AHC: A Socialist South.

Your challenge, is to make the Socialist Party (now major thanks to McKinley living and butterflies from there...) have the South as a bastion of Socialism, like the Dems and Reps had at sometime in the 20th Century.
 
Your challenge, is to make the Socialist Party (now major thanks to McKinley living and butterflies from there...) have the South as a bastion of Socialism, like the Dems and Reps had at sometime in the 20th Century.

Figure out how to build a majority coalition of poor whites and African-Americans and the Socialists will own the South. It wouldn't be easy to do at any point in the 20th century but the Socialists would be the party with the best shot at building such a coalition.
 
Figure out how to build a majority coalition of poor whites and African-Americans and the Socialists will own the South. It wouldn't be easy to do at any point in the 20th century but the Socialists would be the party with the best shot at building such a coalition.

Maybe something with the Populists?
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
Wilhelm Weitling goes South? Greeley sets up his Fourierist communes in the reconstructionist South and when he becomes president provides incentives for other utopian socialists communes to relocate or set up shop there?
 
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.
 
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.

They would need to fell a lot of jungles and constantly replenish the areas with slaves. Unless they take the route of Dutch and British Guiana and bring in Indians and Indonesians.
 
They would need to fell a lot of jungles and constantly replenish the areas with slaves. Unless they take the route of Dutch and British Guiana and bring in Indians and Indonesians.

Good point, although in my defense I never said it would be easy. I won't call a Socialist South ASB, but it does seem like one of the last places on Earth where something like that could ever take hold.
 
I think for socialism to work in the South, you'd have to move against the whole "religion is the opiate of the masses" thing. Of course, that just be my somewhat biased view of the south today as opposed to the south back then.
 
I think it's even more than the religious thing, it's a matter of political culture. See, Socialism may be anti-capitalism to some extent (varies depending on the strain of Socialism), but it's also a response to capitalism, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a political philosophy outside of the context of an industrialized, capitalistic (or formerly capitalistic) society. Thing is, the South is historically not a hotbed of capitalist sentiment. It's usually been the home of mercantilism and aristocracy, to the extent that such a thing exists in America. With that in mind, who in the 19th Century South would be advocating Socialism as an answer to the region's problems? The downtrodden proles are all up north, and any free Blacks who advocate anything as radical as taking over the plantations and apportioning them out equally to everyone would be smacked down in a heartbeat. What I'm saying is that there's just not a constituency for Socialism in the South, so you either have to uproot its culture entirely in the hopes of creating one, like I suggested in one of my earlier posts, or else you have to impose it at gunpoint, which is definitely ASB and probably wouldn't last long anyway.
 
I think the bigger problems facing southern Socialism is a combination of racial attitudes (which divides the obvious base for a Socialist push) and the system Southern elites had in place for quashing any hint of dissent or resistance via extralegal means. The problem strikes me as less an issue of economic systems and more of the local social obstacles.

Speaking culturally and economically if agrarian socialism or Christian socialism gained sufficient acceptance in the South among the poor whites and the blacks either could serve as the bedrock for a Solid Socialist South. Those ideologies gel much more closely with the circumstances in the South and similar ideas have taken hold in largely rural areas before. When you get down to it as much as socialism is anti-capitalist in nature that is within the context of resisting economic elitism. It wouldn't be hard to apply the same slogans aimed at New York bankers to the great lords of cotton. I could see a mix of agrarian and Christian socialism taking off in the South provided, again, you can bridge the black-white divide. Historically speaking that has always been THE biggest obstacle to any kind of radical or progressive social movement in the South.

Speaking more broadly if you have a Christian agrarian socialist South as the "Solid South" of the Socialist Party how would the SPUSA look as a whole if they have to depend on the South's support to be viable? Would Southern success isolate the SPUSA to that region or be the main pillar of a powerful, competitive Socialist Party?
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.

Being largely agrarian didn't stop Russia or China. Just a large relative increase in urbanisation and industrialisation would be something to work with in creating a revolutionary vanguard.

