Democracy viewed as archaic and obsolete

In some cases it didn't actually need out-and-out fascism to replace liberalism. Salazar's Catholic Corporate State, for example.
Salazar's a somewhat unique figure in the history of 20th Europe. He was originally an economics professor by training, although he was educated by priests and nuns and considered becoming a priest at one point. The first Portuguese Republic was tremendously unstable, it say 9 presidents and 44 prime ministers in about 16 years. Salazar stayed on as finance minister for many of the governments. When Salazar took power his ability to balance the budget, expand education, and get the economy on track was his main selling point for the Portuguese public.

He supported the Spanish nationalists due to his fears of a communist invasion of Portugal if the republicans won, to the point where Lisbon was known as the nationalists' port and he received an award from Franco's government. However Salazar received massive positive coverage from Anglo-American journalists and diplomats for his decision to reaffirm the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, keep Iberia neutral, and provide transit and shelter for as many as a million war refugees.

Salazar was one of the only European leaders to predict that Germany would eventually lose as early as 1939, and he was also deeply perturbed by nazism's neopagan and anti-christian tendencies for ideological reasons as an observant Catholic. The Estado Novo was a relatively enlightened authoritarian regime in the 1930s, but it's stubborn refusal to even admit it was a colonial empire made it seem like a dinosaur by the '60s and '70s.
 
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With a POD of 1900 or later, make democracy be percieved as obsolete and archaic, much like many people view monarchy nowadays.

Isn't that pretty much the line China is pushing now? We are living in an age where autocrats are increasingly popular as the neo liberalism pendulum reaches its turning point.

We will see how things go when the successful autocrats have to deal with the messes they create on their own.
 
Isn't that pretty much the line China is pushing now? We are living in an age where autocrats are increasingly popular as the neo liberalism pendulum reaches its turning point.

But the thing this, at least when speaking to western audiences, pro-Chinese propagandists don't come right out and say that democracy is a bad thing. The closest they get to that is something like "Well, sure, China's not democratic, but the west isn't really democratic either, and China is doing a better job with the economy, so how can we lecture them?"

Rather than come out and say that China is authoritarian, the west is democratic, and that's why China is superior. Which I think is the kind of opinion the OP is looking to become widespread.
 
Expand education? Even when he died, 40% of the Portuguese weren't fully literate, I read.
The Estado Novo appears to have expanded child education pretty rapidly, but never tackled adult illiteracy. This report seems to indicate that when Salazar died in 1970, Portugal had a 30% illiteracy rate.

Although the militants of the First Republic had chosen education as one of their banner causes, the evidence shows that the more democratic First Republic was less successful than the authoritarian Estado Novo in expanding elementary education. Under the First Republic, literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 registered a modest increase from 26 per cent in 1911 to 33 per cent in 1930. Under the Estado Novo, literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 increased to 56 per cent in 1940, 77 per cent in 1950 and 97 per cent in 1960.
 
Maybe have the democtatic countries of western europe plunge into "middle east style" third world anarchy. How to achieve that without nuclear war, I don't know.
 
If China's status quo continues for a few more decades it's going to put serious doubt into the Fukuyamist narrative of history. If a regime can control social media closely enough to engineer the public support that it needs to stay in power, the entire concept of "the will of the people" would be thrown into doubt.

China's leadership pays a lot of attention to domestic public opinion, even though political views that challenge the Party can get someone un-personed and kicked off their internet pretty easily.
 
This was basically the case in the interwar period, Mussolini compared fascism and democracy to electricity and gas lamps.

There was a pervasive sentiment that liberalism, in both a political and an economic sense, were 19th century anachronisms that were proven obsolete in the era of total war and command economies, or at least heavy-handed state intervention that maintained private property rights on paper.

It's largely forgotten nowadays but Nazi Germany was a model for authoritarians in eastern Europe before 1939. France appeared to be economically stagnant and in geopolitical decline, while Germany seemed to have recovered from the depression and begun surging ahead.

