Southern Way
Def: A nominally left wing ideology first expounded upon by Marcus Levinson in 1902.The ideology focuses on strong Southern nationalism and a focus on the state as the be-all and end-all of a person's existence. The ideology later became a near-deification of the Levinson Family.
Levinson, the son of a store clerk in Charleston, was the younger brother of anarchist Stephen Levinson, part of the People's Grip, a terrorist group responsible for the assassination of Confederate dictator Nathan Bedford Forrest I in 1891. the older Levinson brother was immediately executed, and in special elections derided by observers as neither free nor fair, Forrest's 19-year-old grandson Nathan Bedford Forrest II was elected president.
Levinson began publishing in 1902, speaking out in favor of racial equality, saying that the slave and the white sharecropper (a practice that began in the 1880s) had more in common than the white sharecropper and the political class. these writings later triggered the Southern Civil War, as the Confederate Army fought the Army for Equality and Popular Rule . As Richmond fell to the AEPR in 1920, Levinson returned to the South, proclaiming himself Director of the Southern American People's Democratic Republic. In 1921, the last Confederate Loyalist army surrendered at Plains, Georgia. Confederate President Nathan Bedford Forrest II and his family were taken prisoner at Plains, held in a small house in Midgelville, Georgia, then Forrest and his wife (already called the Marie Antoinette of the South) were put on trial at the SADPR capital of Atlanta. Forrest and his wife were convicted for treason against the people and executed on March 12, 1922. After this Levinson began a campaign of crash industrialization and collectivization only matched by that of Meng Shiwei*
Levinson almost completely closed the borders of the SADPR, as a score of government officials claimed the title of CS President-in-Exile. All outlets of communication were put in the Southern American Communist Party's control. No information besides peopaganda was allowed outside, as all bridges across the Ohio and Potomac Rivers were demolished and signs were put up saying that trespassers would be shot on sight. The Arkansas River was similarly closed, and heavy patrols began to police the land border with the US. Military spending increased over the 20th century, as the SADPR allied with the Chinese, who fought off a Japanese invasion in the 1940s. The Chinese shared technology with the SADPR, as the Long Struggle, a three-way cold war between the US, Communist China, and Absolutist Russia ensued. Levinson died in 1955 at the age of 91, and was succeded by his son Edward Levinson. The Younger Levinson ruled until his death in 1983. Under the younger Levinson's rule, the military was emphasized, with military parades along the People's Boulevard on major holidays. In 1983, after the death of his father, James Levinson succeded his grandfather, changing his name to Marcus Levinson II and having plastic surgery to make the 30-year-old look more like his great-grandfather. in 1996, the United States announced that they had reason to believe that the SADPR was developing nuclear weapons, as the Chinese and Russians both largely fell apart under the strain of holding up so many puppet states. in 2005, the SADPR conducted their first nuclear test, detonating a 50 kiloton warhead underneath the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. in 2009, in response to a rocket attack against the USS Horace Greeley, the United States declared war on the SADPR and invaded. They found a people who had no idea on the goings-on in the outside wirld and who lived in abject poverty, as total state control of the media was copmmon. The United States declared the former SADPR the "Sountern Military Territory" and has begun a 50-year process of reintegration.
*Fictional person, head of the Chinese Federated Socialist Republic. His crash industrialization and collectivization was reported to have killed about as many people as the OTL Great Leap Foreward