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The Truest Republicans

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A cover of BobMumby's "Jefferson and Adams switch in American history." Many thanks to him for working with me to make this. Here's the original text: 

This is kind of working from that Hellenist America scenario I did, and also coming back to an idea I’ve had, which is reversing the relative success and legacy of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. By that I mean that the early US was in a way defined by Jefferson, more so than even George Washington. But the present day America resembles Hamilton’s ideal far more than Jefferson’s. So what about a world where the Federalists dominated the Era of Good Feelings, rather than the Democratic-Republicans, where the modern United States is an agrarian anti-capitalist state?
The Federalists avoided expansion if they could get away with it. They wanted to build a mercantile empire, not a vast unsettled continental domain. But that didn’t stop Americans. In the period between the war with France in which America annexed Saint-Dominique (and France’s other Caribbean colonies) and began it’s long interest in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and the crumbling of the Federalist party in the 1830s, Americans continued to go west. Especially into the Kingdom of Louisiana, ruled by Aaron Burr. Burr had gone west during America’s war with Napoleon and President Hamilton had turned a blind eye to Burr’s war, as it helped him build America’s lucrative Caribbean empire. Since then, Louisiana had only grown, tearing Texas off Mexico and her explorers had reached the Pacific. The Fort Astoria Treaty turned the Oregon Country into a three way condominium between the British Hudson’s Bay Company, Louisiana and the Astor Fur Company under American patronage.
The largest party to emerge from the death of the Federalist Party was the National Party of John Quincy Adams. He had managed to unite the interests of the Northern merchants with the Southern Planters (substantially enlarged with the addition of Caribbean territories) against an insurgent democratic movement. Adams intended to whip up popular support for his party by pursuing a policy of expansion. Utilising America’s substantial navy, they set about building the same network of forts and factories around the Atlantic and the Pacific that had born such heady fruit for the British Empire. In particular, the Oregon Territory was home to an increasingly large American military contingent. Eventually a deal with Astor to give the company exclusive control of the territory if it were to become part of the United States saw the situation bubble over.
The establishment of the Provisional Government of Oregon led to corporate troops cracking down amongst their investments, and a great deal of diplomatic confusion. America demanded that the United States be given an equal share in the Territory’s government and Louisiana refused. In Britain however, they were distracted by the Balkan conflict to constrain Russian ambition and didn’t want to divide their efforts fighting a costly war for little gain in the Pacific. Through backchannels in Washington, they agreed to divide the territory, with Britain taking Vancouver Island and the northern reaches of the Columbia District, the remainder staying as Oregon Territory. Discussions on renewing the Fort Astoria Treaty would then proceed.
When this was presented to the King in New Orleans, he refused to go along with it. Any change in the treaty would lead to a de facto American majority control of Oregon, and a potential threat on her flank. They had to stop the United States now before it got out of control. Louisiana declared war on America, the King called his war brave vassals in the north to his aid, he summoned the Rangers of the south to fulfil their oaths and they marched for the Mississippi. The war took six long years and cost a great deal of blood and treasure. At the end of it, Louisiana was dead, annexed in it’s entirety to the United States and placed under military governance. Oregon fell entirely under American corporate rule. The Gilded Age had begun.
For the remainder of the 19th century, the United States would pursue an explicitly imperial foreign policy, acting as an ally and then a rival of the British Empire, competing for economic influence in Latin America, for colonies in the Pacific, and then Southeast Asia, for territory in Africa. While America’s democracy persisted, it’s political arguments were over the detail of policy, with a general consensus supporting the cause of imperialism. But a heady political cocktail was being mixed, as the upper class alliance of the National Party split over the issue of slavery. The peculiar institution was becoming increasingly uneconomical and proving more and more of sore point with an increasingly distant British Empire. It was also becoming more and more difficult to abolish as the clear divide between free labour and chattel slavery was being muddied by the American Empire, with the absorption of peons, coolies, contracted indenture, debt slavery and so on. In the ‘Metropolitan United States’, the weight of the northern states eventually told, and the abolition of slavery led to a long, costly civil war. Much of the West, the former Louisiana also rose up, but the Slaveocrats refused to align with them. The end result was the victory of the Abolitionists but the loss of much of their empire as local slaveowners continued an insurgent war, fuelled off illegal slave labour and a growing crime empire.
The new government of the United States from the 1870s had been put off by imperial adventures. Selling off their more troublesome territories in Asia especially, they sought to recoup their losses by investing in the continent. But the cozy relationship between the government and various major companies led to a monopolistic system of economic patronage which suited the aims of the government but ran roughshod over many people. Trade unions emerged and were crushed. The military government which had persisted in the West slowly encroached on the East as the insanitary cities were overwhelmed and congested.
America gained a great deal in the final division of Africa, their long investment in colonialism bringing great results. The end of this last avenue of colonial expansion soon led to a major escalation in global tension. Powerful alliances emerged, with the Americans, Russians and French on one side, the British, Germans, Austrians and Ottomans on the other. The resultant war was cataclysmic, fought on every continent of the earth, tearing apart economies and reshaping the planet. The long Gilded Age ended, as the Anglo-German Alliance emerged victorious and the United States and Russia fell into civil war.
The new orders that emerged from both states were revolutionary socialist in nature, but radically different. Whereas the Russian socialism had grown out of the urban proletarian movements, supplemented by a dissatisfied peasantry, the American socialism sprouted out of the disaffection of the Western miners and farmers, allied to the unionism of urban workers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the long constrained urges of American society were released much more violently than in Russia. Within weeks of victory, the revolutionaries were marching the populations of the cities out into the countryside to work the homesteads established by the ‘rationalisation’ of property. It was a strange breed of socialism, in which industry was repudiated as corrupting and a new ‘purer’ civilisation was built. Millions died of starvation, millions more fled north into British North America or south into Mexico. The remains of the US Government fled to Cuba and established control of the Caribbean. The African colonies were either annexed to the British or German Empires, or in the case of Liberia, organised as an independent republic.
The new United Republic of American Peoples’ became the most notoriously murderous regime in history, slaughtering millions to achieve their goal of establishing an agrarian, post-industrial economy. The British and German Empires slowly rebuilt in the post-war era, becoming the dominant powers of the new world.
Any hope of moderation was crushed as the Communist International inspired uprisings against the colonial powers in the Third World. Latin America fell under Soviet sway, while Africa succumbed to American influence, particularly after Liberia fell to socialist revolution. The German dominated Europaverein one of the last capitalist powers on Earth, but has moved significantly toward accepting socialism, termed 'Capitalism with German characteristics' in the country's discourse. By comparison, Great Britain is an isolated capitalist pariah state, reliant on the German Empire for support, and claiming that the Empire never fell. The USSR is de facto global superpower, it's industrial socialism allowing it to dominate the collective agrarianism of the American Bloc, which deliberately eschews technological innovation in favour of ideological purity.

