Yeah I'm fairly concerned about the treason charge. The UASR still operates on the Constitution, though heavily amended. Treason is a constitutionally-defined charge and her getting charged and convicted means that Cuba is viewed as a state the UASR is at war with and her just participating in a televised event is material aid.
Technically, I think it is a mistake to say the UASR retains the old 1787 Constitution at all. Perhaps the author has changed the story or perhaps I misremember. This was back in the days when Optimus Prime was around and did not have much patience with me. You see, I was rather fond of the idea of a Worker's USA, that the Reds would appropriate and reframe some imagery and symbolism I happen to be rather fond of and think can serve a people's republic quite as well as or better than a bourgeois one. The general drift from both the main author and OptPrime was that I was mired in a bourgeois false consciousness of some kind, that the mood of the revolutionary generation was bitterly weaned from the old republic and its trappings. Hence the new red black flag for instance--no repurposing of the old red white and blue would do. It was time to tear it all down and toss it aside and raise up a new Red imagery.
Distinctly included in this was the old bourgeois Constitution. The whole thing was to be tossed aside and replaced entirely by a new worker's constitution, a clean break with the past. Heck, they could not even retain the name of the union. Why carry over the Constitution?
Now all this said, I do suppose that in many respects, by bits and pieces being carried over like bits of mosaic, many serviceable clauses and phrases were incorporated into the nominally clean sheet new governing document. It may be true that the stringent Constitutional definition of treason was cut and pasted right in, or that an alternative definition quite as stringent was drafted. Perhaps it was precisely in their moment of triumph and as yet ungratified revenge against the class-selfish betrayers of the common bond of humanity that they took some careful thought and wrote in language as meant to impose caution and restraint as the suspicious veterans of the ARW and Parliament and old King George's high handed arrogance meant to restrain any would-be kingmakers or rabble rousers of the rejuvenated republic of the late 18th century.
Or maybe they do have a loose and sweeping definition of treason, relying on the good common sense of pragmatic revolutionaries to only use vaguely restrained powers for good Debs-DeLeonist reasons, and the Party to exercise cautious forbearance. Recall that the magical power of written law and sworn Constitutionalism would not have the same mystical appearance of infallibility to a bunch of materialist revolutionaries; to them integrity of living people, not the runes of demigod ancestors, would be the hard bones of human liberty--living bones, not dead hand manacles of the past.
Note I'm trying to be in character here, OOC in the real world I am not sure I judge them right nor sure who would be right. I certainly do have contempt for the notion some have, or profess to have (I am pretty sure many are being disingenous) for the glorious and presumptively divinely granted wisdom of the Framers, with their talk of mindlessly being bound by the notions of men of the 18th century. We should respect the Constitution because some serious thought went into it and because it has been tested.
For instance I've darkened many a pixel in my crusade for proportional representation and my denunciations of the creaky and baroque old Electoral Vote system, but looking at the election of 1860, it served the nation very well that once, and any more idealized and clever system of executive selection based on national popular vote directly founders in this case--we would at best have got a Lincoln-Douglas compromise, more likely Douglas would be forced to come to terms with Breckenridge and the whole Republican agenda of 1860 thrown in the mud, most likely long term outcome--a later and more terrible still Civil War we can only hope the Union would win (probably, but it is still a roll of the dice) and perhaps instead of that, the nation drifts down a road of compromise of compromises with slavery gaining numb assent even as its economic rationality wanes to nothing, and even deeper shame than our dismal OTL record of racial injustice. All because Idealist Shevek dismantles the Electoral College! Honestly I say, get rid of the EC after 1860... but doing it before is playing with fire.
But when all is said and done, it is words on paper; only people internalizing its values makes it a real living thing, and naturally we will and properly we should change our interpretation of what those values are as our society evolves.
I may be muddled up, but I think the rebels of '33 retired its now dead letters and gave it an honorable funeral and moved on to a new living document. Only the author can clarify if you are right they carried over a stringent definition of treason versus leaving it vague for good comrades to interpret and implement as they find it sensible.
