There’s also an extremely straightforward argument that if the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial players in power now had been then that the outcome of the latter 20th would have been much different.
- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment
- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda
- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini
- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity
- turned a national party into a personal patronage system
- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked
Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.
