Socialism is kind of like, if it existed there’d be no plot in Fallout. That’s almost textual in New Vegas and kind of implied in 1?

We’ll ignore 3 and 4 cause they’re dead above the brainstem, just nostalgiajerking, but the Fallout games are essentially about the folly of the current western world. We never get to see Fallout’s Russia or China, so it’s possible they built cool socialist societies and got owned anyway. Very plausible even, hell perhaps getting rekt by the People’s Republic of China in the Alaskan oil war is what caused the US to throw a nuke tantrum in the first place! With how much red-scare propaganda you see, perhaps the subtext is “the US rejected socialism wholesale as in our timeline and it went BAD”? Fallout 1 is primarily a critique of particularly midcentury America and its warlike habits, which are unending. It has some affection for the consumerism inherent, but mostly as kitsch, the game is pitch black in tone. The games have pretty much always treated anyone looking to return to the old ways with scorn.

The new societies in the Fallout games I basically take to be westoid mindsets repeating their stupid mistakes cause they never read theory. Fallout 2 has an exclusive walled-garden society with slave labour again, and of course in New Vegas you get to explore liberal democracy, (cringe) nascent fascism, (cringe) techbro libertarianism (cringe) or no central gubmint at all. Conspicuously missing are any sort of anarchism or socialism (though the Followers of the Apocalypse were once planned as anarchists) because then the plot would not happen, you can’t really effectively explore all this stuff if based commies just roll over everything. There’s no socialism cause it would effectively fix postnuclear society, and Fallout is about exploring the failings of current western ones, I think.