And a few footnotes in addition:
  • The Russian Soviet Republic isn't our Soviet Union; it is far more Russian in character, and their communism is friendlier to Orthodox Christianity. Think Stalin's use of patriotic and religious symbolism in OTL's USSR.
  • The German Europaverein has made a rather unsavory ally in the Islamic Republic of North Africa. They're Saudi Arabia bad, and they are actively funding Sunni fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. Ironically, this is backfiring on the Germans, since this fundamentalism targets their allies in the Islamic world.
  • The former American colonies in the Pacific rim formed the United States of East Asia after the red revolution. It is practically a Japanese empire in all but name, and its primary beef is with China. It doesn't really get along with the Germans, despite sharing enmity with communism; the USEA really just wants to secure the Pacific and doesn't care about the greater communist/capitalist conflict.
  • Brazil was once the Soviets' main ally in South America, and while official relations are still "cordial," the Brazilians are getting a bit too big for their britches and are forming their own bloc and messing around in former Portuguese Africa. The Kongo (formerly a Portuguese colony itself) is its accomplice in Africa. Ethiopia is now the Soviets' man in Africa.
  • The Chinese reds have taken after their American counterparts, and their agricultural focus has really dampened their economic potential. Poverty is a rather big problem, although people still talk about China being a "superpower by 2030."
  • Africa is a rising continent. Liberia has the potential to become a world power. Its Pan-Africanism is rather popular among the American-aligned states, although the Kongolese are starting to challenge that. It still has major issues with modernization, but it is the master of West Africa.
  • The rogue states of Australia and the Boer Union are rather nasty white supremacist states, that the Germans back half-heartedly if only out of realpolitik. Nobody likes these guys.
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How does the rest of the world view the American government's policies of imposing a rural, agrarian society on everyone?