[0069twiggy]

What is your opinion of him ?

He was FDR's second vice president and was replaced by Truman in this last term because FDR's health was failing and Wallace was thought to be to far left. He also had a moderate stance on the Soviet Union.

If FDR had picked him to be his vice president in 1944 and when he died Wallace became president would the cold war have happened ?

[Nattering Nabob]

If FDR had picked him to be his vice president in 1944 and when he died Wallace became president would the cold war have happened ?

yes because because the Soviet Union would still have rigged elections and forced communism on the countries that fell under it's domain (a domain which incidentally was drawn on a piece of paper and agreed upon by Churchill and Stalin at a meeting)...the Russians would have still tried to force the Allies out of Berlin and this would have led to the same result if Wallace was in office...the Soviets were too blatent in their agression for anybody to ignore...sympathizer or not...

[Eddier1]

yes because because the Soviet Union would still have rigged elections and forced communism on the countries that fell under it's domain (a domain which incidentally was drawn on a piece of paper and agreed upon by Churchill and Stalin at a meeting)...

You know little about the Soviet Union -- elections were used pre-SU, after the creation of the Soviet Union, there were referendums, not elections.

The SU was ahead of the west in scientific method; they used statistical coefficiences rather than merely counting heads. Hence, all the members of the vanguard (what you might call bureacracy that is incumbered) were on the ticket for evaluation by the people. If they did not make tallies sufficient to be included in the stat coefficient, the average mean, then they were marginalized and slated for replacement.

You could see that there is no room in the referendum method based on stat coefficiencies for rigging or merely changing the percentages of "votes" gotten by the slate. The old methods of rigging found in the elections in western republics were frozen out and were obsolete.

The second complaint you have of "forcing" presupposes that communism ought to abandon its core values, and accept the laxities of western democracies of using electoral colleges where one man, one vote is a mockery. The voting public is FORCED TO ACCEPT the appointed electoral college member vote, even if it goes against the plurality vote by the voters.

Such a "system" is not only ridiculing the integrity of the voters, but also treating the people as fools. Is that too much for you NN?, then view it as the people are merely tools to distract from the fact that elections are all rigged in favor of the vested, shareholding interests of the bourgeoisie as a class that is dictatorial covertly in the so-called democratic election system. However, not so covert, eh, now that the communist has given you a clue. At least don't go out and get drunk about it, if you are a drinker. Singing roll out the barrel and happy times are here again is not only silly but pathetic.

[getfiscal]

The '44 election was somewhat close (the Presidential election was about 53 to 46, but that is only part of the story). The Republicans had won a bunch of seats in '42. Any sort of additional traction could have swung Congress more towards the Repubilcans, even if Roosevelt himself hung on. Dewey would have almost certainly defeated Wallace in 1948. Given that Dewey was fairly pragmatic, it would probably be impossible to predict how he would have reacted to various challenge. It would have also been difficult to guess how other players would react to positions taken by Dewey. If he took the same basic road in Korea, maybe Eisenhower would have run as a Democrat in 1952 against him.

In any case, you would have had the same basic dynamic in the US. You would have had a leadership that was concerned of war-time planning converting into a post-war social democratic consensus. That leadership would have been driven to find some other way to subsidize risk and profit, and probably would have focused on the military in the same way. They would also have worked to defend the capitalist system in a period of decolonization and revolution. Some things seem random, like maybe a President would have made the federal government a more aggressive partner in the field of education.

[getfiscal]

The second complaint you have of "forcing" presupposes that communism ought to abandon its core values, and accept the laxities of western democracies of using electoral colleges where one man, one vote is a mockery. The voting public is FORCED TO ACCEPT the appointed electoral college member vote, even if it goes against the plurality vote by the voters.

As far as I know, the US is the only system that uses an electoral college of this type. This is because of the terms of federation, where the primary unit is the state. None of the states, AFAIK, have an electoral college system. Theoretically these are free sub-units, and the electoral college is simply a delegation from these sub-units. Now, the freedom of these sub-units to secede may well be a myth, but that is another question.

For example, the Soviet of Nationalities was supposed to be equal to the Soviet of the Union. In the Soviet of Nationalities, each SSR was represented by an equal number of people. This is a mockery of one man, one vote. But it was considered important as a principle of federation, to show the voluntary nature of national cooperation.

[Eddier1]

each SSR was represented by an equal number of people. This is a mockery of one man, one vote.

What's your source for writing that?

The direct democracy concept of one man, one vote was not a part of the agenda of the transitional first level of socialism active in all SSRs. Instead, by the referendum I referred to, the SSRs were committed to selecting based on a referendum given to the people of each and every district in the SSRs, a representative for those districts. The one that got the most votes in the referendum, within the parameters of the statistical coefficiency was automatically chosen to represent the SSR in the Duma; whether or not the representatives chosen were members of the Communist Party or not! Usually, however, most chosen were also members of the CC, or the central committee of the Communist Party.

Hence, I think you are very uninformed and confused about the machinations of the political system in the Soviet Union.

By introducing the direct democracy concept of one man, one vote, which shall be probably operational in the highest level of communism, you are ignoring the concrete conditions of the social relations of the first level of socialism, which was the transitional level.

In the jargon of the western democracies, you are mixing "apples with chickens" in introducing the one man, one vote notion into the concrete conditions of the transitional stage of socialism. The concrete conditions were totally and significantly different in the SU from any of the concrete conditions in the western democracies.