Defying the Demos: Antidemocratic Thought in the United States, 1930–1950

During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of right-wing intellectuals, sparked by the New Deal, mounted a sustained critique of American democracy and inherited democratic principles. Believing that the progressive democratization of the state had resulted in a decadent, inefficient and morally coarse society, they attacked democracy as the root cause of the nation's problems. Examining the reactionary conservative, libertarian and fascist critiques of democracy, this article suggests that each borrowed ideas from the other, and that their beliefs in autocratic rule or a broadly countermajoritarian politics have not been adequately studied by scholars.