What a Black fascist can teach us about liberalism

Vox

a day ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
American diplomat, consultant and author Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977) walks to court during his sedition trial on May 9, 1944 in Washington, DC. Getty Images
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.
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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 Dennis's view, American liberal democracy did not have the tools to repair the flaws in the capitalist system. Liberalism was, he believed, joined inevitably to laissez-faire economics. Its deference to private property was so total, its institutions so dominated by the interests of the wealthy, that it would be impossible for even a leader as ambitious as then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make serious internal adjustments.
'The features of the liberal system we are now discussing are fundamental. It is constantly forgotten that the quintessence of liberalism and liberal liberties under a constitution is the maintenance of a regime of special or exceptionally favorable considerations for private property,' Dennis writes. 'A series of majority votes arrived at by the parliamentary or Congressional methods of majority group pressures, lobbying, and the individual pursuit of reelection by hundreds of office holders, do not constitute a guiding hand. And a political system of checks and balances is not coordinated control.'
This last line hints at Dennis's fascist vision: a system in which liberal democracy is replaced by the rule of a handful of enlightened elites, who develop a comprehensive plan for the economy rather than leaving things up to the whims of private owners. Only state control over economic affairs, including nationalization of the banking system, could repair the malfunctioning economy and put the United States on the pathway to prosperity.
Dennis was no communist: he did not believe in the complete abolition of private property. Rather, he believed that the state should be far more aggressive in dictating to private owners — forcing them to make corporate decisions based not on the profit motive but rather on the good of the collective, as defined by the fascist governing class. This was the model emerging in Italy and Germany at the time he was writing, and one he believed would prove vastly more efficient and productive in the modern world than American-style liberal democratic capitalism.
'America cannot forever remain 17th and 18th century in its law, and political and social theory and practice, while moving in the vanguard of 20th century technological progress. The defenders of 18th century Americanism are doomed to become the laughing stock of their own countrymen,' he writes.
Dennis believed that liberalism's practical failings stemmed from its philosophical essence: that 'the features of the liberal system we are now discussing are fundamental.' The liberal obsession with individual rights, be it private property or free speech, made liberal democracies ideologically incapable of taking the economic steps necessary to fix capitalism's errors.
'The fascist State entirely repudiates the liberal idea of conflict of interests and rights as between the State and the individual,' he writes. 'Liberalism assumes that individual welfare and protection is largely a matter of having active and powerful judicial restraints on governmental interference with the individual; Fascism assumes that individual welfare and protection is mainly secured by the strength, efficiency, and success of the State in the realization of the national plan.'
The obvious objection is that this fascist vision would lead to terrifying mistreatment of citizens. Dennis did allow that Germany had gone too far in this direction by repressing the media and the church, but argued that 'a desirable form of fascism for Americans' could avoid such 'drastic measures.' Even Germany, Dennis believed, would not become 'a State and government…whose every act would be an abuse,' as 'such an eventuality seems most improbable in any modern State.'
Though fascist ideology might define the national plan in a way that directed violence against ethnic minorities, Dennis — ever the closeted Black man — believed that such racism could be excised from the fascist project.
'If, in this discussion, it be assumed that one of our values should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races,' he worried. 'If, on the contrary, as I devoutly hope will be the case, the scheme of values will include that of a national citizenship in which race will be no qualifying or disqualifying condition, then the plan of realization must, in so far as race relations are concerned, provide for assimilation or accommodation of race differences within the scheme of smoothly running society.'
The anti-liberal traps, from 1936 to 2025
We now know that every single one of Dennis's arguments was terribly wrong.
The New Deal worked; both the US and European democracy developed social models that reformed capitalism without abandoning its essence. This political-economic system proved far more effective economically than either fascist or communist central planning. And fascism in practice committed every horrible abuse that its liberal critics warned of — and some so awful that almost no one imagined their possibility in advance.
Now, '1930s-era fascist was wrong' is not exactly breaking news. But what I found notable about Dennis is how closely his argument follows a general pattern of anti-liberal argument — one which many far-right intellectuals deploy today in their critiques. It is one centered on what I described earlier as the twin 'anti-liberal traps.'