I think the bigger problems facing southern Socialism is a combination of racial attitudes (which divides the obvious base for a Socialist push) and the system Southern elites had in place for quashing any hint of dissent or resistance via extralegal means. The problem strikes me as less an issue of economic systems and more of the local social obstacles.

Speaking culturally and economically if agrarian socialism or Christian socialism gained sufficient acceptance in the South among the poor whites and the blacks either could serve as the bedrock for a Solid Socialist South. Those ideologies gel much more closely with the circumstances in the South and similar ideas have taken hold in largely rural areas before. When you get down to it as much as socialism is anti-capitalist in nature that is within the context of resisting economic elitism. It wouldn't be hard to apply the same slogans aimed at New York bankers to the great lords of cotton. I could see a mix of agrarian and Christian socialism taking off in the South provided, again, you can bridge the black-white divide. Historically speaking that has always been THE biggest obstacle to any kind of radical or progressive social movement in the South.

Speaking more broadly if you have a Christian agrarian socialist South as the "Solid South" of the Socialist Party how would the SPUSA look as a whole if they have to depend on the South's support to be viable? Would Southern success isolate the SPUSA to that region or be the main pillar of a powerful, competitive Socialist Party?

I think agrarian religious socialism would be the way to go about it. I also think this would turn the Socialist Party into the morally grey, rabble-rousing party of blacks and crackers, a stigma which would give them the sort of contrarian approval Huey Long gets from modern day wannabe left populists, but which I doubt would help them in national politics anytime outside of the Depression.
 
To be honest, I suspect that you need the South to be a lot more industrialized for Socialism to be as successful. At the least, you need more urbanization to bring large numbers of workers together for strikes and whatever else would be needed for a Socialist movement to succeed. If we assume this to be true, you'd need to have a POD that goes really far back...like pre-Revolution back. Maybe if Britain got more territories in the Caribbean and Central/South America, there'd be less demand for the growing of cash crops in the South? That might encourage a different economic system to take hold down there.

What would stop the industrialists of the North to start a process of expansion or delocalization of their factories to the South, to take advantage of the new mass of cheap labor created after the emancipation of the slaves, after the civil war?

Please note that i know little more than general strokes about US history.
 
Dont forget, people, that the CCF, the forerunner of the ndp in canada, was founded and run by clergymen. Tommy Douglas, the first Socialist leader of a province, was a baptist minister. And his powerbase was farmers, basically. So, no, you DONT needed large numbers of urban workers for socialism.

For more info in general, follow the links in the above post.
 
Figure out how to build a majority coalition of poor whites and African-Americans and the Socialists will own the South. It wouldn't be easy to do at any point in the 20th century but the Socialists would be the party with the best shot at building such a coalition.

I really don't see it.

People who share the bottom rung of the social ladder generally aren't inclined to get along with one another. The Irish faced very similar problems with regards to ostracism and social persecution at one point in urban settings and this usually only stoked the flames of tension between the two groups because ultimately they were competitors for what scraps they could fight over.

This is actually exponentially worse with southern whites, many of whom for a good long time in the Antebellum period saw ownership of a plantation and a large amount of black slaves as being a mark of social prestige in the same way that having a big house or a really nice car is today. And it should be remembered that the majority of slave owners owned only small amounts of slaves that often worked alongside their owners on a farm.

This is the background to race relations between blacks and poor Southern whites, and the end of slavery didn't make it all that much better with regards to continuing economic problems in the south and the overwhelming tendency of those hardest hit by the South's economic problems (which were inevitably the poor) to scapegoat blacks for their problems in life.

I think to have something like this happen you need better race relations in the South, and even then this isn't going to be socialist (which is so difficult to achieve in the United States as to be borderline impossible barring extreme social changes) it's going to be more of an economically-interventionist populism.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Watson

Maybe if he doesn't turn into a big jerk, he might be able to accomplish something?

Even before his rightward shift, he was a pretty successful politician, so it's not like his rise to power was the result of him turning into a racist.

(Think George Wallace, who was anti-segregation--until it cost him an election.)
 
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