Early Council of Trent

By the early 1500s, the Catholic Church (hereafter CC) was in trouble. It was in many places corrupt and was stepping over certain boundary lines of power. While the average European was more fervently and popularly religious than at most other times in Christian history, the Church was seen by a large contingent as failing in certain areas. This is the reason someone like Martin Luther could write against the CC and manage to break it apart. He began critiquing in 1516 until his death; the CC did not issue a total response until the Council of Trent in 1563. This council reformed the CC and corrected many of the injustices that Protestants had complained about. It was too late, however, and German regionalism and a dislike of papal taxation kept the various Protestant movements alive. John Calvin created an even more popular Protestant group, and some Papal hesitancy and English egotism helped create the Church of England.

A history teacher of mine speculated that if the Council of Trent had been held earlier, even in the first decade of Luther's critique it might have been able to head off the Protestants and Europe would still be religiously Catholic. It would do this by taking the wind of popular support out of Luther's sails. Obviously, some would agree with his ideas of 'faith alone' but the majority population would not have supported them if there hadn't be so many vacancies, huckster priests and indulgence peddlers.

The Council of Trent was spurred on by the Protestants, so how might it have happened earlier? There were a huge number of people calling for reform and only a few were ready to split the church. It just so happens that the guy most luckily placed was one of those men. But his anti-schismatic friend Erasmus was also a powerful voice for reform. A more amenable Pope, in combination with more learned men like Erasmus, could have caused the Council to be held earlier.

How it might have happened, written in the style of a history textbook:

With the end of the Council of Trento [this is the real name of the city in which the meetings happened] in 1511, the CC began the widest pattern of reform it would see until Vatican II in the 1960s. Requirements were put in place to ensure all priests had proper training and that Church officials could hold not more than one spiritual office. This did away with incompetent or absent pastors. Indulgences were banned, not because of their invalidity - the Council maintained they did serve a purpose - but that the 'weakness of some' perverted their use and on the whole undermined rather than uplifted the CC.

Erasmus's moderate and popular critiques were highly influential, but the biggest departure for the CC was the doctrine of relationship between faith and works. Quoting from scripture that "Faith without works is dead," the Church laid out the primacy of both faith and works in salvation.

The most important document produced by Trento was a pamphlet that, while not an official Papal doctrine, popularly depicted the relationship between faith and works. Its author, while unknown, is widely assumed to be the young academic and monk Martin Luther, who would go on to publish many popular tracts. He is widely credited with both informing the public of doctrine and with rekindling antisemitic ideas in the eastern Catholic countries.

"How may a man be saved? The priests say that by their miracles alone may God take a man up into heaven upon his death. But what of a child, knowing of our Lord Christ and being baptized in His name, who is stranded upon an island. With no other men about to be priest, can this good Christian really be damned? No, for the abandonment of a good person for no other reason than the lack of a man in a silk robe would be unlike the loving nature of God. How then is the man saved?, for saved he must be. It is by his continued faith in God in the face of a terrible fate. Yet some people are good who have not faith because it is not in them to do so. They may take the communion but their actions are hollow. Yet in their life they practice good works. Because he does not have true faith, is the man damned? No, for again we find a good man who will not be kept out of heaven by circumstances. God is beyond all circumstances and will not be restrained by the legal formulations of 'faith only' and 'works only'. Each of these has its own proper time, neither superior to the other. The sun is in the sky during the day, and the moon at night. Yet neither overmatches the other but plays its own role in its own time. If a situation calls for a man's faith, God will ask that faith for his salvation, but if the demand is for compassion, for sacrifice, for works on the part of God's purpose then those works will be demanded of the man by God. The saying that God demands only one of these at all times is a solution based not in religion but in law, and is like unto the Laws of the Jews, whose God is bound by the Law in determining which are acceptable to him and which not. God is limitless and not bound by Laws that He Himself created, and to say otherwise is both wrongheaded and evil."

This passage shows how even the popular supporters of Trento were often at odds with the papal structure; priests are given only passing mention, and a rather dismissive one at that. The pamphlet then goes on to describe how the Papacy determines which are the good works one should do, and which are the times God calls for faith or works.

The Bible was, for the first time, translated into the native languages of the states. As part of this indigenization, the requirement that all priests be adequately trained was to be borne not by the CC but by each state itself. This not only kept financial pressures off the CC but also allowed German priests to speak and read in German, French in French. As Kings funded Universities for the production of priests, they became more native and nationalistic. While still subservient to Rome, Spanish Catholicism was distinctly Spanish. Local regions took pride in their Universities and the indigenous languages. Indigenous Bibles in high illuminated style were some of the great treasures of the age.

But there were people who called for even more reform, and others who felt the CC had descended into heresy. The reformers failed to gain enough support, though pockets in Germany and Switzerland did convert. The Old Catholics, who denounced Trento as invalid, were declared heretics. Their Pope was hunted down and put to death, as were thousands of followers who refused to accept Trento.

The greatest danger to Catholic unity was England, were a refusal to issue an annulment caused Henry VIII to declare his kingdom separate from the Pope's authority. While he attempted to frame the breakaway as a rejection of Trento, his new Church of England proposed something too close to Trento to be distinguished. Henry's daughter Mary, married to a King of Spain, was proclaimed the ruler by Catholics. A joint French, German and Spanish invasion launched the Anglican Crusade, the last major Crusade action. It resulted in Henry's beheading and the installation of a monarchy descended from Mary and the Spanish royal house.

So it might have gone.

Could an eccentric billionaire have prevented the Civil War?

In his book For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark asserts that Christianity ended the slave trade. He makes a convincing argument that the Marxist accounts of slavery's end - that it wasn't profitable, that it was becoming outmoded - are wrong. At the time that Britain unilaterally ended the transatlantic trade, slavery was more profitable than ever, and getting even more so. But ending the trade didn't end the institution of holding slaves in the US. While the practice could not be maintained on the Caribbean islands, where conditions usually killed the slaves, the US South had conditions conducive to a sustainable slave population.

Stark also argues that people don't cause changes: organizations do. He points especially to the Quakers in leading the charge against the trade first and the institution second. In America, the Quakers were the most prominent group advocating abolition, usually at the federal level. This is where southerners disagreed - many thought that the federal government could not, and should not be allowed to exercise this kind of power. They preferred the primacy of state governments.

