What were some of the challenges to democracy in the post-World War II era?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Despite the failures of the fascists and Nazis, authoritarianism of every kind continued to challenge democracy. Right-wing dictatorships survived World War II in Spain and Portugal. In Latin America, which, like Spain and Portugal, had escaped the worst rigors of the war, similar regimes, extemporized to meet economic emergencies or revolutionary threats, kept cropping up, ideologically feeble but drawing on fascist rhetoric to justify the exaltation of order, the suppression of liberty, and the priorities of elites.The future of democracy—understood in a traditional sense as government by freely elected representatives under universal suffrage—looked bleak elsewhere, as decolonized countries succumbed to dictatorships, and the Cold War made people rally to state power, with huge police apparatus, truncated civil liberties, tentacular secret services, and engorged military budgets. As well as idiosyncratic forms of dictatorship, newelites, generally organized as parties in one-party states on the Soviet model, monopolized power in many countries. Racial elites kept hold of power where they could. In South Africa racism as flagrant as anything the Nazis championed became the official ideology of the state in 1948, when the newly elected government reorganized the population into racial categories, assigning discrete areas of residence to each in a policy known as "separate development" or apartheid. The horrors of the war did not deter racism, or excise it from the law, in parts of the United States or in imperial territories still under white rulers, or from Australia, where laws against nonwhite immigrants were modified from 1949 onwards, but not altogether abolished.