Do anyone else get the sense that MACUSA would have handled Voldemort better than the Ministry of Magic? If yes, why do you think that?

 

Maybe. The Ministy always came off as corrupt and incompetent. But I imagine Voldemort could have infiltrated the MACUSA just as well, with the Imperius curse and the like. I doubt any Ministy in the world could completely resist a determined and ruthless wizard of Voldemort's capacity.

Well, you have to remember that Voldemort almost won the first war he started. The Ministry was weakened, he had agents already in place, and so on. We know too little of that first conflict. The Ministry shown in the books certainly wasn't at its best.

Are you talking about Voldemort's first or second rise to power? Or if he was born an American?

 

Yeah, it seems like the only real advantage MACUSA would have when it comes to resisting Voldemort is that he'd need to modify his ideology to appeal to a different society with different prejudices. His canon line of "Our refined Pureblood breeding makes us superior to the Mudbloods" might not gain as much purchase, but he could tweak it to something like "No-Majborns are a security risk that could expose our world."

And really, most competent evil overlords should be doing that kind of thing anyway.

 

No.

In the Harry Potter verse there is no reason whatsoever to encourage the idea that magical Britain is particularly fucked up or backward or ineffectual. Nothing in canon supports that and it just results in a pile of shitty fanfiction.

In fact, given that Dumbledore was knocked off the ICW, and the fact that both the Order and the Death Eaters treated continental Europe as more or less a backwater with occasional interesting recruitment opportunities, and said opportunities were never resisted by national governments... I'd say the evidence is everyone else is in the same boat, at best, and possibly quite a bit behind.

On a meta level, magical governments are hobbled because they can't even BEGIN to monopolize the use of force - extrajudicial or otherwise. They simply cannot act or respond to powerful dark wizards in a way muggles would expect or demand. Fudge was an idiot... but an idiot who had very limited options. A smarter Fudge wouldn't have been able to do much beyond not actively sabatoging the resistance. And even there, Fudge was ineffectual.

 

Absolutely not. There's really no concrete evidence to suggest anything of the sort.

People tend to overstate the incompetence of the British Ministry of Magic. MACUSA doesn't seem to have better Aurors. MACUSA doesn't seem to be better equipped to handle a wizard of Voldemort's calibre. There is literally nothing at all to suggest that MACUSA could have handled Voldemort better than the British Ministry of Magic.

Only fanfiction (very idiotic fanfiction at that) would suggest that MACUSA is any better than the British Ministry of Magic, or that the British Ministry of Magic is eons behind the other Ministries of Magic.

And one other thing. It's fucking Voldemort. You know, the guy whose name the masses feared to say? MACUSA would've needed to have several wizards of Voldemort's calibre to take him out quickly and quietly before he could do too much damage. And they definitely didn't.

 

To be entirely honest, MACUSA seems actually worse than the British Ministry, if you take Fantastic Beasts movie as canon.

Voldemort infiltrated the Ministry almost completely before staging his coup- sure. But Grindelwald did a pretty similar thing, did he not? He pretty much controlled MACUSA's Aurors by himself, and presumably had more agents spread throughout.

Voldemort fled when the British Aurors arrived on scene in OOTP. Grindelwald was about to (and seemed completely capable of) dismantling MACUSA's entire Auror force in a direct confrontation single-handedly.

Granted, Dumbledore was there to fight Voldemort so you could argue that the Aurors would merely tip the scales, but I still count that as a point towards Britain; its Aurors are actually not fucking terrible.

 

Grindlewald infiltrated the MACUSA all by himself, as far as we see, managing to subvert it for his own ends without anyone suspecting a thing, and all he needed was something to change his appearance.

Voldemort's coup took two years to pull off, requiring several people on the inside and some carefully applied mind-control, and he still had a resistance fighting back against him.

Given that Voldemort was canonically worse than Grindlewald, that would seem to suggest that the MACUSA wouldn't have been able to touch him.

Edit: ninja'd!

 

I'm gonna buck the trend here a bit. There is little to say they would be better, but neither is there much to say they would be worse.

The biggest issue we see in the British ministry is the desire to ignore Voldemort is back.