Now imagine that some wealthy Quaker (there were quite a few of these) had decided that this tactic was just inflammatory, and might lead to reprisals. He wanted to make non-slaveholding southerners sympathetic, and pushing for a law against their domestic institution would not do this. If the slave issue ever came to blows, a slave power that had popular support would be much more formidable than rich elites yelling at the rank and file southerners to protect their own business interests.

And so my hypothetical rich Quaker decides to take the wind out of the slave power's sails. He beings to buy every single slave an owner will sell to him and immediately free them. He pours all of his wealth into this, and by 1845 he's accumulated about five hundred. At this rate, he will never make a difference. So he follows Stark's advice and enlists the Quaker community. The Churches will help reorient the newly-freed slaves, and anyone who will contribute money to the purchasing is welcome to it.

Any small-scale farmer falling on hard times can find a Quaker to purchase his slaves at far above market value; this actually generates goodwill among the southern population. But after nearly a decade of buying, the effect is too small. My rich Quaker and his rich Quaker associates decide to change their plans: instead of offering to buy each slave offered, they will actively seek to buy out the slaves of all owners in a concentrated area, effectively ridding it of slavery. Targeting southern Virginia, this group of men sweep through with immense amounts of money and buy nearly 85% of the slaves in the southern section of Viginia. Those who refused were mainly large rich plantation owners and the few who are morally opposed to abolition. Some slaveowners who were on the fence about the plan are softened up with prices far above market value.

The essence of the plan is theological: by removing the temptation, the collective soul of each state will be cleansed. These purified souls will respond by banning slavery, as many northern states had done. The process is gradual, and will take a long time. It sacrifices speed for pragmatism. The Quakers know that these mass-purchases are driving up the price of slaves, leading more owners to 'encourage' slaves to have many children, but they are convinced that at some point a critical mass will be reached when slavery in the south will no longer be tolerated, and will come to a sputtering, nonviolent end.

Many people saw the Civil War coming, though no one got its form exactly right. The problem the Union faced was that, because it was widely seen in the south as overwhelmingly federal and disrespectful of the states, it aroused the sympathy of those southerners who did not own slaves. The large majority of those who fought for the Confederacy did not own slaves. They fought, more or less, on a principle of rights for states against the government. This isn't to say they were fully idealistic; less federal regulation was supposedly in the interest of every man in the Confederacy.

With slavery diminished to an issue of the elites, the Quaker plan or any other compensated emancipation plan could possibly have prevented the war. No southerner would pay taxes just to have them used to free blacks, so only a private enterprise could have made a change. No private group could have bought all the slaves; their value is estimated to be larger than any other economic sector at the time. What the rich Quakers could have done was change to culture of just one slave stronghold. If, for example, South Carolina or Virginia had not joined the Confederacy the entire enterprise would have fallen apart. South Carolina was the most important - it left the Union in the first wave, before Virginia, and was as crucial to the CSA as it had been in ratifying the US Constitution decades before.

The reason this scenario is somewhat unpleasant is that it doesn't have that dash of good-versus-evil narrative; the entire thing is almost a compromise. Could Quaker idealists really have carried it off? Would it have changed the southern states enough? The purpose of the enterprise would not be to cause the states to ban slavery, but to eliminate the southern and northern causes of possible aggression. The moral purification of the south would come in time, once slavery was a curiosity and not a practice. By buying out 'commoner' slaveholders, the plan would make slavery something identified with the rich and powerful. Very rarely has a movement been workable that tried to mobilize the masses to defend the wealth of the wealthy without promising the masses something in return. Maybe the embryonic Confederacy would have been castrated of popular support by the new conception of slaveowning as something only 'those rich people' did.

Democratic Backsliding

Elections are coming up again in Zimbabwe, my favorite train wreck of a country. The place has nearly as much potential as South Africa, but seems determined not to live up to it. This election will most likely be a sham again. Opposition candidates are arrested or beaten. Regions likely to vote against the ruling ZANU-PF party are threatened. Yet elections are still held, again and again. They are never free or fair, and never will be as long as Robert Mugabe is alive.

This made me think about democracy: some countries have been democratic and somehow transitioned out of it. The most important example is Germany, which really did elect the Nazis at one point. The failed democracies in Russia under Yeltsin and China in the early 1900s are also examples, but neither had any kind of real tradition of voting. Pakistan seems to alternate between weak democracy and military rule that's afraid to be too oppressive.

When a country beings to be democratic, it's obviously seen as a logical progression. We don't seem to talk about countries quitting the democracy club. Outside of Eastern Europe, the number of backsliders roughly approaches the number who have instituted non-shambolic democracies.

I won't go into the reasons why backsliding occurs, but it's worth noting that a lot of democracies that fall into petty dictatorships have an executive President like the US instead of a Prime Ministerial system like Canada. Is there a way to prevent democratic backsliding? Yes - it's very simple and very hard.

To keep a country democratic forever, just hold free and fair elections at a set interval. Free meaning people can vote as they see fit and regionalism isn't used as a hammer against rival parties. Fair meaning that no party obtains government or military help in "campaigning." It's a very simple theory: when any party seeking to be too authoritarian stays in power too long, the citizens will get pissed. They will eventually vote that party out. This is how democracies can be shielded against Hitlers - people who are elected and never leave.

Of course, such a simple solution means that it's also impossible. You can't simply force an unwilling government to hold an election. If the US means what it says about promoting democracy around the world, then maybe it should think about placing more emphasis on demanding elections. Egypt, for example, bans the highly popular Muslim Brotherhood from contesting elections. Vietnam bans any non-Communist party. To promote democracy, let countries elect parties the US hates. When those parties can't deliver on their messages, their reputation will be severely diminished.

Hamas won elections in Palestine, and the US was worried, with good reason. Hamas is much less friendly to US ally Israel than Fatah was. But since coming to power, Hamas has found itself unable to deliver the goods - it actually might have been more effective when it was a non-governmental organization. Free and fair elections, held again and again, will indeed remove from power those people who overreach.

If there were real elections in Zimbabwe, my cynical side tells me Mugabe and ZANU-PF would still win, since the average Zimbabwean doesn't have much basis for comparison. Mugabe did indeed end Western control of the country. He does have popular support. Forcing him not to propagandize a couple months before an election wouldn't undo the pervasive effects of his twenty-five years of propaganda. But the opposition party, the MDC, would probably get quite a few seats - a lot more than Mugabe would like. It would set itself up as a real opposition party, waiting for the elderly Mugabe to kick the bucket. Zimbabwe is not, and has never been, a real democracy. But I hold out hope that sometimes soon, it may join the club.

