Alternate U.S. constitution

These are fascinating posts. Picking up on where Shevek23 left off, would something like he envisaged work with the IOTL 1787-91 constitution, with these changes:

* No "general welfare" or "interstate commerce" provisions (maybe also no Preamble). The federal government is strictly limited to the enumerated powers.

* No permanent executive executive branch. Congress would make whatever arrangements it wanted for the federal executive. There might be provisions to elect someone to an office like that of the OTL presidency, but as a temporary measure, such as the Roman dictatorship.

* State delegations to the ITTL equivalent of the Senate or Confederation Congress are explicitly appointed by the states, under state laws, and can be recalled by the states and replaced an any time.

It would be good though not essential to require all the states to consent to the creation of new states. Also maybe things like treaties should be agreed on by a percentage of the state governments themselves, instead of their representatives.

I left out the OTL federal House of Representatives, but actually I think this is compatible with the other provisions, and may be seen to have been needed, either in the eighteenth century or down the road, as a way to give large population states more influence and inject a democratic element into the system. Even the European Community eventually wound up with an equivalent in the form of the European Parliament.
 
....
Paine, however, is with the artisans and mechanics, the tradesmen and laborers. He is, in short, a proto-socialist. He hasn't yet completely severed himself from capital, but his love of liberty and hatred of aristocracy does make him wary of the subservient social relations of the proletariat-bourgeois. Thus he prefers small capital, the petite bourgeoisie. So sometimes he's on the side of the Jeffersonians, sometimes with the Hamiltonians (because the interests of the proletariat are entwined with that of capital, at least until they abolish it and thereby themselves as a class)...

...
I would be very careful about calling things proto-socialist, as that's way too much reinterpreting-from-hindsight. Paine would certainly not identify with socialism as we typically understand it. If we call him 'socialist', it is of a utopian 'libertarian socialism' variety. Even in his most radical writings, he clearly believes very ardently in the individual (not the collective) as the source of all good things. He argues passionately for free, unfettered enterprise, he is opposed to tarriffs and wants free trade etc. -- in short, if we take 'capitalism' to mean 'a free market', Paine is a total capitalist. If we take it to mean 'a system where big business rules all', then Hamilton is the capitalist, and Paine is... something quite different. (So definition matters here, very much!)
I quite agree that Paine cannot properly, yet, be called a "socialist." I do suspect that if he could live longer, or rather have some science fictional ISOT into the future, perhaps skimming a bit a la "A Christmas Carol" or It's a Wonderful Life with some Virgilesque narrator to explain developments to him, and arrive in say the 1920s or early '30s, he might well become a socialist, but there was no reason for him to leapfrog to such positions in the late 18th century! The possibilities of liberal society had only begun to unfold, in his perspective, and he did not have reason to think they would be exhausted.

Although I frankly admit to being a great admirer and follower of Marx, I certainly think the socialist tradition and practice is enriched by other perspectives, and I have a definition of socialism that is not limited to a Marxist perspective.
That is, I think a socialist is someone who 1) has an analysis and critique of society as it is, and a blueprint of how it ought to be and a roadmap to get there, however sketchy and unrealistic it might be, based on the proposition that human beings are deeply social in nature, that human abilities are the product of cooperative action, and that human peculiarities and particularly the lion's share of human misery comes from social machinery that is out of alignment with the general and particular good of the majority. In other words, the proper unit of analysis of human affairs is understanding the nature of society, seen as a machine as it were made of customary and expected human interrelationships. There is a side commentary against over-idealization of the lone individual, a la Robinson Crusoe (Marx credits/damns Defoe for writing this manifesto of Enlightenment era ultra-libertarian idealization of the individual, omitting to note how many powers Crusoe exhibits that realistically "take a village" to enact) but it is hardly necessary to set the importance or dignity of individuals at nought--indeed the way I read Marx he didn't do this. But socialists in general are distinguished from other idealists in recognizing that some sort of scientific analysis of how societies work, economically and politically, on a comprehensive scale, is necessary toward drafting any program for improvement. And 2) socialists accept that the status of the majority of the people, those who comprise the mass and energy of the society, is the yardstick to measure social success and failure by, and that the first obligation of any socialist movement is to be democratic and aim at improvement of the lot of the common person--the people who make up the majority of society.

