AHC: United States politics dominated by class, not identity politics.

It's often said that Great Britain's obsession is with class, and America's is with race. How might we create a scenario in which the people in America believe that class divides people more than race, where identity politics?
 

Alan Clark

Banned
It's often said that Great Britain's obsession is with class, and America's is with race. How might we create a scenario in which the people in America believe that class divides people more than race, where identity politics?

Democrats win every election ever.
 
Avoid the crackdown on the Socialists during WWI, allowing them to remain as a significant force. When the Great Depression or an equivalent rolls around, they could take the place of one of the major parties. This should inject some kind of class-based element into US politics.

If you wanted to go earlier, you could mess around with the Populists in the late 1800s, make them more successful and less racist.
 
1945 Stalin wakes up on the left side of the bed instead of the right. Greece, France and Italy are given "go" signals.
1945 US Government slows mobilisations for political effect and policing assistance with civil disorder and communist non-compliance in France and Italy.
1946 Rail & Coal strikes synchronise with sporadic European Mutinies. These are seen as "triumphal" and "democratic" amongst the majority of European servicemen.
1946 Sporadic PTO mutinies occur after ETO mutinies are tied to a rapid repatriation policy. These are comparatively successful.
1947 Further repatriation related strikes drive up wages, the Union movement resists decommunisation on a principled basis, and with greater support from leftwards moving post-mutiny veterans.

From there you can have your pick of "More like the UK" or "More like the Antipodes," but with a strengthening union movement willing to protect its left, and viewed as legitimate by ex-soldiers as associated with getting them repatriation, you've got a recipe for the Democrats realigning as the Party of Labor, and the Republicans realigning as the Party of Anti-Labor.

Not that this is going to remove race as an issue, but it will help make race a class issue, like in Ford plants in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

yours,
Sam R.
 

katchen

Banned
Taft-Hartley is successfully filibustered in 1946. Maybe not even allowed to come up for a vote.
1968. Martin Luther King's assassination is prevented.
1968. LBJ goes public with evidence that the Republican National Committee and the "China Lobby" have persuaded the South Vietnamese Government to dig in their heels at the Paris Peace Conference in the hopes of electing Richard Nixon. As a result, senior Republican officials including Nixon are indicted. Humphrey wins the White House.
 
I think the POD would have to be well before the 20th century for that to happen. Racial discord was ingrained in American culture from the star because of the sheer ethnic diversity of the United States, along with the proliferation of slavery and massacre of the Native Americans.
 
No immigration act in the US in 1965. Also, no Roe v. Wade, abortion remains regulated exclusively at the state level. This prevents the religious right from forming as a real political force. Do this and you're likely to see parties breaking mostly on class lines in the US, much like Europe.
 
Perhaps I should have been more clear, since no one else is saying it. One of the hopes of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment bill was to end blacks and whites fighting over the same jobs (which is why Nixon supported Affirmative Action), because there would always be full employment. But OP might want to butterfly away 1960s-style politics entirely.

In that case, it's best to nip Jim Crow in the bud, leaving the biracial Populists to end up competing with the Democrats and Republicans in the South until an ATL Great Depression drives pretty much the whole country to the Populists. But that's more Before 1900.
 
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