It wouldnt have ended capitalism by any means, nor would it really better the immediate conditions of the American poor, but the election of Al Gore in 2000 was the beginning of late stage capitalism, and the beginning of the end for the world
That being said, was this timeline too blessed for humankind?
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*NOT electing Al Gore in 2000
Maybe he would have picked up the phone when the alphabet agencies called on September 8th and we would have gotten another feel-good decade.
Doubt it. 9/11 almost certainly would have still occurred, along with everything that followed, save possibly Iraq.
He would have been a one-termer, dragged down by lingering Clinton sleaze and the powerlessness of his party. My theory is he gets inaugurated but impeached shortly after because congressional Republicans cook up an election fraud scandal. The Bushes, CIA and company delay 9/11 until one of their guys is in the white house.
It doesn't matter because American elections at that level are rigged. Al Gore wasn't going to be president, and it wouldn't have mattered if he was because Gore was a hawkish conservative. Everything Bush did for the national security state would have happened under Gore, Iraq would have happened, and America's stance would be the same. There might have been a slight difference in who benefits from the spoils, that is what American politics is really about and whatever you want as people is shunted to the wayside. But, Bush Jr. and the cronies around him were practically ruling this country as a dictatorship, and the Bush family's tentacles run deep. They're not going to give up power and they're not going to give up their agenda of making America an outright Nazi country, fitting with their beliefs. Bush was going to win, and Jeb was about to win except that they needed to sell Trumpian bullshit since conservatives largely HATE the Bush family (but they're still fascists, of course).
I dream about this universe
The security state came around because of 9/11, and we can argue whether that wouldve been prevented or not, but its higher chance it wouldve with Gore in office. I agree with alot of what you say about america at its core, however. As a brit,i hate to say ive fully given up on it ever seeing the light for democratic change.
Im skeptical on this, i think there wouldve been other plots sure, but we know the Bush admin straight up ignored intel they were given. I cant imagine Gore doing that, sure a quick read and toss, but not entirely disregarding
The National Security Act of 1947 and other acts implemented at that time essentially turned America into a police state. Blame Harry Truman, but considering the situation he really had no other choice. The Patriot Act just stepped it up, and essentially dropped the veil (the "revelation" conspiracy theorists keep yammering about was actually that, yet the rightists are still shitting their pants about a future that has already come).
Maybe I'm wrong though and Gore demonstrates some level of independent competence that Bush Jr. lacked, and would realize that the American regime could maintain the fictions of the post-60s consensus. (Nixon's election was pretty much another turning point for America become more of a police state, the story I heard is that Johnson left Nixon with papers essentially declaring martial law then and there.)
watching the burns documentary on Vietnam and it wouldnt suprise me. LBJ was going insane and sincerely thought the government wouldve been toppled by the anti war movement.
The biggest turning point in world history was the 1944 Democratic National Convention.
The sitting Vice President, Henry Wallace, was an extremely popular New Dealer, who had been the architect of ending the dust bowl, and had very pro-worker domestic policies and very pro-Soviet foreign policy.
The Democratic Party's leadership knew that FDR was close to death, so they cut a bunch of back room deals with delegates at the convention to have Wallace replaced by Harry Truman, a stalwart anticommunist and general fucking chud who literally wasn't even running for VP.
In the end, Truman became President, refused to accept Japan's surrender until after he'd dropped nukes on them, told Stalin to fuck off and broke pretty much all of FDR's promises, propped up fascist dictator Syngman Rhee in South Korea (kicking off the Korean War), allowed the French to recognize Vietnam (setting the stage for the Vietnam War), backed the monarchies in the Greek civil war, and just generally fucked everything up.
Without Truman, there would have been no cold war, and we would be living under global communism by now.
Recolonize, not recognize. Autocorrect got me.
Oof. How did Truman manage to get the dem nomination from Wallace if the DNC didnt back him?