The first anti-liberal trap is a claim that a recent crisis is a product of unchangeable and unreformable liberal philosophical commitments. It is a belief that while liberal states still stand, the author has seen their coming doom — and its causes align, just perfectly, with the author's preferred view of the world.
Such claims not only demand extraordinary evidence, but risk being embarrassed when events in the world begin to shift.
Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, has put this mode of argument at the center of his worldview. In two recent books, Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Deneen argues that the current rise of populist figures like Donald Trump augurs liberalism's collapse — a collapse that is, he believes, a necessary product of liberalism's philosophical commitments to meritocracy and individualism.
'Liberalism has careened towards its inevitable failure,' he writes in Regime Change, because 'liberalism's conception of liberty created both a new ruling class and degraded the lives of the masses.'
Specifically, he argues, liberalism's commitment to freeing individuals to live the lives of their choosing has led to weakening of the ties that bind humans together — without which most will suffer so badly that the system cannot long survive.
'The advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefinition, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches,' he writes.
Deneen's analysis is, in argumentative structure, extraordinarily similar to Dennis's.
Both take recent events, be it the rise of Trump or the Depression, as proof that liberalism's doom is not merely likely but assured. Both argue that this inevitable collapse stems from liberalism's unchangeable and unreformable philosophical essence.
And both, notably, locate the failures in areas that align with their political interests. Deneen is a Catholic conservative who believes the state ought to promote conservative religious values; Dennis was a fascist who believed in a state-structured economy. Not coincidentally, they blame liberalism's inevitable doom on (respectively) its social and economic failings.
In describing these similarities, I am not attempting a comprehensive rebuttal of Deneen's arguments. The content of their arguments are different enough, as are the circumstances. Perhaps Dennis was wrong and Deneen is right. But there is a tendency, among observers of all stripes, to overextrapolate from recent developments — typically in ways that flatter their own worldviews and biases.
The second anti-liberal trap represents a similar kind of wishful thinking. It is an idealization of liberalism's alternatives: a comparison of actually-existing liberalism either to theoretical models or whitewashed versions of its real-life competitors. To imagine, in essence, Dennis's anti-racist fascism or less-hateful Nazism.
You can see this, most obviously, in the recent right-wing vogue for Catholic integralism: a political model in which the state would be tasked with using its power to further the spiritual mission of the church.
Any such project would require 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). More broadly, right-wing religious regimes have a poor track record when it comes to protecting the rights of non-believers.
Yet integralists respond to these claims either by deflection — liberal states coerce too! — or an assertion that their confessional state would surely be better than the others. Recalling a conversation with a Jewish colleague about what would happen to this person under integralism, Harvard's Adrian Vermeule — a leading American integralist — described his answer in two glib words: 'nothing bad.'
You also see parallels to Dennis in the way that modern anti-liberals talk about contemporary Hungary, which has become to the illiberal right what the Nordic states are to the American left. Hungary is undeniably authoritarian, but its modern right-wing defenders angrily deny that its regime is anything other than a well-functioning democracy. Hard evidence to the contrary, such as its repression of independent media or attacks on judicial independence, are dismissed as liberal propaganda or else no worse than what happens here in the United States.
This false equivalence, incidentally, was a favorite move of Dennis's. In dismissing charges that fascism would trample on individual rights the liberal state protects, he replied that all states coerce, just in different ways.
'The popular type of denunciation of fascism on the ground that it stands for State absolutism, or a State of unlimited powers, as contrasted with the liberal State of limited powers, is based on misrepresentation of the true nature of the liberal State,' he wrote. 'The important differences between fascism and liberalism in this respect lie between those certain things which each State, respectively, does without limitation.'
Again, the point is not to suggest complete equivalence: Viktor Orbán's Hungary is not Adolf Hitler's Germany. Rather, it is to point out how similar the arguments are structurally — how easy it is, when starting from a point of hostility to liberalism, to handwave away criticisms of its alternatives through idealizations and tu quoques.
Lawrence Dennis was not a dumb man. After reading much of his writing, I'm confident of that. But his arguments, which seemed so persuasive to many at the time, proved to be mistaken in nearly every particular — a shortsighted extrapolation from recent evidence that misread both the politics of liberal democracies and liberalism's philosophical adaptability to new circumstances.
It's a lesson that radical anti-liberals today ought to take to heart.