I just don't see the same attitude coming from Americans.

A lot of it depends on how the MACUSA is structured. Are they more similar to the British structure or do you have a similar style of government to the NOmaj USA?

America is a land of immigrants so I don't really see there being old, pureblood families holding positions just because of heritage.

Honestly it ticked me off that they tried to portray the MACUSA as less progressive than Britain. By very nature of being an immigrant country the USA should be more progressive in that sense.

 

Ah yes, because the US is so much more progressive than Britain.

Anyway. MACUSA got pwnd by the European Grindelwald. The only ones who beat Grindelwald were two British wizards - even though he didn't threaten their own country. Power in HP is nonlinear, but this does tell you something about the international magic hierarchy.

 

First off, "canonically worse" depends on what that choice of words means. Voldemort is more ruthless, but Grindelwald would be by far the greater threat, being both a schemer and political astute enough to do some large-scale planning as opposed to Voldemort's narrow-minded fixation on whatever seems immediately valuable in the sense that it gives him "power", magical or otherwise. That being said....

You know, I am reminded of Fantastic Beasts script...

Gnarlak has emerged from the depths of the speakeasy. Smoking a cigar and smartly dressed for a goblin, he has a sly, smooth demeanor like a Mafia boss. He eyes the newcomers as he walks. [He] sits himself at the end of their table, an air of confidence and dangerous control. A house-elf hastily brings him a drink.

He runs a speakeasy frequented by all manners of wizarding criminals in New York City, murderers, human traffickers, con-artists, you name it, and surrounded by these people, some of the most dangerous and murderous individuals, he carries himself with "a sly, smooth demeanor like a Mafia boss" and exudes an air of "of confidence and dangerous control". I think this says quite a bit about him and what position he has/respect he commands in the figurative underworld of the wizarding community of America. And yet, what happens at the mere mention of Percival Graves' name?

Gnarlak stares. A sense that there is much that he could say—and that he’d rather die than say it.

GNARLAK
You ask too many questions, Mr. Scamander. That can get you killed.

Okay, there is NO indication that Gnarlak is in any way in league with or aware of Grindelwald's presence in the USA, meaning that until Rowling says otherwise, we cannot realistically just assume that he does. So if the name of an AUROR of MACUSA, a sworn protector of wizarding America, can inspire such fear in a individual so prominently positioned in the criminal underworld, I mean, that's how most people would've reacted in Britain if asked about Death Eaters in the UK. And yes, I know he's more than an Auror, being Head of Magical Law Enforcement and Magical Security as well, but when it comes down to it, he's still an Auror. Meaning that if the rest of the Aurors at MACUSA displayed only half of the ruthless efficiency Graves must have done to be so feared, the Death Eaters at the very least would've be screwed. Remember how in the 2017 edition of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them book? Newt said he in retrospect thought it foolish of entering USA with that case due to MACUSA's "curse-to-kill" policy on magical creatures perceived to be a threat to secrecy. If killing Newt for allegedly letting fantastic beasts loose to expose wizardkind would get him executed without due process, imagine how swiftly MACUSA Aurors would be licenced to "contain" the Voldemort-situation by any means possible? Wouldn't they be authorized to "curse to kill" Death Eaters as well?

The way I see it, if we replace Rufus Scrimgeour and his Aurors and replace them with the real Percival Graves and the MACUSA Aurors, Barty Crouch Sr. would've seemed gentle. If posing a sufficient to secrecy, the Aurors wouldn't just be granted the power to use the Unforgivable Curses against their enemies, they would be ordered to kill on sight and only live one DE alive to provide more information, by torture if necessary.

 

It's not, but one of the things Voldemort preyed heavily upon was the racism towards muggleborns and how that effected the pureblood way of life.

Without centuries of established traditions and being an immigrant nation, it is unlikely the MACUSA would possess this same weakness.

Wizards live for nearly one hundred years or longer. The USA is only 140ish years old at this time. You don't have generations that have passed. You have people who have lived through the civil war..you have immigrants from magical britain, germany, france etc. all coming together. Unlike muggle USA, they haven't really had generations to consolidate and develope a culture. You have one or two generations at best of disparate groups coming together.