1) Post shit like this in the American politics general, it's why it was created
2) I'm going to repost a bunch of shit from other threads that are similar to this because they are all relevant to your question and I'm sick of people trying to rehab American liberalism here, I have seen it repeatedly and its really pissing me off
While the Democratic Party has been purely liberal and a graveyard for real Left Wing movements since at least Franklin Roosevelt, it took a sharp right wing turn at the end of the 1980s. Similar to how it is now under Trump, Democrats had been totally obliterated for the first time in decades under Reagan. The leadership of the party and many liberal pundits blamed this on the party ceding too much power to its Left Wing, which had included folks like Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson at the time, and decided that the only way it could have a shot at winning elections again was to alienate what remained of the Leftists within the party and try to pick up moderate Republicans in the suburbs and potentially even regain support in the South.
Therefore, the "New Democrats" were born. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, HIllary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, etc are all cut from this cloth, which is basically an attempt to take the neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy, and "tough on crime" rhetoric of the Republicans and fuse it with a strong dose of liberal Identity Politics and an excessive focus on Political Correctness. The former appealed to many of those "moderate" conservatives in the suburbs while the former was able to keep new liberals and progressives who had grown up under Reagan and were opposed to his exceedingly actually reactionary domestic policies but didn't really give a shit about economics or anti-imperialism due to coming of age in the "End of History" period of the USA.
When Clinton and Gore won in the early 90s, it was seen as cementing the inherent correctness of the New Democrat approach to American politics and encouraged the Dems to essentially completely give up on even pretending to give a shit about the Left. However, because Reagan and Bush had so thoroughly destroyed what remained of Leftist movements of the 60s and 70s, there wasn't really anyone left to oppose the Republican Party, who had shifted even further Right what with ghouls like Newt Gingrich being elevated as its posterboy and such, and with the expansion of far-right talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. Essentially what happens at this point is that a centre-right Democratic Party is able to start branding itself as a Leftist opposition due to the creeping fascism that is beginning to manifest within the Republicans. When you factor in the aforementioned new liberals who have grown up in the culture wars and who almost completely divest political life or social issues from economics, you see a "New New Left" if you will emerge in the 1990s.
Also, this New New Left didn't have much incentive to care about economics in the first place. Clinton, through embracing neoliberalism and institutionalizing it as an economic dogma in the USA in a way that even Ronald Reagan couldn't have dreamed of, was able to grow GDP and give everyone a sense of a continuing prosperity. This boom coincided with the final dismantlement of the Soviet system, which many in the US Left and Liberal class had long perceived as an evil on par with Nazism and a betrayal of socialism, and thus a feeling of giddiness about the future overtook the country, particularly forward-looking liberals. In this "End of History" atmosphere, it appeared that the responsibility of the Left was only to further defeat reactionaries on purely social issues, that representation and "equal opportunity" was preferable to talks of "working-class solidarity", "class warfare", "peace,land, and bread" and so on. I mean, doesn't that sound scary? Doesn't that sound like it might shake up the perfect little world that Western liberal democracy supposedly had built, with the USA at the center? Doesn't that sound a bit too much like something the just-defeated evil USSR would advocate?
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So basically what happens in the 1990s is that the culture war completely claims the center of discussion for both the Left and Right, with class issues being seen as more of a nuisance that occasionally must be dealt with out of necessity rather than an actual issue to be fought for perpetually (this applies to the expansion of the military and security state as well of course, which was basically seen as a necessary evil to maintain the "End of History" atmosphere). What is often said about the Democrats at this time, and again under Barack Obama, is that they moved Left on social issues while not doing the same on economic issues. Personally, I see this analysis as lacking. Throughout the 90s many social issues such as LGBT rights, continuing the Civil Rights advancements for PoC, women's rights, etc were utterly and purposefully butchered by the New Democrats. A true "Left" approach on issues such as these would be to simply legalize gay marriage, prohibit the build up of the private prison industry and push for rehabilitation rather than punishment, end the War on Drugs, and institutionalize a feminist mindset on women's issues at the governmental level. This is more akin to the approach some European social democratic parties took in the 1980s and 90s, a true "Left on social issues Right on economics" paradigm.
