Oh, another cliches thread.
-Huey Long always has a disproportionate importance and political weight, even if the United States does not exist and Louisiana is French.
This an AltHistory Wikia thing, mostly?
-Any territory that becomes independent will necessarily be much more prosperous and rich than it ever was in OTL remaining united. Bonus points if they absolutely ruin the country they split from in the process.
Yeah, that's definitely been an issue with CSA TLs-I've been meaning to cover the issues with that in another thread, btw, for what that's worth.....
"Bad people make bad presidents." When someone who is a bad person comes to power, he immediately starts making stupid and evil decisions in such a way that it seems that he is deliberately trying to sabotage his own country to leave it in the worst possible situation.
This is.....not something I've seen very much of, actually. Which is a shame because it can be more plausible than many think. (Now, the "Genuinely outright bad-and not just flawed-people as great leaders" trope, on the other hand, really is way overused, to the point where it's arguably hard to take it seriously.
-There is no 50% approval rating. The population comes in two flavors. 1, absolutely adores his ruler and will fully support him even if, based on the knowledge of the time, he is making completely meaningless decisions. 2, THE ENTIRE population ABSOLUTELY hates their ruler and are so desperate to get rid of him that, if they were the Republic of Poland, they would happily welcome Hitler's Third Reich as a liberation to get rid of the President of Poland.
Yeah, that does tend to be an issue. No dispute about that.
-Of course, since most authors overestimate the economy to the extreme, this means that before three months the Government will fall into the most absolute anarchy, will suffer a civil war or a communist revolution completely out of the blue, or all at once , and you will expect me to believe that this is a direct consequence of the economic crisis.
Good point here, too-some folks do tend to oversimplify these things-like, for example, with the Soviet Union IOTL: yeah, the economy wasn't doing as well as it once had in the 1980s thru to 1991 but this wasn't just problem of Andropov/Chernenko/Gorbachev: many of the problems were structural and had to do with the Communist system itself.
It's a cliche in alt-history but mostly because the ACW's foundation is baked into a post-Articles of Confederation America if the Constitution is anything like that of OTL. The US from early on was divided on the subject of slavery and it was clear that one side would have to win. Either slavery would be free to expand until the land was unsuitable for plantations or it would be contained and slowly strangled. We had several compromises that only inflamed tensions between Slave and Free and people were already fighting and dying over the question of slavery in Kansas prior to the ACW. If the POD is after the Constitution, barring some break up of the country that decisively tips the balance one way or another, I'm certain the ACW will happen in some form.
Yeah, that's true. Plausibly avoiding a Civil War-type scenario is really hard to do and even then you might have to really stretch some things.
The portrayal of socialists and other flavors of the left often seems more like a pop culture cliché than anything else.
In fact, it often seems that the authors are not clear on the differences (or even acknowledge the existence of such differences). Or that they have been documented watching the representations of pop culture.
The stereotype of the "leftist" seems to be an extremely aggressive and irrational person, who talks about nothing but the greatness of his ideological flavor, and aggressively tries to convert other people to his ideology regardless of time or place. (the "leftist AH" will try to give speeches about the greatness of socialism to people like Adolf Hitler or Nicky II).
You can recognize them because they are every other sentence using jargon expressions like "material conditions", "inherent contradictions", "class enemies", "reactionaries", "working class" (ok, this is not jargon, but they treat it as if it were) as if they were perfectly developed explanations and with full sense by themselves. In case it is a modern flavor, they will also use expressions like "white patriarchy", "institutional racism", etc. They will also show a worrying propensity to support political violence in a way that is commonly associated with fascist movements, being the first to propose the use of force as the default solution to any problem (real or perceived).
In sum, what we see is basically evangelical preachers with a coat of red paint and replacing God with Marxism.
The only ideological variety of the left that seems to receive minimally respectful treatment is Kaiserreich's Syndicalism. Which, despite being designed as a "meme ideology" without any real value, is treated as a viable, strong ideology, and worthy of the utmost respect.
Yeah, there's definitely some element of truth here. The problem isn't so much with phrases; for what it's worth, patriarchy and institutional racism are both real phenomena (which are also largely self-explanatory) which have done real harm.....and reactionary is a really qood-quality descriptor for those who generally hold to the most backwards, etc. positions in any given society(yes, that differs from the classical left's original use of the term, but still.....). And the working class is also a real thing in just about any modern society.
