WI: New Deal Dystopia

This is a scenario I have been interested in. Imagine a world where the New Deal continued and expanded, and ran amok in the wildest fever dreams of a Conservative. Wartime and Depression era powers and economic controls remain intact. There is a massive, pervasive government with a bloated, labyrinthian bureaucracy. Labor unions are massive, growing out of control, and can strangle the economy. Regulation is overly done. And it is getting bigger, more controlling, and worse as time goes on. What if this had happened? What would this United States and the wider world beyond this United States look like?

And as an additional scenario, imagine Objectivism then having success in that world at some point in its existence. Essentially, it is Atlas Shrugged from the perspective of how such a thing would look in a real world rather than purely fantasy with strawmen and personal gratification of one's ideology. That is where this comes from. The government was not like it was portrayed in that book. So from there comes the whole idea of what would that type of thing look like if it were done in the real world.

And for the love of God, please do not do the recent trend of talking about the lead up to the scenario with no focus on the aftermath of the scenario. An AHC is for the lead up. A WI is for the aftermath. In normal terms, I would come down more on total fixation on the lead up rather than the aftermath, but this topic is certainly something of an AHC as well. Just please do not totally ignore the aftermath, as that is the entire point of a WI. This is bad form. It drives me mad. I will be displeased.
 
You don't need a conservative perspective for this - the New Deal had glaring problems easy for anybody to exaggerate into dystopia. Two that come to mind immediately:

- A lot of New Deal social programs baked in elements of white supremacy and patriarchy - partially due to attitudes at the time, and partially due to compromise with Dixiecrats in Congress. The most famous example is the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, many of whom were women or African-American, from the Wagner Act. Keeping the Dixiecrats within the fold of the governing coalition could bake these elements in even further, limiting how the benefits of this world's welfare state are meted out and making it difficult for civil rights movements to achieve any more than formal legal equality. Elements of structural racism and sexism could be buried even more deeply into the legal architecture than they are IOTL.

- Many of the New Deal's agricultural and public works bureaucracies became extremely environmentally destructive over time. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner describes in detail the sad and wasteful excesses of the dam construction rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. Their campaigns ultimately led to the damming of nearly every wild river in the West including those unnecessary for irrigation and barely sufficient to generate power, the destruction of vast swaths of wetlands, the die-off of millions of migratory birds, the intentional displacement and destruction of many valley communities, and the waste of billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars. Exaggerate the New Deal and you could end up with staggering expenditures on projects like the NAWPA, a trillion-dollar project to shunt water across the entire continent, or the Rampart Dam, which would have created a lake the size of Lake Erie in Alaska. You could end up with Yosemite Valley dammed for hydroelectric power, or mass deaths from reckless dam construction in totally unsuitable areas, as happened in Idaho in the 70s.

If the state is inextricably identified with race and gender oppression and environmental destruction by the time of your story, it's possible that alternate civil rights and environmental movements will adopt an anti-statist attitude that could find common ground with Objectivism and broaden its constituency. The environmental movement might resemble Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang, who primarily take on land management agencies rather than private corporations as the pillagers of the wilderness.

One last thing to note is that in real life, a lot of large corporations, especially those with primarily white-collar non-union workforces, were fairly comfortable in the New Deal consensus - in part because they didn't mind the labor laws and in part because they had the economies of scale necessary to deal with bureaucracy. The heroes of your "realistic Ayn Rand story" probably wouldn't be Dagny Taggartesque captains of industry but rather small business owners and professionals - the same folks who IOTL were the footsoldiers of the Goldwater campaign and the early conservative movement.
 
Last edited:
I think a decent nation to look at is Britain after the War and the policies of the Labour Party, in some respects. I'm looking with emphasis on nationalization of industries and austerity measures.
 
Well, one dystopic element could be rampant corruption combined with regulators becoming captive to the industries they oversee. An example would be airlines, with carriers bribing the Civil Aeronautics Board members for new routes and fare increases. You could see similar corruption with such bodies as the Interstate Commerce Commission (buses, rail and trucking), the Federal Communications Commission (radio and TV), the Securites and Exchange Commission, and so forth. N ow toss in something like the NRA that effectively sets prices in other industries and the ingredients are there for a full-blown kleptocracy within a heavily regulated economy.
 
You might want to read the book The Other Path by Hernando de Soto, if you haven't already - Peru at the time had the kind of over-regulation that you described.
 
This topic always reminds me of an amusing passage from Christopher Hitchens:

"In 1950, Henry Luce's Life magazine had hailed it [Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four*] for exposing the essential totalitarianism of FDR's National Recovery Act and Tennessee Valley Authority, and used it to excoriate 'those fervent New Dealers in the United States [who] often seemed to have the secret hope that the depression mentality of the 1930s, source of their power and excuse for their experiments, would never end'. This image - of Eleanor Roosevelt's sensible shoes crashing down on a human face.--was hardly more absurd than Mr. Podhoretz's view [that Orwell if alive in the 1980's would be a neoconservative]..." https://books.google.com/books?id=viPLBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT41
 
The socialist Norman Thomas said:

The similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini's corporative state or Hitler's totalitarian state are both close and obvious.

Context is obviously lacking, but I've seen similar quotes from Thomas elsewhere.