The New Democrats however actually were quite conservative on social issues, just not to the extent as the Republicans, particularly the Republicans who took power in congress in the "Republican Revolution" (google it for more info, its quite interesting). Many of the new Republicans simply wouldn't budge or actually wanted to go backwards on this issue, whereas the New Democrats solutions were to promote equality in OPPORTUNITY. Essentially the line became that if you were represented on TV more, if you gained more education and skills and thus had a better chance of climbing the corporate ladder, if you were able to CONSUME as much as a previously privileged person, and if your groups identitarianism was tolerated as much as the "predominant" one, then you were liberated. Rather than giving people liberation people were given the "tools" for liberation and left to sort it out on their own. Whereas neoliberals in the Republican Party, one could argue, wanted deregulation and lower taxes as ends in themselves, so that old white guys and their yuppie sons could enjoy economic prosperity while keeping the minorities and women and other marginalized groups who could do the same to a minimum, the New Democrats sought these economic "reforms" as the pathway to social equity (hence the memes about neoliberal Democrats equating more women CEOs with women's emancipation. It's quite literally what they believe)
Thus, this is what became the face of Leftism in America in the 1990s. Sure there were still holdouts such as the anti-globalization movement, a resurgent interest in anarchism (itself largely a paper tiger), certain social democrats who maintained their position in congress such as Bernie Sanders. But make no mistake, what became of the US Left in the 1990s was essentially a full bending of the knee to the New Democrats and their approach to politics.
Thus you get folks like Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters who, despite being seen in Europe and other parts of the world as Angela Merkel style "moderate" conservatives, get to call themselves "the Left" or at least get to be perceived as the Left. And it worked great for Republicans as well, because they got to essentially blame failures of the Democrats, who weren't much different from Ronald Reagan at this point, on "Leftism", "socialism" "communism" etc and move even further Right. This got even worse under Bush and Obama.
Therefore, despite the overton window beginning to shift ever so slightly back to the Left thanks to the growth of groups like the D/SA, the Bernie Sanders campaign demystifying old school Keynesianism and social democracy and even getting young people interested in researching what is genuinely meant by the term "socialism"(IE figuring out that it doesn't mean "when the government does stuff") and even the rise of a small but growing Far-Left thanks to the Internet and so on, there is still a tendency and a habit of calling the Democrats, whether they are the corporate neoliberal types like Pelosi and Clinton or the succdems like Bernie and his new crops of "democratic socialists" the Left. Because it worked so well for them for so long many neoliberals don't want to give up portraying themselves as Leftists and I suppose there are some who genuinely believe it and because it worked so well to smear the Dems as "leftists" the Republicans for damn sure will NEVER give it up.
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Bush was anti-imperialism gang.
youtube.com
I think you might have misread. The DNC are the ones who got him nominated, they did literally 100% of the work because he wasn't running. So he had their support.
It's funny how Harry Truman was more of a heavy handed warlord than Stalin but there's rarely any hand wringing over his legacy. Dude used nuclear weapons on civilians and killed millions of people with conventional bombing in east Asia and it's like it never happened.
If Gore is President, let's say for 8 years, and actually resits the security state expansion and doesn't launch wars of aggression, then the American empire is more stable and not bleeding to death from self inflicted wounds. However if the so called Arab Spring still happens and a Republican is president there'd be an even more enthusiastic response since the military wouldn't be overextended and exhausted from Iraq/Afghanistan. Maybe Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, and others get ousted by NATO looting operations in short order and the middle east is even more violent and unstable.
Truman also physically destroyed the White House.
lol Al Gore would have been exactly the same, with the exception of 35% tax rates instead of 31%, literally nothing would be different today.
I was told there would be no 9/11?
Just another bootlicking servant of 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧international finance🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
Bump for based Gore