What Wooldridge likely means by "liberal" is neither the American use of the word denoting leftish politics or even as a reflection of the actual state of affairs in 1914, but rather as a more abstract idea about the politics before the war and after. Liberal order in this sense meant faith in democracy, governing institutions, constitutional order, and the rule of law. All of the major warring parties had a constitution in 1914, and all had some variation on the franchise, albeit some (eg, UK, Germany, France) much more than others (Russia, Ottomans). Wooldridge is thus tapping into an old interpretation of the First World War that held the experience of the war engendered cynicism about the pre-1914 order and a search for alternative politics.

This interpretation of the First World War's legacy holds that there were two distinctly anti-liberal alternatives that emerged out of the wreckage of the war. On the right, there was fascism, which in the words of Jeffrey Herf practiced a form of "reactionary modernism" which stressed a hybrid return to the pre-liberal past as well as the modern unleashed by the war. The SS in many ways exemplified this contradiction; SS men were to be modern and educated, but Himmler also put them as a neo-feudal knighthood of the Third Reich and many SS ceremonies had a pseudo-medieval character to them. In both character and actions, fascism had disdain for liberal institutions like laws or constitutions and the leadership cult transected prior norms. Action was more important than measured responses preceded by debate. As Mussolini famously said "better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep," which was simultaneously a statement about his own virility as much as it was an excoriation of liberal Italy for its timidity.

True fascist movements though were a relative rarity in postwar European politics (determining if political movements were fascist is compounded by the problem of it having no real coherent ideology), Communist Parties were not. This was the other postwar pole in this interpretation. After 1917, rather than working within the system, as many mainstream socialist parties did, Lenin showed that with determined effort, a revolutionary party could bring the state down. This was a powerful attractant for many on the left, who were disillusioned with the mainstream socialist parties who voted for war credits and participated in the capitalist system. Although Communist parties would vary in their engagement with democratic institutions in the interwar period, their fundamental ideology stressed that the democratic and capitalist order was an edifice that would eventually need to be torn down; liberalism and its capitalism was incomparable with the ideology of Communism on a fundamental level.

While these two movements were vibrant and attracted many young people and intellectuals, this pessimistic interpretation holds that the old liberal order was reactive and beaten down by the burden of guilt for the war as well as having to defend the state from these two upstarts. There were few people clamoring to defend the liberal order, and the insurgent movements had a much more populist character to them. In some cases, the liberal order was able to prevent the destruction of the political center, such as the UK, or just barely defend it, as in France. Still other cases saw right-wing dictatorships flourish that sought to co-opt fascism as in Hungary or Romania, but other polities fell into the abyss such as Italy and Germany.

While it is certainly true that interwar politics took a nasty turn after the war, the interpretation put forward by Wooldridge is only one interpretation of the First World War's legacy, and a rather old one at that. Recent social and political historians' research has shown that the postwar liberal order was much stronger than prior generations held it, and under certain circumstances the liberal order could quarantine these upstarts from the wider body politic. Historians looks at the rise of fascism with a more nuanced eye, as it built on long-standing ideas and social trends as well as capitalized on the immediate mistakes of the existing political order. Moreover, the notion of a frontline radicalization has been called into serious question in current scholarship. In a lot of cases, the insurgents, whether Communist or fascist, dominated the immediate discussion of what the war meant to those who fought it. This obscures other developments in the front that played out in the postwar, such as the growing peace movement or renewed interest in a different form of Christianity or other spiritual expressions. Rather than being typical of the European political opinion of the postwar opinion, the insurgents against the liberal order were very much a minority, albeit a highly determined one. Many of them tried to overthrow it in the interwar period, but only a few actually succeeded, and even then it was often the result of compromises and short-term tactical alliances within elements of the liberal order.