Whatever we were defending, it wasn't democracy.

Yeah, I know. I chalk it up to it having been an American writer. A goodly number of Americans don't actually seem to understand democracy, but rather use it as a sort of catch all for anything that seems more correct than whatever the other guys are doing, sort of the same way "patriotic" is bandied about as meaning rooting for us is more correct than, well, anything else. A more appropriate word might have been "humanity".

Hitler and Mussolini had huge electoral majorities.

...in their respective countries, yes. But British even removed their poor King (under that charming 'transatlantic forbidden love' pretext) for liking Hitler too much...

Canadians from the article were not engaged in Iraq-style 'regime change'; they were not protecting Germans from Hitler, but the rest of Europe.

Apropos Hitler's popular support and WWII: tanstaafl just reminded us in another thread of this popular method of handling depressions.