great Depression: Rudolf Hilferding, the former finance minister and a leading theorist of the SPD, squashed Wojciech Woytinsky’s ambitious proposal to rally the party around a program of large-scale public works and deficit spending—essentially, a German New Deal. Woytinsky, an economist of considerable vision, had argued for state-driven investment to break the cycle of unemployment and deflation, but Hilferding and the party establishment clung to orthodox fiscal rectitude and the gold standard, fearing inflation and the loss of bourgeois confidence more than mass immiseration.
The result was paralysis: the SPD, while notionally the party of labor, proved incapable of adapting its ideology to the new economic realities, and so Germany’s democratic left found itself outflanked by reactionaries and radicals alike. When the crisis demanded innovation, the party’s leadership offered only caution and incrementalism—a failure that, in the end, opened the door to Hitler’s seizure of power. Thus the collapse of German social democracy in the face of the Great Depression was not merely a matter of bad luck or external pressure; it was a tragedy of intellectual and organizational rigidity.
Hilferding’s refusal to break with economic orthodoxy left the SPD unable to offer a plausible alternative to Brüning’s austerity, which was driving millions into the arms of the Nazis and Communists. The party’s fear of alienating centrist voters, and its lingering trauma from the hyperinflation of 1923, led it to defend a status quo that was already visibly collapsing. In the end, the SPD’s commitment to parliamentary procedure and fiscal discipline proved to be a straitjacket—it was, arguably, the last chance to save German democracy from the abyss. In the end, the party’s failure was not just tactical or ideological, but existential.
Analogously, six years later in France, Leon Blum’s Premiership was aslo a failure. He could not keep his Front Populaire coalition together to make his attempt at a New Deal successful in France.
When the Popular Front—a grand coalition of Socialists, Radicals, and Communists—came to power in 1936, hopes ran high that France might finally break out of its economic stagnation and political sclerosis with a program of sweeping social reform, much as Roosevelt’s New Deal was doing across the Atlantic. Blum’s government did indeed enact significant measures: the 40-hour workweek, paid vacations, collective bargaining rights, and wage increases for workers.
Yet the coalition was riven by ideological rifts and mutual suspicion:
the “Radicals “feared Communist revolution more than they desired social progress,
the Communists were wary of “bourgeois” reformism,
and the Socialists were caught in the middle, trying to hold the whole edifice together.
When Blum attempted to launch a program of public works and government-led investment to combat the Depression—his own version of the New Deal—he ran headlong into a wall of resistance from the business community, the financial sector, and, crucially, the Bank of France, which refused to countenance deficit spending or currency devaluation. The coalition fractured under the strain, with the Radicals peeling off and the government collapsing in 1937. Thus, the French attempt to construct a New Deal analogue foundered not on lack of vision, but on the shoals of institutional conservatism, elite intransigence, and the inability of the left to maintain a united front.
And so the stage was set for the conquest of France by fascism. The failure of Leon Blum’s administration led to substantial grumbling, along the lines of “better Adolf Hitler than Leon Blum”. May and June 1940 saw France’s swift and humiliating military defeat by Nazi Germany. That marked a decisive turning point in French political history. Marshal Pétain, the aged hero of Verdun from World War I, was called upon to form a new government as the country reeled from military disaster and the exodus of millions of refugees.
Pétain’s regime, soon headquartered in the spa town of Vichy, swiftly dismantled the institutions of parliamentary democracy, immediately dissolved the National Assembly, and initiated a program of “National Revolution” that abandoned the republican ideals in favor of authoritarianism, Catholic traditionalist integralism, and collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. The original revolutionary “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was erased and replaced by “Work, Family, Fatherland”.
Under Pétain, France became, for the first time in its modern history, a state openly committed to reactionary values and the suppression of political dissent—a regime that interned Jews, persecuted Communists, and sought to “cleanse” French society of the supposed degeneracies of the interwar years. The Vichy government’s capitulation to fascist ideology was not merely the product of foreign occupation, but the culmination of years of political polarization, elite disillusionment with democracy, and the failure of the French center and left to mount an effective defense of the Republic. It was both the consequence of German military might, but the endpoint of a long process of democratic decay and elite retreat from republican principles. Only Charles de Gaulle and a handful of others urged resistance in June 1940. The overwhelming majority of deputies and senators, traumatized by the scale of defeat and convinced that further resistance was futile, voted to grant Pétain full powers to draw up a new constitution.
