Business opponents rhetorically equated the New Deal with totalitarianism

Evidence

In 1934, the du Ponts founded the American Liberty League, an organization that claimed to be devoted to teaching the American people about “the right to work, earn, save, and acquire property and to preserve the ownership and lawful use of property when acquired,” and in the process, mobilizing a vast popular movement against the initiatives Roosevelt was undertaking. In reality, the group mostly issued shrill broadsides against the New Deal, warning of the new era of class conflict and government tyranny that was arising in the United States. As one pamphlet put it, the New Deal represented “the attempt in America to set up a totalitarian government, one which recognizes no sphere of individual or business life as immune from governmental authority and which submerges the welfare of the individual to that of the government.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1444

Categorization

• CANDY: The du Ponts’ Liberty League likening the New Deal to a ‘totalitarian government’ is a fun, tweetable nugget about the durability of anti-state rhetoric.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-New Deal business propaganda and Cold War totalitarianism fears jointly reshaped US regulatory policy — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 346; Neoliberals coined ‘totalitarianism’ to denounce any collectivist market intervention, not just terror states — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 153; Calling opponents racist equated them with Nazis in Soviet rhetoric (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals coined ‘totalitarianism’ to denounce any collectivist market intervention, not just terror states #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 153
• Calling opponents racist equated them with Nazis in Soviet rhetoric #exemplifies (0.75)