Presidential nominations, 1920

[Peter the Lefty]

Since Debs is clearly more left-wing here than in rl, I think I'll back Bob.  

Not really. Debs supported the Russian Revolution IRL.

Initially, but he became quite critical of it not long after.  And he never advocated the creation of a so-called "workers' commonwealth" in a place like the US, where democracy, corrupt as it was, already existed.

Debs was very much a revolutionary socialist that did not accept the limits of American bourgeois democracy, though, in real life. The majority of the Socialist Party's membership was revolutionary, which is why the SPA lost most of its members to the Communists when they broke away IRL in the early 1920s. Here, Debs and most of the Socialists are still quite revolutionary, especially when you take into account the fact that there has been an organized attack on socialists and labor union members for the past decade, with no signs of abatement by the incumbent administration. You also have to take into account the nature of the socialist republics here. Luxembourg's Germany is not the Soviet Union, after all, and with a strong (left-wing) critic of Lenin around, there's no reason to believe that I'm going to have the Free German Socialist Republic degenerate into Stalinism or anything like it.

The FGSR is governed along council communist lines and is radically democratic, much like the early Soviet Union was before the Bolsheviks decided to wipe out the left opposition and the whole thing degenerated into a party dictatorship (thanks, Stalin). Plus, thanks to the butterfly effect and the presence of a strong anti-Leninist socialist group in Germany, you might not even end up with Stalin in Russia, especially with left-communism and anarchism a lot stronger in continental Europe.

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Calling him a revolutionary socialist is certainly a stretch, and he simply opposed the "bourgeois" part of the term "bourgeois". In real life, he never advocated the replacement of the current political system–only economic.  And everything I've read (plus election results) would indicate that the right-wing of the SPA was larger.  Though I can see why the party would be more left-wing in this tl.  Still, I think democracy can be saved, which is why I'm going with Bob.

[Goldwater]

Ideally, I would support Pershing, but he doesn't' have a chance of winning the nomination, so I went with Cox.

[Mechaman]

Governor Smith