Many conservative elites, business leaders, and Catholic intellectuals had long yearned for a regime of “order” that would restore hierarchy and discipline to a society they saw as enervated by decadence and class conflict. Pétain’s ascent was thus greeted by many not as a national tragedy, but as a necessary, even redemptive, correction.
And so within a matter of days, the machinery of republican government had been replaced by an authoritarian “Etat Français,” with Pétain as “Chef de l’Etat,” wielding near-absolute authority. The Vichy regime rapidly set about dismantling the achievements of the Third Republic: labor unions were suppressed, the press was censored, and the principle of secularism was eroded in favor of a Catholic-inflected nationalism. Most infamously, Vichy willingly participated in the persecution of Jews, enacting its own anti-Semitic statutes and facilitating the deportation of tens of thousands to Nazi death camps.
Indeed, Dennis’s judgment that fascism (or communism) was the future was correct for every place except Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States.
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And in the United States, at least, I believe it was a nearer-run thing than we recognize today.
Suppose Lillian Cross had not hit assassin Giuseppe Zangara with her purse on February 15, 1933. Suppose his bullet had then found the brain of president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than the lung of Chicago mayor Anton Čermák. Suppose Roosevelt had died and Čermák lived.
Then America’s history in the Great Depression years of the 1930s and the world’s history since would have been very different. For “Cactus Jack” John Nance Garner would then have become president eighteen days later. He was a conservative go-along get-along Democrat from the rural far south of Texas, first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1903. He focused on local issues and party organization rather than championing national progressive reforms, quietly building seniority and influence. He did support measures like the graduated income tax and the Federal Reserve System, but generally aligned with the southern-conservative Bourbon wing of the Democratic Party—those who were not Republican because they remembered that Lincoln had freed the slaves. In the 1920s, Garner rose to Democratic whip and then minority leader, and was known for his skill at legislative maneuvering and coalition-building.
Garner became Speaker of the House when the Democrats retook control of the chamber in 1931, and then Vice President in 1933. Initially a key ally in passing New Deal legislation, he later broke with Roosevelt over issues like deficit spending and the expansion of federal power and became a rabid anti-New Dealer.
But in our timeline, in this branch of the multiverse, on March 4, 1933, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt took hold of the US government, broke the gridlock in US politics, and started to experiment with ways to solve the economic problem of the Great Depression. The next day FDR forbade the export of gold and declared a bank holiday. Within four days the House and Senate had convened, and the House unanimously passed Roosevelt’s first bill, a banking reform bill, the Emergency Banking Act, that arranged for the reopening of solvent banks, as well as the reorganization of other banks, and gave Roosevelt complete control over gold movements.
The second bill Roosevelt submitted to Congress also passed immediately. It was the Economy Act, cutting federal spending and bringing the budget closer to balance.
The third was the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, a precursor to an end to Prohibition—the repeal of the constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcohol.
On March 29 he called on Congress to regulate financial markets.
On March 30 Congress established Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.
On April 19 Roosevelt took the United States off of the gold standard.
On May 12 Congress passed Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act.
On May 18 Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, creating the first large government-owned utility corporation in the United States.
Also on May 18, he submitted to Congress the centerpiece of his first hundred days: the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). All factions within the newly constituted administration won something in the legislation: Businesses won the ability to collude—to draft “codes of conduct” that would make it easy to maintain relatively high prices, and to “plan” to match capacity to demand. Socialist-leaning planners won the requirement that the government—through the National Recovery Administration (NRA)—approve the industry-drafted plans. Labor won the right to collective bargaining and the right to have minimum wages and maximum hours incorporated into the industry-level plans. Spenders won some $3.3 billion in public works.
And so the First New Deal entailed a strong “corporatist” program of joint government-industry planning, collusive regulation, and cooperation; strong regulation of commodity prices for the farm sector and other permanent federal benefits; a program of building and operating utilities; huge amounts of other public works spending; meaningful federal regulation of financial markets; insurance for small depositors’ bank deposits along with mortgage relief and unemployment relief; a commitment to lower working hours and raise wages (resulting eventually in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, or Wagner Act); and a promise to lower tariffs (eventually fulfilled in the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1935).
