How could the U.S. have gone Fascist realistically before WWII?

He effectively did. While the Nazis didn't take full, de jure state ownership of the means of production, they certainly established state control of said means, and therefore effective de facto ownership.

As long as the proprietors of the means of production retain de jure control of their businesses, and especially as long as they are free to use the profits extracted therefrom, the rulers don't radically change the social fabric of the country (and indeed, with the major exception of Aryanization, the Nazis didn't; families that were rich before the war were rich after and during the war; the wages of workers didn't increase significantly, and the property structure essentially remained the same).

We need to distinguish the structure of property and the structure of the economy.

You can have a socialist economy with market structures, Yugoslavia being the most egregious example; you can, at the same time, have a privately-owned but centrally planned economy: this is roughly what Nazi Germany was like.
 
Power is too decentralized in the United States for Fascism to be able to take power.

Could Fascism have taken over individual States? I mean, the Solid South was an authoritarian enclave (see Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972), and Long went the extra mile.
 
Could Fascism have taken over individual States? I mean, the Solid South was an authoritarian enclave (see Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972), and Long went the extra mile.

A Huey Long candidacy for President in either 1932 or 1936 would be a good POD.
 
Could Fascism have taken over individual States? I mean, the Solid South was an authoritarian enclave (see Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972), and Long went the extra mile.

At the state level sure. But that's a pretty significant distinction from the whole country under the rule of a single Duce or Fuhrer.


If one wants an authoritarian US, I think Executive Departments of the Federal Government that lack proper oversight would be a better route.
  • Nobody messed with Herbert Hoover, for example. He proceeded to accumulate dirt on half of Washington.
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as originally structured was supposed to involve the Director of the Bureau naming their own successor, not the President. In PHH Corp v CFPB the the three-judge panel of the DC Circuit court said that “other than the President, the Director of the CFPB is the single most powerful official in the entire United States Government, at least when measured in terms of unilateral power.” The CFPB Director also cannot be removed by the President, except for cause (which is a difficult standard to meet). The CFPB's funding is also independent of the usual congressional appropriations process, meaning Congress can't really do much about it either. Imagine a whole bunch of bureaucratic departments that are self-perpetuating, cannot be held accountable democratically, and have tremendous economic power that they use at their discretion.

Maybe a single individual somehow ends up in charge of multiple departments, such as Mulvaney recently having being OMB Director, CFPB Director, and Chief of Staff at the same time (though he stepped down from CFPB pretty quickly).


But a bureaucratic party-state is not the same as Fascism.
 
If we had a President who was a prominent WWI General instead of FDR, who instituted similar policies to FDR in 1933 to become overwhelmingly popular, and we had the Bonus Army appear or return around 1933 to protest Congress not giving them adequate money, if said overwhelmingly popular President then led the Bonus army to march on Congress and had both houses arrested while declaring himself a dictator, I wonder what would happen...

Would people just accept it quietly as he promises to take care of the economy?
 
Was Long a fascist, though? I don't know much about him, aside from his 'I will go to extreme lengths to accomplish what's best for Louisiana' approach to government and his depiction in Kaiserreich.

He was relatively left-wing, and actuallly fairly progressive on race, IOTL, but he definitely had the personality of a fascist leader and was planning to ally with Father Charles Coughlin, who drifted towards fascism after Long's death. If Long had abandoned his racial progressivism and allied with the KKK in the 1924 election, he could have won and positioned himself for a Presidential run in 1932.
 
If we had a President who was a prominent WWI General instead of FDR, who instituted similar policies to FDR in 1933 to become overwhelmingly popular, and we had the Bonus Army appear or return around 1933 to protest Congress not giving them adequate money, if said overwhelmingly popular President then led the Bonus army to march on Congress and had both houses arrested while declaring himself a dictator, I wonder what would happen...

Would people just accept it quietly as he promises to take care of the economy?

This is the United States, not some dictatorship in South America. The American people, say nothing of the actual US Army, would not tolerate a renegade President leading a group of retired soldiers to overthrow Congress, regardless of how popular the leader is. The only way for a President to become a dictator is to slowly erode the foundations of American democracy.
 
You see, I actually managed to create a de facto dictatorship in America in my TL:

The crimes of Stephenson were never discovered, so the Klan rise of the 1920s continue into the 30s.

Calvin Coolidge runs for a 2nd term, he would of course win thanks for the great economy, nothing would go wrong except when the Depression hits. Coolidge's lack of intervention further brings disaster to the economy, and Quentin Roosevelt (TTL's FDR) proposes a "Fair Deal" (The New Deal), he wins the election with Garner as VPOTUS, but he is killed by a Italo-American Proudhonist (Anarchist) and Garner becomes POTUS. (Also remember that the Prohibition never ended)

Then as Garner goes Hoover with some half-hearted attempts that further drag the economy downhill, Huey Long becomes the main leader of the American left, making Quentin a Martyr and promising to fulfill his dream. Adding his populism, charisma, and powerful allies (like Coughlin), he manages to defeat Garner in the Democratic nomination and Alf Landon in the 1936 elections.