Jefferson and Paine have only a limited, partial and eclectic analysis of the human condition on the ground, and they are not in principle afraid of the extremes the cult of individual merit and achievement might lead to, enough so that Jefferson would famously comment at some point that the USA did not require a defined aristocracy (
as a great many post-Revolutionary American theorists worried we lacked--prior to the Revolution most Patriots were Whigs who gloried in the British Constitution and pointed to its unification, and mutual checks and balances between, all three Aristotlean catagories of state--monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, in the form of the Monarch, the gentry and the Commons--with society apparently collapsed on a great Commons alone, quite a few fretted at what would become of the Republic with no Aristocrats to play their role, and as this thread explores, some desired a Monarch as well
) not because no aristocracy was required, but rather that we enjoyed a natural "aristocracy of merit"--that is, the fact that great individuals would elevate themselves by either renown for their accomplishment or more concretely, by great wealth, was a good thing. Because a society needs its aristocrats, you see--he was pleased to believe that they would always be so by earning the status by personal merit, and that such aristocrats would be persuaded to look beyond personal interest to the common good.

Don't know whether Paine would argue strongly against that or not. Certainly even I would agree that in any realistic working society there are going to be famous and admired people of exceptional ability and vision, and that many enterprises require the submission of many wills to the direction of such a visionary--the question is, is this submission voluntary, or does society put the screws on people to compel it? Jefferson and Paine may well have agreed the great new American Republic would show a new way in which such compulsion would wither away and die and all great works would be accomplished by teams of volunteers positively attracted to people of exceptional vision. And if I agreed that that is how our society had evolved or is likely to evolve without radical revision, I too would join with them in such rosy hopes.

If the thread can tolerate a bit of Marxist terminology and taxonomy here, Marx did address a society distinct from either medieval manorial-feudal conditions or capitalism proper, going by the somewhat awkward name of "simple commodity production."

In a precapitalist society in the mainstream of historical development, the common people are overwhelmingly peasants, meaning that they seek to autonomously replicate their economic needs in a generic, multi-tasking way where one worker typically does a bit of everything; food is grown on the premises, craft works are done in slack agricultural periods largely by the peasants though of course there is some specialization already--blacksmithing and so on--families make their own clothes and so forth, the peasant community is one of homogenous types in terms of the normal work cycle. In an idealized "pure" capitalist society on the other hand instead of the community, the nexus is the market; workers overwhelmingly perform highly specialized tasks as parts of production teams micromanaged by the capitalist minority (or rather their hired agents, themselves formally wage workers in the enterprise) and are paid wages, from which they purchase the fraction of the total mass of commodities universally produced in such large scale capitalist enterprises to meet their consumption needs, rather than being able to produce any of these things they need--food, shelter, clothing, etc--independently for themselves. All products of labor go onto the market, whereas in a peasant society the peasants strive to put as little of their product as possible on the market--but as part of a class society, they are visibly exploited by higher classes that overtly and openly proclaim the right to seize some tribute from them--in the form of taking goods in kind perhaps as in early manorialism, and commanding levies of collective and individual service, or perhaps in the form of money taxes which compel the peasants to acquire money to pay it by selling some goods on the market. Marx spends much of his historical analysis, as opposed to theoretical conceptualization, showing how societies generally evolved from medieval style tribute-based exploitation to labor-market based exploitation pretty much directly, beginning with convict or legally compelled pauper labor enforced with the active involvement of the state before a proper "free" labor market could be expected to evolve, which requires on the one had adequate development of the mercantile system to provide the full spectrum of worker needs for purchase on the market, reliably, and on the other a lack of opportunities for the workers to seek self-employment with their own personally owned means of production. Given they have no option but wage labor due to the capitalist class monopoly on means of production, it is easy, indeed seems "natural" at that point, for the wage bill to be driven down well below the total value of product enhancement over and above the unprocessed raw material inputs added in a period of work, leaving the rest as the profits out of which capitalists procure their own consumption requirements from the same markets, and expand or diversify the enterprises they own with the rest (typically most of it). This is the engine which in Marx's view removes labor-content value from the hands of the workers who create it and sequesters it as the owned property of these few, who essentially rule the society, in private via ownership of all workplaces, and in public, including restraining unruly workers, via controlling the state (which is in principle funded by capital, for the taxes extorted from the workers cannot be properly regarded as part of their true wages--the portion the tax man gets by whatever route is only ever nominally in their hands, it is not practically so). Unlike the medieval model, the extortion is invisible, part of the mysterious but increasingly ideologically sacrosanct workings of the market--in the liberal view, the worker never owned the capital share of the proceeds and has no grounds to complain of anything being taken from them, and indeed increasingly the owners of capital are seen as the creative forces, with the basic language calling them wage providers and job creators. Wealth seems to emerge naturally from well-managed capital and society is seen as dependent on their creative largesse, and in bitter times the workers are denounced as "useless eaters."