Theories of History

Why do events happen the way they do? Why not something else? At a very micro level, we can ask if one assassination or birth could change things. At the largest level, observing hundreds of years of history at once, these micro changes seem to give way to material explanations.

This, at least, is my opinion. So now I'm taking sides in the huge debate between materialists as nonmaterialists. For example, Marx was a certain kind of materialist when he spoke about history. He said that culture or great people did not drive history (I agree) but that resources and geography (I agree) created systems that competed and over time evolved towards the final utopian stage of Communism (I do not agree).

There are actually a huge number of nonmaterialist arguments in popular media today, but they get play alongside nonMarxist materialism without anyone remarking on their incompatability with each other. Not to say that the theories are entirely opposed, but they can't both be fully correct. I personally see the large sweep of history being determined almost entirely by material concerns: time, geography, population density, technology, resources. A nonmaterialist argument heard often in the US - mostly from folks on the political right, but sometimes from the left as well - is that the US and the Western world are great because of certain aspects embedded in Christianity. This is not at all the vulgar argument that the US wins because 'God favors our undertaking' - that argument requires faith in a certain kind of God and is not provable or testable in a meaningful way to a historian.

The real nonmaterialist argument is much more subtle and does not assert the existence and superiority of one kind of God. It merely says that, for example, Protestantism favors hard work theologically, and shapes Protestant nations into hard-working ones. This is one tiny example; one could argue technological innovation is slowed down by a religious or overly conservative culture [conservative meaning 'resistant to changes']. True enough, obvious enough. It's a good theory. It's not something you can defeat with just one counterexample, as some vulgarians would like to do.

Meanwhile, I think the materialist/nonmaterialist debate thinks too small, and that this is to the detriment of the materialists. While a culture may influence a specific event, or a path taken by a group of people, the aggregate effects of dozens of groups competing and defeating each other can be conceptualized more easily by materialist theories. When you observe China and Western Europe, and see that they are of relatively similar size and that until very recently were similar in cultural and ethnic diversity, you can wonder about why they are so dissimilar today.

northern China has spent the majority of recorded history either united or split between a small (at most 4) number of kingdoms. southern China has often been included, in whole or in part, in this unity. Meanwhile, the Roman unity of the Mediterranean lands looks more like a lucky accident than a pattern. While much of modern China has been politically unified for over half a millennium, not a single European empire has managed to hold both Germany and France, or England and France, or France and Spain, or England and Spain, for more than fifty years and keep it stable. It has not happened, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon - no European country is going to surrender its sovereignty to the EU in our lifetimes.

Why did this happen? Why did Europe stay in bits why China hung together? I take the materialist explanation from Jared Diamond most seriously: geography. China is surrounded by inhospitable zones and mountains, making invasion less likely to break it apart. Within China, natural boundaries are not enough to hold off armies or moving settlers. Meanwhile, Europe's rivers, mountains and forests do not cut it off from invasion - they almost welcome it. European history is full of mass migrations: Franks, Goths, Germanic Tribes, Slavic Tribes, Huns, Avars, Mongols, Turkics. The geographical features cut pockets of territory off from each other, leading to a fractured and not united Europe. Switzerland is tiny and has never been a world power. It survives because it is in the mountains and could not be destroyed by French or German attempts.

And in my opinion, this is where the debate about materialism driving history goes astray. People end up arguing over why certain very specific events happened when the really huge questions don't even get brought up. So when writing about history, or how it could have gone another way, we can indeed factor in culture, religion, ethnic and tribal ideas. But the further back we go, the more and more we can see broad patterns determining things. So, in the end, I'm not at all hostile to a nonmaterialist version of some localized event, and together the two theories make a relatively good synthesis, but priority should be given to the materialist branch in matters of debate.

Alternate History #3.1: A weak Russia in the East

Nazi Germany is the master of Eastern Europe, slowly industrializing the various lands. Russia has all but given up on being a large empire again, and has retreated to the highest-population areas to counteract overextension and famine. France and England can't manage to get popular support for an anti-Nazi war. Italy is the facism sidekick of Germany. The US has no reason to awake from European isolationism. It's 1946 and WWII has not happened, mainly because of Nazi advisers managing to keep Hitler from trying to do everything at once, instead expanding into the vacuum left by the lack of the USSR.

But how did Asia turn out? Asian Russia and Central Asia are scattered places, not unlike a less-divisive Afghanistan in 2005. No legitimate central authority, many different power-bases for different ethnicities. But the same forces that ended the Russian Czars were also operating in China, where a revolt took place in our timeline that removed the Emperor and began a democratic government. In this timeline, as in ours, the military soon usurped the democratic government. However, in our timeline, the Chinese nationalists who would take power for a few years before Mao were highly financed by the Soviets. The US was interested in a nationalist China, but was less enthusiastic until WWII.

The most important effect is how this works to Japan's favor. Without funding from Soviets and with the US in isolation for the moment, Japan has an easier time conquering northern China. They set up a puppet kingdom and continue to build the Japanese Empire. There are communist and nationalist resistances to Japan in China, but neither can pull itself together and both are crushed. Around 1940, Japan sees the US stirring from its isolation: too many powers hostile to US allies are gaining too much power. Because of their racial programs, the US presidents cannot bring themselves to ally with Germany or even carry on cordial relations. Meanwhile, Australia and the Philippines are very close to the Empire of Japan's edges.

At this time, Japan decides that conflict with the US is inevitable at some point. Without a war to pull it out of the Great Depression, the US in 1943 is recovering, but slowly. Some postwar technologies that created dramatic increases in standards of living after the war in our timeline are being invented, but without intensive production they are not yet affordable to even upper-middle class people.

Finally, in 1944, Japan launches a massive effort against every US possession in the western half of the Pacific. The great prize here is the Philippines, taken by the largest landing in modern military history. This is the Japanese equivalent of Normandy - a risky operation, it results in the surrender of US forces on the islands after only token resistance. To be fair, the US is caught unawares - intelligence indicated an Australian landing, or one in New Zealand.

This is the timeline's WWII. It is between Japan - not as powerful as Germany was in our timeline, but with more territory and much more manpower. Japan can more effectively leverage Chinese production because of the lessened resistance. It is friendly with Germany and Italy, but will not be joined by them in the war.

The early war goes badly for the US. Submarine designs bought from Germany and innovative airplane designs allow Japan to take all US possessions in the west Pacific, then the East Pacific. A failed Japanese invasion of Alaska via the Aleutian Islands marks the first Japanese setback of the war. Meanwhile, California is in a panic. Japanese Internment is carried out so quickly, some European observers liken it to the Nazi's deportation programs. England is worried that the US may try to expel Japanese citizens. Fortunately, the US policy is to continue internment only until the threat of Japanese invasion of the US is removed.

