What if FDR was "fascist"?

TFSmith121

Banned
Shhh - you're challenging a meme RWers have held dear

All this business about the New Deal being modeled after German, Italian, or Russian models is IMO completely misguided. (Not surprisingly, it is more popular with crank journalists than with professional historians.) It not only overlooks the roots of New Deal programs in the TR and Wilson administrations but ignores that insofar as the New Dealers had a foreign model, it was social democratic Scandinavia, with its successful cooperatives and strong labor movement and its "limited but robust" state enterprise. https://books.google.com/books?id=_L-rj3VLlYMC&pg=PA5 Marquis Childs' *Sweden: The Middle Way* instantly became a favorite book of the New Dealers.

As William Leuchtenberg wrote,

"Hardheaded, 'anti-utopian,' the New Dealers nonetheless had their Heavenly City: the greenbelt town, clean, green, and white, with children playing in light, airy, spacious schools; the government project at Longview, Washington, with small houses , each of different design, colored roofs, and gardens of flowers and vegetables; the Mormon villages of Utah that M. L. Wilson kept in his mind's eye--immaculate farmsteads on broad, rectangular streets; most of all, the Tennessee Valley, with its model town of Norris, the tall transmission towers, the white dams, the glistening wire strands, the valley where 'a vision of villages and clean small factories has been growing into the minds of thoughtful men.'55 Scandinavia was their model abroad, not only because it summoned up images of the countryside of Denmark, the beauties of Stockholm, not only for its experience with labor relations and social insurance and currency reform, but because it represented the "middle way" of happy accommodation of public and private institutions the New Deal sought to achieve. 'Why,' inquired Brandeis, 'should anyone want to go to Russia when one can go to Denmark?'56" http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/NASD/d2...ed1d/SRV/ulib/xml/285/files1/TXT/00000377.txt

Shhh - you're challenging a meme RWers have held dear since 1932... next thing you know, you'll suggest Chiang Kai-Shek was responsible for China!We all know it was commies in the state department!;)

And flouride.

Best,
 

LordKalvert

Banned
Favoring large, regulated corporations =/= corporatism. The latter means organizing society into functional blocks such as business, labor, and the church, and letting them negotiate as blocks. So instead of having multiple, industry-specific unions (e.g. SEIU, UAW) and individual companies lobbying congress you'll just have the One Big Union hashing it out with the Chamber of Commerce.

Not necessarily. Corporatism takes many forms the key element is to organize groups like farmers and workers into a corporate identity. The extreme of fascism would be to then make the state in control over everything. Roosevelt never got that far. However, the NRA and Labor Relations Act would be in that vein
 
It should be read into the record that FDR was the guy who, faced with a recalcitrant Supreme Court, threatened to expand the membership to fifteen judges, with the newbies appointed after promising to uphold the New Deal. For all practical purposes, shutting down the SCOTUS as an effective check on government.

Of course, that was in the service of things that liberals tend to like, but one can only imagine what they would have said if Nixon had tried to do the same thing in order to win law-and-order cases.
The way FDR went about revealing this plan, in a way that assured it had 0 chance of getting passed, suggests it was more meant to cajole the Supreme Court into compliance than actually go through with it. Still not acceptable, and a blemish on his record, but I think it's a fairly overrated event in importance.
 
Favoring large, regulated corporations =/= corporatism. The latter means organizing society into functional blocks such as business, labor, and the church, and letting them negotiate as blocks. So instead of having multiple, industry-specific unions (e.g. SEIU, UAW) and individual companies lobbying congress you'll just have the One Big Union hashing it out with the Chamber of Commerce.

Exactly. And just to add, corporatism =/= fascism. The New Deal certainly had corporatist elements, but to say it was fascist is like saying Star Trek's Federation is Stalinist because it has communist economic elements.
 
Exactly. And just to add, corporatism =/= fascism. The New Deal certainly had corporatist elements, but to say it was fascist is like saying Star Trek's Federation is Stalinist because it has communist economic elements.

Or saying that Hitler was an Ayn Rand-style laissex-faire capitalist just because he opposed communism.:rolleyes:
 
Shhh - you're challenging a meme RWers have held dear since 1932... next thing you know, you'll suggest Chiang Kai-Shek was responsible for China!We all know it was commies in the state department!;)




Commies in the state department-sure, why not? What's special about Americans in government? Very likely the state department was penetrated, possibly even presidential advisers. The British gov was penetrated at all levels why not the American? The same type of elite, naïve people, from university to government. Perfect recruit material.
 
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TFSmith121

Banned
None of which had anything to do with who was

Very likely the state department was penetrated, possibly even presidential advisers. The British gov was penetrated at all levels why not the American? The same type of people, from university to government.

None of which had anything to do with who was responsible for winning or losing the Chinese Civil War, of course; that one was Chiang's or the KMT's to win or lose...

Sort of like the current kibitzing about ISIS/ISIL/Daesh ... amazing how the memes are repeated, and yet when the critics are actually in a position of responsibility, their best idea is to invade somewhere else - because one can never have enough lands wars in Asia, apparently.

Fortunate Son remains appropos.

Considering the examples of Lincoln, TRoosevelt, and Eisenhower, it is rather amazing, actually.

Best,
 
Commies in the state department-sure, why not? What's special about Americans in government? Very likely the state department was penetrated, possibly even presidential advisers. The British gov was penetrated at all levels why not the American? The same type of elite, naïve people, from university to government. Perfect recruit material.

McCarthy and the John Birch Society truly were the only things standing between democracy and chaos
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
Can I just say, the movie mentioned in the OP, Gabriel Over the White House...what the hell?

The context and analysis section of the Wikipedia article, even allowing for the assumption that it was written with a political axe to grind, is good for a few head-scratches. I guess people were desperately blurting out a lot of stupid shit during the Depression, sometimes in motion picture form.
 
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