By the way since it seems to be a matter of some confusion, as I understand it, a "capitalist" properly understood is someone who owns, personally or in the form of sufficiently large shares, a means of production incorporating enterprise operating on such a scale that the share of profit which flows to them so very "naturally" is adequate, as a minimum, to enable them to first of all meet their own personal needs for survival over the indefinite long run--this is a misleading benchmark though because in fact capitalists function in a social world where they must usefully interact with other capitalists, and must present a suitable image of substance and solidity as the basis of their credit and credibility, so they need to pad their net personal consumption up quite a bit, I'd say at least half an order of magnitude (say a factor of three or so) beyond levels typical of a well off wage worker, and demonstrate this adequate level of wealth to be presentable in respectable society in some concrete way, so their "need" is expected to be higher than that of a common or even exceptional wage worker.

In terms of modern American conditions, I would say that a serious capitalist, say the owner of a sufficiently large machine shop or hamburger franchise or the like, would at a bare minimum have to be frugal, clever and persuasive to get by with as little as say $50,000 personally spent a year, and I suspect I am ludicrously underestimating, it might be more like half a million. Say $100,000 personal revenue consumed a year is the minimum and the prevailing rate of profit is as high as 5 percent, then to predictably clear that share every year the property has to be valued at least $2 million. But that is not enough--a capitalist is not expected to eat up the entire profit yearly, they are expected to have a lot left over for expansion and contingencies--business grows or it dies, so more like $ 5 million are probably more the minimum. Now, back in the late 1980s maverick former Nixon operative Kevin Phillips wrote The Politics of Rich and Poor, and in that book set as a benchmark "$20 million" as the minimum level below which American politicians, particularly US Congressmembers, tended to disregard class interests in the modern context of competitive electoral races requiring funding from richer people. It was never clear to me whether he then mean income or assets--conservatively assuming the latter, and noting that inflation since 1990 is probably more than enough to double that, I am off by a factor of 8! I think I grossly overestimated prevailing rates of profit to start with, and overestimate how much of profit it is deemed fitting for its owners to spend personally, at least on such marginal enterprises, and also still underestimate how much personal consumption spending a well-turned out, respectable capitalist needs to display. After all I think a substantial number of American workers can earn $100,000 before taxes--a distinct minority, but a lot of workers all the same, and if I were to consider myself financially secure and well able to support a modest sized family adequately I would require earnings in that ballpark myself--at a quarter that income I found it impossible to simultaneously pay modest rent and maintain a reliable automobile after all and was otherwise living hand to mouth with overall modest expenses--no satellite or cable TV for instance, no vacations or gaming expenses, just basic Internet and a cell phone.

