Latest POD For American Fascism

I think we could see something proto-fascistic emerge around the fin de siècle in the United States. Fresh off of a successful war with Spain, lots of xenophobia, the nadir of race relations, an unstable economy, labor unrest, entrenched plutocrats, eugenics, agrarian populism...a lot of the ingredients are there.

And Wilson's behavior, while certainly not fascist, was very much authoritarian.

EDIT: Just reread the title and saw that you wanted the "latest" POD... sorry :eek:

I would consider that the latest POD would be the 1930s. Perhaps 1933 with the establishment of the National Recovery Administration.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Thought I should include the definition of fascism from one of the authorities on it.

Robert O. Paxton said:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive vigilance and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
 
The Radical Republicans were the more egalitarian ones who wanted to destroy the planter-ocracy and redistribute the lands to the poor blacks (and poor whites too).

They don't seem really "fascist" to me, even though the "State Suicide Theory" is fairly radical.

Eh, the Radical Republicans wanted to help the blacks, but we also can't forget the idea of "waving the bloody shirt" and why that was such a good electoral strategy. Radical Republicans wanted to help blacks but they were also advocates of the "stomp on their throat" school of thought in regards to treatment of the South.

And now on to our main attraction...

1) The national legislature of the US incapacitated due to;
2) A far worse 9/11, leading to;
3) A far worse anti-Muslim/anti-Middle Eastern reaction, eventually accompanied by;
4) A government plan, either initiated by the government or approved with a blind eye, of relocation based upon the precedent of the concentration of Japanese-Americans in WWII.


I find this difficult to believe, the US has tons of contingency plans in the event of Congress somehow being largely disabled/made unable to work by way of some external crisis (i.e. a war, especially a nuclear one), 9/11 would not only have to target Congress while it is in session but all of the replacement senators/representatives that state governments could line up in the event of the death or disability of current ones as well. Simply put, it's hard enough to target Congress in session, but if you manage to get rid of that then it is simply replaced, the legislature is incapacitated for a few days at most but in a flurry of last-minute flights and activity they manage to get a temporary Congress in session very quickly, the US expended countless hours and effort planning for this exact eventuality in the event of a nuclear attack on Washington that could potentially cripple the American government in a critical moment, the amount of time it would take for a president to take the amount and scale of the actions (i.e. interning American Muslims or other groups) would simply not be enough, it also wouldn't be the first action any president considered undertaking, while I absolutely believe that the idea of a modern president taking such a drastic action is completely implausible given the circumstances, I'll humor the idea with the condition that its still bound by both logistics and other considerations, simply put, it won't succeed, Congress won't allow it, and neither will public sentiment.

Internment is a bad precedent because it was 60 years ago and most of the internees are dead or getting old enough to the point where the only people who have any sort of direct experience regarding internment are going to be their children, and pretty much all of the people in government who made the decision are dead as well. It really is not too out there to say that the America of the 1940s was simply not the same as the America of the new millennium.

And Wilson's behavior, while certainly not fascist, was very much authoritarian.

While I am not in the mood for a Sedition Act argument because they inevitably devolve into morality circle jerks I think you could make the argument that a good amount of the factors you listed that made turn of the century America ripe for fascism were alleviated by Wilson's presidency. While he was lock step behind certain aspects of it, a lot of matters in regards to economics and class stability were brought to a decent resolution by Wilson's "New Freedom" policies: creating the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, limiting child labor and other Gilded Age excesses, etc.

Though the worst of the Red Scare I think really did play out in its effects following the Wilson administration and how America in the 20s largely turned in on itself and its own problems to be isolated from the rest of the world. So fascist America would be more reminiscent of Stalin's Soviet Union in its foreign policy in my view, a lurking, monstrous power with its own ambitions isolated from the world but feared by it just the same.
 
The 1930s are a popular POD, but I think oversold. I'm no economic determinist, but if you look at the countries that went fascist, they all percentages of middle class within a range that the US, the UK, France, were all outside of, even during the Depression. Curiously, now that Chinia is getting into those ranges, its starting to develop fascist characterists too.

I think a POD during the 30s can't lead immediately to fascism, it needs some time to develop the worsening conditions.

But that being the case, a POD after the 30s could probably lead to fascism too, given enough time to work. But if would probably need to be fairly dramatic.

Of course, lots of time when people say 'fascism' they really just mean a centralized, militaristic state. That's less difficult to do, IMHO.

In the "Republican Fascism" thread, wolf_brother said the notion that a dictatorial regime could not ever come to power in the United States was "American exceptionalism."

I pointed out that the abuses Warsie pointed out took place a long time ago, in a different cultural context, and that his (and JaneStillman's) scenario of the Republicans using the militia movement to stage an alternate-9/11 and as a freikorps-like enforcer gang was ludicrous.

My argument is that American fascism is lot less likely the further after the 1960s you get. I suggested if you wanted American fascism, the best time was the 1930s, even though the Business Plot in and of itself is rather dubious.

What do you all think?
 
