Politics & Power Quote by H.G. Wells

Wells comes in with the tone of a man who’s watched empires wobble and decided the polite fictions are the real danger. Calling the New Deal “working socialism” isn’t just a provocation; it’s an attempt to strip American politics of its comforting euphemisms. The key verb is “avert.” He frames Roosevelt’s program less as ideological conversion than as emergency engineering: a society patching its own pipes before the whole house floods. In Wells’s hands, “socialism” stops being a scare word and becomes a functional description of state power mobilized to keep capitalism from eating itself alive.

The barb is aimed at American self-image. “Americans shirk the word” suggests a culture that can tolerate the machinery of collectivism so long as it’s disguised as pragmatism, relief, or recovery. Wells is poking at that rhetorical allergy: the nation will accept sweeping federal intervention, but insists on narrating it as anything other than a systemic shift. His question, “what else can one call it?” is less inquiry than indictment - a demand for terminological honesty.

Context matters: Wells had flirted with utopian planning and watched the “Russian experiment” harden into something more coercive and grim. By invoking Soviet “Plans,” he’s not praising Stalinist methods; he’s warning that crises push modern states toward centralized coordination, whether they admit it or not. The wit lands because it exposes the New Deal’s double life: sold as rescue, functioning as redesign, haunted by the era’s fear that collapse and revolution were only a few breadlines away.