AHC: Alternate Ideologies for America

Could US Democracy survive a scenario of a worse depression without FDR ?

  • Yes ! Liberty shall never be extinguished

    Votes: 4 21.1%
  • One Radical may come close or even get Presidency, but he would fail

    Votes: 1 5.3%
  • If a radical ideology took over America, it wouldn't outlast his leader

    Votes: 3 15.8%
  • If done right, a radical ideology may last until the end of the century

    Votes: 4 21.1%
  • If done right, a radical ideology could still rule America today

    Votes: 7 36.8%

  • Total voters
    19
I have a proposal: Design a radical ideology that could potentially take over the USA in the case of a much worse Great Depression (and no FDR to fight it). It can be from Far-left to Far-Right to Third Position. Bonus if you explain how it would rule and how long it could last.
 
Huey Long could become a more populist version of FDR who is credited with helping normal people during the Great Depression, but running roughshod over the rule of law and becoming an earlier Nixon or milder, American version of Juan Peron. An assassination of FDR is a common POD, but the most likely result of this is a milder New Deal that is watered down by Congressional opposition without the popularity of FDR's larger than life image.

Pre-New Deal America was much more decentralized than the modern American state is, it would be difficult to destroy democracy in the entire country. Part of the reason the Nazis could take power was the Preußenschlag in 1932 where Von Papen essentially dissolved Prussia's state government and the national Chancellor's cabinet ran Prussia under article 48.

Weimar Prussia would be like if the entire US Eastern Seaboard and the midwest was one massive state, none of the 48 American states was that disproportionately influential at the time. Any general who gets Bonapartist ideas or charismatic leader who tries to declare themselves the living constitution or president for life would probably see state governors refusing to accept their legitimacy.

Even if this American Caesar had the armed forces behind him, the small interwar army probably wasn't large enough to overpower the national guards units that may side with their elected state government over a junta in Washington. In the early '30s there about 140,000 officers and enlisted men in the army, and the national guard was the largest branch of the military with about 180,000 men (source). The navy was largely oriented toward a potential conflict with Japan and would be largely irrelevant to a conflict over control of the mainland US. The air force didn't exist as a separate branch until 1941, it was still just the Army Corp at this point in time.
 
Communism was disturbingly trendy among American intellectuals during the '30s, but I don't think it ever had the mass support necessary to take power. The Bolsheviks had a St Petersburg Soviet in 1905 as a dress rehearsal for 1917 and the CCP governed base areas like Jiangxi well before it took power in 1949. America had a bloody labor movement before WW1, but American socialist revolutionaries never controlled a territory like their Chinese and Russian counterparts did.

Fascism might be even harder to get in the United States. Fascism took power in Italy, Germany, and Austria where democracy was unconsolidated or the transition to universal suffrage was relatively recent. The conservative aristocratic establishments weren't on board with this newfangled democracy thing, and the labor movements hadn't accepted a nonviolent, parliamentary role they played in postwar social democracy.

Fascists also relied on powerful revanchist sentiment and a desire for living space that would fall on deaf ears in the US. America bought most of its "living space" from France, conquered it from Mexico in the 1840s and had settled it all well before the 1920s. Anyone who wanted the prestige of a colonial empire had the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, the canal zone, and the Caribbean subject to varying degrees of de-facto US protectorate.

I don't think ideological antisemitism would be popular in the US the way it was in Europe. The Confederate States, the most reactionary state in US history, allowed a Jewish politician to serve as its Secretary of State and Secretary of War. American history has its shameful episodes like Leo Frank's lynching and Henry Ford's loony publications, but the US is generally better than the old world on this issue. The US has never had a state religion or required elected officials to be a certain denomination, there wasn't an American Jewish struggle for legal emancipation like there was in Europe.

The American nativists had largely gotten what they wanted on immigration with the restrictions passed in 1924. American reactionaries' focus would likely be delaying civil rights as long as possible (basically OTL) and maybe keeping prohibition around longer. Organized crime would keep milking the cash-cow of bootlegging. and civil rights would happen embarrassingly late ('70s or '80s), likely with more civil unrest involved. This would be a nastier, less enlightened version of OTL, but it wouldn't be a totalitarian break with the past like Stalinism and National Socialism were.
 
I could maybe see a "Business plot" happening, with a strong Authoritarian state, Nationalist, pro-Capitalist, militarist, and a America "Back to the values of the founding fathers".
 
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