The devaluation of the dollar, plus the NIRA, did break the back of expectations of future deflation. The creation of deposit insurance and the reform of the banking system did make savers willing to trust their money to the banks again and began the re-expansion of the money supply. Corporatism and farm subsidies did spread the pain. Taking budget balance off the agenda helped. Promising unemployment and mortgage relief helped. Promising public works spending helped. All these policy moves kept things from getting worse. They certainly made things somewhat better immediately and substantially better soon thereafter.
But aside from devaluation, monetary expansion, an end to expectations of deflation, and an end to pressure for more fiscal contraction, what was the effect of the rest of Roosevelt’s “first one hundred days”? It is not clear whether the balance sheet of the rest of that period is positive or negative. A full-fledged policy of monetary inflation and mammoth fiscal deficits that might have pulled the country out of the Great Depression quickly—that did pull Hitler’s Germany out of the Great Depression quickly—was not really tried. Consumers complained that the National Recovery Administration raised prices. Workers complained that it gave them insufficient voice. Businessmen complained that the government was telling them what to do.
Progressives complained that the NRA created monopoly.
Spenders worried that collusion among businesses raised prices, reduced production, and increased unemployment.
Hoover and his ilk declared that if FDR had only done as Hoover had been doing, everything would have been better sooner.
In the face of such criticism Roosevelt kept trying different things.
If business-labor-government “corporatism” did not work—and was blocked by the mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court—perhaps a safety net would. The most enduring and powerful accomplishment of the New Deal was to be the Social Security Act of 1935, which provided federal cash assistance for widows, orphans, children without fathers in the home, and the disabled and established a near-universal system of federally funded old-age pensions. If pushing up the dollar price of gold did not work well enough, perhaps strengthening the union movement would: the Wagner Act set down a new set of rules for labor-management conflict and strengthened the union movement, paving the way for a wave of unionization in the United States that survived for half a century. Massive public works and public employment programs restored some self-esteem to workers and transferred money to households without private-sector jobs—but at the probable price of some delay in recovery, as firms and workers saw higher taxes.
Other policies were tried: Antitrust policy and the breaking-up of utility monopolies. A more progressive income tax. A hesitant embrace of deficit spending—not just as an unavoidable temporary evil but as a positive good. As the decade came to an end, Roosevelt’s concerns necessarily shifted to the forthcoming war in Europe and to the Japanese invasion of China. Dr. New Deal was replaced by Dr. Win the War. In the end the programs of the Second New Deal probably did little to cure the Great Depression in the United States. But they did turn the United States into a modest European-style social democracy.
Much followed of consequence. That Franklin Roosevelt was center-left rather than center-right, that the length of the Great Depression meant that institutions were shaped by it in a durable sense, and that the United States was the world’s rising superpower, and the only major power not crippled to some degree by World War I—all these factors made a huge difference. After World War II, it had the power and the will to shape the world outside the Iron Curtain. It did so. And that meant the world was to be reshaped in a New Deal rather than a reactionary or fascist mode.
Individuals acting in particular ways at precise places at precise moments, not just thinking thoughts but finding themselves with opportunities to make those thoughts influential, matter profoundly. Their deeds in such moments even shape the Grand Narrative of an entire long century.
Without FDR, what?
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But let me return to Lawrence Dennis, for while he strikes Zack Beauchamp as very wrong, he strikes me as right, but right not in our timeline but rather in many many timelines in the multiverse very close to ours:
Read today, Lawrence Dennis’s “Fascism for America” is equal parts time capsule and fever dream, as it crystallises a temptation that seems today to forever lurk at the edge of democratic capitalism: when the machine misfires, summon the engineer-dictator.
Dennis Great Depression not as an episodic downturn but as a structural heart attack induced by liberalism’s own operating system. Markets allocate capital? Not when banks cower behind excess reserves. Judicial protections secure property? Not when foreclosure courts would liquidate half the Midwest. Congressional politics balances interests? Not when every lobby raids the Treasury for emergency relief. Add it up and liberalism, Dennis claimed, was simply incapable of the macro-coordination modern economic life required.
That diagnosis, ex post, was not entirely crazy. Keynes in Cambridge, Hansen at Harvard, Marriner Eccles at the Fed—all were also groping toward the insight that an under-employment equilibrium could persist unless the state acted forcefully.
