What If We Had Chosen the Commons?

What another world revealed: on imagination, memory, and the futures we were always capable of building

A parallel America chose care over conquest. No Cold War. No Reagan. A public future built from the ruins of war. We could have had it all—and with trillions to spare. The question was never cost. It was choice.

Opening Scene

In 1945, the war was won. The skies over Berlin and Tokyo fell silent, and for the first time in years, the world exhaled. America emerged untouched by the devastation it had helped end—its cities unscarred, its factories roaring with the after-echoes of total mobilisation. One out of every three manufactured goods on the planet bore its mark. Its soldiers returned not to ruins, but to ribbon-cuttings. Its wealth, its industrial capacity, and its influence were unmatched. Europe lay in pieces. Japan smouldered. The Soviet Union bled. The question was not whether the United States would lead the new world—but what kind of world it would choose to build.

That was the question in both timelines. Only in one, they answered it differently.

I didn’t always know there was another version. For most of my life, I walked this world—the only one I thought existed—with the familiar ache of misalignment, a subtle but unshakable sense that something vital had been lost before I arrived. It was the feeling you get when entering a conversation mid-sentence, when the map in your hand doesn’t match the terrain beneath your feet. I used to think it was personal. Now I’m not so sure.

The device—though “device” is too crude a word—entered my life without ceremony. It sat, unlabelled and half-covered in canvas, in a forgotten sublevel beneath the Library’s western wing. I had gone searching for records—congressional transcripts, budgets, blueprints. What I found was something else. It pulses when I’m near, like a tuning fork struck inside the body. It does not speak. It reveals. Images, sounds, sequences—not quite dreams, not hallucinations, but memories rendered in another register. Not imagined. Witnessed.

I’ve become, for lack of a better term, a historian of the forked world. I document what I can, though it resists capture. What it shows me unfolds in fragments, like half-buried film reels dredged from a river. But the contours are unmistakable. The divergence begins in the late months of 1945—not with a revolution, not with a coup, but with a decision so ordinary it almost went unnoticed: to redirect the force of war inward, toward healing, rather than outward, toward dominance.

In that other world, they looked at the factories and saw not tanks but trains. They saw tools, not weapons. They saw returning soldiers not as liabilities or costs, but as builders of the future. They launched what came to be known as the Grand Reconstruction—not a hand extended abroad, but one turned inward, to lift the people who had kept the engine running. Entire industries were nationalised with little fanfare. Housing was declared a human right. Land was redistributed through cooperative trusts. The railroad maps were redrawn, the medical schools reoriented, and the phrase “public good” was no longer met with a smirk.

At first, I assumed it was fiction—an elaborate fantasy generated by a mind desperate for justice. But the more I sat with the device, the more undeniable the coherence became. Their archives are not cleaner, but more generous. Their wounds are different. Their ghosts speak in other tongues.

And so, I write. Not because I believe we can return to that juncture, but because I want to remember that it existed. The question was not whether the United States could lead. The question was always—what kind of world would it choose to build?

In our world, we chose empire.

In theirs, they chose each other.

Act I: 1946–1955 — From Arsenal of Democracy to Garden of the Commons

The divergence began not with a headline, but with a blueprint. Not a revolution, but a reorientation.

In their world, the factories didn’t fall silent—they were transfigured. What once forged the hardware of war now turned to the architecture of care. Rail lines extended, not to move troops, but to connect cities to farmland, families to clinics, communities to one another. A new initiative was unveiled—not with trumpets or ticker-tape, but with quiet deliberation. They called it the Grand Reconstruction, a phrase borrowed from the fraternal orders that had shaped President Truman’s early life. As Grand Master of Masons in Missouri, he had once presided over rituals of moral stewardship and civic uplift. Now he brought that ethos to the nation itself.

Under the Grand Reconstruction, the same mobilisation that had defeated fascism was redirected inward—not toward containment, but toward cultivation. Federal contracts once bound to Boeing and Lockheed were repurposed for public housing, cooperative farms, and rail-centric cities. The War Department became the Department of Reconstruction and Transition, its new motto etched above the doorway in stone: That All May Dwell in Safety and Share in Plenty.

The GI Bill was rewritten to include not just tuition, but land grants, housing co-ownership schemes, and seed capital for worker-owned businesses. Veterans returned not to highways and cul-de-sacs, but to cooperative cities—designed by Bauhaus émigrés who had fled European fascism and now found purpose in building a different future. These cities were not segregated by red lines or exclusionary covenants. They were laid out along rail spines, walkable grids, and garden corridors—planned in consultation with feminist urbanists, disability activists, and former sharecroppers, whose knowledge of land, access, and survival had long been dismissed in our world.