Reminds me of what Shirer wrote about Germany c spring 1939: "Everyone could see the contrast between this martial, imperial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies of the West." In its heyday, down to about mid 1940, fascism did seem like the wave of the future and virtually unstoppable. This perception began to change later that year when Britain thwarted the Luftwaffe and crushed the Italians in North Africa. But what if the nazis had been able to wrap up the war on good terms by late 1941? Even if it hadn't achieved total victory fascism would have seemed like a very capable system. Inevitably many people would've ben drawn to it afterwards. FDR was aware of this possibility when he said he didn't want to "live in a world dominated by the Hitler philosophy" (as opposed to actual or military dominance).
 

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Reminds me of what Shirer wrote about Germany c spring 1939: "Everyone could see the contrast between this martial, imperial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies of the West." In its heyday, down to about mid 1940, fascism did seem like the wave of the future and virtually unstoppable. This perception began to change later that year when Britain thwarted the Luftwaffe and crushed the Italians in North Africa. But what if the nazis had been able to wrap up the war on good terms by late 1941? Even if it hadn't achieved total victory fascism would have seemed like a very capable system. Inevitably many people would've ben drawn to it afterwards. FDR was aware of this possibility when he said he didn't want to "live in a world dominated by the Hitler philosophy" (as opposed to actual or military dominance).
Don't forget the popularity of communism in 1930s among intellectuals in the first world and nationalists in the Third. If the USSR is still around in that scenario, we can expect it to promote its ideology as a counterweight to fascism and democracy.
 
Don't forget the popularity of communism in 1930s among intellectuals in the first world and nationalists in the Third. If the USSR is still around in that scenario, we can expect it to promote its ideology as a counterweight to fascism and democracy.


Sure. But a lot depends on the outcome of a nazi-Soviet clash (which was probably inevitable). Even if the nazis had no realistic chance of overrunning the USSR to they extent they wanted, they might still have come out on top had, if for example they had negotiated by September 1941 or a month later, after Vyazma. Had there been a Brest-Litovsk-like settlement then, and a general peace soon after which froze it, nazism probably would've seemed better than communism. You could say the struggle between them had been settled empirically.
 
Well, okay. Let’s specifically refer to representative democracy here. Clark wins 1912, brings the US into WWI, wins it by 1917, the whites win the civil war. No previous model of authoritarian communism for tankies to adapt.

Already you have a massive amount of butterflies there, but basically, if Russia is fucked up by the Depression and the Bolsheviks aren’t around, then unless the fascists catch the public eye, there is plenty room for social anarchists in the vein of Bakunin and Kropotkin to turn the public against the state as an institution. (After all, the Bolsheviks killed most of the Russian anarchists, so there’s likely a far greater number of anarchist activists in 1929 ITTL than there were IOTL.)

If a social anarchist model is successful in Russia and the fascists end up losing TTL’s equivalent of the Second World War (especially if a hypothetical anarchist Russia prolongs the life of Revolutionary Catalonia), expect decolonised countries to adapt anarchist models in the same way as they adapted the USSR’s model IOTL. (Humans aren’t very creative.) Ideally, the US wouldn’t be quite as imperialist ITTL, so it wouldn’t get itself involved in quashing social anarchism abroad (ie. in South America), but expect heavy dissent by the US state against American anarchist groups not long after alt-WWII ITTL, especially if they were still on the Allies’ side. This’d likely turn public opinion (especially from demobbed soldiers who just fought against totalitarianism) against the state and towards anarchism, because ideally they wouldn’t have an totalitarian left boogeyman to point to ITTL and say ‘hey, they’re oppressing their people, we’re the freest country on Earth, USA,’ and so on.

Since the butterflies are already massive, I’ll end it here by saying that ultimately, in this scenario, the general public would lose its faith in the state and in representative democracy as a means of liberating its people. Where this would lead is anyone’s guess, but democracy would look far more archaic ITTL than IOTL.
 
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