Franklin Delano Roosevelt has entered the chat…
Look up the New Deal. Pretty good blueprint for a place to start.
Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:
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The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I’m replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren’t included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.
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The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.
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The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.
The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure.
Nice revisionism.
There wasn’t any chance of a massive class struggle like the USSR happening. There was more of a chance that the richest would have kicked FDR out and put in their own junta. That attempt only failed because Smedley Butler wasn’t having any.
I was lucky enough to meet some old school Communists who’d been in the Spanish Civil War. They would have laughed at the idea that the US was on the verge of a Socialist takeover in the 1930s.
It certainly wasn’t as extreme or successful as the soviet union, but there was a lot of unionization going on during the industrial revolution that was more radical than the tamer bargaining unions we see in the post-war era. And then the depression happened and things got really bad. It’s not hard to see how elites would have looked out at what was happening in the world, looked at the bad economic situation at home, and concluded that something had to be done.
FDR even said that they were trying to reform capitalism to save it.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Transwiki/American_history_quotes_New_Deal
1933 “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.” President Roosevelt, on how his emergency actions in 1933 prevented a revolution and saved capitalism.