Eighty years ago, Friedrich Hayek watched in anguish as Western liberal democracies seemed to embrace the authoritarian tendencies that had given rise to Nazism in Germany. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), he dedicated his work "to socialists of all parties," warning that both left-wing socialism and national socialism were branches of the same tree. Hayek feared England would repeat the history he had witnessed in Germany when he wrote the following:

When one hears for a second time opinions expressed or measures advocated which one has first met twenty or twenty-five years ago, they assume a new meaning as symptoms of a definite trend. They suggest, if not the necessity, at least the probability, that developments will take a similar course.