Evilprodigy
Donor
With a PoD no earlier then the creation of the USSR and without them invading the USA, could the Alternate History cliche of a Communist USA be acheived? (Bonus points if it is during the cold war)
With a PoD no earlier then the creation of the USSR and without them invading the USA, could the Alternate History cliche of a Communist USA be acheived? (Bonus points if it is during the cold war)
1934, country was in the grips of mass labor strikes and clashes. Unionists attacking scabs, policemen shooting unionists...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_West_Coast_waterfront_strike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Teamsters_Strike_of_1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_workers_strike_(1934)
In the 70s, the radical left was rather popular and many police cars, banks, and mailboxes were blown up. Presumably if Vietnam continued, and so did racial unrest, then the countrywould fall into Communism.
Well, if the currently corporate/banking interests dominated US ruling class screws up badly enough with global warming, peak oil, rare element depletion, etc. the notion of capitalists dangling from lamp-poles may gain some currency again....
Bruce
Yeah but that'll just be some populism gone horribly wrong. Not communism.
Yeah but that'll just be some populism gone horribly wrong. Not communism.
soviet or maoist
Their's no way with that PoD that America woud go Soviet or Maosit Comunist, they simply go to much against core American sociopolitics.
America can go Communist however it will be a unique American form of it.
then look into the future, you can put in a future date too
Still won't in the future, Soviet Communism is highly authoritarian and centralized, both things America is essentialy the anti-thesis of.
Maoism is almost totally dependant on a country having a large non-Urbanized population.
Political movements like communism is usually run by a clique of elites who pretty much direct every thing, as in the French and Russian revolutions, to name a few.
Populism is more dominated by the "people" so to speak; more of an organic movement, so to speak, usually based on resentment of "entrenched elites" and a want to "throw the bums out" or "take the country back" rather than a really defined ideology. I suppose you could say it's more of an emotional movement rather than a political one.
Less fear of encirclement and invasion, for one. America will be the largest industrial power, and have a formidable navy still. And also, the lack of any need for a Stalinist style mass expropriation and liquidation of rural classes to finance industrialization (that already happened through the inexorable march of capitalism).
No, they've never established a national government, but they've held a good deal of sway in areas. The KKK, for example, was a populist movement. You can't say they were controlled by elites since the organization was rather decentralized, grassroots (like all populist movements), and despised by the elites who inhabited most of the Klan's strongholds. The Southern aristocracy, for example, loathed the Klan and saw them as a bunch of troublemaking white trash thugs.Was there ever such a movement that actually established a national government?Such "gut-based" movements usually simply are the dupes of one elite or another, or of wannabe elites.
Bruce