You know, I sure wish I could get a peek at a “we never elected American progressives” parallel timeline, or even just Clinton was never President, since we’re talking having no issues because we didn’t buy in....
>>You know, I sure wish I could get a peek at a “we never elected American progressives” parallel timeline<<
Well, you would start such a story with President McKinley surviving the assassination and Theodore Roosevelt never becoming President. Then you’d construct a chain of events where Woodrow Wilson didn’t become President and where the Depression was avoided in the US because of prudent action by Calvin Coolidge to prevent the banks from getting involved in the stock market.
At that point then Hoover gets reelected in 1932 and the crippled FDR becomes a footnote in history.
Republican isolationism would have probably kept the US out of the war in Europe in the 1940’s but we would have been even more likely to have been hit by Japan in 1941. Meaning the war in the Pacific didn’t hinge on the philosophy of our leaders but on the imperial aspirations of the Japanese militarists.
Post-war the left/right balance of the USA would have hinged on who won in Europe...Russia or Germany. If Germany won then the USSR sponsored leftist agitprop of the Cold War would have been replaced by leftist Nazi agitprop. Not as communist but also not as socially destructive as the communists were and are.
The major states would likely still be Republican because the communist-influenced Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 would have never even been proposed. The US would still be super-majority white, Christian, and conservative.
...just my two cents on that!