TL 191 - Confederated Socialist States of America?

[Deleted member 107190]

Been re-reading Turtledove’s Southern Victory and a line by Tom Colleton struck me as interesting: “If they’d waited til after the war half the poor white would’ve thrown in with the black reds.”
Well, what if he was right? What if the Red Marxists had risen up in 1918-20 when the CSA economy was in the toilet and their army was exhausted. Hell I expect a lot of soldiers would throw in with the Marxists given the behaviour of their officers. Naturally this would lead to the Union going fascist under Gordon McSweeney.

 

[Deleted member 107190]

Just realised this should be in Fandom AH my mistake.

 

[CASSICTOR2]

Just realised this should be in Fandom AH my mistake.

Fun fact: TL-191 actually is one of my favorite Althist series out there

Also you're right making Thread about it but this time: Fandom AH

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Probably should put it in Alternate History Books and Media, Fandom AH is about AH/AU scenarios for (largely non-AH) Fandom

 

[Born in the USSA]

The question is, who do they ally with? Unless there are Kaiserreich-esque socialist revolutions in France and the UK they'd probably have to try creating some sort of Crimson Circle out of Mexico and the Caribbean. La raza cosmica could be an inspiration if the CSSA wanted to make a full-throated push for racial equality, which could open up space for allying with/fomenting revolutions in the racially stratified societies of Latin America.

 

[Deleted member 107190]

The question is, who do they ally with? Unless there are Kaiserreich-esque socialist revolutions in France and the UK they'd probably have to try creating some sort of Crimson Circle out of Mexico and the Caribbean. La raza cosmica could be an inspiration if the CSSA wanted to make a full-throated push for racial equality, which could open up space for allying with/fomenting revolutions in the racially stratified societies of Latin America.

I’d imagine if the revolution is successful then Mexico follows maybe we see an Alt Mexican Revolution. After that probably autarkic policies are pursued, forced draft industrialisation and the like. Perhaps there’s real politik trading with Argentina and the former Allies of WW1?

 

[Deleted member 107190]

Further, supposing the Union goes Fascist would the Union-German alliance continue? Would a McSweeney led USA seek ties with its co-ideologies in France and Russia?

 

[Polish Eagle]

A lot of this depends on how the CS does in the absence of the revolution and what that means for Confederate soldier morale. In the books, the Red Negro Uprising of 1915 gave them a ready-made Stab in the Back myth. ITTL, you will likely see continuing grinding attrition until Custer's Barrel Roll Offensive breaks through in Tennessee, probably at the same time (I don't really get the impression in the books that the uprising seriously disrupts the Confederate army's operations). Late in the war, Wilson wants to put Confederate blacks in uniform--if this still happens, that could either increase racial tensions in the army (since white soldiers could blame them for the loss) or heal them, creating a less racist Confederate identity juxtaposed against Yankeedom. [waves hands] The latter happens. So let's say the war ends only a little bit later than IOTL, in early 1918, with a Federal offensive that drives to Virginia and Custer reaching Huntsville, AL.

Circa 1919, riots start breaking out in Richmond, Atlanta, and Birmingham as returning soldiers, both white and black, are denied jobs and pay. Shots ring out. Soldiers' councils, organized on wartime regimental lines, are assembled that take over.

The key point is that racial harmony in the CS, such as there exists, is based on the experience of shared wartime service. Confederate Socialism will naturally progress along more stratocratic and militaristic lines--less "workers of the world unite," more "soldiers of the Confederacy, unite!"

What's interesting is the fallout this can have in the US. A lot of Yankee officials might cheer the revolution on, in the assumption that it will weaken and divide the CS further. And in canon, the Socialists took the White House for the first time in 1920--assuming TR doesn't try a crackdown, or Custer the world's least-convincing dictatorship, that still happens. Which means that all of North America above the Mexico is ruled by socialists of one stripe or another. Reconciliation and alliance between the two? An Anti-Comintern Pact by the European empires (Germany, Britain, the Tsarists, and Austria-Hungary together, with Republican France drifting into the Socialist camp)? What happens next?

 

[Born in the USSA]

Here's a post relevant to my suggestion that I made over in the flag thread:

Freedom and Liberty: A More Divergent Timeline 191

I recently posted a flag in this thread for an alternative Integralism based on a persistent dislike I have for Communist/Fascist Confederacies. I'm not necessarily saying that I dislike all of them, as such, it's just that foisting OTL totalitarian ideologies on a surviving Confederate States of America passes up a rich vein of potential for the development of alternative political theories. Given that AH ideologies are far and away one of my favorite aspects of the genre and in the wake of a pretty robust discussion on Fitzhugh and the "slavery modernists" in the Could-Have-Been Ideologies thread since I posted that original Vasconcelos-inspired Integralist flag I decided to tweak the concept to create a more divergent scenario for Harry Turtledove's Timeline 191. Here's flags for three wildly different strains of socialist political party to demonstrate a little variety (and continue my low-key theme of avoiding red as the color of socialism 🤔)

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The first is a flag for the Liberty Party. In TL 191 the Republicans fall into irrelevance as a result of the loss of the Civil War, with the Democrats remaining the only game in town before eventually settling into a two party system with a (Lincolnite) Socialist Party. I understand that this was done to increase the parallelism with European history that forms the backbone of the series but I have a different take. In my scenario while the Republicans do suffer some loss of popularity the simple fact is that it's the Democrats who receive the blame for the war actually starting in the first place. With the Republicans thus secure in the near term after the war they become a fairly conservative party, causing the left wing of the party to split away.

