The Same Coin: Effects of a Confederalist Party on global ideological trends?

[Born in the USSA]

So this is something that occurred to me yesterday, and it deals with two major Alternate History cliches:

1. Somehow the American Revolution gets the ball rolling on revolution in general, and is the ultimate root of all the major ideological change since then. The most prominent example is For Want of a Nail, where the Revolution fails and it butterflies away the French Revolution, communism/fascism, and any popular revolutions stemming from them.
2. An America that keeps the Articles of Confederation is destined to disintegrate into a teeming mass of hostile nations. Turtledove has done it and What Madness is This? on this very forum uses it too.

With these genre tropes in mind I got to thinking: If we presume a scenario where the inverse of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist divide occurs (the Articles of Confederation are kept but amended slightly, rather than see the Constitution ratified with the inclusion of the Anti-Federalist Bill of Rights), leading to a stable American First Party System dominated by the Confederalist Party, how would the triumph of a decentralizing impulse in the United States effect other republican and reform movements around the world? What new ideologies might arise from such a political climate?

A tongue-in-cheek answer would be to imagine a world where the opposite factions win out in new revolutionary governments (Girondin France! Menshevik Russia! Strasserist Germany!) but I think in all honesty you could see revolutionary movements agitating for greater local and regional autonomy. Imagine a French revolution that not only removed the aristocracy but devolved power to historical regions of the country, creating a far more localized idea of the modern state and casting multiethnic nations or empires as super-national alliances rather than nations as we would now understand the term. Basically I'm keeping the "As goes America so goes the world" cliche but completely discarding the "Every state for itself massive Civil War" cliche. What do you think?

 

[AltoRegnant]

Well the issue, I think, with your plan is that the revolution in America was because theyd gone from a very local government with Britain barely interfering, to Britain regularly pulling some shit. Fundamentally, I don't think it would change the FR too much, especially since the republic would be just as, if nkt more unstable. Which probably means Napoleon still rises, probably still gets frozen in Russia, and probably still incites german and Italian revolution.

But in north America, well the confederacy is probably independent if abolition comes to pass. Though I didn't know how expansion goes in this America

 

[Nephi]

I think you'd still have other revolutions maybe the US inspired a few but it won't change everything, communism still pops up in a different name.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I think you'd still have other revolutions maybe the US inspired a few but it won't change everything, communism still pops up in a different name.

Oh I understand that, that's why I think it's a cliche. I was mainly interested in how a republic with a confederal rather than a federal structure could inspire or influence other political movements. I could see two primary reactions to these developments:

• A drive toward greater centralization, producing federalist movements on the one hand and possibly entrenching a form of reactionary monarchism on the other. Perhaps socialism in such a timeline would advocate centralism as the only way to truly better the lot of workers. Whether this takes the form of a federal structure or a unitary state is a question.
• The drive toward greater decentralization. Egotism and anarchism could both be factors in such a movement, while syndicalism could serve as a less total decentralizing force.
• In multiethnic countries you could see a form of confederal socialism, with regional socialist parties "with x characteristics" cooperating in a loose union of independent regional states.