Where Dennis swerved onto the dark path was in supposing that the only effective action had to be not merely activist but authoritarian. His “solution” was textbook corporatism: nationalise credit, marshal savings through compulsory channels, dictate investment priorities, abandon both judicial review and congressional appropriation, and thereby jump-start full employment via ten-billion-dollar construction drives.
Dennis did understate the informational and incentive advantages of pluralism. A planning board can set quotas; it cannot, as Hayek would later emphasise, replicate the fine grain of decentralised signals. Dennis’s own plan dissolves into vaguery the moment it confronts questions like “Which factory first? At what real wage? Using which relative price of steel?” Mussolini’s Italy never cracked that code; Stalin’s USSR managed brute-force industrialisation only by sacrificing consumption and liberty on a scale Dennis politely ignores.
Third—and most important—Dennis pretended that he could erase politics via giving absolute power and energy to a plebiscitary president. Why, he asked, should elites hesitate? Private property would survive—owners would simply be told what to do with it. Workers would gain jobs and “security,” a word he repeats with hypnotic insistence. The only losers would be the lawyers and the sentimentalists who worshipped parchment. The masses, Dennis insisted, cared nothing for eighteenth-century verbiage; give them pay-packets and they will salute any flag you wave. Let the president set the goals for society and tell people to fall in line, and people would.
Dennis did miss that his plan would merely move politics from legislators to courtiers. Who selects the “executive council”? How are errors corrected when neither courts nor elections can bite? His assurance that elites would patriotically align profit with plan is less an argument than an incantation. The twentieth-century record, from Nazi rent-seeking to Soviet nomenklatura privilege, suggests that unchecked hierarchy petrifies quickly into predation.
Still, Dennis’s 1935 “Fascism for America” remains a remarkably candid manifesto for authoritarian reorganisation in the midst of the Great Depression.
Dennis begins by noting the convergence of otherwise antagonistic observers—conservatives such as Herbert Hoover, moderate socialists, and Communists—on a single point: liberal capitalism, as embodied in the American constitutional order, is tottering. In his reading, the Depression discredits the liberal state’s reliance on private investment, judicial safeguards, and congressional bargaining. Dennis envisions a “middle-class revolution” that would supplant checks-and-balances with unified command. The authoritarian state would nationalise credit, enabling unlimited but carefully budgeted public investment in order to absorb the jobless and modernise the nation’s capital stock. Simultaneously, it would compel private owners to operate under strict state directives: profits and interest would be permitted only when aligned with the national plan, and any defiance would trigger managerial replacement. Courts would become clerks, enforcing rather than reviewing administrative orders.
Dennis goes all-in with the totalitarian conviction that “order” and “welfare” can be ensured only by concentrating political, economic, and cultural power in the hands of a single hierarchy. Religious institutions, the press, and radio would have to amplify, not challenge, state objectives. A national fascism, led by the current élite but forced to sacrifice laissez-faire prerogatives, can preserve civilisation and even deliver higher living standards through disciplined production. Yet this window is narrow: if the “ins” refuse to adapt, the “outs” will dismantle the old order violently.
Dennis is scornful of liberal paeans to individual liberty. The masses, he argues, have never read Locke or The Federalist; their loyalty is malleable, shaped by propaganda and conditioned by economic security. In the same vein he mocks conservative faith in the Constitution, likening it to Jacobite nostalgia for Bonny Prince Charlie—romantic, futile, and destined for irrelevance once the next crash vaporises banks and savings.
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And it is at this point that I need to remind you of the importance for the successful construction of the social-democratic New Deal Order of not just Roosevelt but Keynes, who had a plan to avoid fascism and communism alike by delivering stable full employment and a not-too-inequitable income distribution via the lightest of light-handed (or light-fingered?) central-planning adjustments to the economic mechanism.
