WI: The US became a one party state after the 1936 election

Would FDR get away with making the Democrat party the only legal party to vote for?

  • Highly unlikely

    Votes: 61 88.4%
  • Unlikely but it would depend on the courts feelings on the issue.

    Votes: 6 8.7%
  • Maybe but there would be people voting on right leaning Democrats.

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Sure it's likely as the GOP screwed it all up so people should be up for getting rid of them.

    Votes: 1 1.4%

  • Total voters
    69
So because Henry Ford manages to get the Republican Party nomination for president in the 1936 due to a large successful campaign paid %100 out of his own pocket he runs on the issue of Jewish international bankers being the main issue and why the great depression happened. His main platform is ending the fed, arresting bankers and ensuring a living wage. The race was very heated and Ford claimed FDR needs to be impeached for all the unconstitutional things he has done. FDR claimed that Fords views is part of a past that needs to be torn down from the modern age with unrelenting prejudice.

He loses managing to win %46 of the national vote with 12 states carried.

So because FDR believed he must act after the 1936 election he gets congress to draft a bill making the Democratic party the only party allowed on the ballot. With Democrats eager to join FDR to make a better future for the US they get the bill passed and signed into law. So what likely happens in future elections since everyone running has to be a member of the Democratic party?
 
This isn't just highly unlikely, it's outright impossible. What you're describing is someone with dictatorial ambitions. FDR was many things, but not a dictator in making. The Democrats would be handing the Republicans a central rallying theme which they could effectively use to mobilize their supporters (which there were still tens of millions of). Not to mention the image this would give the U.S. Pretty hard to decry the dictatorships popping up in Europe when you're taking a page out of their book.
 
Sorry but this scenario is impossible.

The US already had a well established democratic tradition and more than a century of elections on its belt and with a widening democratic franchise, it is very unlikely for the Republicans to nominate Ford for the Presidency no matter how much money he pours into his campaign, and even if that were to happen, Roosevelt would not ban the entire GOP over one bad candidate, it was not in his nature, not in the nature of his party, and the US public and courts would have not allowed him to do so.

The beauty of democratic systems is that the longer they last the stronger and more stable they become, 1930s USA was not Weimar Germany or Republican Spain.
 
Executive Order 6102 and Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 seem to show FDR is quite willing to give the courts and the people the finger if they get in the way of his vision for the nation. I don't think it's an impossible stretch for a man willing to bend courts and steal peoples gold to get what he wants to do ban the GOP over a really bad nearly Hitler like candidate that threatens the future of the US as he envisions it.

He wasn't a softy and would have went to war with Germany much sooner if he could have gotten the political will around him for it. Democratic systems can weaken and destabilize when the wrong set of events happen, no 1930's USA wasn't Wiemar's Germany but would FDR want to find out later in 1940 that the GOP rallied around someone like Ford but could actually win.
 
Executive Order 6102 and Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 seem to show FDR is quite willing to give the courts and the people the finger if they get in the way of his vision for the nation. I don't think it's an impossible stretch for a man willing to bend courts and steal peoples gold to get what he wants to do ban the GOP over a really bad nearly Hitler like candidate that threatens the future of the US as he envisions it.

And the American people punished FDR, and the Democratic Party, in 1938 by electing 81 Republicans to the House of Representatives and 7 Republicans to the Senate. Granted the Recession of 1937-1938 had a part in that, but the point is that FDR has his limits; the American people would hold him and the party to account. Those election numbers reflect the public's mood when FDR try to tamper with the Supreme Court. Imagine them if FDR tried to ban a major political party that had been in existence for over 80 years, and counted as on of its leaders none other than Abraham Lincoln.
 
And the American people punished FDR, and the Democratic Party, in 1938 by electing 81 Republicans to the House of Representatives and 7 Republicans to the Senate. Granted the Recession of 1937-1938 had a part in that, but the point is that FDR has his limits; the American people would hold him and the party to account. Those election numbers reflect the public's mood when FDR try to tamper with the Supreme Court. Imagine them if FDR tried to ban a major political party that had been in existence for over 80 years, and counted as on of its leaders none other than Abraham Lincoln.

So what would happen if the POD was in 1940 instead with Henry Ford nearly winning due to a worse recession of 1938?
 
FDR would have to amend the Constitution to even try this, and that would never have a prayer of working. He got pushback from his plan to pack the Supreme Court; outlawing the Republican Party would get him run out of the country.

The best he could do is secure enough victories to make the Democrats a permanent majority, and even then, a party fracture would ruin that.
 
If you want an even halfway-plausible Henry Ford for president scenario, 1936 is way too late. Ford by that time was anything but the national hero he had been in the prosperous 1920's.
 

Wallet

Banned
FDR wasn't always so popular. His approval ratings were hurt badly in the 1938 recession and his court packing scheme. Had the international situation not been so bad in 1940, he could have actually lost. If WWII never occurred, he probably would have lost in 1944 if he was crazy enough to run.

Only after death with the memory of him winning WW2 and getting out of the depression was he so revered.
 
Everytime I see one of these threads I start thinking of Lewis 1935 novel 'It Cant Happen Here'. Ought to read it again sometime.

