What do you think of the possible dictators of a communist USA?

Gukpard

Gukpard

We got three main names, William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and Norman Thomas. Ofc there are other proeminent american far left politics but openly communist I only remember those of my head. What do you think of them? How would their governments be like if they somehow grabbed power due a civil war?

Edit: Norman Thomas was a socialist, not a communist (by that be marxist Leninst or Stalininst) so he is not a option anymore.
 
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Rath

It'd probably end up being a ruthless bastard who joined the party after the POD, if we're honest.
 
Relekka

Relekka

Honestly speaking, none of them really. The conditions that allow a a 'communist dictator' aren't there considering by writ large American socialism was vastly more libertarian and anti-authoritarian than the Bolsheviks. The preconditions you'd need for a dictatorship simply isn't there, because a civil war by its own right would change how these people think and operate. Under conditions, you're more likely to see a democratic socialist state under someone like Norman Thomas, the IWW, or other organizations. The Soviet Union couldn't prop up an American puppet regime for long, and even pressing its thumb on the scale brings with it major risk; the CPUSA was increasingly dancing to the tune of Stalin, which turned many leftists against it and by the 1950's the CPUSA was nothing more than a scapegoat and a honeypot with the FBI crawling all over it.

At its peak, the CPUSA had around 55,000 members, it'd make them an insignificant player if you put them into a civil war situation.
 

David T

None of them, of course. Browder and Foster were the ideal Communist leaders for a country where the Communists had no chance of coming to power. In general, the weaker a Communist Party, the smaller the chance of a Communist revolution, the greater the party's single-minded devotion to the revolution that had already triumphed in Russia. That explains why, although Browder had been praised to the skies by US Communists for years, it just took one hint from Moscow (published in a French Communist publication!) to bring him down in 1945.
 
TheKutKu

TheKutKu

I don’t think you can get a communist America without massively changing the 20th century both domestically and internationally
 

chankljp

Donor
In the TL "Red Dawn Plus 20", set in the (As the name clearly suggest) an alternate version of the 1980s in which the Soviets invaded the US as in the 1984 movie, they had Gus Hall, the OTL General Secretary of the Communist Party USA since 1959, as the American president of the Soviet install puppet government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Hall

While in the HOI4 mod "Red World", in which the Soviets won the Cold War thanks to a massive series of US-screws one after another since the end of WW2, one of the rump successor governments fighting to control the balkanized lands of the former united states is the Soviet-backed 'Union of American People's Republics'. With Angela Davis (A communist political activist and academic who was part of both the Communist Party USA and later the Black Panther Party) being an expy of Stalin, complete with mass purges and massacres of 'capitalist class enemies' in the streets of Sacramento.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis

In "Red World" There was also Jarvis Tyner, a founder of the Young Workers Liberation League, and later spokesperson for the Communist Party USA in OTL, who can become the the 'Khrushchev' to Angela Davis' 'Stalin'. With him denouncing her cult of personality, apologizing for the mass atrocities during the revolution, and tries to introduce a more moderate version of communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis_Tyner
 

chankljp

Donor
Another potential candidate for an American communist dictator for you: Jack Shulman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Shulman

He fought in the Lincoln Brigade as part of the international volunteers for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and turned away from the Communist Party USA becuase of their rejection of Stalinism after Khrushchev's secret speech. He later moved to China during the Cultural Revolution to work for the CCP... But later decided that Mao was too revisionist, and once again moved to Hoxhoaist Albania instead.

After the fall of communism in the late 1980s'-early 1990s', Shulman tried to bring Hoxhoaism to the United States, and kept working at his mission of communist activism until his death in 1999.

Say what you will about his political views, but from what I have read about this guy, Shulman is most certainly not a man that lacks conviction towards his cause.

If he or someone like him managed to grabbed power due a Second American Civil War/Revolution as a communist dictator.... Well.... We are talking about a guy who thought that Mao was too revisionist, so I am guessing that someone inflicting a 'Pol Pot' level of damage on the former United States will not be out of the question.
 
Gukpard

Gukpard

chankljp said:
In the TL "Red Dawn Plus 20", set in the (As the name clearly suggest) an alternate version of the 1980s in which the Soviets invaded the US as in the 1984 movie, they had Gus Hall, the OTL General Secretary of the Communist Party USA since 1959, as the American president of the Soviet install puppet government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Hall

While in the HOI4 mod "Red World", in which the Soviets won the Cold War thanks to a massive series of US-screws one after another since the end of WW2, one of the rump successor governments fighting to control the balkanized lands of the former united states is the Soviet-backed 'Union of American People's Republics'. With Angela Davis (A communist political activist and academic who was part of both the Communist Party USA and later the Black Panther Party) being an expy of Stalin, complete with mass purges and massacres of 'capitalist class enemies' in the streets of Sacramento.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis

In "Red World" There was also Jarvis Tyner, a founder of the Young Workers Liberation League, and later spokesperson for the Communist Party USA in OTL, who can become the the 'Khrushchev' to Angela Davis' 'Stalin'. With him denouncing her cult of personality, apologizing for the mass atrocities during the revolution, and tries to introduce a more moderate version of communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis_Tyner
Click to expand...

Well, there is also the Crazy Nazbol Bernie :v
 

chankljp

Donor
Gukpard said:
Well, there is also the Crazy Nazbol Bernie :v
Click to expand...

Well, the difference is that compared to 'Nazbol Bernie', the leaders of the UAPR in Red World were actually all real American communists in OTL, so they were at their core still 'in character', compared to Bernie, who fundamentally had a much different life experience compared to OTL that caused him to go off the deep end.
 
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