Postwar democratic regimes nonetheless rested on party states and empowered workers

Evidence

The era of high-party politics was never one of irenic stability. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle’s coup upset France’s republican order and transitioned the country into a presidential regime with softly authoritarian features. In Greece, Spain, and Portugal, populations lived under dictatorships sheltered by a Cold War umbrella. In Britain, mass strikes and worker unrest unseated conservative governments. The notion of a long capitalist peace hid the colonial expeditions and communist counterinsurgency embroiling European empires. Yet these were regimes built, in many ways, on the party state that Schmitt had first lamented in the 1930s, where the working class achieved a much greater say in government than it did before. It was the West’s “democratic age,” as historian Martin Conway terms it, for better and for worse—the era when the democratic component in “liberal democracy” counted for something. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 136

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar social democracy rested on perpetual growth between capital and labor — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 127; Postwar party democracy was authoritarian, patriarchal, and corrupt despite nostalgia — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 127

Broader Connections

• Postwar party democracy was authoritarian, patriarchal, and corrupt despite nostalgia #qualifies (0.70) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 127