WI: FDR was a fascist

A revision to the original question: What if these authoritarian tendencies had not been very apparent until Roosevelt had taken office?
He would probably lose re-election or be impeached. And if he tried to take things too far too quickly there might even be a coup. Look at the backlash he got from court-packing IOTL, and that was small potatoes compared to jailing dissidents.
 
A revision to the original question: What if these authoritarian tendencies had not been very apparent until Roosevelt had taken office?
Then this probably should have been posted in ASB: that FDR might harbor such tendencies but have somehow get elected president without ever having shown any great evidence of them, including in his time as Governor of New York, is exceedingly improbable.

Setting that aside, it depends on how his authoritarian tendencies manifest themselves. If he attempts to simply govern like any other fascist dictator, outlawing rival political parties and having his political opponents jailed, kidnapped, tortured and/or killed, he will be removed from office in short order. If he is less blatant, he may hold out longer until being taken out by impeachment, failure to secure reelection, or death, but this restraint would accordingly make it harder to describe him as really fascist.
 
*looks at the Japanese Internment camps and all his non-existent changes to race laws in the US*..hmm....

Not to mention the anti-Japanese propaganda, which was pretty much indistinguishable from the Nazis anti-Jewish stuff.

BUT...

Moscow-allied and sympathetic leftists also endorsed the internments and that propaganda, so we kinda have to be careful about who we're calling "fascist" here.
 
I find it implausible for a few reasons.

Fascism requires either a economic corporatist state (as in, a restructuring of representation from having Senators from Pennsylvania and New York to having Senators from the coal miner union and the small shop keepers guild, etc.), or some form of revanchism to drive home a message of renewal and mobilization.

The US has a form of government that has proved remarkably durable and revanchism has never really been a large factor of its politics since perhaps the Civil War.

In addition, FDR would find it hard to hide his Polio if he was to build a cult of personality, which is integral to fascism.
 

Deleted member 94680

What if FDR, in addition to his economic policies, was an extreme nationalist and had his OTL authoritarian tendencies turned up to eleven?

Well there were some criticisms of him at the the time..

You just need to figure out a way to expand on the dictatorial aspects without having him running foul of the American political system (until it’s too late for them to stop him)
 
Not to mention the anti-Japanese propaganda, which was pretty much indistinguishable from the Nazis anti-Jewish stuff.

BUT...

Moscow-allied and sympathetic leftists also endorsed the internments and that propaganda, so we kinda have to be careful about who we're calling "fascist" here.


Ironically (if people want to conflate fascist with conservative) "Mr. Conservative" himself, Robert Taft, opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans.

So did General George Marshall.

And, most surprising to me, J. Edgar Hoover did not favor it.

But some people we think of as liberal today DID favor it (FDR, Earl Warren).

So the military itself, and the head of the FBI, and "Mr. Conservative" were all level headed and sensible.

One article about the internments:

http://blogs.britannica.com/2009/01...he-japanese-top-10-mistakes-by-us-presidents/
 
From the above article:

Not until 1976 did a U.S. President—Gerald Ford—rescind Executive Order 9066 and issue a formal apology to Japanese Americans. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush sent out checks for $20,000, tax free, to the 60,000 survivors of the internment camps. In a letter that accompanied the check, President Bush wrote, “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories, neither can they fully convey the Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals. We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.”
 
Finally, on this issue ... reading the article I linked to, I realize just how terribly the Japanese-Americans were treated. It was similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews early on (obviously, thank God, it did not reach the level of attempted extermination).
 
Yeah, how could the President who dramatically expanded executive power, was the first President to seek more than two terms, attempted to pack the Supreme Court to circumvent the other two branches of government, and put an entire ethnic group of Americans in concentration camps, and praised tyrants like Mussolini and Stalin and was praised by them in turn ever be looked upon as a fascist.

There is a reason one of the first things that was rushed through after his death was restricting the Presidency to two terms by law.
 
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