Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Wallace

Wallace’s line is a grenade disguised as a definition. He doesn’t argue that the United States is marching in lockstep beneath banners; he rewrites the category so it can’t be safely outsourced to foreign caricature. “American fascist” becomes less a uniformed zealot than a familiar type: the person who, when forced to choose, treats human beings as overhead and power as principle. That’s the trapdoor. If fascism is framed as an ethical reflex under pressure, plenty of respectable suits fall through.

The conditional “If we define...” is a sly rhetorical move: it invites the reader to nod along with what sounds like a reasonable premise, then drops the moral indictment. Wallace also refuses to name names. “Several million” is both an accusation and a sociological claim, implying the problem is structural, not a few bad actors. He’s talking about incentives that reward cruelty when it’s profitable, and about institutions that launder that cruelty as “business.”

Context matters: Wallace was a New Deal vice president turned thorn in the side of the emerging Cold War consensus. In the 1940s, he warned about homegrown authoritarianism fueled by concentrated wealth, anti-labor politics, and corporate influence - anxieties sharpened by the era’s actual fascist movements abroad. The subtext is a defense of the New Deal’s moral logic: democracy can’t survive as mere procedure if economic power can veto human welfare. By pinning fascism to money-first decision-making, Wallace makes the charge unnervingly domestic, and therefore harder to dismiss.