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Just a general musing...

So, I was rereading Thande's Look to the West the other day, aand I saw something that caught my eye. He said that one of the interesting things that he was doing with LTTW was taking the old "Britain Falls to Sealion and London is burned to the ground" cliche and slightly inverting it to "Britain suffers Sealion, London is burned to the ground, but the invasion is eventually defeated." The ramifications of such an event are, in fact, more interesting than those of the tired old cliche.

So, being a Pragmatic Yank, I took the Good Briton's idea and applied it to America.

Lets take a scenario similar to Jello Biafra's great "Reds: A Revolutionary Timeline." McKinley lives, Socialism grows more and more popular, the Great War leaves a bunch of radicalized soldiers, etc. The federal government deveops into a semi-democratic oligarchy with heavy doses of Parliamentarianism. The people slowly get fed up.

But lets diverge-lets make Socialism a little less popular, a little less universal. Then, along comes some minor crisis (not an attempted military coup, as in Reds), and when taken in the backdrop of a slightly better Great Depression, there are Socialist Revolutionaries on the streets in no time. But in this TL, they do worse, the Loyalists rally, and the rebellion, though at its height occupying 40% of the country, is put down. This all happens in the mid-30s

But- what happens next? The economy is still chugging along. But the newly reformed government is torn-it owes the utraconservatives a lot for their role in putting down the rebellion, but Socialism is still very strong, and a harsh crackdown could easily spark another revolution. So, what does the government do? And what are the effects (long and short term) on American soociety and culture?
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