Continuing from here. In a low-butterflies Turtledove zone, let's say the following happens:
The white working class gets really angry in the (independent) South from the 1870s/1880s onwards, and a racist form of socialism takes over, seeing slaves as a threat to their labor. Whenever manumission happens (in the 1900s?), many freemen are expelled to the North and elsewhere, and the remaining Confederate blacks are considered to be a lumpenprole excluded counterrevolutionary class. By the '40s, a socialist Confederate state is in power and socialist parties within the South are reaching to the northern white industrial worker and urging them to cast off the chains of abolitionist capital to establish a white worker-run Northwestern Confederacy.
Some sort of WWI-analogue happens here, wherein the U.S. is bloodily bruised.
The U.S. receives a growing African American minority. Black nationalism becomes a thing, but the anger is directed at the South. Northern revanchists form an unlikely partnership with black nationalists. Afro-fascism becomes a thing. Marcus Garvey is elected as the first black president, shocking the nation, though he is seen largely as a convenient figurehead for the white militarists.
Does this work in a pulpy implausible Stirling/Turtledove way?
The white working class gets really angry in the (independent) South from the 1870s/1880s onwards, and a racist form of socialism takes over, seeing slaves as a threat to their labor. Whenever manumission happens (in the 1900s?), many freemen are expelled to the North and elsewhere, and the remaining Confederate blacks are considered to be a lumpenprole excluded counterrevolutionary class. By the '40s, a socialist Confederate state is in power and socialist parties within the South are reaching to the northern white industrial worker and urging them to cast off the chains of abolitionist capital to establish a white worker-run Northwestern Confederacy.
Some sort of WWI-analogue happens here, wherein the U.S. is bloodily bruised.
The U.S. receives a growing African American minority. Black nationalism becomes a thing, but the anger is directed at the South. Northern revanchists form an unlikely partnership with black nationalists. Afro-fascism becomes a thing. Marcus Garvey is elected as the first black president, shocking the nation, though he is seen largely as a convenient figurehead for the white militarists.
Does this work in a pulpy implausible Stirling/Turtledove way?