In Appalachia and across the Deep South, land reform proceeded with an urgency our timeline never knew. Former plantations became agrarian co-operatives, jointly owned and democratically run. Public electrification, paused by corporate obstruction in our world, resumed here with federal support and local direction. Entire towns became self-sufficient in power and food by 1952.

And most astonishing of all: the Cold War never came.

Not because there were no tensions—there were—but because the United States, in that timeline, refused to sanctify its fear. Difference was not framed as danger. Truman, mindful of the staggering Soviet sacrifice at Stalingrad, chose diplomacy over dominion. In the early days of reconstruction, the architects of perpetual war were not seated at the table—they were in the dock.

At Nuremberg, alongside the architects of the Reich, stood John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and William “Wild Bill” Donovan—tried not for crimes of ideology, but for the wilful creation of the conditions that started the war, the prolonging of war for private gain, and crimes against world peace. The evidence was overwhelming: secret backchannels to Nazi industrialists, the deliberate sabotage of Allied coordination, and a postwar blueprint steeped in extraction and regime change. In our world, they became statesmen. In theirs, they were held to account.

Without their shadow over policy, the scaffolding of empire never rose. There was no Central Intelligence Agency, no doctrine of rollback, no quiet coup in Iran. The phrase “Iron Curtain” never caught on. Instead, that decade came to be known as the Cold Collaboration—a time of cautious but sincere cooperation between former allies to demilitarise, decarbonise, and deconcentrate power. There were summits instead of stand-offs. Shared scientific institutes, not stockpiles. Mutual suspicion, yes—but not yet the poisoned well of permanent surveillance.

It was not utopia. It was effort. It was grief, redirected. They moved not with speed, but with trust. Where we broke ground for bases, they planted orchards. Where we laid claim, they laid track. Where we centralised, they devolved. They did not move faster than us. They simply moved together.

I’ve watched all this unfold in fragments—each glimpse a tremor in the spine, each archive a psalm from a world that survived its own worst impulse. My hand trembled as I wrote. Not because it was perfect, but because it felt possible.

They had the same steel. The same ration books and weary generals. The same frayed flags. But where we summoned the gods of war to carve out dominion, they built a nation that no longer needed war to feel strong.

And they did it by beginning, first, with justice.

Act II: 1956–1980 — The Communal Century

If Act I laid the foundation, Act II revealed what it meant to be raised in such a house.

Their Baby Boom was not a marketing category—it was a generation born into a project of collective repair. They were not positioned as engines of consumption or foot soldiers in ideological battles. They were, from the beginning, understood as stewards. Raised not on slogans, but on structure. The children of veterans did not inherit trauma cloaked in silence—they inherited a world remade by their parents’ refusal to replicate the harm.

By the mid-1950s, the wartime medical corps had been reorganised into a vast, decentralised National Health Service. Rooted in regional councils and community-run clinics, it operated not as a bureaucracy but as a covenant. Health was no longer framed as a personal failure or private commodity. By 1965, their life expectancy had surpassed that of Scandinavia—not just in length, but in dignity. Maternal death all but disappeared. Mental health care was considered as ordinary as dental work. There were no GoFundMes.

Urban policy, too, was built on a different premise. Rather than redlining and racialised displacement, cities embraced Community Land Trusts, granting permanent collective ownership to the people who lived there. Public housing was neither warehoused nor pathologised—it was beautiful, local, and intentionally intergenerational. Architects competed to design structures that spoke to both dignity and ecology. The goal was never profit. The goal was rootedness.

The Civil Rights Movement still rose. It had to. But in their world, it was not criminalised, co-opted, or neutralised by assassination and surveillance. Black cooperatives, unions, and freedom schools were not just permitted—they were funded. Reparations were not theoretical. They were structured into land return programmes, direct cash transfers, and community economic trusts, administered with local leadership and federal backing. The memory of slavery and Jim Crow was not buried under textbooks—it was carved into monuments of grief, study, and repair.

By the 1960s, the moon was rising. But the Moonshot was no nationalist feat. In this world, space exploration became a shared human project, coordinated by scientists and engineers from the U.S., USSR, India, Brazil, Ghana, and Japan. The first images of Earth from orbit were released under the heading: No Borders from Here. Their Apollo wasn’t a flex. It was a fellowship.

