Well, if it come to that it should be noted that in the 1930s and 1940s there were a lot of people that saw both fascism and communism as the waves of the future and democracy as doomed. It worked differently in one way because fascism lost utterly due to a communist victory so Pyrrhic liberal democracy survived by default.

Then there's the reality that Southern plantation slavery of the 1850s was an innovation due to the cotton gin and hence had surprised damned near everyone in the USA, which was why the issue of what states slavery would or would not spread to mattered as it did.