That said, he might have gone a bit easier on the Hitler comparison specifically if he had been making the statement after Nazi genocide had been entered into the hstorical record. Even if it's true about the economics, comparing anyone to Hitler for any reason is usually seen as highly inflammatory rhetoric.

Apart from all that, I'll just observe that if we look at FDR's administration overall, and include World War II in that, the anti-Japanese propaganda was about par in terms of racist de-humanization with anything put out by the Axis. Probably a bit of a stretch to consider that part of the New Deal, though, and it likely would have been at least as vicious under a Republican president.

link
 
Norman Thomas on the New Deal:

"What Roosevelt has given us, and what Republicans cannot and will not substantially change, is not the socialism of the cooperative commonwealth. It is a State capitalism which the Fascist demagogues of Europe have used when they came to power. The thing, Mr. Smith, that you ought to fear is not that the party of Jefferson and Jackson is marching in step with Socialists toward a Socialist goal; it is that, unwittingly, it may be marching in step with Fascists toward a Fascist goal.

"I do not mean that Mr. Roosevelt himself is a Fascist or likely to become a Fascist. I credit him with as liberal intentions as capitalism and his Democratic colleagues of the South permit. I call attention to the solemn fact that in spite of his circumspect liberalism, repression, the denial of civil liberty, a Fascist kind of military law, stark terrorism have been increasing under Democratic Governors for the most part -- in Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and, of course, in California, where Mr. Roosevelt did not even come to the aid of an ex-Socialists, Upton Sinclair, against the candidate of the reactionaries.

"I repeat that what Mr. Roosevelt has given us is State capitalism: that is to say, a system under which the State steps in to regulate and in many cases to own, not for the purpose of establishing production for use but rather for the purpose of maintaining in so far as may be possible the profit system with its immense rewards of private ownership and its grossly unfair division of the national income.

"Today Mr. Roosevelt does not want fascism; Mr. Hoover does not want fascism; not even Mr. Smith and his friends of the Liberty League want fascism. The last-named gentlemen want an impossible thing: the return to the unchecked private monopoly power of the Coolidge epoch..." https://www.chicagodsa.org/thomasnewdeal.html
 
To certain among the Socialists, I would say Fascism is perceived as ultimately Capitalism, and active defense of Capitalism is a march toward Fascism. As in most regards, I differ with the outlook of the Socialists.
 
Last edited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_(Anthony_Burgess_novel)

Rather than a sequel to Orwell's novel, Burgess uses the same concept. Based on his observation of British society and the world around him in 1978, he suggests how a possible 1985 might be if certain trends continue.

The main trend to which he is referring is the expanding power of trade unions. In the hypothetical 1985 envisioned in the book, the trade unions have become so powerful that they exert full control over society; unions exist for every imaginable occupation. Unions start strikes with little reason and a strike by one union usually turns into a general strike.
 
Alright, I need to bump properly, so here is a proper post. The curbing, or lack of expansion of the New Deal...however you want to spin it...started about 1937. FDR tried to balance the budget and cut back spending, and it pushed the recovering economy into a recession within the Depression, until they went back to the fat and happy Liberal spending and New Dealism. 1937 also had the "Court Packing" thing, which alienated even Roosevelt supporters. And in came a Conservative resurgence, and therein lies the Conservative Coalition of Republicans and Conservative Democrats who basically ran the government for the next thirty years, and ensured no more major government liberal legislation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Great Society. And that Conservative Coalition was the saltpeter on New Deal Liberalism, and you had such things as the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which curbed the power of the Unions. This is all rather odd for a nation where in 1932, the New York Herald-Tribune declared "For Dictatorship. if Necessary." and millions of Americans agreed with the sentiment of a dictator to address the Depression. And Roosevelt did not even become a dictator, but he caught flack for lesser transgressions. Politics are fickle. Anyway, imagine a world without the upsets of 1937.
 
My mind's eye image of this is industrial, art deco landscapes overrunning everything, impeding on nature. Unnecessary trains and rail lines, dams where there don't need to be dams, and deco building competitions overtaking the cities and something beautiful but bad in the subtext. And unions running everything, with strikes that can grind the country to a halt, in conjunction with a military industrial complex where big government gets in bed with big business in the ways that tried to bring down Howard Hughes and killed the Tucker. No independent work: join the union. If you're kicked out of the union, you cannot get work as everything is a closed shop. No independent or small business, no upstarts: the giants who are running it now get to run it, and there will be no new competition or the Justice Department will claim it was really fraud and launch an investigation, and HUAC will target you for secretly being a Communist. No real freedom except freedom from Communism.
 
On the Randian level of things, it is amazing how many people you would not expect having flirted or held some high esteem for Ayn Rand. Walt Disney among them. And a letter from Ayn Rand to Disney is here. Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen were inspired by "The Fountainhead", among other sources, to follow their dreams and believe in themselves. It's like finding out Elvis had Scientology literature (which he did). It's surprising.
 
I need to get around to reading Atlas. It seems like interesting alternate history, honestly. Perhaps you'd need Truman to do better and get his Fair Deal through?
 
I need to get around to reading Atlas. It seems like interesting alternate history, honestly. Perhaps you'd need Truman to do better and get his Fair Deal through?

Atlas Shrugged has the danger of bad information being worse than no information. Rand is alluring but...improperly minded.
 
Top