Really all these points go together: one of the main themes of this work is to expound my view that people in OTL tend to waaaaay overrate the importance of economic issues when attempting to interpret history and politics, something which of course our friend Karl Marx is largely responsible for: even his enemies basically allow him to set the playing field and argue within his own defined boundaries, rather than suggesting that that's not the only game in town to start with. I'm going for something roughly analogous here, with the primary 'theory of history' being based on identity rather than wealth, Sanchez as the loose analogue to Marx and his Diversitarian opponents again allowing him to define what the game is and playing it against him, rather than just saying 'actually maybe identity just isn't such the important all-defining issue you say it is to start with?'
Naturally we are all somewhat blinded by OTL bias on this: the choice of identity as the alternative 'all-defining issue' on my part is clearly influenced by the fact that it is the only occasional competitor to economics in OTL when defining political spectra and historical interpretation. Two OTL examples of identity dominating over wealth to define a political landscape and historical interpretation are Northern Ireland and Belgium. But in OTL these are regarded as aberrations, at least so long as the West remains the dominant contributor of ideas to global interpretations of history. My point is that there are probably thousands of alternative issues that could become the 'all-defining one' people fight ideological wars to the death over, it's just that identity is probably the easiest one for us to see and thus the obvious choice for me to write about.
With that in mind, I enjoy it when people sometimes criticise LTTW as not being economically well grounded, for example suggesting that country X could not be as powerful as it is painted as being on economic grounds, because it shows me that I am writing the way I want to write. People in TTL would find it a very alien attitude to suggest that a country's power and influence is so tied to its economic potential (resources, industrial output, etc.), and also would find the ways in which we measure it to be rather strange. You can see similar examples of philosophical disconnect just within OTL if you vary viewpoints based on chronological time back and forth rather than parallel timelines side to side. The obvious one being that people back in the 17th century or so would find our notion that there is no fixed amount of trade in the world that countries must compete over to be completely mad.
Similarly, modern historical interpretations of things like, say, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes almost always take the tone of 'Louis XIV was foolish to do this because it meant most of the Huguenots went to England, thus depriving France of these educated industrious people and gifting them to France's enemy'. This is not an interpretation that can be found in works about the incident written prior to the 19th century when the ideological ideas the assumption is based on were concocted. It is equally valid to say 'Louis XIV was wise to do this because it purified France's national identity, tying the newly centralised state to religious conformity, and allowed the Bourbons to make realistic threats to the Papacy that they might break with Rome and create a national state church, giving them greater influence when seeking to alter the balance of power within Europe with Papal backing'. But you'll never hear this said nowadays, because it is just assumed that France's economic power is intrinsically more important than the coherency of France's identity, as though there are no circumstances in which having the latter would objectively benefit French interests more than the former. Again, identity is probably far from the only issue in which you could draw this distinction, it's just the most obvious one to me because of how OTL has shaped our minds.
So here, via the extracts from the in-timeline books, I am not only presenting a world in which history has gone differently, but where historiography has gone differently as well, and people do not necessarily focus on the same things we do when seeking to interpret the currents of history. Is that clear?
I'm afraid I made a bit of a straw man of myself by limiting my reference to economics, when my typical objections are economics
and demographics, but that's neither here nor there.
That above does certainly clarify what you're going for much more clearly, and expresses where you're coming from in your answers, but it doesn't do justice to the people raising the issue of economics (or demographics) in your timeline.
What may well for your creative purposes be a single point, represents two or arguably three very distinct positions that are being raised by the readership (though I'll try to mostly just speaking for myself). [1] There is indeed the timeline bias which you use to express events in a manner carefully both alien to your readers and internally consistent. But economies were described by Marx, not invented by him - [2] asking how certain events are possible in economic terms is as valid in LTTW as in any TL, and is questioned much more often than is the substance of your thesis - people take Societism-Diversitarianism largely for granted. And finally, [3] there's the difficulty of paralleling the extremities of policy and philosophy between the two timelines.
The main issue is conflating the first and second points. Some who have criticized the economics of the TL are probably coming at it from a framework of class. And after all, that's what Marxist economics has inculcated into the OTL worldview. I say "probably" because I can't recall any besides Shevek, and he doesn't dwell on it himself. So if someone is demanding to know how to align the history in this timeline with "Menshevik" doctrine.... I suppose I've just ignored them.
You'll note that that's not been the basis of
any of my economic questions. I haven't been the only one asking about non-Marxist economics either. Having in-timeline sources dismiss the importance of economics is more than fine; it's part of crafting a world and one of the timeline's greatest strengths. But when the author and the OTL viewpoint characters have no explanation for events that would seem economically improbable.... Well, that's another matter entirely, and any back-patting over the latter is sorely misplaced.
A focus on a world that thinks in terms of national identity / the lack thereof, instead of class identity / the lack thereof, can and should be explored. And may I say I trust you to do it some real justice. But that doesn't necessarily make economic criticism proof of success. A timeline with steamboats running up and down the Plata needs to have an answer ready for where the fuel came from, regardless of whether even the very concept of economics exists.
Likewise, no matter how inconsequential it might seem to in-timeline historians, the cotton gin
defined the historical industrial revolution. If you want an alternate, more power to you, but the priorities of those alternate historians (oh dear*) don't bear on the practicalities. Heavier early industrialization running on wool with a sideline of armaments would have drastic implications for the nature of the societies involved. As much as economists might be fringe figures and the economics themselves under-explored, that doesn't preclude the inevitable knock-on effects. It just demands that they be explained by the "local" historiography in different terms. They'll still be there.
And the third point, on which I'm
very willing to be corrected: For all the extremities of the Communism-Capitalism debate, there weren't excesses quite as dramatic as those we see in the Societism-Diversitarian conflict. People changed their opinions some, their rhetoric a lot, certainly their voting patterns, and then.... Nothing. Upwards of 99% of everyone (in America, say) went on to live day to day exactly as they would have otherwise.
Of course, I half hope you can prove me wrong on this last point, but I don't see it.
* ATL historians? Do we have terminology for this?
Edit: Just realized that you did answer my question about South America. By implication at least. Well played.
