Luce’s and Wallace’s visions differed in two critical ways. First, Wallace denied that America had any special or inherent claim on democratic ideals. “We ourselves in the United States,” he declared, “are no more a master race than the Nazis.” When citing models he hoped other nations would follow, Wallace mentioned not only the American Revolution but also “the French Revolution of 1792, the Latin American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, the German Revolution of 1848,” and, more dubiously, “the Russian Revolution of 1917.” The implication was that global progress would flow from a partnership of nations, each of which boasted traditions of liberty, rather than domination by an America that would mold the world “for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”[...]
Wallace, by contrast, saw unchecked private wealth as a threat to liberty. The “common man,” he argued, must “have the opportunity to form unions and bargain through them collectively.” If Luce saw Nazism as a species of socialism, Wallace saw it as the result of a toxic alliance between demagogues and big business. Citing “Herr Thyssen, the wealthy German steel man” who “gave Hitler enough money to enable him to play on the minds of the German people,” Wallace warned of “wealthy men who sincerely believe that their wealth is likely to be safer if they can hire” tyrants who “lure the people back into slavery.” [...]
Sanders’ speech evokes both of the key themes of Wallace’s 1942 address. First: its anti-exceptionalism. Sanders, like Wallace, describes a global struggle between democratic and authoritarian forces. But he doesn’t see that struggle as pitting democratic America against its authoritarian foes. He sees it as pitting democrats across the world, including Americans, against their increasingly antidemocratic governments, which include Trump’s. [...]
The second way in which Sanders evokes Wallace is by linking authoritarianism to concentrated wealth. Wallace warned of “wealthy men who sincerely believe that their wealth is likely to be safer” if they support “demagogues.” Sanders notes that many of today’s authoritarian leaders are “connected to a network of multibillionaire oligarchs.” He cites Sheldon Adelson as an example. Like Wallace, who said that “men and women cannot be really free until they have plenty to eat,” the “global democratic movement” that Sanders envisions is also a movement against “global inequality.” The widening gap between rich and poor, Sanders argues, fuels authoritarianism in two different ways: It gives oligarchs the resources to fund despots and it drives the alienation that leads some in the working class to support them.
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