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As I understand it (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the political conflict in the Western world from the 1700s to the mid-1800s was primarily one between reactionaryism and radicalism. The former represented the aristocracy and opposed reforms to make society more liberal and democratic as threats to their power; on economics, they generally supported traditional mercantilist policies like high tariffs that called for larger government. The latter represented the lower classes (though primarily the middle-to-upper class bourgeoisie) and was classically liberal, supporting republicanism and civil liberties along with less government intervention in economics. In general, their logic was that government mainly serves to help the elites, so it’s best for it to be small. This led to cases where people like John Stuart Mill are simultaneously considered classical liberals/right-libertarians and proto-socialists. The division was pretty obvious in Europe, but vaguer in America as there was no preexisting aristocracy for radicals to rebel against. In general, the Federalists/Whigs emulated reactionaries/conservatives with their support for big-government, mercantilist policies that benefited big business while the Jeffersonian Republicans/Jacksonian Democrats were classical liberals who supported limited government and opposed elitism. Of course, issues such as slavery make the analogy more complicated.

This trend of big-government conservatism vs. small-government liberalism began to change during the Industrial Revolution, during which classical liberal policies allowed businesses to exploit urban labor. In response, leftism emerged as a new force calling for big-government policies to protect consumers and laborers. In their minds, corporations had overshadowed the government as the main threat to people’s well-being. Leftists ranged from radical socialists who wanted to completely overthrow liberal capitalism to social democrats in Europe and populists in America who simply wanted to implement reforms and regulations to help the working class. In the early 1900s, the Liberals in Britain were supplanted by Labour, while in America the traditional laissez-faire Bourbon Democrats were pushed to the sidelines by progressives like William Jennings Bryan. In the meantime, the Republicans, traditionally the party of big government, soon came to endorse small-government policies while still keeping their pro-business goals. A number of ideologies such as corporatism and distributism tried to form a third way between capitalism and socialism, and of course fascism and similar ideologies became popular during this time. But overall, the primary political conflict in liberal democracies by the early 1900s largely corresponded with our modern definition of left vs. right.

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With that exposition dump, I have a question: could things have gone differently? There obviously could have been some differences, such as if Marx, and thus his influence on leftism, never existed, but, assuming that the Industrial Revolution still happens, is it inevitable that politics in Western democracies realign to small-government, pro-business conservatives/classical liberals vs. big-government, pro-labor leftists/populists? If not, what would the alternatives be?

Essentially, with a PoD around 1800, how likely/unlikely is it that the political landscape by 1900 would end up looking like OTL?

The most obvious alternative is one of the many third position ideologies that arose in the late 1800s/early 1900s such as corporatism, which, as I understand it, wanted large government and more central planning, but supported private property and tried to play both sides of the labor vs. business conflict. More libertarian forms of socialism such as anarchism and syndicalism have also been thrown around on this board a lot as alternatives to Marxism, but what would that look like? Specifically, what would be the policies of a “moderate” left-libertarian faction that could participate in liberal democracy?
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