The longest battle of this war is the Battle of California - much like the Battle of the Atlantic, a series of submarine, airplane and battleship confrontations that the US wins by sheer productive capacity alone. Japan may have three times as many workers in its empire, but the Empire itself is loose and inefficient, and lacks major productive capacity that the US has. Japanese presences are reduced to hovering around occupied islands. The US invasion of occupied Hawaii in a costly success. A second Pyhrric victory at Midway gives the US control of the east Pacific again; internment on the east coast is disbanded, though still in place on the west coast.

At this point, in 1947, after four years of tense but not particularly intensive war, the US develops atomic weapons. US policy becomes targeted use of atomic weapons to minimize US casualties. Many islands Japan holds are uninhabited except for the soldiers. The main US strategy now becomes naval superiority for blockades, and atomic bombing of the atolls. This is known as the Atoll Campaign - dozens of atomic weapons are used, and before each strike radio broadcasts are sent into all Japanese territory proclaiming the intended target. Because of US naval power, the atomic bombers cannot be stopped. Island after island is decimated, and the Japanese Empire is shown again and again to be impotent. This strategy works in US favor, since the majority of casualties are soldiers or support workers - all combatants. France and especially England, worried about colonial possessions near the Empire of Japan, support the US strategy.

Because of the absolute humiliation of Japan at the hands of the US, the regions of the Empire are once again able to develop nationalist movements. Japan is widely hated in Asia as a bully, and an impotent one at that. Attempted revolts in Vietnam, Philippines and south China spread Japanese security forces too thin. Many Japanese believe their Empire is doomed, and will be slowly taken apart by the US and various nationalists. The US is still unable to gather public opinion for a large troop deployment.

However, without an attack on their homeland, Japan will not surrender. The US then makes its most controversial move of the war: is advertises that it will drop atomic weapons of Tokyo in one week if no surrender is made. Tokyo's population largely flees, but one in eight people stay and many fervent supporters of the Empire move in, in order to pressure the Emperor to launch one last defense of the homeland. The Japanese try, but fail, to stop the bomber and Tokyo is obliterated. The failure of Japan to keep safe the capital city, and the two-year naval blockade of all Japanese possessions results in violent populist nationalist uprisings in the various Asian countries, which Japanese soldiers cannot resist and very rarely try. They prefer to be captured and ransomed back to Japan itself. With its provinces falling away as independent Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos-Cambodia, Korea and China, Japan must confront the truth: a conditional surrender, asserting the unity of the Japanese home islands and the Emperor's power, as restricted by a new constitution, as well as the renunciation of expansion or of any atomic/nuclear program.

The US never fully emerges from isolation; the Japanese-American war results in less than 50,000 US citizens dead, most killed in Hawaii or Midway or by disease in the process of supplying the Asian nationalists. The strategy succeeds because Japan's empire was built on an image as well as power. When the image is totally shattered by the bombing of Tokyo, and the power eroded by blockade, the Empire collapses. The first half of the war accounts for 85% of casualties and 80% of lost materials by the US.

The US heads off any assertion of European colonial power in Asia, and begins to 'adopt' China, giving it aid and advisers in order to balance it against Japan, which the US is sure will rise again. In a future war, China will be able to fight back against Japan. The postwar world is one in which Germany seeks to make allies in the loose sections of Russia, and where the largest conflicts are those over decolonization. Without the exhaustion of WWII, England and France take a decade longer to let go of their colonies. A rough Cold War-analog exists between Germany and the democracies, exacerbated by nuclear weapons.

So, all this might have happened if, way back in 1921, Herbert Hoover hadn't tried to be such a nice humanitarian.

Alternate History #3: Soviet Russia strangled in the cradle

At the end of WWII, the Soviet Union became a world power by fully utilizing the combined forces scattered about Eastern Europe, uniting the region under one relatively unified political ideology. But the USSR had nearly been killed just three years earlier, when the Nazi forces had almost taken the western half of Russia. This was not the first time the Soviets had been saved from near-death.

What happened:
In 1921, US President Warren G Harding had put an embargo on the newly-communist Russia in an attempt to force a regime turnover. A famine came upon the country, and Lenin was horribly worried that some new peasant revolution would overwhelm his government. At the last possible moment, Harding's Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, sent food aid to starving peasants in Russia in a humanitarian gesture. This may have been remembered by Stalin when he worked alongside the US in WWII, and it also might have saved the Soviet state.

What might have happened:
Either Herbert Hoover is more heartless and didn't push for food aid, or he's removed from the cabinet. In the second scenario, he wouldn't have had the clout to become President, so let us assume that he simply does nothing.

The effects:
Soviet Russia revolts again; the country is now known as a perpetually unstable place. An attempt at a democratic regime fails when the army steps in to 'correct the corruption' present among the Russian parliament. By 1929, the authoritarians have a firm hold on western Russia and Ukraine - the eastern section of the country is nominally controlled but the autonomous Republics conduct themselves like independent zones. Siberia especially has leeway; its warlords run not on military power but on laborers extracting its considerable resources. The military cannot get these materials without giving over large amounts of power to the Siberians. Siberia, too large to pacify, exists in a loose federation with European Russia.

Meanwhile, in central Europe, the Nazis come to power as they did in our timeline. Hitler promises to fix the mess made by the great depression. Without Stalin to modernize the country, Russia is a large but relatively backwards land. Its considerable Ukrainian farmlands are badly used, being allocated by the government to powerful supporters. Sometimes the Russian government verges on facism like Spain, Germany and Italy, but is full of too many communist and socialist sympathizers to go totally in that direction. Eastern Europe is a scattered mess of weak states.

Hitler is, as always, expansionist. However, lacking a counterbalance in the East he sees an easier route to power than through attacking France. He annexes Austria, the Czechs, allies with Romania, takes Poland easily, continues into the further East. France and England worry about Hitler, but he's only taking over Poland and other nonce countries; they cannot find a way to motivate their populations into a popular war.

Hitler always thought that conflict with France and England was inevitable; this made him too ready to attack France in our timeline. Upon taking much larger bites out of Eastern Europe, this Hitler finds them totally lacking in industrial capacity. Instead of beating down France, he finds that he must instead organize the building-up of the Eastern Reich. He sees the Reich as a grand project, much like how Lenin and Stalin saw the USSR - something inevitable, not to be rushed. His advisers intentionally sidetrack him into dealings in the East to keep him from biting off too much, namely a war with the West.