Don't get me wrong. I think the MACUSA would lose to Voldemort, but not for the same reasons the British ministry fell. It wouldn't be as subterfuge but would just be Voldemort and his death eaters conquering the MACUSA...

Of course where he would get his death eathers from would be intersting in this scenario.

EDIT: This is all assuming the MACUSA isn't just a shoot off of the British ministry that was "let go" after the american Revolution.

UGH...I want an american magical history dagflabbit!

 

ALL magic Grindelwald did up until he took on about twenty Aurors at once was while suppressing his abilities and ensuring that he did not use magic beyond the capabilities of the real Percival Graves, and the need not to exercise all his power would've constantly been in the back of his head since using magic too advanced or too powerful for an above-average Auror would've been a dead giveaway, considering who he was impersonating. In other words, he was toying with Newt when he defeated him. If he can take on and get the upper hand on twenty MACUSA Aurors, each of which would've logically be a more proficient duelist than Newt himself, Grindelwald would've defeated Newt as effortlessly as he dispatched/killed those five Aurors at the beginning of the movie if he chose to, the fact that the same curse would've probably had the subway roof come down and kill them all notwithstanding. Newt attacked him from behind when he was preoccupied showing off, that's how Newt "beat" Grindelwald, not by fighting him and winning, but attack him from behind with his back turned preoccupied with twenty highly trained Aurors. Newt's capture of Grindelwald doesn't even come close to coming close to Dumbledore doing the same thing.

 

British magical goverment survive that long because dumbledore live in there. That said if us macusa want to survive voldemort they need a wizard or witch of that caliber.

 

Except this is only true if the immigrating cultures aren't bringing this exact issue or similar ones. I can certainly see the poorer purebloods of Europe immigrating to America for financial gain and trying to imitate the class system they came from. Only this time they'd be on top, and that's reason enough for them to try.

As you said there hasn't been time for "coming together." There's no unifying culture or traditions. Even without a pureblood upper-class fueling discrimination towards muggleborns, you'd have wizards from one country looking down on wizards from other countries. You'd have native american wizards (who presumably didn't die from muggle diseases in catastrophic numbers) feuding with the immigrating wizards.

There's nothing to suggest MACUSA is in any way more egalitarian or tolerant than Britain. If anything, America should be much weaker in this regard. MACUSA should be a balancing act between the different groups that make up the new country.

 

One thing that hasn't mentioned so far is our point of reference to the MoM and MACUSA.

We see MACUSA during the 1920s while MoM is 1990s so a 70 year difference in time would also make a difference in how the governments would operate. Personally I think MACUSA might have an edge over Britain simply because Voldemort's dogma probably wouldn't have as stronga hold on the American people.

 

If he would lay off the Pureblood supremacy talk, I think he could be as successful with American wizards as he was with the British. Tom Riddle was very persuasive, after all. There had to be a few wizards who hated Scourers and making something out of that couldn't be too difficult.

 

I'll agree with that. After all the one consistent thing about magical prejudice is that Muggles seem to be looked down upon.

 

Like I said upthread, I think Voldemort could find a way to modify his pitch to appeal to the inhabitants of the magical US. While the magical US probably wouldn't have old long-established Pureblood families like Britain's, I expect he could still find some sort of powerbase to build off of and existing prejudices to work with.

 

I rather suspect that things would have gone much like they would have in magical Britain. Success would vary, of course, with the individuals in office when he attempted to do so. Fudge was a particularly weak Minister, so it might have gone better with a stronger leader.

The MACUSA also seems slightly more inclined towards the use of capital punishment than Wizarding Britain, but that would make little difference unless the same scenario occurred as in canon, and all suspected Death Eaters were put on trial. If it did happen, Voldemort would lose a few powerful followers, but nothing irreplaceable.


The inability of humans to set aside differences shall ever be the lever by which they shall be moved to ruination, and Voldemort would have preyed on that weakness. Purebloods vs. Muggleborns/Subhumans in Britain, Wizards vs. No-Majs in MACUSA.

Perhaps he would have offered to build a wall and make the No-Majs pay for it.