So to review--I see a lot of obscure argument about who is and is not a capitalist. The vast majority of Americans, nor citizens of any other country, are not capitalists, for the income they can expect to realize on mere ownership of property is not adequate to support them even frugally let alone on capitalist standards of living. A lot of people own enough that they do not need to work for someone else, but they must put in a day's worth of personal labor, of the value creating kind or its equivalent in service, over and above managing the successful small business they manage to keep afloat. They are neither wage workers nor capitalists, but fall into a middle category that as I am getting to Marx called "simple commodity producers"--though aside from the smaller fry of the independent farmers, most of these are actually not in the commodity production business but in some sort of service enterprise, so the label is not quite apt. Capitalist status is a matter of scale, and I think someone whose share of ownership in a collection of enterprises is less than $50 million would if near that scale be quite marginal as a capitalist, and well below it clearly fall below that status, and that what Phillips was saying in 1988 was that American elected politicians had become completely, unambiguously and nearly universally servants exclusively of the capitalist class, with all other public good they might by the way accomplish for the working classes precisely that--by the way, as a kind of trickle down. No substantial American political movement capable of real power will sacrifice the interests of the capitalist class in any way for the good of those below that line of survival by ownership, is what Phillips was getting at. It is a valid question just when the last strong political movement capable of forcing any such sacrifices last existed, or if it ever did, but Phillips claimed to be observing a serious shift and nothing I have seen since 1988 or even long before it seems to contradict him!

So, if Tom Paine for instance was the champion of the artisan and the small businessman, he was in fact moving away from or refusing to be fully sucked into support for the capitalist class as such--the problem being that in a competitive society that tolerates or champions proper capitalism, the capitalists suck up control of the majority of wealth and capture control of the markets rapidly. A person on the cusp of becoming a capitalist is most likely to fail and fall back into the working class, but their alternative is to grow past the boundary zone and become a successful capitalist proper.

Clearly it is logically possible to have a state of society in which workers are neither members of a medieval collective, mired in their native earth, nor do we have an anthill of vast enterprises with workers like so many interchangeable ants with great bloated queens and drones of capital poised to organize and direct and feed off of them. What if in fact every worker, or anyway family of them, could acquire means of production and compete directly in the market--spend most of their time producing, not a miscellaneous mess of as much of the whole range of life necessities as they could manage to personally a la Robinson Crusoe, but focusing their skills and attention on one type of product they can make well, produce goods for the market they own fully themselves, and then appear in the market to first of all sell off their daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal or annual product for fair value, then using these proceeds in turn purchase every other thing they need from their neighbors, and go home to enjoy the fruits of their personal labor in concrete form, to prosper or perhaps starve according to their industry and diligence, but either way beholden to no other person and thus among other things, fit if humble citizens of a great democratic republic, unlike either parochial and unenlightened peasants or the driven and dependent minions of holders of great capitalist wealth.

Simple commodity production of this kind had a chapter of analysis in IIRC Volume II of Capital. Its dynamic, assuming for a moment it could be sustained, differs from capitalism proper. The law of value, that goods tend to trade at prices corresponding to the amount of socially necessary human labor to create them, holds since specialists in particular crafts or trades are ignorant in detail of the labor processes of other specialists but have a shrewd idea of how much work goes into other items and refuse generally to be rooked into trading at less than fair value.

