Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: Why write a fictional history in which liberal ideas are ascendent?

Utopia? I don' want no steenking Utopia!
Mary Anne — (archived)

Seriously, Steve. We had an open-ended multi-disciplinary course based in the house I lived in my sophomore year in college. The topic was organizations of small communities. I researched utopian communities, theoretical and real (think Shakers and Transcendentalists), for the project, and after that I lost all desire to live in one.

I'm not looking on this as a "utopian" project, but as an alternative one. Now that Robert has cleared up my brain for me, that is.

What might have happened if the capitalists of the 19th century had been more driven by the same "liberation theology" (20th century expression, but oh well) that drove the abolitionists' relationship to slaves in their relationship with labor?

What if Al Smith had defeated Hoover and won the Presidency? (Would JFK have won?)

What if FDR had died before Yalta?

What if the 19th Amendment had been passed 10 years earlier?

What if Woodrow Wilson had not re-segregated the Federal civil service? What if Eisenhower hadn't integrated the armed forces?

I have no wish for a perfect world. I have no ambition to dream one, because there would have to be only saints to live there, and that means I would have to go.

We have a world now in which, in America, liberal ideas have had quite a run. Now conservative ideas, or what pass for them, are trying to strike back. Things can be different without being perfect. It could even be a different liberal world... (Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion, you know.) I would like to see what people think a world in which many liberal ideas never got even a test drive would look like.

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