Some thoughts:
Although Walt Irving is amusing in terms of just how badly mistaken he is, I feel like he's almost a caricature, rather than an actual person. In particular, the way he cites his own books as evidence for why he's right, rather than any actual physical evidence, is ludicrous. If this is intended as a jab at modern academia, it's also pretty drastically wide of the mark.
I mean, from his (and the NCR's perspective) the E-USA is saying they've reformed and are being all democratic and all while:
A. Denying what Richardson did.
B. Continuing to build statues of and naming capital ships after him.
C. Having his descendants still play a major role in politics.
D. Making belligerent noises toward the NCR and allies.
E. Intelligence from within and reports from those fleeing recently-annexed regions still give evidence of brutally totalitarian behaviour.
F. Making ludicrous propaganda claims along the lines of what comes out of North Korea IRL.
So why shouldn't Irving be skeptical? Remember, the NCR has even less inside knowledge of E-USA than we had of the USSR during the Cold War (at least we had embassies in Moscow):
During the
Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in
Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as "First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper
Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.
To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national
Communist parties, looking for omissions and discrepancies in the ordering of objectives. The description of state visits in the Communist press were also scrutinized, as well as the degree of
hospitality lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized
ritual, in that it noticed and ascribed meaning to the unusual absence of a policy statement on a certain anniversary or holiday.
[5]
In the German language, such attempts acquired the somewhat derisive name "Kreml-Astrologie" (Kremlin
Astrology), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong.
Any analysis is inevitably going to involve large amounts of guesswork and extrapolation from limited data, especially when large amounts of the data are treated as dubious.
n particular, by seeking to reconstruct the US as it was pre-war, the story seems to disregard all the ways in which the pre-war US was fundamentally corrupt and deeply flawed
Was it corrupt and flawed? Certainly. Fundamentally so? Not, at least insofar as all countries will inevitably be corrupt.
Indeed, Fallout as a whole is a brutal satire on capitalism, consumerism, and Western imperialism.
I mean, it also accepts them as facts of life, as I do.
I think it would have been more interesting to consider what actual changes could have been made to prevent the same problems from arising. With regards to the political system, there could be increased government transparency outside of matters of national security, and increased protections against gerrymandering and voter suppression.
I mean, you would see less gerrymandering in E-USA's districts, generally because politics is far less partisan.
For voting, FPTP could have been ditched in favour of AV, STV, or any number of fairer and more proportional alternatives, killing the two party system outright.
FPTP has its benefits, and there are good arguments in favour of a two-party system.
The House of Representatives (and the Electoral College), could have been altered so that district sizes were the same across the different states, so that seats were actually proportional to population, as they were intended to be.
A problem with that is that the HoR now serves as the Commonwealths' contribution to the legislature. As for the EC there is an idea that all the States should follow Maine's example IRL (and in FOverse) but political reform is in general hard to do while also carrying out major military and industrial build-ups and the general consensus is that such should be left up to the States. Political capital isn't an infinite resource.
The Bill of Rights could have been updated with far more explicit defences of human rights and civil liberties
I don't really see a reason why E-USA should want or need to update them. Judging by the Fallout series, pre-War America was already racially integrated, had women in the workforce (and in front-line military roles) and tolerated sexual minorities.
To prevent big corporations from amassing too much power, and avoid repeating the corruption embodied by Poseidon Energy and others, there could be greater restrictions on campaign finance and lobbying (e.g. no more super PACs).
I mean, politicians have to get campaign funding
somehow.
Equally, to prevent them from exploiting consumers, there could be stronger antitrust laws, restrictions against price gouging (e.g. massive cost inflation of pharmaceuticals), increased workers' rights, and more.
I mean, there are anti-trust laws, workers' rights protections and such. I just don't focus overly on them.
The incestuous Military Industrial Complex could have been dismantled, and prevented from influencing army officers and politicians.
Dismantle the military-industrial complex? While prepping for a major war? I mean, as I noted, the establishment in E-USA's Legislature would prefer to deal with the NCR later rather than sooner. Partly because of the risks of war, partly because actually incorporating the old States back again would put them at the mercy of
actually having constituents (also with no continental threats there'd be no need for a massive land army and lots of military contracts would go bye-bye).
Massive IRL issues, like healthcare (with some 20 million still without coverage, and another 60-80 million underinsured) could have been solved with a single-payer system, or even by creating some kind of NHS. IRL the US is the only advanced country without Universal Healthcare, despite spending twice as much as a share of GDP as most countries do (including public and private healthcare, by the way), and also has worse metrics for pretty much everything, from life expectancy to maternal and child mortality.
There is a National Health Authority, though it's more reminiscent of the more market-based European systems IRL (the NHS and other systems based on the Beveridge Model are
far from ideal).
It seems strange that someone like Autumn both wouldn't have recognised those problems, and wouldn't have tried to fix them, particularly when he and other senior Enclave members were well aware of just what Richardson and co had attempted to do prior to the destruction of Enclave Station One and Navarro. They had an opportunity to fix the United States, and despite knowing everything they did, they chose to restore it just as it was, warts and all.
I mean their POV (and mine) was that Richardson's actions were not an inevitable result of pre-War America's flaws but a contingent series of events that had relatively little to do with them, seeing how pre-War America was not a racist country and did not see its war with China as a racial one. I mean, E-USA knows pre-War America was flawed. It also views it as the best that could be achieved.