It should be plain enough why such a model of society might seem both attractive and sustainable to people in the position of Jefferson and Paine in 1786; unlike old Europe, Americans had collectively wrested from Britain claims to vast lands for colonization. The ideals of colonial societies, at least such somewhat democratic elements as these visionaries hoped to encourage and lead, were, as the former and last British governor of Massachusetts General William Gates sourly reflected as the revolutionary crisis was exploding in as slow a motion as his tactics could manage, strongly tied to the second chance the frontier offered American colonials and now (a decade and more later) Patriots who had expelled him and his king. Gates came to believe even before the battles that ultimately drove him and his Regulars out of the former colony that the insufferable attitude of arrogance he observed in Yankees, and truth be told American colonials even elsewhere (nowhere as bad as Boston though!) was due to this notion that anyone could up stakes and make a new man of themselves on the frontier. Thus the major path toward self-sufficient independent ownership would be agricultural. And indeed American frontier settlers very often would not settle to create a permanent lifelong homestead to hand down, peasant style, to self-supporting children and grandchildren, but with an eye toward rapidly exploiting a new cleared land, until the fertility dropped and the region became more settled, selling cash crops for cash purchases of goods, then sell the land and move on west again with the proceeds to once again hopefully augment their fortunes with another bite at the wilderness. But the expanding markets this process implied left quite a lot of room for ventures at individual self-support for craftsmen or artisans, self-employed and dealers in their own labor product as independent agents. To a remarkable degree, America was at this time indeed largely though hardly entirely a nation of simple commodity producers, and the means to sustain this virtuous state via expansion onto a really vast frontier (one Jefferson would double with the Louisiana Purchase, and others would expand further under the rubric of Manifest Destiny) for--well, as far into the future as Jefferson and Paine thought necessary to worry about for the time being.

As non-socialists they lacked a serious and comprehensive analysis that would reveal to them the dangerous instability resulting from the eventual filling of the interior, and anyway that other mechanisms of gross instability doomed their vision of a republic of small independent owners, and that any expedient mechanisms they might propose to try to stabilize it would require both serious scientific inquiry into the true state of social affairs and a political commitment to the priorities of the common citizen that would swiftly place them at odds with the assumed verities of the sanctity of private property, the same sanctity their half-baked analysis suggested the citizen majority should bank on for their security!

In analytical terms, a society that is properly or mainly simple commodity production based is not stable or sustainable, first of all because the chaotic operation of fortune tends to ruin some, leaving them too poor to own means of production, and enrich others, enabling them to cross the event horizon to proper capitalist status, at which point they tend to accrue wealth faster than remaining simple commodity producers can produce it, becoming a financial black hole. More fundamentally, if a society run by people like Jefferson and Paine were aware of the instability of this mode and sought to stabilize it, they would find that other societies that allowed capitalist concentration to go forward unhindered would soon undercut their virtuous republic of associated free proprietors, for it is a basic principle that labor that is combined and cooperative, brought together in larger enterprises, tends to become more productive in terms of mass of goods turned out by a given number of workers. In allowing themselves to be proletarianized, workers enable a more productive economy in which the prices of goods, relative to necessary labor time, fall, so that less labor is needed to maintain a given overall standard or alternatively the same labor enriches the society as a whole; when goods from these capitalist nations appear in the markets of a simple commodity producing society it must either enact tariffs to artificially buoy the prices and thus keep their country poorer in material goods, refusing trade in the cheapest goods and thus being more and more outclassed every decade, or letting them enter a cascade of failures of domestic products to trade competitively must ruin and cast into desperate poverty the nation--its majority of former free proprietors will succumb and have no choice but to report to whatever capitalist offers them a job in the more efficient cooperative production environment.

Or, conceivably...the nation might start to pioneer some form of worker syndicalism, in which formerly mutually competitive craft workers merge their assets, and collectively purchase and learn to work similarly combined production processes that can compete with the capitalists overseas or domestic. In so doing each craft worker must surrender their pretensions of being their own unconstrained master and accept the need for close voluntary cooperation in a large operation. If this could be done, then the nation might continue to remain one of proprietor-citizens but these citizens would no longer operate in magnificent independence; whether they regard their new cooperative situation as a humiliation or find a new pride in shared labor is perhaps a subjective matter. But to enable it to work, and to find the silver lining, requires both a hard headed social analysis that refuses to shift the blame for the new reality onto scapegoats but faces squarely the objective need for cooperation to meet the challenge of top-down shop floor cooperation enforced by the threat of starvation, carefully think through the necessities of practical labor cooperation, and steer clear of the path of least resistance, which is to let the majority simply fail at individual competitiveness and go begging to the most successful who perforce will have developed integrated capitalist production shops to offer wage jobs to the loser majority to hold. All of this requires both elements of what I highlighted as the essentially socialist mentality--a solid analysis of social mechanisms, and a plan to manage their evolution so as to prioritize the fate of the common person. Omit either and the only course is to submit to capitalist dynamics, for good or for ill.