Long soon finds congress to be uncooperative, he bypasses with executive orders, the SCOTUS blocks him, he accuses them of letting America suffer and starve, he attempts to pack the court, and then a Business Plot conspiracy led by George van Horn Moseley, D. C. Stephenson, and Charles Lindenbergh attempts a coup to oust him.

Klansmen take the White House while Lindenbergh (who is Speaker of the House TTL) uses the Army and Klan intimidation to push an impeachment attempt. But due to an spy, Long manages to escape before that, calling Loyalists under General Patton and the American people to resist the coup by radio, after a battle, Washington is retaken and the conspirators defeated.

Long then blackmails J. Edgar Hoover (due to his homosexuality) and uses the FBI to arrest several opponents and break down his enemies, censoring Press, packing the Court and even arresting SCOTUS members due to possible involvement in the conspiracy. He releases Stephenson's crimes to the world, causing general outrage against the Klan and causing its decline. Long starts implementing the policies of the Fair Deal witch result in a sharp improvement of the economy by the 1938 midterms.

Long created his own paramilitary militia of loyalists, growing paranoid of the army, he purged several rebellious generals, he also leaves the Democratic Party and declared himself "Independent" (while using congress puppets to create his own "America First Party" to exert his influence). Using his charisma, bribes, the economical improvements, blackmail, intimidation etc, the America First scores a massive landslide all over the nation in 1938, cementing Long's control using the FBI, a puppet congress, puppet Supreme Court, and puppet governors, Huey Long now was the de facto Master of America. Or as one may call it: "Longmerica."
 
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Fascists viewed themselves as a "third way" opposed to both bourgeois capitalism and degenerate socialism, but what they were more than anything else was Romantic, hyper nationalist reactionaries against modernity. Diametrically opposite to "left wing" movements which embrace modernity and champion "progress" and "rationality" in an international context.

Except that Fascism was very definitely about wreaking radical transformations on society to conquer the modern world. There was a strong connection between Fascism and the Futurist art movement. Italian Fascism reveled in modernist architecture and feats of technological prowess, such as Balbo's famous mass flight to America. So did Nazi Germany.

Indeed, Fascism really began as a break-off from "Red" radicalism, which had expected the increasingly-oppressed proletariat to rise up spontaneously and make the Revolution. But by the 1900s. the proletariat never had it so good. Lenin's faction argued for a disciplined vanguard force to make the Revolution. Other revolutionary theorists, notably Georges Sorel, argued that as the masses would not act from economic need, they had to be mobilized by other sentiments, such as romantic nationalism. But the goal remained fundamentally the same - all power to the radical elite for the total remaking of society.
 
Except that Fascism was very definitely about wreaking radical transformations on society to conquer the modern world. There was a strong connection between Fascism and the Futurist art movement. Italian Fascism reveled in modernist architecture and feats of technological prowess, such as Balbo's famous mass flight to America. So did Nazi Germany.

Indeed, Fascism really began as a break-off from "Red" radicalism, which had expected the increasingly-oppressed proletariat to rise up spontaneously and make the Revolution. But by the 1900s. the proletariat never had it so good. Lenin's faction argued for a disciplined vanguard force to make the Revolution. Other revolutionary theorists, notably Georges Sorel, argued that as the masses would not act from economic need, they had to be mobilized by other sentiments, such as romantic nationalism. But the goal remained fundamentally the same - all power to the radical elite for the total remaking of society.

I... strongly disagree with the first claim. It depends of course which country you're looking at but the antebellum era was infamously rife with class conflict, and culminated in the mass slaughter of millions. The Proletariat did not have it so good at that point, or indeed I would argue until after the Second World War, and then only in certain areas.

As to the second, insofar as Bolshevism turned out that way yes (this was very generally the big split between the anarchists and the Marxists, and Leninist vanguardism is its own innovation as well), but there was still a striking theoretical difference between fascism, even Fascism fascism (as opposed to Ur-Fascism or the general trend of such movements) and "socialism" per se; both the Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists viewed themselves as the enemies of the Bolsheviks and of communism generally, and this was a key aspect of both their rise to power and also their outlook in the years up to and including the Second World War. They wanted to remake society yes, but remake it in an image of a "purified" and in some sense antiquated (Romantic is really the word, in the sense of 19th century Romanticism) view of the old nation and people (ie "restore Germany/Italy to greatness"), whereas the Bolsheviks and other communists, in theory, wanted to abolish the old distinctions of class, nationality (of course in practice it turned out to be a second Russian Empire in all but name and by the time of Stalin, and the Great Patriotic War, had adopted strikingly "nationalist" propaganda, but that's another story). That the movement "borrowed" so much from the modernists (and had former socialists like Mussolini in it) is in some sense... not really indicative of its core motivations IMO, or rather that it's a mistake almost to try and describe fascist ideology in strictly rational terms; fundamentally "fascism" is about the will to power and a sort of revolt against "rationality" per se, and often hostile to intellectualism as well.
 
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