Meanwhile even with the OTL and legacy 1787 version, context frames interpretation. If just some random former debutante from Muncie Indiana's Red granddaughter were to get on the Cuban TV denouncing the defeminized harpies of the Red Mob and their animalistic ways, she would be dismissed as delusional and made fun of probably. And in legal hot water should she set foot on UASR soil again. But the Hearsts were among those with pretensions to American nobility, and the family's peculiar association with media in particular gives her betrayal of the Red America that had nurtured her and she had apparently accepted so willingly. One can see that where one is just a deluded brat, the other is treasonous in that she has more to gain from counterrevolution; the restoration of capital would elevate a Hearst heiress far above the common lot. Perhaps this led more people to believe she would make such a treacherous decision to aid and abet counterrevolution willingly and knowingly and cold-bloodedly.
Where I find the story a bit overblown, and I guess after all this fundamentally in agreement with the implausibility of a treason sentence in absentia, is not because it must be legally impossible, but because after making the case for the dangers and hence wickedness of counterrevolution with a sober and straight face, I think the appropriate response in the ATL UASR of the 1970s would be general laughter. Yes, Comrade Shevek, the treacherous snake could cast us into civil war and grind us under the heel of capitalist reaction...
Very funny, now I'll tell one!
Perhaps as late as say the early postwar period, someone might possibly think the UASR is vulnerable to counterrevolution, but I'd say that was sheer momentum in thinking. In the later '30s it might be a real thing. Lots of people then were sacrificing and had little but hope to go on that they would be rewarded. Lots of reactionary hangovers remained. If just perhaps the American people themselves were beyond the point of no return already, still some Anglo-Nazi alliance might come goosestepping across the Canadian border to impose it on us by sheer overwhelming force of a conquest that doesn't care if it has to massacre every one of us to secure its victory. The young UASR and its unconventional doctrines on how to fight a people's war were all untested. And might not the Comrade Leaders turn out to be as prone to corruption and infighting as their Bolshevik counterparts, and turn the very tools of revolution against the true interest of the masses, again discrediting the dream of a democratic people mature enough to take the world directly into their massed hands, and setting up large numbers for despair and a fey openness to the restoration of the old capitalists, the devil so many had known for so long?
Flash forward to 1950 or so, and see how much has changed. The Comintern has fought and prevailed over vicious reaction on every continent. Wealth of a level unheard of in human history is the shared right of every worker and their children in the Western Hemisphere Red nations, and we require no capitalist plutocrats, no high society ladies, to enable us to produce and share it. Our defenses are the most sophisticated and they are in the hands of proven comrades of the people, with new youth being trained every school year. The bourgeois might possibly destroy us with nuclear flame and poison, but not without unleashing such whoop-ass onto themselves the whole planet becomes a cenotaph of the ambition of some apes who could not endure that some of them found the path to Paradise. They can do nothing to take us down without signing their own death warrants! Short of Ragnarok, how can they stand in our way?
So...some dolled up and painted silly puppet of obsolete pretension tells us she is a princess, and thinks our women comrades will feel some kind of shame or envy, when they have what women of the past have only dreamed of--wealth, comfort, safety...and also respect, their equal share of mastery, and the whole realm of human ambition thrown open to them on equal terms they won for themselves? When their children should they choose freely to bear them shall enjoy an inheritance of joy no Padishah or Emperor could ever hope to bequeath to their own dynasty? When the very name of the Revolution shines with glory and success?
The thing about the AmeriCubans, as the old generations who personally felt the sting of their bile and the bitterness of their betrayal, is that they are pathetic clowns. The FBU has got some serious nuclear arsenals, the betraying misleaders of the Indian masses have, well, masses mobilized under their deceptive thumbs. Perhaps Brazil, not properly purified in proper revolution but limping along in some Weimar-like false consciousness fool's Paradise, might go dark again and come back to ravage the honest workers of Latin America and who knows, land their fanatics on our shores and go a ravaging. But the posturers of Cuba? All they have is failure and pretense, and their little dollhouse games of wealth and distinction are just toys and costumes against the real power and wealth of people's America.