Regardless of how violent they actually are, these characters will often be portrayed as being considered rational, level-headed people who "do what needs to be done" even if they behave as if they are paranoid about non-existent threats.
The same phenomenon can be observed in the representation of right-wing ideologies, with the difference that in most cases the authors really try to convince you that this is bad.
Yes, but the truth is, one thing that does make me scratch my head is-why do very few, if any, TLs centered on the United States barely make any mention of extreme-right/reactionary/etc. domestic terrorism(apart from occasional mentions of the KKK)? That easily could have been a majorly bad problem IOTL(like,
at least a few 9/11s' worth of deaths overall, if not several, or even more), and yet nobody really covers it for the most part.
- Nations will always be in the future a liberal democracy or they lose to liberal democratic. Because liberal democracy is invincible
- Social constructions the same thing. Acceptance of minorities and other religious groups are always taken for granted. When they could have stayed out of the power zone for a lot longer .
Eh, if anything, that first thing cuts both ways, and I've seen a fair number of TLs in which liberal democracy just fails miserably even though-in pretty much every case I've found-there was no reason for that to occur.
I always hated in fiction that depicts alternate settings, be they historical or fantastic, they always have the same social values as twenty-first century Americans
This is
kind of a thing, yes......but not really as much as some think. And there is definitely a problem-a seemingly more widespread one, I'd add-with whole societies, or at least characters meant to be representative of them, in a setting being at least somewhat
too culturally conservative even for their time and place and sometimes far more so(to the point of being significantly culturally insensitive, if not outright racist, when it comes to some authors portraying cultures outside their own).
Oh god yes the amount of times I see the basically timelines treat liberal democracy as this societal cure all is nauseating. Especially when treated like it will just always reach the best outcome "Ohhhh this nation is suffering from a Liteny of issues plaguing it in many cases not being entirely rooted in government structure well that sounds like you need some liberal democracy *throws it at person/ country* you will be right as rain in the morning *walks away as nation sets a light* *long ass sniff* ahh smells like success" it just reeks of this this whighish histography.
To be fair, there are a few timelines that do take things a little too far here-liberal democracy truly is a great thing, but if a country still has issues with corruption, or with a 4th estate that's too timid to take tough stances on tough issues and/or with portions of it often overly pleasing to one side, etc. then yeah, there's liable to be some real problems.
It is one of the reasons I begun writing my alt history about the black death. To view what a medieval thinking world in the modern tech world would look like.
Well, hmm. Though fancifully implausible-if I may-I suppose I wouldn't mind giving it a read if you ever get around to posting it.
The truth is that I am not so clear about the fact that a multipolar world degenerates into a worse environmental situation.
Or exactly I would point to this trope: throwing out the "but this would make the environmental situation worse" argument to justify opposing any alternative to OTL ignoring that until relatively recently climate change was believed to be baseless scientific quackery (and many people still do). believe).
Basically what I mean is that people within the ATL most likely have little awareness of the correlation between the industry and environmental damage. So it wouldn't make sense for them to make decisions seeking to prevent global warming (especially since everyone is going down the deindustrialization route while all their neighbors are industrializing, which sounds silly and suicidal).
Generally agreed on this-how well climate change and other things are understood in a given period will depend on the POD and developments since then, etc., especially in regards to certain scientific factors.
in the American view, minorities get together, when normally one or two of them suppress the other groups to gain their own benefits.
Yeah, I can see why there would be complications in some cases, for sure.....but in American scenarios it does make sense, and you could even see this applied (at least to some degree) elsewhere as well, depending on the circumstances.
Technological acceleration.
It doesn't happen every time, but I've never seen a timeline where science and technology advanced, on the whole, slower than IRL. It's always 'same as before', 'some faster, some slower, net same as before' or 'some or all faster'.
I've seen a few where tech slows more on the whole than IRL, TBH-but outside of certain works(like
The Peshawar Lancers), I can't recall any that seem to have done a particularly spectacular job justifying this(granted, not always really poorly, either, but.....). But I have seen TLs which do well with a mixture of both, and even faster than OTL(to be fair, I do know of one TL that might arguably have taken the latter a little bit too much over the top-Tony Jones's
Gurkani Alam. Fun read-and one I've revisited with some regularity-but gets a little heavily punk-ish at times, as I recall).