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A Confederacy of Dunces
I absolutely despise “alternative history” fiction. The distortion of real history is bad enough.
Enter David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and executives at HBO. Time-Warner’s pay channel has commissioned the creators of “Game of Thrones” to create “Confederate,” an alt-history series where the American Civil War ended in a stalemate and the Confederacy is now a 21st Century nation with institutionalized slavery. This is, as liberals would say, “problematic.”
The biggest hurdle the lead writers (the spousal African-American team of Malcolm and Nichelle Tramble Spellman) will have to overcome is the raison d’etre for slavery in the first place: large agricultural plantations needing vast numbers of cheap laborers to operate. At some point between 1865 and 2017 technology will overtake it. Will they suggest that slavery will be transferred out of the fields and into the factories? Will they be able to plausibly explain why white people will have no jobs in an industrialized South? And what about the rest of the world? Will there have been no world wars? No Great Depression? No Holocaust? Just 152 years of peaceful co-existence between the US and the Confederacy? No uprisings before 2017? It’s absurd.
What it will be is a Social Justice Warrior wet dream, a conglomeration of every hatred and prejudice in their own stone-cold hearts. It will lay bare exactly what they think. It will be the biggest “reelect the president” ad buy in history.
Published in History
You know what show would anger people more? A show where Goldwater won the 1964 election.
“Confederacy” as it’s been described is a double loser: it won’t win over Blacks, and it will not attract as many whites as it antagonizes, or outright repels. They misunderstand their target audience.
It’s not even an original idea:
And no, that’s not just a fake trailer, it was an actual mockumentary. I watched it, and it wasn’t half bad. Not exactly convincing as alternative history (for all the reasons we’ve already discussed), but still it managed to be both funny and disturbing at times.
Another thing I find implausible about your scenario is the idea that China will become so powerful it can simply dictate policy to the entire world.
I have little doubt that the era of American global dominance as the lone superpower will come to end, but I expect a return to the historical norm of a multipolar world with shifting regional alliances. Even if China emerges as the largest economy and greatest military power, it will still have Russia, India, and Japan at its borders and a long history of hostility and mistrust between them. The UK and EU will retain at least some influence for the forseeable future, while nations like Brazil or Indonesia might one day get their act together and emerge as great powers.
China isn’t the only nation capable of learning from the past.
In theory; however, seldom in the aggregate.
Speaking of alternate histories, two years before they collapsed.