Italy wants to be a world-class power, and is good allies with Germany. It hopes to expand its African colonies, and begins troop movements that impinge on English and French lands. Hitler is inclined to fight France there and then, but his advisers convince him to discipline Italy. Germany sends a delegation to the Italian King, who stops Mussolini from making any further moves. There will be no grand Italian Empire; Germany has made it clear that only one fascist empire will exist. Italy may play sidekick, much like the current UK does with the US. Knowing that if they disobey, Germany will launch reprisals that will not be fought off by France or England, Italy assents to the lesser role.

Russia, seeing Germany crawling closer, makes an amazing move: it willingly grants independence to much of the country. Now there is a stronger government in Moscow that stretches into the Ukraine - the most productive zones. This government is not overtaxed in holding onto empty lands it cannot really police. It makes friends quickly with France and England and Turkey, the only powers of any importance who openly oppose the Nazis. Overwhelmed with a crushing industrialization program, the Reich sees Russia's consolidation as a natural boundary. This generation it will not take more than this territory; the historical project of the Reich means that it can think long-term. The USSR did a similar thing - not pressing for a military engagement because its own ideology told it that, post-WWII, the capitalists would fold. The Reich believes that the people it has conquered (often 'discovered' to be germanic people rather than slavs) will in the end be stronger than any other.

Russia is now in bits - small, fractious ones in Central Asia and the Caucasus and a large Siberian one in the far East. These bits are horribly weak, especially Siberia. All of Russia still subscribes to a federative idea but the small bits are de facto independent.

Next time: WWII with a super-Germany and a tiny Russia.

Alternate History #2: Wendish Paganism and Cathars gone wild!

The most successful Crusades, in terms of setting up hardcore Catholic states and holding them, were not in the Middle East but rather in Europe itself. The most successful of these was the Albigensian Crusade, in which the exceedingly popular dualist/Christian Cathars were, over the course of twenty years, totally wiped out.
Fifty years earlier, the Wends, whose paganism was apparently becoming highly organized and resistant to conversion, had been dealt a blow by an earlier Crusade.

What happened:
The Wends, unable to pull themselves together enough, were beaten badly and their lands destroyed. They did not present a serious threat again. Half a century later, Cathars took over southern France. They looked in good position to hold it, and their religion was percolating into the general population well. The Crusade destroyed their political power and returned Catholicism firmly to the region.

What might have happened:
If a Crusade against the Wends had happened earlier and been badly organized - like the People's Crusade (crushed utterly by the Turks) or the Children's Crusade (disbanded when the crusaders were sold into slavery) - the Wendish religion and political unity might have come together at last. This early crusade would have been beaten back, and the second, better funded one would not have made much headway either.

The effects:
A pocket of ethnically-based paganism survives in Eastern Europe, and a few good Kings and generals grow the Wendish kingdom. Anti-Christians from surrounding regions (who were often the elites - rich and better educated) fled to this Wendish kingdom. The main Crusading obsessions from 1150 onward are not in the Middle East but Wendland and its small slavic allies. However, Wendland has an advantage: it's small and headed by a King. It doesn't break apart into factions, since it's too small for any one bit to survive alone. The King is smoothly succeeded by his eldest son for quite a number of power-transitions. This is uncommon in Europe until about 1400, but small, homogeneous, fierce Wendland manages it.

With all their resources for Crusade heading to Wendland and making no progress, the fever of war is dimming around Europe. Then, Cathari nobles come to power in southern France. At this point there are three Catholic Kingdoms: the Holy Roman Empire, France and England. Spain is mostly Muslim. These three have their attention split between each other, Spain, Wendland, the Middle East and now south France. This is just too much.

France obviously wants to fix its Cathari problem, but the HRE is being bothered and worried by expansionist Wendland. England is trying to take Scotland and hold it, to fund Spain against the Muslims, to do something in the Middle East. The reason why the Catholics succeeded in our history is because they could deal with each problem one at a time. The addition of the Wends as a power undoes that. The HRE can't get its act together to held France out, and this time, the Cathars beat the French back. The HRE does contain Wendland for now, but the Cathari state of Languedoc has emerged. It makes quick friends with the Wends and Muslim Spain, as well as anyone who can protect it against a further Crusade, which it knows is coming.

Thirty years pass, and it's now about 1230. The young nobles of France and Germany have lived their whole lives with Languedoc free, and the urgency of destroying it is fading among the less faithful. Wendland had fallen on hard times with famines and such. France, without its southern ports, is noticeably weaker. The HRE looks at France and likes what it sees: a Franco-German war ensues which weakens both participants. This gives Wendland a bit of time to get strong again and lets Languedoc build more friendships and defenses. Crucial to this strategy is an alliance with the HRE, which the Cathars obtain. They harass French troops in the south, taking lands they don't hope to hold in order to aid Germany.

By a stroke of luck, the HRE army wins a couple big battles, but can't keep any territory. The battles are hugely expensive in money and men, and both countries are exhausted. France is so tired it can only take back about half of what the Cathars took, and with major effort. Languedoc is now strong, permanent. The HRE misses its big chance to eliminate Wendland while it's weak. North Poland and the Baltic states belong to it now. Wendland behaves half like Scandinavia - raids and quick strikes from the sea - and half like a standard European kingdom.

And this situation sticks around. There are six European powers, only three are Catholic.

• Catholic England, Germany and France
• Cathari Languedoc
• Muslim Spain
• Pagan Wendland

So what happens is that European history is much more religiously diverse. Historically, Muslim Spain didn't want to expand - they felt Europe was too cold for comfort. Wendland, I imagine, would shrink and grow over time, sometimes making large conquests southward but always restrained by the HRE to its west.
The most interesting of these new states would be Languedoc, because Cathars showed a remarkable ability to convert Catholics. Maybe northern Spain would go Cathar, leaving no Spanish Catholics in power.

Why all this establishment?