The Vietnam War never happened. Without the Dulles framework, without the CIA, without the corporate imperative to secure rubber and tin, there was no justification. The funds—hundreds of billions in our world—were instead directed to a global anti-colonial alliance. Led by the formerly colonised, backed materially by the U.S. and USSR in unison, this alliance provided reparative infrastructure to Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. On their terms. Not through conditional loans or military training, but through solidarity and scale.

Even queerness found breath. In 1974, what we might have called “the first gay commune” was federally recognised—not as anomaly, but as model. Situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it became a demonstration site for alternative kinship, co-parenting, and the design of inclusive domestic life. What had once been hidden in code and camp was now taught openly in universities: the grammar of chosen family.

To write this is to grieve. But also, to marvel.

They had no genius that we did not. No abundance we lacked. No magic policies, no perfect leaders. Just different scaffolding. Different assumptions. A different answer to the question: What is a nation for?

Their Boomers grew up planting trees, not fearing drills. They read books about the commons, not about hiding under desks. They learned to speak in councils. They knew, early, that care was a structure—not a kindness, not a gamble, not a debt.

I don’t idealise it. Their world had its struggles. But they were different struggles. Human ones. Not imperial ones.

And still, I wonder what it must have been like to grow up with that kind of sky overhead. Not the one filled with warplanes and mushroom clouds. But one that promised no borders. One that whispered: This is all ours, together.

Interlude — Missing Birth

Somewhere in the reel of the 1970s, I grew curious.

I searched—not for news or policy, but for myself. A kind of vanity, perhaps. Or longing. I scanned the registries, the school records, the census archives. I combed through directories and birth announcements, half-expecting to find a familiar name, or at least a trace.

But I wasn’t there.

In that world, the conditions that drove my parents’ families to the United States never came to pass. There was no debt crisis, no land seizure, no bargain passage in a cargo hold. Their towns were never dismantled by multinationals or destroyed by war. Their cities never drowned in smog and hunger and "development."

They never left.

And so, they never met.

And so, I was never born.

For a long time, I sat with that—not in bitterness, but in a kind of reverent grief. It was not that I wanted to be there, exactly. It was that I saw what had been made possible by my absence. A world where survival didn’t demand migration. Where family wasn’t scattered by capital. Where no one had to claw their way into a country only to be told they didn’t belong.

I’m not jealous of that version of events. Just… humbled.
To be alive in this world is to be shaped by its ruptures.
To be absent in that one is, strangely, to feel its mercy.

And so I return to my watching.

They enter the 1980s not with despair, but with abundance.
And I, a ghost of what never needed to be, continue to listen.

Act III: 1980–2024 — Resilience, Not Scarcity

The 1980s arrived not with austerity, but with architecture.

Not the sleek towers of speculative capital, but the textured, local structures of social abundance—cooperatively designed, regionally maintained, and bound together by a shared belief that survival was not a competition.

Reagan never rises.

In that world, there was no stage for him. No backlash waiting to be weaponised. No moral majority aching to be seduced. There was no Southern Strategy because the South had been offered more than symbolism—it had been offered land, resources, autonomy. There was no neoliberal pivot, because the economy had never been handed over to speculators in the first place. The 1980s are remembered not as a time of extraction and excess, but as the golden age of post-scarcity design.

The climate transition began in earnest by 1990—not as panic, but as planning. Nuclear energy, reimagined through a public safety lens, formed the base load. Solar cooperatives, regional water trusts, and federated ecological councils stitched together a new grid—resilient, redundant, relational. Fossil fuel companies had long since been nationalised, their profits redirected toward climate repair and job guarantees for every former roughneck and miner. The planet was not healed. But it was not hurt so deeply.

Libraries evolved—slowly, steadily—into the beating hearts of their communities. No longer just places of quiet study, they became knowledge hubs in the truest sense: offering childcare, eldercare, after-school programmes, mutual aid kitchens, fabrication labs, archives of culture and memory. You could learn to code or cook, apply for housing or plant a garden, meet a doula or take a poetry class—all under one roof. They called them Commons Halls, though most still used the older word: library.

And in 2008, there was no crash.