The Great Depression was the twentieth century’s greatest case of self-inflicted economic catastrophe. As Keynes wrote at its very start, in 1930, the world was “as capable as before of affording for every one a high standard of life.” Yet, he said, “we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” Keynes feared in 1930 that “the slump… [might] pass over into a depression, accompanied by a sagging price level, which might last for years with untold damage to the material wealth and to the social stability of every country alike.” He then called for resolute, coordinated monetary expansion by the major industrial economies “to restore confidence in the international long-term bond market… and to restore [raise] prices and profits, so that in due course the wheels of the world’s commerce would go round again…”
Nobody followed his direction in 1930, save for Takahashi Korekiyo in Japan, who took the Keynesian path without knowing what it was. He pulled Japan out of the Great Depression very early through bold, proto-Keynesian policies: abandoning the gold standard in 1931, aggressively lowering interest rates, and using the Bank of Japan to finance deficit spending on public works and government programs. Takahashi’s policies led to a rapid recovery in Japan—well before the U.S. or Europe—but his later attempts to rein in military spending led to his assassination in 1936.
But the dominant reaction to Keynes and his ilk in 1930 was to reject him, as a con artist, for, as Winston Churchill’s private secretary, P. J. Grigg, put it, “an economy could not forever by government financial legerdemain live beyond its means on its wits…” The claim instead was that mass unemployment was an essential part of the process of economic growth, and that attempts to artificially keep the unproductive from experiencing it would only store up more trouble for the future. We saw this revived during the Great Recession of the 2000s. when thinkers like the University of Chicago’s John Cochrane welcomed the prospect of a recession because “people pounding nails in Nevada need to find something else to do”: he thought recession unemployment would be a welcome spur. Keynes had anticipatorily snarked back long before. Activism and reflation were nevertheless “the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety.”
Moreover, Keynes snarked further, if his critics were even half-smart, they would have understood that successful capitalism needed the support of an activist government ensuring full employment, for without that, only the lucky innovators would survive, and only the mad would attempt to become innovators. Growth would therefore be much slower than necessary: “If effective demand is deficient,” he said, the entrepreneur was “operating with the odds loaded against him.” The “world’s wealth” had “fallen short of… individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune.”
Austerity and orthodoxy and laissez-faire were, in the conditions of the world after 1914, deadly destructive mistakes. And the persistence of the Great Depression, no matter how big the budget cuts, showed that Keynes was right. He wrote in 1936, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that his proposals for the “enlargement of the functions of government” that were required in order to adjust “the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest” might seem “a terrific encroachment” on freedom “to a nineteenth-century publicist or . . . contemporary American financier.” But, in fact, they were “the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.” His policies and his alone would produce a world in which not just capitalism but individualism, personal liberty, and personal autonomy—which I believe the extremely bisexual Keynes valued immensely—could survive, for the other authoritarian system options obtained full employment only through great regimentation of society.
The underlying message of Keynes’s is that the government needs to intervene on as large a scale as needed in order to shape the flow of economy-wide spending and keep it stable, and, in doing so successfully, guard the economy against depressions while preserving the benefits of the market system, along with human economic liberty and political and intellectual freedom.
The only substantive difference between a Keynes and, say, a Milton Friedman was that Friedman thought that central banks could do all this alone, via monetary policy by keeping interest rates properly “neutral.” Keynes thought more would be required: the government would probably need its own spending and taxing incentives to encourage businesses to invest and households to save. But those incentives alone would probably not be enough: “I conceive,” he wrote, “that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment, though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.”
And so Dennis was wrong. Then. In our timeline branch of the multiverse.
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References:
Beauchamp, Zack. 2025. “Fascism for America”. Vox, July 30. https://link.vox.com/view/608adc2191954c3cef02cb34ocrry.dn9/84c0b10c.
Berman, Sheri. 2006. The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/9780521521109
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/ ↗
Dennis, Lawrence. 19356 The Coming American Fascism. New York: Harper & Brothers. https://archive.org/details/the_coming_of_american_fascism.
Dennis, Lawrence. 1935. “Fascism for America.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 180 (July): 62–73. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271623518000110
Deneen, Patrick J. 2018. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240023/why-liberalism-failed/
Gerstle, Gary. 2022. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free-Market Era. New York: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646
Judt, Tony. 1998. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, & the French Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo3621996.html
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory
Maddow, Rachel. 2023. Prequel: An American Fight against Fascism. New York: Crown. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719377/prequel-by-rachel-maddow
Shirer, William L. 1969. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France, 1940. New York: Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Collapse-of-the-Third-Republic/William-L-Shirer/9780671203375
Shklar, Judith Nysse. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674644519
Vermeule, Adrian. 2022. Common Good Constitutionalism. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/11373/Vermeule ↗
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