Pre-WWI Britain harbored many of the preconditions for fascism

Asking why Britain did not follow the same path as much of Europe in the early part of the 20th C is a worthy question but this is an oddly ahistorical article. The rise of the New Liberal government didn't happen by accident as the article seems to imply, it happened in response to social conditions.

The fact that Britain took three years to win the Boer War (largely because the army was unfit to fight) was a national scandal, and gave birth to a national preoccupation with the condition of the working class.

Independently of each other, two wealthy British industrialists, Booth and Rowntree, published two surveys into the state of working class life in Britain. These found that 30% of people were living in poverty, and that the conditions were such that people would be unable to pull themselves out of poverty alone.

While the rest of Europe engaged in a great battle between Marxism and Imperialism, British politics set about trying to improve the condition of the working classes.

Political revolution has also never really been the British way. Almost all of the major institutions of British society (including arguably the trade unions) are under the pall of political conservatism. One of the reasons why the recent Brexit has been such a surprise is that Britons have never been given to overthrow the whole system.

Politics in Britain pre-war was also intensely local. Most people lived and died close to where they were born, people were even more parochial than they are now, and most people saw what was happening in Europe as completely distant from their lives.

Politics in Britain pre war may have held some of the conditions for fascism, but it was never likely due to a multitude of reasons never addressed in this article. Also, it was a strange kind of crisis for conservatism - the Conservatives went on to dominate 20th Century politics in Britain.

Perhaps the book does a better job (or argues a different point entirely) but I'm not sure the article does a particularly good job of justifying its headline. Most of the things it describes (ambivalence towards democracy, mostly latent racism) were the rule rather than the exception in most historical societies; lack of mass democracy was if anything a bulwark against populist movements like fascism. It was the liberals the middle classes favoured rather than socialists they feared that were driving changes, and the Right's preoccupation with vestiges of monarchical tradition and belief their "racial superiority" could best be demonstrated by the Empire were the polar opposite of the fascist fondness for radical new social contracts and demonstrating superiority through self-reliance and military might

Above all, the early twentieth century UK didn't have the sort of massive sense of grievance that fascists built their movement arount or a charismatic far-right figure to lead a fascist movement.

Thus characters such as Roderick Spode in P.G. Wodehouse's works.

A far more interesting story is how Houston Stuart Chamberlain's writings influenced the Nazi movement in Germany. The Slate article omits the fact that Chamberlain married into the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, who were early and enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. The family was also deeply enmeshed in a nexus of virulent pro-Aryan and anti-semitic propaganda prior to WW I. Chamberlain left England in the late 1800s and settled permanently Germany where he became a citizen during WW I. This fact alone seems to indicate that conditions for Fascist philosophy in England were less than salutary.

For a great read on the Wagner clan and their connections to Chamberlain, see Oliver Hilmes' outstanding biography of Cosima Wagner. ("Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth", "Herrin des Huegels" in German).

And the same was true of the United States, pre-WWII. While I certainly heard a lot in school about our victorious rescue of Europe from the claws of the Nazis, little was I told about our cultivation of eugenics and scientific racism. Or anti-Semitic industrialists like Henry Ford allying themselves with Hitler. The turning away of Jewish refugees. Charles Lindbergh and the American Nazi Party.

How would the US be different today if we understood our own complicity in fomenting fascism ideology in the aftermath of WWII?

The sub head "Edwardian Britain harbored many of the preconditions for fascism—including rampant anti-Semitism—before war broke out and united a divided nation"

Doesn't sit well with me because that competitive european colonial era was a lot more complicated than Pugh describes.

I hope Pugh's book discusses the realities of the global rentier classes and the origins of globalization, because I would argue this is at the root of much of subsequent events.

England, Germany, Holland and France were all competing to colonize the globe in a militaristic fashion during this era, and their internal and external societies reflected that. The advent of fluid global capital unaligned to nation states - including the 1910 Jekyll Island 'Federal Reserve' invention in the USA - led to massive pressures on the parochial societies.

The semitic ethnic cleansing to create the predominantly Ashkenazi state of Israel was largely the result of British capitulation to the global financiers who orchestrated the Sykes Picant and Balfor treaties that enabled the state of Israel to be reinvented.

The punitive reparations on Germany after WW1 was largely seen as this same class extracting tribute from Germans ...and crucially the popular sentiment was that German society was being dominated and overrun with Jewish capital. These are obviously contentious issues but, just as the case now where the 1% who own the world's capital 'haven't taken out enough insurance to protect themselves from the rest' to paraphrase economist Mark Blyth, 'populism' ie people waking up unsatisfied with the way their societies are dominated and run, was a major motivator for change then and now.

Well over 100 million people died in WWII and billions were made by those same stateless rentier classes (who are of all ethnicities and religions, this isn't uniquely about Judaism).

The author's website

http://www.martindpugh.com/page3.htm

Kind of a "duh" headline to me. The headline of this article isn't that big a deal to me, because every country harbors some level of the preconditions for facism. So I found it more interesting to read about a country that did make the transition from a strong liberal democracy to a facist regeime.

I just finished the book "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J Evans which covers Germany from ~1880 to 1933, and does a great job of explaining how ordinary Germans at the time were living their lives and the greater cultural shifts that gave way to the minority-populist uprising that was the Nazi seizure of power. Way more insightful place to start, in my opinion.

Which pre-war countries with advanced societies didn't have, say, entire scientific communities beating the drum of eugenics? It was an entire academic discipline in the universities of many countries, and there were 3 international conferences in the early 20th century.

I don't see how you could write a balanced article on this topic without even mentioning the rise and fall of Sir Oswald Mosley, because therein lies the major difference. British fascism died once people realized what was happening in Germany, most notably the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The BUF didn't even have enough support to run in the subsequent election in 1935.

How did Slate lose the plot?

They used to have good articles that seemed quite moderate?