In almost every confrontation between an organized religion and an 'indigenous' one, the organized one has succeeded in converting the natives - or enough of them that the old system is fatally undone. This happened again and again, in vastly different times and places:

• The Turkic peoples of Central Asia took on Islam and moved away from their traditional shamanism
• The various African religions and tribal idea systems were absorbed, broadly, into either Christianity or Islam
• The Americas were Christianized over hundreds of years
• Europe, after the fall of Rome, was Christianized out of scattered pagan, polytheistic, druidic and shamanistic faiths
• East Asia was thoroughly taken over by a combination of Buddhist and Confucianist ideas which replaced ancestor worship, Korean shamanism, scattered Chinese paganisms, Indochinese idol worship

Each time, a 'codified' faith entered the region of an uncodified one. These 'loose' religions may have been at a disadvantage because they had no book to refer back to, or because they were simply never examined with academic rigor. Yet Islam spread among the illiterate Turkics, so the Quran was not such an advantage. And Greco-Roman paganism had hundreds of volumes dedicated to its study, but was not spared from the overwhelming wave of Christianity. It seems that the codified religions win out, given enough time. As we can see today, the very last vestiges of African Traditional Religion are being swept out - now all ATR is rolled up into Christian and sometimes Islamic faith. Fewer and fewer people are identifying themselves as practitioners of only ATR. I believe there is only one African country where the largest religious group identifies as only ATR, and they are not an absolute majority - just larger than either Muslim or Christian populations.

But does it have to be this way, historically? The evidence - which I have not come up with a theory to explain - seems to indicate yes. Of course, you can explain away any one case: the Americas were Christianized because the Europeans had the technology and the germs to prune away rebellious populations, etc. But you cannot explain away all the cases.

Do uncodified religions ever survive, then? Yes they exist in the US, but anyone who thinks the Native American Church (a native/Christian hybrid anyway) is a powerful movement is in need of medication. But uncodified religions do survive. It is my understanding (knowing very little about either) that both Indian Hinduism and Japanese Shinto crystallized out of various native paganisms. So, by that count, nearly one billion people do identify as some kind of aboriginal religious group.

I recently read a book called The Barbarian Conversion, which detailed the Christianizing of Europe after the death of Rome. Some stories in it are familiar to anyone who's taken a course in Medieval history - the conversion of the Franks, the various Germanic conversions, the eventual Scandinavian conversion. But there was one section that proved most interesting of all: Eastern Europe.

The book spent some time on the East, past the Germanic tribes where no intro course dares to go. In the area of Poland-Balkans-Baltic-Slavic people there was a tremendous diversity of religion. And somewhere in there was a group called the Wends, who are possibly the greatest religious what-if of Medieval Europe. They followed a relatively familiar polytheistic faith, similar to the Norse or Germanic tribes. Various gods for various jobs, with a head god who was most powerful. The Wends (who didn't call themselves that) held out against Christianity for quite some time, until a few military losses and royal deaths but Christians and Christian-sympathizers into power. Wendish paganism lost all real power in a short time after this confluence of events. What is so important is that just before this mess happened, the Wends were being politically united more like Western European proto-states, and their religion was being codified.

It seems that some anti-Christian Wends had thought very seriously about their faith and had done a lot of the work needed to call something codified. We don't know much about it, but organized Wendish paganism may have been a short time away from presenting a serious religious challenge to Christianity. The Wends were trapped between Eastern Orthodox Slavs and Catholic Germanics, so even if they'd managed to fend off the Christians their organized paganism (the first to my knowledge in Europe) wouldn't have been able to expand very far. But how different might Europe's history have been if there had been a pocket of non-Christian, even anti-Christian believers somewhere in the region between Poland and Greece?

Unitary States and Federal States

There are, broadly, two kinds of states in the modern world: Unitary and Federal ones. I live in the USA, a federal state. Ever since discovering the two opposing concepts of state organization, I wondered which I would prefer. Eventually I settled on a federal state, since I was already living in one. Now I've had an opportunity to rethink that idea.

To explain:
In a federal state, the subdivisions of a country (US states, Swiss cantons, Russian federated republics) have some measure of inherent authority - something the central government cannot take away. Federal states often emerged historically from the union of smaller groups either by assent or loose cultural/military conquest. Some federal states include Russia, the US, Germany, India - as well as some lesser lights - Sudan, Ethiopia.

In a unitary state, the government delegates authority to the provinces (as the subdivisions are called in most unitary countries). The provinces do not inherently reserve powers to themselves, but are given them by the central authority. Unitary states have often entered the modern world through revolution, and most communist or ex-communist countries are unitary. Leaders include France, Spain, the United Kingdom, China - and some lesser lights - Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Zimbabwe.



Scanning these two options, anyone who does not seek to be authoritarian might prefer the federal system. The idea that the central government gets to decide how much power to allocate the regions is too prone to abuse, you might say. But eventually, I became convinced that a unitary government is easier to handle, less prone to get out of hand. Of course, what follows does not apply very well to countries without strong democracies, where race or religion or military juntas dictate power distribution. But, let's remember, there are strong democracies among the federal and unitary.

To demonstrate my argument, let us look at the US (federal) and UK (unitary). US states know they have certain powers - setting state taxes, local law enforcement, etc. But over time the states, who were supposed to be primary, were gradually overwhelmed by the central government. No serious observer should argue with the idea that the central government has grown at the expense of the states (primarily through use of the commerce clause, I would argue). Why have states been unable to keep certain powers when challenged, even though the states say they reserve these powers? I would argue that US states don't come to each other's aid as often as they could. They suffer from a sort of diffuse responsibility: each time the central government tries to exert power over a state, the other states say, "well, that's not me" and do nothing. This is easier because it's not always obvious when one state's loss will be expanded into another state's. One day the government says it wants to regulate porn coming into Alabama and Texas does not stand with its sister state. The next decade, the government is striking down Texan bans on sex toys. Maybe if the states had teamed up, the government wouldn't have been able to pull it off.
In the UK, the four constituent countries (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) are guaranteed no powers. But in each, movements for greater regional autonomy are succeeding. Scotland may be seriously considering secession. When the central government of a unitary state wants to increase its own power, it must very publicly remove that power from the purview of the subdivision. This way, both central and subcentral governments know what they may do - unlike in the US where there is a constant pull over what each state may do and what the government may regulate within a state. The fight in a unitary state is very explicitly one over subdivision powers, and an attempt to strip them is obvious and will be fought because it clearly establishes precedent to take power from other regions.

As for the idea that federal states always collapse into the central government, that's obviously not true. Switzerland - the OG of federal states - has a weak central government, and German politicians must derive consensus from the subdivisions for policies that effect them. Meanwhile, France - the archetypal democratic unitary state - has a very low level of subdivision.

What a unitary state allows, in reality, is the ability of its citizens to find and maintain the level of autonomy they desire. Spain - unitary, democratic, highly regional - wants a lot, as does the UK in recent times. France wants very little.

