Fallout Made Me Sad for the End of Liberal Democracy
Image; Kilter Films, Big Indie Pictures, Bethesda Game Studios, Amazon MGM Studios
Fallout (2024) is a series about the end of the world. Most of the action takes place over 200 years after the "Great War of 2077," a nuclear Armageddon that has irradiated the planet, permanently changing the flora and fauna on the surface. Our heroes navigate a wasteland scarred by decisions made hundreds of years ago, the context of which has been warped by time.
If there is one message drilled into the viewer, it's that liberal Democracy does not and cannot stop this fate from coming to pass. Fallout is a show about how Democracy failed to prevent corporate forces from taking over (and ending) the world and how it's utterly incapable of stopping history from repeating itself.
A thought that makes me incredibly sad.
The End of America
The show wastes no time skewering the meritocracy so often associated with American Democracy — i.e., the "American Dream," the idea that if you work hard, you will succeed. There is a scene where protagonist Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller living in a self-proclaimed meritocracy, tells a wastelander (Dale Dickey) that the vaults will save America. Ma June, the woman Lucy is talking to, sardonically quips: "And when exactly were you planning on saving America?"
It's a cutting line meant to highlight the nonsensical nature of this meritocratic sentiment — at this point, America is already gone.
As the scene progresses, we learn that the vaults are where the rich fled when the bombs dropped. Ma June goes on to say that, "The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned." It had nothing to do with helping people. Saving the American Way was simply the propaganda Vault-Tec, the company that made them, used to extract further profits from anxious Americans and make them feel less worried about liberal democracies' race toward collapse. Propaganda that has survived to the present day.
Over and over again, we see Vault-Tec, a stand-in for corporate America, co-opting these emotions for control. It's learned that Lucy's vault, number 33, is not actually a functioning democracy as she believed but a front controlled by the post-apocalyptic successors of Vault-Tec. Cryosuspended employees from before the Great War secretly manage the vaults, ensuring that their people are always elected into positions of power.
Vault 33 provides the illusion of Democracy and nothing more.
Even before the apocalypse in 2077, Vault-Tec had hollowed out American Democracy. The American government exhausted itself with a jingoistic resource war against China, and so the company picked up the pieces, becoming one of the largest employers in the US. Pieces that the company was not interested in putting back together again.
It's initially believed that either America or China launched the first bombs that led to the devasting Great War, and maybe one of them officially did, but Vault-Tec engineered that collapse. We are told this point-blank at a boardroom meeting that the company intended to drop the bomb all because they believed that the ensuing destruction would benefit them.
Part of this logic was short-term thinking. As the character Charles Whiteknife (Dallas Goldtooth) says of capitalism's perverse incentives to maintain bad situations indefinitely for profit:
“The US government has outsourced the survival of the human race to Vault-Tec. Vault-Tec is a private corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to make money for its investors. And how does it make money? By selling vaults….[but] they can’t sell vaults if these peace negotiations go through.”
Vault-Tec sabotaged that peace to maintain its competitive edge. But it also wanted more than profits; it wanted control.
To do that, the company's leadership reasoned that they had to drop the bomb and destroy the remnants of American Democracy so a new society they could mold from scratch would emerge. In the words of Vault-Tec employee Bud Askins (Michael Esper) in a pre-War flashback:
“Time is the Apex predator. And in the event of an incident, time is the enemy with which we will defeat all of our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism. Not by outfighting anyone, but by outliving them.”
As we shall soon notice, this wait-and-see approach is integral to Vault-Tec’s plan to dominate the world after the Great War.
Culling the wasteland
While the wasteland was (and is) a bad place for most former Americans to live, even in the company's early planning stages, they were aware that humanity might survive the fallout of nuclear armageddon.
And indeed, people did survive. Democracy rose from the ashes. The New California Republic (NCR), a liberal polity established in the wake of the games that inspired this series, became one of the dominant forces in the wastelands by 2241. One of our protagonists, Maximus (Aaron Moten), grew up in their capital, Shady Sands, only for it to be blasted into oblivion by Vault-Tec so that they could have their sought-after "fresh slate."
We only see the destruction the company left behind: a giant crater where the NCR capital used to be. "That's how Vault-Tec deals with competition," one character monologues. "Just like they did 200 years ago."
There is a cycle here where Vault-Tec destabilizes the wasteland to maintain control, waging a shadow war against the surface, so its vaults are the only places of comfort and safety. They may be running vicious experiments on most of their occupants to see which idea will create the "perfect" society, but at least you can get good food, hot water, and shelter.
In the meantime, as the company slowly whittles away at its competitors so it can control the future, the only forces that can survive in the wasteland up above are grifters exploiting you for resources and fascists that shoot first and ask questions later.
The most prominent example of the latter is the Brotherhood of Steel, a militaristic theocracy that hoards weapons built before the Great War and uses them to maintain control. In the closing moments of the season one finale, it's this organization that crushes a nascent revival movement for the New California Republic.
The NCR Revival movement was headquartered in an egalitarian commune in an old observatory up in the hills. Their goal was a noble one: to make nuclear fusion — a technology Vault-Tec had hoarded since before the war because it would have crushed their business model — and give it to the wasteland so that society could restart. The Brotherhood of Steel, envious of what that technology could do for military expansion, destroyed that NCR compound and took cold fusion for themselves, once again killing any hope for Democracy in the wasteland.
When the NCR was destroyed (again), it felt like learning a dream you thought had died was killed again. Democracy tried to thrive, and instead, it was destroyed by the world corporate America created: a war of all-against-all, curated by unseen, trigger-happy managers.
A downer of a conclusion
It's hard to walk away with a positive message from this show. Fallout is deeply cynical about capitalism's anti-democratic nature, which is a strange message for Amazon to perpetuate. Vault-Tec, an Amazon-like company that can arguably be seen as a stand-in for capitalism more broadly, repeatedly throughout the series destroys liberal Democracy (the ones it can't control anyway), and it always succeeds.
There is a touching last line in which the dying NCR revolutionary Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) preaches to lead Maximus to keep fighting his fascist organization, saying, "Maybe you can stop them. Maybe you can't. Maybe all you can do is try." It's a love letter to liberal Democracy—one in which we are meant to believe that if we keep up the fight, eventually, the dream of the NCR will manifest somewhere out there.
And yet, this optimism feels naive. Moldaver fails, and her life's work is crushed by an authoritarian regime that will co-opt her most significant scientific discovery to oppress the wastelands.
The only positive society in season one is Vault Four, a former science-led technocracy violently overthrown by its test subjects. They kill their oppressors and establish a pluralistic, arguably communist society where all resources are shared. Yet even this society is one bad day from collapse, as seen when Maximus steals their primary power source.
Taken altogether, Fallout seems to suggest that liberal society is utterly incapable of fighting the forces of fascism and corporatocracy that seek to undermine it. It's a depressing thought to consider. As we potentially hurdle toward that outcome ourselves, hopefully, we will move past the failures of liberal Democracy and find a middle ground between being overtaken by corporations and letting them annihilate us for profit.
If time is the apex predator, we'll find out eventually.