That natives everywhere (not just here) took to domestication of animals and plants immediately. Not sure it even took a decade for American tribes to become expert horsemen. We do have to note that great civilizations did spring up in the new world. Domestication of crops like maize and other animals gave rise to advanced empires like Aztecs and Incas, which were totalitarian, superstition-based empires. Yet - those totalitarian empires never achieved the power of the US in the New World. Just saying - that argues against your theory that totalitarianism could “just as easily” have achieved the same result.

Horses existed in the new world prior to reintroduction by Europeans. The peoples emigrating down from the Bering Sea didn’t domesticate them. They hunted them to extinction.

So, it’s possible a dictatorship could somehow have achieved America’s might. But it didn’t - a democratic republic was what ultimately led to the kind of unity that allowed the people here to punch above their weight until the country was fully formed, and become the most powerful polity in history (imo). Maybe not the longest lasting, but the most powerful.

Ideas like democracy didn’t exist here before Europeans. I think the theories in Guns Germs and Steel help explain why those had a chance to take root in Europe, so that they could be exported here.
[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 01/31/2024 11:40AM]