War & Peace Quote by Henry A. Wallace

A vacuum is a terrifying thing to waste. Wallace’s sentence turns a technocratic observation into a political threat assessment: modern inventions don’t just add conveniences, they reorganize power. When technology accelerates production, communication, and surveillance, it also concentrates leverage in fewer hands. If democratic life doesn’t keep pace - not as a slogan, but as “effective enthusiastic action” - that imbalance becomes an opening for authoritarians who promise speed, order, and certainty.

The phrasing matters. “Democracy” here isn’t a constitutional diagram; it’s a kind of mass mobilization, a public that can govern at the same tempo as the machine age. Wallace implies that procedure without participation becomes brittle. The subtext is that fascism isn’t merely imported ideology or a foreign pathology; it’s an opportunistic response to modernity’s dislocations: rapid change, economic insecurity, propaganda at scale, the seductions of managerial control. The fascists “increase in power” not because they’re inevitable, but because they’re adaptive - they colonize the spaces democracy leaves unattended.

Context sharpens the warning. As Vice President during World War II, Wallace was watching an alliance fight fascism abroad while American industry, media, and labor were being radically reshaped by wartime technology and centralized planning. “After the war” anticipates demobilization: the moment when societies often lurch from collective sacrifice into anxiety about jobs, status, and national identity. Wallace’s line reads like a memo from the future: inventions don’t guarantee progress; they raise the stakes of who gets to steer the new world they make.