Neither Jefferson nor Paine can sustain their position as idealists for the plebeian but propertied common man without becoming socialists; they must abandon the notion of magnificent independence of the isolated common man and instead become advocates of voluntary and necessarily political mutual cooperation, and on an ever expanding and intricate scale.

They might have alternatives. For instance, something like Huey Long's Share Our Wealth program might manage to square the circle of making competitive enterprise and the maintenance of the dignity and power of the common citizen harmonize without requiring syndicalist mutualism, though it would I think tend toward that dynamically--still, on paper a program of systematically skimming off the accumulating large fortunes to fund ongoing and massive redistribution to the bottom of the social pyramid, limiting the ability of wage-paying enterprises to force workers to accept low wages by means of a guaranteed personal income and limiting the ability of capitalist fortunes to accumulate beyond a moderate level so that the capitalist class no longer holds decisive and unchecked power both privately and publicly. Such a scheme, if it could be imposed on a formerly capitalist nation or cultivated on some colonial frontier, would certainly fail to become socialist in Marxist terms, but by my broader definition, if it proved sustainable as it technically might, and politically workable, it would on one hand require considerable redefinition of the nature and basis of private property rights--a socialist analysis you see, though not Marxist in conclusions--and rest again on a moral basis of priority of the needs and interests of the common citizen over the propertied elite. The latter could surely exist, and even buy into the system as a good one, but major violation of property rights in the form of massive taxes and ongoing free gifts of real wealth, systematically skimmed off the rich in order to benefit the poor on a permanent basis, as a matter of right, would be its foundation. I would anticipate if the rich elites could be persuaded not to make bitter war and subvert it at every opportunity, but accept their fortunes would have to be made within the bounds of this system, that the upshot would be a technically dynamic and innovative, flexible quasi-capitalism, free from the ruinous economic cycles that plague workers periodically and via hangover, threat and recurrence, on an ongoing basis, and a rich nation such as the USA adopting it, assuming one can paper over or wish away the likely ruinous civil war, would surge forward in per capita wealth and technical power, with a mass of quality goods in such quantities no rival could suppress her.

But by my terms, if Huey Long or anyone else could bring this about, they'd be a bad Marxist (programmatically anyway if not analytically, because Marx looked forward to the abolition of private property across the board while this sustains it forever, if on conditional terms) but excellent socialists. Jefferson and Paine were definitely not there and would require some major changes in beliefs to get there.

In terms of a debate about policy in 1787, their recommendations would not be socialist but plebeian populist propertarian. And God help the Native Americans and slaves because they won't!