Maybe the thing I don't like about federal states is the way the government can sometimes take away from its subdivisions without them clearly knowing it. It almost feels like cheating.

Alternate History #1.1

Continuing from the scenario in which Russian possession of Alaska sparks a North American Amerind revolt, I realized that there is a horrible ending for this line of history. In the last sentence of the post, I wrote a tossed-off line:

Assuming this crisis escalates quickly, the US could find itself
needing to put down reservation secessions by 1950. This is just five
years after the last of the Japanese internment camps closed, and it's
not totally out of the question that they could be reopened once more
for another US minority.

Now here's a thought. In real life, the validity of internment has never been repudiated. There were several Supreme Court cases about whether such a scheme was valid or constitutional, and none of them ended with a definitive verdict against internment. The most direct on the subject, Korematsu, explicitly allowed internment. Since the case was decided, it has been reevaluated. This seems wonderful for freedom-loving people. Unfortunately, the case was not overturned. Instead, the facts upon which the case was based were found to be lacking and the verdict was evacuated. What this subtly implies is that if the facts that certain military officials basically fabricated about Japanese Americans had been true, the internment would have been allowable.

Scared to death by communist Amerinds demanding and later receiving independence in Canada (in three different SSRs - bringing the American total to four Amerind SSRs - Alaska, Yukon, Nunavut and Saskatchewan) the US interns its own Amerind population. Or maybe they are offered a choice: leave the US and reside in the SSRs or be interned until the threat passes. "The Threat" can only be resolved by building a huge expensive border fence with the SSRs, which cover one third of the US's northern border.

The point of discussing internment so much is that if two different groups are interned within five years, and even in our current history the courts and government can't bring themselves to invalidate the strategy, then a much less secure US might find internment to be a legitimate strategy going forward.

Here's where things get truly horrible. Amerinds make up no more than two percent of the US population. Now it's the 1960s, and the SSRs are sealed off. Amerinds are freed but suspect to the white population. As in our history, the largest minority in the country begins to push for full rights. In the 1960s, the black population decides it is finally time to stand up.

Let us be honest: the Civil Rights movement had frequent socialist (if not communist) leanings. While anti-Civil Rights politicians argued that the blacks were manipulated by commies, this was never the case. Besides, it is entirely understandable why minorities might turn against capitalism: its systems had failed them and socialism or communist offered ways out. But that's never the way politicians saw it. For them, especially in the South, the black unrest was fully and utterly Communist with an uppercase C.

Now we have the following situation: blacks demand rights and reparations, many leaders are socialist or Christian socialist (much like Dr King). In this world, unrest can legitimately be met with internment if the people are scared enough. Blacks make up between 12-20% of the US population. Black internment would be, in raw numbers, the worst violation of American liberty since the passage of the 13th Amendment ended slavery.

Some might say that this could not happen. Of course, the threat to the US would have needed to be much more dire than it ever was in our history. But the Amerind SSRs scared this alternate America. It could indeed have carried out black internment. But could it have been done logistically? Could a country intern one in eight of its citizens? I think it could be done, but it would hurt the US economy and require sacrifices from the free population. Let's remember that when it was taken by Nazi Germany, Poland's population was 10-15% Jewish. Now there are 1,000 Jews in a country of 40 million. This is a testament to the logistical possibility of black internment. Just as with Jewish deportation to camps, many of the suspect group would assume their plight was temporary and it was not worth fighting. Many Jews gave themselves up to the German authorities; no doubt many apolitical blacks would do the same. And while black internment would not be a prelude to extermination, it would permanently dislocate blacks from the American economy and culture.

Remember where all this started? The purchase of Alaska? We've come a long way down a horrible road.
Moral of the story: If you can buy some useless territory, then do buy it no matter how much the other politicians tease you.

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Ethnic Nationalism and State Borders

What I've been wondering for some time is to what extent national borders should coincide with ethnic or religious groups. The lack of a reasonable ethnic division in Africa, for example, has probably caused or exacerbated many conflicts in the post-colonial era. But what would another way of doing it have been?

Had the English or French decided to carve up their empires in a reasonably ethnic manner (as Woodrow Wilson generally believed that borders and ethnicities are meant to coincide) that would have left Africa with something like 800 tiny states. Some ethnic groups have 100,000 members. Others have 500. The ability of a state of 100,000 to simply overwhelm the tiny ethnic state might have created more instability. With ratios that skewed, you just need one twentyeth of one percent of the population of the larger state to join the army (most states have armies in the 1-10% of population range). With this miniscule army, you could march into the small country and have each soldier kill just one enemy man, woman or child. This done, the smaller state would be totally wiped out. It would be the most complete genocide in the history of the planet, a 100% destruction of an ethnic group. Assuming neither country sat on oil or diamond resources, it might happen too quickly for other powers to do a thing. The large state could then claim and occupy the smaller one. It would be a horrific but brutally efficient lebensraum. The large state's ethnic group could grow faster using the space and food resources.

We've seen how most Western states won't stop a genocide, and there's no reason to think they would stop this kind either. At least by aggregating the many similar ethnic groups into larger states, the current system makes wars and genocides more costly. Any group that wishes to use their army to wipe another groups out will face massive disapproval from the international community, with sanctions and possible military intervention. This hasn't stopped genocides by any means, but maybe it has decreased the wholesale destruction of small ethnic groups.


As a historical aside, people often don't mention that during the Rwandan Genocide (which also took place in neighboring Burundi) there were retaliatory killings of Hutus in Tutsi dominated areas after the genocide began. And both groups killed the minority third ethnic group, the Twa pygmies.

But there were also colonial empires outside of Africa, in Asia and the Middle East especially. Asia's borders are, by and large, correlated with major groups. Central Asia (all the countries that end in -stan) is sliced up almost esclusively on ethnic grounds. While this area is nowhere near prosperous, it is also less ethnically violent. The biggest problem in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etcetera is not genocide, war or civil strife but corruption and government opression. Corruption and injustice we can deal with. Genocide is harder.

As for the Middle East: it has fewer groups than Africa, and so an ethnic/religious partition of the region would not easily cause the genocide scenario above. All the groups are large enough that no one can destroy the other overnight.


Credit: Ralph Peters & Chris Broz

Here's a proposal for just such a partition, made by militarily-connected men who know a thing of two. It slices up the Middle East in new ways that reflect the various entities that actually exist there. Unfortunately, the three biggest losers in this scenario are also the most powerful: Saudi Arabia loses some land to Jordan, loses its Holy Lands to the interestingly-named Islamic Sacred State, and its Gulf coast to the Arab Shia State. Iran and Turkey both lose territory to Kurdistan, but that territory is currently held by ethnic Kurds, so the partition at least makes some sense.


