By 1938, democracy appeared to be in retreat. Fascism, for all its brutality, projected an air of momentum. Leaders like Chamberlain seemed hesitant, constrained by economic crisis or political exhaustion, while authoritarian figures promised clarity, speed, and national revival. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Franco could move with a decisiveness that democracies, by design, could not. They offered spectacle, order, and the appearance of results — however temporary or illusory — and for a time many found that intoxicating. Part of the appeal, then as now, was the simplicity: one leader, one direction, no friction.
Those regimes ended, as such regimes tend to, in catastrophe. Stalin endured longer than the others, but the pattern was unmistakable. Yet memories fade, and the old temptations return. Authoritarian leaders are again on the march. Putin and Xi have held power for years, but what is striking is how nations with long democratic traditions have increasingly produced leaders with unmistakably authoritarian instincts — in style if not in structure — Trump, Netanyahu, and for a time Bolsonaro.
There is no great popular hunger for authoritarianism itself. But there is a discernible appetite for the populist strongman — the figure who promises to cut through paralysis, punish the corrupt, and restore a sense of national purpose. Democracies themselves often create the frustrations from which such politics draws its energy: drift, delay, fragmentation, and the growing perception that no one is truly accountable.
And in an age of digital media, amplified by sympathetic technology executives and algorithmic ecosystems, it has become easier to present these figures not as threats to democracy but as expressions of it. The packaging has improved even if the substance has not.
We once assumed that after the fall of the Iron Curtain these debates belonged to the past. It turns out they belong to the human condition. The choice between democratic restraint and authoritarian certainty is not a settled question but a recurring one — a question each generation must answer for itself.
And the argument, as Kennan would remind us, must be waged with seriousness and won with patience.