Challenge: Pre-Fascist 'Third Way' Ideology Takes Power in the US in the 20th century

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
The challenge is, with a POD of 1800, to get an ideology which resembles one of the following to take power in the US in the 20th century:

Technocracy Inc
Thorstein Veblen's Institutionalism
Edward Bellamy's Nationalist Clubs
Georgism
Social Credit
Distributism

An 1800 POD isn't very restrictive, so you can be imaginative, but try to be plausible. The US doesn't have to stay in one piece either if that makes it easier.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
No ideas? Ramping the discontent of the end of the 19th century up to 11 and ensuring socialism/populism/progressivism doesnt steal the movement's thunder is what would be required.

I'm trying to think of something interesting to do with the US government in a backstory where the US balkanizes and loses the South and West after France and a conservative Britain decide the US is a threat and needs to be taken down, the British Empire crippling and ultimately destroying itself in the process.

Note that this POD gets rid of a lot of the discontented areas which were attracted to alternative ideologies like populism and progressivism OTL, so a new source of discontent needs to be found which isn't solely agrarian in origin. (Not that it was OTL with the trusts and Gilded Age, etc. but even more so than OTL. Also, it's not like the remainder of the US is devoid of agriculture and mining, so these sectoral interests can still be important.)
 
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The challenge is, with a POD of 1800, to get an ideology which resembles one of the following to take power in the US in the 20th century:

Technocracy Inc
Thorstein Veblen's Institutionalism
Edward Bellamy's Nationalist Clubs

Georgism
Social Credit
Distributism

An 1800 POD isn't very restrictive, so you can be imaginative, but try to be plausible. The US doesn't have to stay in one piece either if that makes it easier.
The bolded weren't really "third way" in the usual sense, as they were either implicitly (Technocracy Inc.,) or explicitly (Veblen, Bellamy) socialist.

Georgism also tended to be associated with socialism in the US via many individualist anarchists and their sympathizers.
 
I have no idea why in this scenario the socialists won't steal the movements thunder, especially since the early labor movement hadnt adopted marxism yet so it hardly needs to change anything to appeal to the same audience only with the added bonus of not believing in authoritarianism.
 
The bolded weren't really "third way" in the usual sense, as they were either implicitly (Technocracy Inc.,) or explicitly (Veblen, Bellamy) socialist.

Georgism also tended to be associated with socialism in the US via many individualist anarchists and their sympathizers.

Veblen's institutionalism was, far more so than Marx, a means of economic an social analysis (and a very good one IMO) rather than a political program. The Engineers and the Price System is a political program, but it's basically a less detailed version of Technocracy, crossed with the "Managerial Revolution" stuff of Burnham and Galbraith.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
The bolded weren't really "third way" in the usual sense, as they were either implicitly (Technocracy Inc.,) or explicitly (Veblen, Bellamy) socialist.

Georgism also tended to be associated with socialism in the US via many individualist anarchists and their sympathizers.

Fair point. I just want a peculiarly American socialism in opposition to the already successful European socialism of the TL I have.

I have no idea why in this scenario the socialists won't steal the movements thunder, especially since the early labor movement hadnt adopted marxism yet so it hardly needs to change anything to appeal to the same audience only with the added bonus of not believing in authoritarianism.

Yes. Hence the challenge. There are already vanilla socialist takeovers of the US depicted in detail on this board, including Jello Biafra's. I would like to use a backstory which is a little different.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
Veblen's institutionalism was, far more so than Marx, a means of economic an social analysis (and a very good one IMO) rather than a political program. The Engineers and the Price System is a political program, but it's basically a less detailed version of Technocracy, crossed with the "Managerial Revolution" stuff of Burnham and Galbraith.

I think Veblen would have to be the grandfather of any such movement precisely because his writing was more sneeringly ironic than filled with outrage and demands for direct action.

Back to the challenge, perhaps one or a mixture of these ideologies could piggyback in on one of the Third Parties or be part of some oppositional coalition, then seize their opportunity to expand or conduct an internal coup during a civil war or similar disturbance where the population becomes radicalised, like what happened during the Spanish Civil War.
 
A better organised, and better controlled leadership, of the 2nd Klan is what you're looking for. Anti-worker, anti-revolutionary, reactionary, nationalist imaginary, racialism, semi-paramilitary, participatory, willing to accommodate with the bourgeoisie in harmonising the national project and the imperialist project.

yours,
Sam R.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
A better organised, and better controlled leadership, of the 2nd Klan is what you're looking for. Anti-worker, anti-revolutionary, reactionary, nationalist imaginary, racialism, semi-paramilitary, participatory, willing to accommodate with the bourgeoisie in harmonising the national project and the imperialist project.

yours,
Sam R.

The story I'm thinking of fitting this into has an independent South which is heading for their own communist and black nationalist uprising. The Klan doesn't exist at the beginning of the scenario and the African American population in the North is less significant, so there wouldn't be a powerful White supremacist Klan analogue in say Indiana.
 
The story I'm thinking of fitting this into has an independent South which is heading for their own communist and black nationalist uprising. The Klan doesn't exist at the beginning of the scenario and the African American population in the North is less significant, so there wouldn't be a powerful White supremacist Klan analogue in say Indiana.

You probably should have mentioned this because a successful South will result in a revanchevist streak in the North and change the complexion entirely of US political life.

yours,
Sam R.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
This is for a game mod scenario. As pointed out earlier, Britain takes a very different path in the 19th century in its relations with the US and ends up losing its empire and balkanising Canada and the US, the latter losing much of the South and West. It's an ASB-lite scenario in its backstory, but I would like the scenario to be well-constructed and stylistically self-consistent to make a detailed, compelling scenario for the later period of time depicted in-game.

This topic does raise the issue of who will be the major and third parties in the North though. Does losing the South, Southwest, West Coast, and parts of the Rockies make populists/progressive/socialists more or less powerful in the North? Can those OTL third party currents coalesce into an enduring, unified third party, or even replace one of the major parties? Or will those political currents be butterflied away along with the Gilded Age without Southern Democrats?

Will the US' relations with Canada and the South be revanchist or is the US' political culture too developed for that? Will relations with the South resemble the Koreas (militarised and a desire to reunify through military conquest), India-Pakistan (militarised and a desire to remain separate), or Pakistan-Bangladesh (no point crying over spilt milk)? How would this affect the North's domestic politics? Could the Technocrats' idea of a North American Technate appeal to those who want to right the wrongs committed by the South and its allies (Canada and French puppet Mexico) during the war of secession?
 
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