It's never too late for fascism! Cold War goes hot, US government decapitated, crazy general takes over. Bam. I think some of the scenarios discussed in the Bad 90s thread could also yield some pretty late-in-the-day results.
 
It's never too late for fascism! Cold War goes hot, US government decapitated, crazy general takes over. Bam. I think some of the scenarios discussed in the Bad 90s thread could also yield some pretty late-in-the-day results.

I think it's generally acknowledged if you have to have a global thermonuclear war to accomplish what you want for a timeline that you're crossing over into ASB land, plus it makes it so boring because it's crap we've seen in countless timelines and countless movies/books/TV before that.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Remembered this and thought that the OP might appreciate it:

Robert O. Paxton said:
Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and "degenerate" artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 German or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had "stabbed them in the back." Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists.
 
Wolfpaw,

We did see the "Hard Hat Riots" in which a delegation of construction workers from the AFL-CIO beat up hippies and raised flags that were at half-mast for the victims of the Kent State shootings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot

However, that was a one-time thing.

I do remember some Chicano activists talking about "Veteranos," so if Vietnam vets did turn into militias, they might not be exclusively right-wing. Weimar Germany had armed Communist and Social-Democrat gangs too.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
I do remember some Chicano activists talking about "Veteranos," so if Vietnam vets did turn into militias, they might not be exclusively right-wing. Weimar Germany had armed Communist and Social-Democrat gangs too.
I agree--those militias spawned by oppressed minority groups will likely be left-wing and anti-war in nature, but they will also have that extra-nasty ingredient of chauvinism. So I'd say that overall they'd be more left-wing, but they would probably not shy away from aggressive right-wing rhetoric.
 
4) A government plan, either initiated by the government or approved with a blind eye, of relocation based upon the precedent of the concentration of Japanese-Americans in WWII.

The Japanese-American Internment doesn't work as a precedent since it has been acknowledged as a gross violation of civil rights by the government since the 1970s. As a matter of fact, it would have the opposite effect since the internment camps now have (justly so) negative connotations and any program that shares any sort of similarity would face an immediate backlash.
 
The Japanese-American Internment doesn't work as a precedent since it has been acknowledged as a gross violation of civil rights by the government since the 1970s. As a matter of fact, it would have the opposite effect since the internment camps now have (justly so) negative connotations and any program that shares any sort of similarity would face an immediate backlash.
In the strictly legal sense, it does work as a precedent. Korematsu v. US has never been overturned, and the very similar case Hirabayashi (curfew for Japanese) has even been recently cited by Clarence Thomas (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). While I think today's SC would overturn Hirabayashi and/or Korematsu given the chance, it has yet to happen, and of course in an alternate timeline many things are possible (especially if, say, the mentioned alternate-9/11 kills several Justices somehow...).
 
No Lost Decade for Japan?

I'm of the opinion it's never too late for fascism, especially if we're using it with the same degree of precision as a 14-year-old complaining about cops and his dad. But an element that may be necessary, and is certainly helpful, is feelings of inferiority or defeat (which the USA hasn't seriously had during the 20th century). If we can jigger Japan's banking policies so that they don't implode, maybe the Japanophobia of the late 80s-early 90s keeps growing, as does the perception of their economic prowess?

That's the latest. My favorite would be a significant cockup during the Korean War, so that Best Korea is the Only Korea while Red Hordes (tm) wash over the US Army and eat MacArthur alive or something. Then Sputnik. Then Gagarin. Maybe have Senator McCarthy assassinated or something before he can make a fool of himself on television so that he retains some credibility. I think you could get the nation in enough of a panic by the election of 1960 for a really regrettable choice in the ballot box.
 
First of all "fascism" is a twentieth century creation so any POD prior to WWI is irrelevant. The only semi-realistic POD for an Americanised version of European fascism as practiced in the 1920's and 30's would be a successful assassination of FDR by Zangara in 1933. FDR's actions, for marco-economic better or worse, allieviated the immediate crisis effects of the Depression and maintained American confidence in the democratic process. I can not see John Garner pulling that off. The likely outcome of a Garner administration is a continuing and deepening economic slump and a govenment increasingly perceived as incapable and irrelevant. Both right and left wing groups become more openly violent and several situations could develop. Most likely scenario, if we butterfly away Carl Weiss, is the successful rise to power of Huey Long and Charles Coughlin. Some might argue that Long was to left-wing to be "fascist", but he was no socialist and in pwer would have coopted pro-military and nationalist groups to his regime as well as much of the traditional elite, who would prefer him to Upton Sinclair or Norman Thomas. Certainly Long had a total disregard for democracy as we know it, and is the most plausible and capable potential "fascist" leader in American history. But to rise to pwer he needed the administration elected in 1932 to utterly fail, and that requires removing FDR from the scene.
 
In the For All Time world, it's not hard to imagine a fascistic President getting elected during the chaotic fifties, sixties or even seventies. So a 1941 PoD of FDR's death could eventually lead to the collapse of US democracy if you stick with the butterflies.
 
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