For those who have not read it; a demogogic but administratively incompetent candidate is elected to presidency. He manufactors a war against a foreign state to distract from his failing policies. That makes things worse & a actual revolt threatens. This individual is removed by a group who are unable to resolve the situation economically or politically and manage to make things worse. A actual revolt emerges. The new administration are replaced by a crowd apparently modeled on Ernst Rhoem & the SA, including the homosexual conatations. That lot are in turn replaced by a US Army coup. General Wilkerson 'stabilizes' things, sort of. But, he & the other generals lack the political skills & imagination to figure out how to return the US to democracy or a republic. The novel ends with the US collapsed into a seemingly endless depression, without international friends or allies, & run by a stagnating bueracracy.
 
The beauty of democratic systems is that the longer they last the stronger and more stable they become
False. Democratic systems can and will degrade given the right occasion: in particular, a growth of authoritarian sentiment is the prime threat to democracy, because people will then vote for a dictator and be happy for it. It's not something that happens out of the blue, of course; but worsening life conditions lead to political anger, and from there it's either authoritarian pampering by democratic parties, or the actual rise of authoritarian powers, unless the situation improves.
 
False. Democratic systems can and will degrade given the right occasion: in particular, a growth of authoritarian sentiment is the prime threat to democracy, because people will then vote for a dictator and be happy for it. It's not something that happens out of the blue, of course; but worsening life conditions lead to political anger, and from there it's either authoritarian pampering by democratic parties, or the actual rise of authoritarian powers, unless the situation improves.

Sure, but the longer democracy has been ongoing in a country, the more difficult it is to root it out. Any democracy can go totalitarian given the right circumstances, but you would need a longer or stronger period of decline for, say, Switzerland to go totalitarian than for, say, Iraq.

As a general trend I think what I said holds true. If a system of stable institutions and checks and balances becomes entrenched it is harder to root it out.

I think you would need a considerable upheaval for the US to go totalitarian in the 1930s, even bigger than the Great Depression in OTL.

It may not seem that way, but democracy once it has consolidated itself, is the most stable political system of them all.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/govt2000.htm
"Nothing lasts forever, and almost every nation on the planet has seen at least one violent or unconstitutional change in leadership over the past hundred years. In fact, there are only a handful of countries that have had an unbroken chain of legitimacy since 1900 -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, probably Canada -- all democracies. In theory, it doesn't have to be this way. Monarchies, for example, are supposed to pass father to son, but none have survived the past hundred years without surrendering power to liberal parliaments. (The only absolute monarchies still around are younger than the 20th Century. [q.v.]) Single-party states are supposed to have orderly transitions of power, but here too, none have managed to go a full century without collapsing. Compared to all these failures, democracy looks a bit tougher."
 
I think it may be too optimistic to declare the USA immune to dictatorship, but the path to it would look nothing like the quasi-legal route the OP suggests. A law to mandate one party only? That's how it might consolidate itself, but first there would be violence without recourse to law, except insofar as we might say the unilateral claim of some leader to hold emergency governing powers is a "law." So it would be if the dictator stayed in power of course!

I don't think FDR wanted to be a dictator on lines of Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini--this does not mean he would never bend rules to stay in charge. I think there might have been circumstances in which he assumed emergency powers, and would not subject them to Congressional review until after the emergency, and if in his view being held accountable in that forum would undermine a necessary victory, he might suppress it. But only if he felt the alternative was far worse! OTL he governed with the Republicans dominating Congress sometimes, and relied on fair elections to remain in office--note that the court packing scheme was a threat, not a resolved plan he was prevented from carrying out, and the threat had the effect of persuading a swing SCOTUS justice to switch sides and form a new court majority not devoted to checking everything he did.

Dictatorship may have happened at the hands of a reactionary faction panicking at the dangers of the discontented mobs of the Depression years. It may have taken the form instead of such radicals deciding the regular political system was too slow to address their urgent needs, especially if the system didn't throw up someone with the combination of credibility, energy and gravitas FDR offered but put up some nonentity instead. OTL Huey Long of Louisiana wanted to play a long game, trying to throw the '36 Presidential election to some Republican so that the people would be in a mood to back his more radical and sweeping "Share the Wealth" program in 1940, so he isn't a good candidate for a dictator in a hurry. Perhaps if the Democrats had failed miserably to offer a promising candidate in the 1932 election though maybe Long would respond to mass discontent by offering to lead an emergency regime.

The thing is, it would happen by people stepping out of line and breaking the normal rules. My working definition of a revolution is when a decisive majority of the military decides they should be backing some rebellion instead of suppressing it. Modern stereotypes about the mentality of military people, even officers, won't serve us too well here; the officers tended to lean conservative but there are plenty of examples overseas of leftist military coups and some examples of very popular military leaders with populist, if not necessarily, progressive ideas. Dictatorship would happen via civil war, because even if one faction appeals more strongly to the majority of soldiers and sailors, the other side will have its adherents and they would fight each other in the streets, along with militias partisan to both sides.

The civil war might drag on and result in all around ruin, and the nation, exhausted, might submit to some gray nonentity just to have peace. Or one side or the other decisively wins early on and calls the shots thereafter.

After someone has won, they might gut or hamstring democracy to keep in power and maintain stability. More likely they'd pretend to be banning all parties for the sake of unity; the handpicked "unity" leaders would in fact be a new party of course. There's no way that one party, even if it dominates a legislature, can simply vote to perpetuate itself and ban its rivals without the other side calling foul and getting a lot of public sympathy and support. The attempt to do this might cause the civil war that settles matters, but it cannot accomplish its aim just by a few hundred legislators saying "aye" and ignoring the "nays."
 
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