Benjamin L. Alpers

In Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s – 1950s, Benjamin L. Alpers argues that, while Americans treat dictatorship and democracy as polar opposites, “for most of the history of Western political thought, dictatorship and democracy were regarded as only two of many possible forms of political organization – among them, tyranny, aristocracy, and monarchy” (pg. 1). Further, the assorted cultural producers that Alpers identified shaped the varying interpretations of dictators. He writes, “Understanding the idea of totalitarianism as a product – and an important component – of 1930s U.S. political culture forces us to reconsider that political culture” (pg. 4). Alpers continues, “The move away from a cautious optimism about dictatorship in the early 1930s to the nearly universal condemnation of the phenomenon late in the decade was accompanied by a shift from dictator-centered to crowd-centered explanations of modern dictatorship” (pg. 11). Finally, he argues, “Just as historians have shown the many ways in which Popular Front culture continued long after the collapse of the Popular Front, I believe that the roots of Cold War political culture go deeper into America’s past than we often suppose” (pg. 13).
Alpers writes, “Since the mid-1930s, dictators and dictatorship have been the absolute Other of democracy in U.S. political culture; thus their place in American political cultural life immediately before that time is, in retrospect, surprising…Dictatorship and especially the figure of the dictator himself evoked positive as well as negative fantasies. Many of these fantasies were only quasi-political. Like the members of the British royal family after World War II, Mussolini was enormously attractive to many Americans who had no wish for his form of government” (pg. 16). Briefly, in the first nine months of Roosevelt’s administration, some Americans voiced hopes for a semi-dictatorship to fight the Depression. Alpers writes, “Two aspects of this dictatorial moment are worth emphasizing. First, American understandings of dictatorship, both positive and negative, were largely based on the image of the dictator himself…Second, those who openly supported dictatorship rarely engaged in explicitly antidemocratic rhetoric” (pg. 32). As to the concept of totalitarianism, Alpers writes, “Whatever its ultimate empirical value, totalitarianism achieved its status in American political culture without anyone producing a paradigmatic theoretical or analytical account of it” (pg. 61).
Moving into his main discussion of American views of totalitarianism, Alpers writes, “These [pre-Pearl Harbor] views shared one major feature with both older right anticommunist perspectives and older left analyses of fascism: a tendency to explain these regimes by looking not at personalities, but at social forces. But whereas often the former imagined communism as social breakdown and anarchy and the latter regarded fascism as the simply tyranny of a minority class, the newer images of fascism and communism emphasized the ordered, regimented, uniform crowd” (pg. 95). Some blamed this on the impact of the Depression, but cultural producers among the liberal and Popular Front groups “rejected the socioeconomic explanation offered by Roosevelt and others because fascism simply did not deliver the material goods that, based on that view, accounted for its mass appeal” (pg. 109). Alpers continues, “It was generally agreed that the regimented crowd was created by a failure of people to maintain their own individuality. Whether destroyed by economic conditions, the mass media, the social psychology of capitalism, or even a lack of education, individuation gave way to a mass mind” (pg. 129).
Turning to World War II, Alpers writes, “Until the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Germany’s sudden push over the Soviet border in June 1941, World War II seemed to feature liberal democracy against an unusual alliance of far right and far left regimes, regimes that many Americans collectively labeled ‘totalitarian’” (pg. 188). He continues, “Officially, at least, World War II was an ideological, not a national conflict” (pg. 189). Alpers writes, “Most American cultural producers understood Germany as primarily an ideological enemy, whereas they tended to regard the U.S. alliance with Russia as basically an affiliation of nations, not ideologies” (pg. 221).
Alpers concludes, “The association of totalitarianism with the Cold War became so great that all of the scholarly and public debates over the usefulness of the term that raged in the last four decades of the twentieth century were limned by Cold War politics. Yet, as this study has shown, we misunderstand the origins of the idea of totalitarianism – and misread American political culture in the 1930s and early 1940s – if we make the common mistake of regarding it as a product of the Cold War” (pg. 250). Examining work historians mark as the beginning of a Cold War understanding of totalitarianism, Alpers writes, “From this perspective, Schlesinger, Orwell, and Arendt belonged to the earlier period of thinking about dictatorship” (pg. 253). Further, “None of these works was wildly original; each reproduced ideas that the author – or someone else – had previously published, though often they applied these ideas for the first time to the problem of modern dictatorship” (pg. 254).… (más)