Honestly, with the tech Fallout America has access to? They should easily be able to achieve the kind of economic system that would make something like Communism a non-starter. Just because there shouldn't really be the kind of pressures that let something like Bolshevism seem like a viable path.
Exactly, but not in the way you think. The working and middle-class population enjoy a relatively prosperous existence with a good deal of political freedom and strong potential for social mobility - not exactly the sort of stuff that breeds revolution. Not to mention the strong cultural and religious stigmas against anything that even sounds like communism. E-USA is a country where every major town and city has its own nuclear war memorial, where elementary school kids watch documentaries about communist atrocities in Alaska (and across the world) and go on field trips to museums where they learn about the horrors of the post-nuclear dark ages that communism caused.
Especially with the state of their robotics, and that replicator tech, in the more developed areas most people would barely have to work and the dedicated human workforce would be those who, for them, work and their hobby are one and the same.
I mean, the picture of pre-War FO-USA we're shown isn't that of a paradise where people's jobs are synonymous with their hobbies, so I would have to differ. Even ignoring the major war that was going on and ensuing political authoritarianism, it certainly wasn't that.
Even the notion that it was on a straight shot to post-scarcity seems doubtful, when you look at what the replicator tech actually consists of. Essentially, glorified vending machines. And we don't know that the technology can be meaningfully scaled up, e.g. it could be that it takes exponentially higher levels of energy to rearrange larger quanties of matter, and the Sierra Madre network is at the limit of what a municipal grid is capable of reasonably supplying.
Now, the ubiquity of fusion power certainly points to a lack of energy scarcity - that's a given. But that's also the same situation we've had for decades OTL, just with less room to be concerned about running out of fuel or environmental problems.
That FOverse has sentient AIs also doesn't mean that all jobs will be taken up by them, given that:
A. Most are approximately the size of a bus.
B. Those that aren't are the product of hundreds of years wandering around a nuclear wasteland causing fluke unintended results (with seemingly high odds of violent insanity).
C. Those that aren't A or B are actually more like clones or vat-grown cyborg humans.
A society dependant on robots also has them as a single point of failure and is hence vulnerable to a computer virus, hacking attack or plain old negligence in coding the latest firmware upgrade patch bricking all your robot workers and soldiers.
Or if you ultimately remove all the kinks ... in a society where sentient robots do everything and humans sit around and fulfill their hobbies, the humans are redundant. At best, you get Rogue Servitors from Stellaris:
At worst, in the end the robots decide that it's a waste of clock time keeping the humans that they have to wait on around anymore. And since all functions of society are reliant on them, resistance wpuld be futile.
At any rate, there are good reasons to believe, and some fair bit of statistical evidence, that the automation rapture/armageddon isn't actually a thing that's going to happen IRL. FO-USA and E-USA aren't societies where robots replace human workers, but where they assist them. And such is not likely to change in the timeline of this fanfic.
Like, for anyone to really end up homeless or hungry in a Fallout America that has bounced back would require people to deliberately fuck everything up for themselves or to just flat out be incapable of taking care of themselves.
I mean, IRL most homeless are drug addicts or mental cases, so this isn't really any different from OTL. Superior medical technology does cut into their numbers though, certainly.
As for what the British got . . . I'd assume getting Britain back under their control, and even getting all of Ireland under their control again, would be more than good enough. On top of getting that bit of Northern France.
From what I recall, the British were much worse off than the Germans were. Like, Germany was already reclaiming a lot of its old territory while the British government was still basically just stuck in the London metro area.
They had London and Kent, basically, when they were first contacted. Technically it wasn't "Germany" also, it was a self-declared successor state to the Second Empire that controlled the Brandenburg region and parts of Pommerania, and was actually less "legitimate" than some East German remnants directly to their south in Saxony (but then East Germany was never anything more than a Soviet puppet, so they weren't really that legitimate). It was a situation roughly similar to the post-Napoleonic pre-Wilhelmine period, when most of the random little HRE micro-statelets had been consolidated but there was still no real unity (with a touch of the ideological craziness that blossomed during the fall of the European Commonwealth also in play).
