From The Long Shadow (David Reynolds, 2013) pp424-5
Britain’s democratic transition was also distinctive. Mass democracy exploded across Europe in the wake of the war, inspired in very different ways by Lenin and Wilson. But its destabilizing effects were soon being channelled by new political elites — the Bolshevik concept of a vanguard supposedly preparing the way for eventual proletarian control, the fascist response in the form of a ‘superman’ leader directing a dominant party. By the mid-1930s much of continental Europe was polarized between left and right, even in Britain’s co-victor France. The United States, uniquely, withstood the appeal of Marxism but the backlash was in its own way destabilizing. Wartime ‘100% Americanism’ and the post-war Red Scare, though a brief spasm, laid the basis for a Manichean ideology of hyper-patriotism and vehement anti-communism that would eventually define America’s foreign policy in the second half of the century. In Britain, by contrast, the sudden tripling of the electorate in 1918 was successfully absorbed Within parliamentary politics, The threat of an utterly crippling general strike never materialized. Under Ramsay MacDonald the Labour Party was desperate to prove it did not pose a threat to the constitution, the empire or the pound. The party’s ideology drew less on continental Marxism than on indigenous traditions of nineteenth-century radicalism and nonconformist religion. At the same time the Tories, led by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, won the support of many of the newly enfranchised women and skilled workers, attracted by policies such as a ‘property-owning democracy’. In Britain fascist elements like Mosley remained marginal, and potential ‘supermen’ leaders, such as Lloyd George and Churchill, were excluded from office.
Tgk1946's Blog 