There were no too-big-to-fail banks, because there were no banks in that sense at all. Finance was cooperative, accountable, local. Wall Street had long since been converted into a museum, where schoolchildren wandered through exhibits on speculative bubbles and the violent absurdity of algorithmic trading. What we call “the economy” was, in their world, merely the term for how people shared what they needed to live.

When COVID-19 arrived, as it did for them too, it was met not with denial or hoarding, but with abundant care infrastructure. Entire regions had pandemic response councils in place since the early '90s. Every person had paid leave. Food delivery was immediate and free. Childcare was reallocated, housing stabilised, and care workers given leadership roles in shaping the national strategy. Decisions were made democratically—not imposed by executive order or corporate algorithm, but through citizen assemblies, guided by disabled and immunocompromised elders who had helped design the protocols decades earlier.

They mourned their dead, of course. But they never forgot each name.
And no one died alone.

This was the world they carried into the third decade of the 21st century. Not perfect. Not utopian. But resilient, interdependent, abundant. Their guiding ethic was no longer growth—but stewardship. Not dominance—but repair. They understood that the world was not something to own. It was something to tend.

Closing: Reflections From the Parallel Now

It’s 2024, and a teacher walks home along the Los Angeles Greenline. Her name isn’t famous, but her students know it by heart. They say it with trust.

She lives in a six-unit cooperative above the Commons Hall, where the roof collects rainwater and the walls remember who built them. Her walk takes her past fig trees, the free pharmacy, and the café that serves oat porridge for three dollars and never asks what name you used to go by.

Her pronouns are she/her. Always have been here. No one made it a fight.

In the morning, she teaches primary science. In the afternoon, she co-facilitates a queer youth council with two other educators—one Deaf, one nonbinary. The classroom is full of sensory-friendly furniture, fidget tools, and unpoliced joy. Her students learn about ecosystems, mutual aid, and fungal networks. They know that care is not a reward, but a responsibility.

Last week, she took paid leave to recover from top surgery complications. No one blinked. Her position was covered by another trans educator—someone she trained, someone who knows the rhythms of her classroom. Her job was not threatened. Her dignity was never on trial.

There are still hard days, of course. She’s human. Some lessons flop. Some kids cry. She still gets misgendered—rarely, but it happens. But the scaffolding of her life does not collapse under that weight. The system holds her. Not perfectly. But enough.

No one asks her to prove her worth. She is not debated on morning news. No parent petitions for her removal. No camera waits to catch her “inappropriate conduct” for reading a story about chosen family.

She is not afraid.

And watching her, I realise: that is the difference.

Some say this world was never possible.

But I’ve seen enough now to know the truth: it was not impossible. We simply chose against it.

Not all at once. Not with a single war.
But slowly. Relentlessly. One military budget at a time.

That was the pivot. The war economy. The great siphon. The nation’s wealth bent toward threat, not care. Toward punishment, not protection. We spent $45 trillion on death and then asked where the money was for housing. For healing. For classrooms where trans women could teach in peace.

All of this—all of it—was possible. With trillions to spare.

We could have had co-ops instead of evictions. Clinics instead of carceral contracts. A generation raised in abundance, not crisis.
We could have built a world that knew the difference between safety and control.

And maybe—if only for a little while—we still can.

But only if we remember the question.
And ask it again, this time like we mean it:

What kind of world will we choose to build?

Post-Script: The Numbers Were Never the Problem

Between 1946 and 2024, the United States spent an estimated $35 to $45 trillion on war and war preparation. Not just the Department of Defense, but the sprawling constellation of intelligence agencies, nuclear arsenals, military contractors, foreign bases, veterans’ care, and interest on war debt. It is the single largest sustained public investment in American history—bigger than the New Deal, bigger than the Interstate Highway System, bigger than Apollo, Medicare, or public education combined.

For comparison: a fully public national health service over the same period would have cost roughly $10 to $12 trillion, with savings on private insurance, hospital administration, and pharmaceutical profiteering factored in. Free public college and trade school could have been funded for less than $3 trillion. A rail-based national transit system, replacing car dependency and reducing emissions, could have been built and maintained for around $4 to $5 trillion. Community-owned housing, agrarian land trusts, publicly owned energy, paid family leave, and fully funded libraries would have required another $6 to $10 trillion combined—depending on how boldly we built.

All of it—every system of care and freedom and interdependence imagined in that other world—could have been ours for less than what we spent on empire. With trillions to spare.

This isn’t fantasy. It’s arithmetic.
The numbers were never the problem.

The question was always the same:
What kind of world were we trying to buy?