In a new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR, author Jonathan Alter reveals that the President and his advisors for a time considered assuming dictatorial powers, including creating a “private army” under the command of FDR himself. I was reminded of an article from Cato, about the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House, which advocated for dictatorship.
Cato commented on the film, in which the president takes on fascist dictatorial powers and suddenly solves all the country’s problems through martial law: “Gabriel was both a commercial and critical hit, but ‘faded into obscurity, in large measure because the idea of a benevolent dictatorship seemed a lot less attractive after the degradation of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.'”
Then as now, Hollywood loved fascism (actually a left-wing movement, btw), as long as it wasn’t called that, and sometimes even when it was.