Paine's idea regarding land is very interesting. It seems to me that he saw land ownership as an entrenched elite. He was thinking of the wealthy planters. He saw them as a feudal leftover, and wanted to redistribute that land/wealth to destroy that feudal elite power. In that way, much like Jefferson, he was a champion of the yeoman farmer. Flipped around, Jefferson was actually a lot like Paine: he wanted to raise the vast majority to the status of (small) land-owner, since that was his own ideal, too.
A century later, the theories of Henry George, often named under the rubric of "Single-taxer," would command a wide degree of respectability among both American and British elites; Ulysses Grant for instance claimed to be Georgist. The "single tax," a bit of a dumbing down of George's analysis and proposals, was to be on land, on the theory that revenue from land ownership was "unearned" in a way that did not apply to property in general--that were it not for the distortions caused by the peculiar nature of land rent as it emerged in the market, capitalism would evolve in a harmonious way as expected by Smith and other mainstream, non-revolutionary, non socialist economists. Thus state intervention to compensate for the pernicious distorting effect of land ownership, which might also serve to fund the state very handsomely, would remove social dislocations and smooth the path to a harmonious future of rising prosperity. Analytically I think it is half-baked; I'd give George marks for effort as a democratic semi-socialist in my terms, but he fails for lack of a fully forthright and sound analysis. I have never delved too deeply into Georgist theory in detail, but I suspect that if one shifted the analysis from property in land to property ownership across the board, recognizing that what is good to respect on one scale (consistent perhaps with the productive abilities of one individual, as a shareholder in the collective production that does exist) becomes pernicious and dangerous on another, we'd then be on the track of a sustainable program--perhaps converging precisely with a well thought out version of Huey Longs SOW scheme for instance. Or, as a student of Marx, I have some vague understanding of his own theory of the basis of land rent in a competitive capitalist system, and this has suggestive policy implications for a social democratic movement that falls short of seeking comprehensive abolition of capitalism and property across the board, but does propose to tinker and intervene on behalf of the common citizen and seek to re-siphon some of the upward redistribution of wealth implicit in capitalist enterprise back downward to the wealth producers where it will do some good. One might wind up with a quasi-Georgist program, though if Marxists were doing it they'd seek to generalize beyond the peculiarities of land ownership to attack and drain bastions of wealth in whatever form they accumulate.

Again, in the context of the "open" US frontier--Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinances defining the procedure for the Articles Congress government to assimilate them ultimately into new states via territorial government by Congress delegating it to settlers--finessing Georgist results without taking from the rich (though preempting their future opportunities to monopolize it) seemed promising indeed; they didn't need deep thought when they had such largesse to distribute. They had reasons to hope it would work out well, in part because they had faith in the tenacity and rationality and moral decency of the independent citizen-proprietor nation they hoped to foster development of, that they would sustain it on an equitable basis once given the chance to found it.

I think I will break off for tonight, but I plan to continue to read this post for more reactions of mine!
 

Well, its not very often one sees a half decent showing of Marxist thought online. I generally consider myself a marxist, or at least marxian. Personally there are bits to your definition of socialism that i would alter, but you mostly hit it on the head.

The US, along with many of the other American nations, are the only ones that would have a chance at maintaining simple commodity production. America is at the right time, place, and development to make it possible, in the majority of the old world thats just not possible.

But as you said, its not stable, and requires an increasing amount of thinking, effort, and political will to maintain it. And the only other options, to maintain the republic in the peoples hands, is a mutualist-syndiclism or expanding Paine's Agrarian Justice plan to property in general and then kicked up to 11.
Even still, there are tons of other obsticals in the way of such a development.
 
Has anyone done a TL where the President is elected for life? If, not this could be interesting.

The easiest changes would be to the executive branch.

Another possibility, favored by the likes of Morris and Alexander Hamilton, was lifelong terms for senators and/or the president, with the goal of the president as a sort of elective monarch and the senate as a quasi-aristocracy. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney went a step further; he opposed election of representatives by the people (I guess the alternative would be election by state legislature) and believed that senators should not be paid as only people who are already wealthy should be elected to the senate.
 
"Has anyone done a TL where the President is elected for life? If, not this could be interesting."

The problem with elected Presidents (or Kings) for life is that the presidential election now becomes very, very important. They will be important enough to not be conducted freely or fairly. The framers of the 1787 constitution had the ongoing example of Poland right in front of them. Though it didn't happen with Poland, civil wars breaking out over presidential elections is a strong possibility given that it actually happened once with the OTL constitution.

If your presidency for life also comes with impeachment and removal expect to see much more impeachments and removals as well.

By the way, on a smaller scale, the political drama over Supreme Court appointments just doesn't happen outside the USA, though almost all other countries have followed the USA in instituting high courts with judicial review, because the USA is the only country that gives these justices lifetime appointments.
 
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