Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Wallace is warning against the soothing fantasy that victory abroad automatically restores virtue at home. Coming from a sitting vice president in the closing stretch of World War II, the line is less a battlefield prediction than a political dare: don’t confuse the defeat of Axis armies with the defeat of the ideas and interests that made them possible.

The phrase “worldwide, agelong struggle” deliberately stretches the frame. It turns fascism from a foreign uniform into a recurring temptation, something that can reappear wherever fear, hierarchy, and grievance are mobilized into policy. “Democracy,” by contrast, is treated not as a stable inheritance but as a practice that needs maintenance. Wallace isn’t merely forecasting postwar tensions; he’s insisting that democracy’s real tests arrive after the parades, when emergencies fade and societies decide what kind of peace they’re willing to fund and enforce.

The subtext is pointedly domestic. Wallace had been outspoken about economic inequality, labor rights, and civil liberties, and he feared that corporate power, racial injustice, and anti-union repression could generate a homegrown authoritarian drift. Read in 1944-45, it also anticipates the coming ideological battlefield of the Cold War, when “anti-fascism” could be replaced by new crusades that justify surveillance, purges, and the narrowing of dissent.

Rhetorically, it works because it refuses the clean ending audiences crave. By denying closure, Wallace positions democracy as an ongoing labor - and makes complacency itself sound like collaboration with the next regime waiting in the wings.