Originally just calling themselves the Radical Republicans they rebrand around the Second Mexican War, resurrecting the Liberty Party from the ashes of history. The newly reformed Liberty Party forms a natural home for American socialist and populist trends, absorbing a fair amount of European radicals driven out of the German sphere of influence. Adopting the olive green of the OTL Free-Soilers and the anaconda of the Populists, the party essentially remains as a permanent opposition until their star begins to rise in the aftermath of the Great War, with different factions espousing everything from agrarian socialism to social democracy to Georgism. While considered to the left by the American political system the Liberty Party is actually the right flank of international socialism in my scenario. The Liberty green and red contrasts with the Republican's blue and yellow TTL.

View attachment 674261

The second flag is for a vastly divergent version of the Freedom Party. As I see it, the only way to force through abolition in the 191 scenario would be something similar to the adoption of the US Constitution over the Articles of Confederation in OTL- an attempt to reform the original Confederate Constitution in the wake of the Second Mexican War results in a completely unrelated document in a not strictly legal way that nonetheless gets forced through. With the UK and France applying pressure there's no going back, but the slavery modernists are able to adapt their theories and step into the breach, resulting in an even more class-stratified society than we see in Turtledove's books, just one where poor whites are able to realize they have far more in common with other racial minorities. The socialist revolts at the tail end of the Great War therefore feature a Readjuster-style interracial coalition, but they still get repressed just as brutally as they do in the books.

In a scenario where the oligarchal Democratic one-party state spends the aftermath of the Civil War joined at the hip with an also Fitzhughist Mexican Empire in exploiting the Caribbean and Central America, the cross pollination of Vasconcelos's ideas with Brazilian racial ideology occurs as I described in my initial Integralism post, with the Great Depression setting off a powder keg and triggering a full blown multiracial revolt against the political elite ushered in by the Integralist Freedom Party. The flag contains the Integralist phi symbol and colors, with one star each to represent the united front between whites, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.

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The third flag is for the British Industrial Radical Party, with the name inspired by The Difference Engine. I originally wanted to post the above two flags and stop there but I realized as I was writing up the description that if the CSA became Integralist then there simply wouldn't be an analogue to the Axis in a hypothetical 191 Second Great War, and we can't have that. So I decided to take a page out of Kaiserreich's book and have Britain and France undergo their own revolutions so that they could remain allied with the Confederates after their own revolution (with British exiles settling in the US and French ones in Quebec). Perhaps the Fitzhughist extreme class stratification of the CSA catches on among conservatives in the two countries, leading to a fierce backlash from the oppressed lower classes in the wake of the losses of the Great War? Anyway, while the Confederates and their immediate sphere get swept up in alt-Integralism and the French come under the sway of Yellow Socialism, revolution in Britain is in the hands of the Industrial Radical Party. Perhaps the most "orthodox" of the socialist parties from an OTL standpoint, they've replaced the monarchy with a republic and implemented a guild-based strain of technocratic syndicalism. Because violet became a color of the working class as a result of advancements in manufacturing in real life I decided to go with a green-white-violet color scheme rather than the more traditional green-white-red, using the stripe sizes from the KR Union of Britain flag and adding in a modified symbol taken from my own Social Capitalism flag.

However in a quadripolar SGW scenario with the German-American Bund on one side, a crypto-Fascist Britain and France on the other, Japan doing its own thing and and a socialist pole centered around an antiracist CSSA, the most likely members of the "Crimson Circle" would be an alliance of the CSSA, Mexico and Brazil under the sway of a form of Integralism as described above. After the war they would likely be one of the major drivers of decolonization and might even try to spark an Integralist revolt in the GEAC-PS 🤔

 

[Tiro]

This scenario, of a Revolutionary Republic in the Confederate States neighbouring on a USA in which the Socialist Party have achieved a revolution (small-r) at the ballot box, is particularly intriguing because there's likely to be a powerful tension between Socialist internationalism and hatreds lingering from the Great War (not to mention fears in the North that the Capital-R Revolution might lose it's grip on the South or - arguably worse - start working to undermine to the more conservative USA).

One can easily imagine Mexico and Canada still becoming the stage for proxy struggles intended to keep the Twin Republics from turning on each other in this timeline, though the tone of official diplomatic relations might be more overtly friendly (at least in public).

 

[Tiro]

Also, for some reason the name "Democratic States of America" and "American Social Republic" popped into my head as alternatives to 'Confederated Socialist States of America'.