Apparently a lot do things about "No Irish Need Apply" were references to how they were treated in England, with those mentioning no Irish in American newspapers often being English immigrants.
Interesting if indeed true. Any links you can show me?
The US was a very helpful relief outlet for the impoverished populations of Europe in the 19th century. Without that outlet existing, the population pressures could have pushed Europe in some really bad directions a lot earlier.
Politically speaking, for better or worse the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan undergirded the modern west developing as it did. That is another big positive in my view.
On the downside, we did open the nuclear genie box, which in many ways might have saved lives in the long term but acts as a massive risk to global stability nontheless.
That first bit could make for an interesting timeline, if you ask me.....
No, the bottom line of democracy is for all people, not just white men, as much as some people like to shrug off the experiences of women and non-whites. While racism has been common across societies, the complete absence of state protection from domestic terrorism certainly isn't. If you truly want a bottom line, I would note today the EIU, the leading independent think tank on assessing democracy, currently classes the UK and Canada as full democracies and the USA as a flawed democracy.
I understand, and we don't necessarily disagree.
Several founding fathers are on record as criticising democracy and set up the US system with several explicit checks against democracy, including the electoral college and the senate.
Not entirely true, to be honest. What Madison and certain of the other founders were concerned with was
unchecked democracy(hence, the comments about "mob rule" and such), not democracy itself(there is a key difference)
The USSR had all sorts of civil rights coded in law. If they are not enforced, they do not exist.
Fair enough, but I should note this was not uniformly true in *all* of America; some places were better than others.
I disagree. The extremism that has taken over the Republican Party can be directly traced to the rise of the conservative movement in the South, which was a direct reaction to black people getting political and civil rights.
There is some truth to this. However, though, Southern conservatism's more general link to the fear and/or loathing of black people, and racism in general, honestly, well predates the World War II era, and can be traced all the way back to the 1830s, if not earlier.
I do accept that the extremism could exist in alternate polities,
That's fair.
but the south would not be as dominant in a British empire that included the British Isles and Canada.
I wouldn't be
quite too sure about this, though, necessarily. I mean, it's certainly possible, yes, but it depends on the scenario....and perhaps there are at least a few scenarios out there in which the *South become
more dominant, and/or for longer, not less.
I'm not sure that would be true, since slavery would remain a significant part of the income of the empire if the southern colonies are held, and economic forces are political forces.
Yes, this is likely, at least for some time.
But even assuming that the British still abolish slavery sometime in the mid 19th century, it doesn't prevent oppressive, slavery like conditions or de facto slavery in British India or British Africa.
And this happened IOTL.
Also, what is to say that a British Empire with a white imperial population of 300-500 million, held together with military force, wouldn't survive to the present, retaining racial and social views somewhere between Cecil Rhodes at worst and Winston Churchill at best until 2017? Especially if there is no WW1 or WW2.
While I honestly wouldn't go
quite that far, it
is true that IOTL, the Allies' victory in World War II did a fair bit to advance the cause of liberalism worldwide.
With perhaps the exception of the establishment of the Dutch Republic, the American Revolution was the first victory of liberalism. If the revolution fails, liberalism will be set back decades. The French Revolution even more so.
Unfortunately, this would be a real possibility. Maybe not inevitable, but more possible than some might think.
Did the United Kingdom evolve into a liberal country? Yes. It didn't start out as one though.
Right. I mean, Britain was by no means a dystopia even in the early days of colonialism but it took quite a bit to make Britain the functional, modern, and relatively liberal democracy that it is today.
If anything, a less industrialized North America and less agricultural productivity means that the settlers need more land to produce the amount of food they did, meaning the expansion west will be more violent and seize more land.
This may well be true, too.