While most people probably look at the map for its Iraq-related regions, I'm more interested in the Islamic Sacred State. Imagine it truly existed - would the Wahhabi-inflected Saudis pack up an move there, allowing the Saudi Homelands to travel the modernist path using their oil wealth? If the most conservative members of the Middle East all packed up and moved to one localized area, the rest of the region might jump into modernization (though by no means secularization).


One last thought: Baghdad is listed as a city-state, like the ones from Classical Greece. I wonder why we don't really see too many of those anymore. City-States seem like workable solutions to the problem of disputed ethnic control over a major capital city.

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Alternate History #1

The concept of alternate history is something I am absolutely in love with. There are full-fledged novels based on some good alternate history concepts but I prefer to take a more academic look at the long range effects of certain events. Obviously, in changing any event you must determine what would happen as a result. This is easy to do when you are close in time to the divergence, or when the change is not very large. For longer effects, you obviously need a theory or supposition about why history happens the way it does.
Why, for example, did Japan and China, both more sophisticated in guns and ships respectively than Europe until very recently, both abandon their great technologies? Originally I thought that the abandonment was the choice of a single ruler. Had that ruler been killed or replaced earlier, the ban would never have crossed the minds of the next ruler. It turns out this is wrong, and that banning guns in Japan was more popular than I could have guessed. So as I hypothesize about history, I sometimes find out I was wrong and must abandon my old ideas.

Now for my first presentation. Background is all true, putting the situation in context, Divergence is the changed part, and Result is the effect on later history.

Background: It's 1865, the Civil War is over. France and Britain had been hostile to the Union government, seeking to protect cotton interests in the Confederacy. The Union did have one European ally: Russia, at that time the owners of a huge stretch of empty land known now as Alaska.
Southern discontents, seeing the Union and President Lincoln as tyrants, formed a conspiracy to assassinate top Union officials. Three men set out to kill the President, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.


Divergence: As it happens, the man tasked with killing the VP chickened out, and Seward was only wounded. Lincoln was indeed killed but the conspiracy had no long-lasting effect. Seward, who remained on in the Johnson administration, rewarded US ally Russia by buying Alaska for an amount of money most considered "folly." Now if Seward's assassin had just stabbed him a bit more soundly, the man would have been killed. It was his idea to buy Alaska, and his political capital that led the government to actually do so. His death would probably have headed off this chain of events.

Result: It's now 1948, and the world is looking uneasily at the US and USSR as they rise from the ashes of WWII and struggle for global supremacy. The Soviets have a tactic of funding communist parties in areas where the people are being exploited, as it is fertile ground for Marxists. Particularly worrisome to the US is the Russian presence in the Alaskan SSR, which shares a huge, indefensible border with neighbor and ally Canada. In addition, Canada's less than fair practices towards its indigenous inhabitants, the so-called First Nations, have made these various groups (who mostly live in the emptier western section of Canada that is near the Alaskan SSR) susceptible to communist calls for independence and resistance to imperialists.
The US worries about communists filtering into the northern states through Canada, which is resistant to crack down on First Nations in the west for fear of causing instability among First Nations in the east. [American Indians or Native Americans, from now on Amerinds] Amerinds, especially those with radical tendencies, being to filter out of the US up into Canada with two aims: some seek to join the revolution and secure part of North America for its aboriginal people, others want to simply outnumber whites and 'Amerind Unionists.' Once the population balance is in favor of the Amerinds, there are plans to put forth a referendum for independence. Since these regions are very sparsely populated, even small migrations make a difference.
French-speaking Quebec, which is friendly with France (where communist parties almost came to power in several different elections prior to the 1950's) is also interested in leaving Canada. The US regards these developments with horror, as the European-dominate British possession seems to be breaking apart into three parts, one of which is solidly capitalist (The East), one socialist-sympathetic (Quebec) and one nationalist-Marxist (The First Nation Territories). To ward off a break-up, the US vows to send troops to Canada if any revolutionary or secessionist activities take place.

There we have it: a totally different Cold War, caused by Russian presence in North America. I don't know enough to continue much further, but let's speculate what the worst outcome could have been for the US. It is possible that, in response to US deployments against Amerinds in Canada, the reservations within the US could have declared independence. Added up, US reservations are about four times the size of Rhode Island - not an easy area to pacify, especially since they are often in bad land over difficult terrain. Assuming this crisis escalates quickly, the US could find itself needing to put down reservation secessions by 1950. This is just five years after the last of the Japanese internment camps closed, and it's not totally out of the question that they could be reopened once more for another US minority.

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The Effect of the Party Primaries

The two American political parties have different ways of racking up delegates in their primaries, and it explains why John McCain will get to sit back and watch Hillary and Obama beat one another senseless for some time yet.
Observe:

Republican primaries are almost all Winner-take-all. If Candidate A gets one single vote more than B, A takes every single delegate. This means that someone who is popular in the first few states can end up with a huge chunk of delegate even before his opponents get more than a handful, even if this candidate will do horribly in the later primaries. Unless two opposing candidates both have regional power bases - one in the Midwest, another in the Deep South, the contest will be decided relatively early. The reason no clear winner emerged earlier this time around was not that there were different bases but rather too many candidates. As they cleared out, McCain began to win. The effect of this system is that it ends the contest quickly, so the Republicans can begin to campaign for President in earnest.

Democrats, on the other hand, have a more proportional system of handing out delegates. If you get 45% of the vote, you get nearly 45% of the delegates in most states (there are exceptions for both parties). This means that unless somebody has a huge power base in the early states, the contest will drag on and on. This is currently happening. Notice that having a base ends the contest for Democrats but prolongs it for the Republicans.

Personally, I don't like the winner-take-all system because it seems undemocratic. If A wins 51-49 in one state but loses 70-30 in another equally sized state, A and B end up tied in delegates, but B is far more popular overall. Meanwhile, I don't like the Superdelegate system the Democrats have either, again because it's undemocratic. It also seems to favor an established candidate (like Hillary) in an elitist manner. If Democratic voters truly want an establishment candidate, can't they vote that way without party moguls acting as Superdelegates?

Personally, I would prefer a primary system for both parties that was like the Democrats' system, but maybe with a small stable of extra delegates to reward the outright winner of each state. But then again, I'd also like to see the popular vote instituted for President, and that's not going to happen right away.

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