The idea that the granddaughter of a Hearst, or the heiress of the Vanderbilts, the matron of the Rockefellers, or the shrew of any Fords that might have survived their miscalculated backing of Hitler is going to have any sort of influence on American women, or that any of these museum pieces of a dead past are going to sway the loyalties or warp the common sense interests of the weakest child of the Revolution is just...a joke. All it is is sad, heartbreaking really, that someone like Patty could go so astray. Let her enjoy her poisonous and caking makeup, her confining and entangling gowns, be weighed down by worthless shiny stones stolen from the Earth by enslaved and bleeding workers. Let her enjoy the trembles of her hapless servant staff as she whimsically considers condemning their overborne families to an even more grinding and pathetic fate in Cuba's slums and backwaters for some petty mistake in sewing or spilling a drink. Perhaps those Cubans whose back she stands on will have enough and throw her from her height. And if not...it is those servants, those field laborers, those factory workers an American of the Red legacy might spare some feelings for, not this tailor's dummy. Deep down the betrayal stings, but it is mostly for the sordid betrayal of herself we weep for. Americans will not be well able to get their heads around the mindset that could possibly so seduce such a woman as she was.
And so...given this is yet another tale of Reds! as some kind of benign (well I think it is) Mirror'Verse along the lines of Comrade Nixon, I don't think it is a spoiler to predict that it turns out she was brainwashed somehow, that in fact the Cuban Hearsts did unspeakable things to her to break her and turn her into their puppet, and then all sorrow for inexplicable self-degradation is swept away by righteous anger against slavers so degenerate they enslave their own kin.
I never delved into the whole Patty Hearst drama OTL because it happened when I was a kid in school and by the time I became an adult interested in deconstructing these things, her story had faded into memory. I do not know the rights and wrongs of the real OTL woman, who was the brainwasher and who was the liberator really. Were it not that the OTL SLA looked so over the top psychotic (and yet, what do I know, I only know what the extremely bourgeois press of the third rate Southern small towns I lived in had to say, plus the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, plus some retrospectively read satire when I binge read old Doonesbury cartoons) I could well believe her liberation was in fact by the radicals, and her return to the loving family was her re-enslavement. Therefore the methods used by SLA OTL may have been vile, or they may have been the most reasonable treatment she ever got in her life, I would not know for sure. My honest opinion right now is that the SLA was probably a bunch of cultish goons on a power trip and they abused her mind quite badly, but who knows?
In the ATL, the whole thing is melodrama--worse for her, because I am morally certain these Cuban Hearsts would have tortured her by any definition. Maybe in very sophisticated and damaging ways, abusing psychedelics while she was in the hands of experienced inquisitors, I suppose.
So I too think the bit about trial in absentia would be noncanonical, an inadmissible mirroring of OTL. OTL any trial of her was by a corrupted justice system that myopically refuses to situate what she did under SLA guidance in the larger context of our systematically unjust system. In the ATL though I think we can trust the UASR judicial system to be very properly committed to big picture justice, to seek all means of reconciliation...and above all, to reserve judgement until the facts are actually in. Perhaps it is too much to speculate that someone watching her on TV in the UASR would say "hey, I think she is tortured into this performance! Liberate Comrade Hearst!" But judges, and even prosecutors, would not consider trying her until they had her in hand and could ask her what the hell she thought she was doing. Most likely she'd be examined by very sympathetic psychologists first thing, and they'd see at once the classic signs of someone broken to harness.
There would be no trial, not because treason is necessarily the wrong charge in the ATL but because it would be like locking someone up for proposing to tear down a fortress with sticks of butter for one thing--maybe you do lock them up, for their own safety, while you try to work through their delusions. But not for treason. And because trial in absentia might do for someone like MacArthur or Ford, whose crimes are real and well known, but with nothing for evidence but a Cuban broadcast, for Hearst it would be like taking Goering's word for it and sentencing Marianus van der Lubbe for burning down the Reichstag without even having him present to give his side of the story. The Nazis at least did have the Dutch radical in their hands when they sentenced him...God knows what they'd done to him with those hands before of course.
