There are long term economic trends, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that those are what is "really important" (as some say). But so many of those economic trends are invisible to most of us, and only become visible at moments of crisis, and so our ideas about the defining factors within society aren't economically informed as much as their socially, culturally or politically informed. In large part, the stories we tell about what America's situation is, what the problems are, who the culprits are, how it needs to be fixed, etc, have their own history that's largely independent of or even runs counter to a lot of the economic factors. There can be a large chasm, in other words, between the ideological factors and the economic, materialist ones (or in Marxist language, between the superstructure and the base). I mean, why did racial inequality and gender/sexual inequality become the most salient fault lines of inequailty in the past 5 years? I expect there's no way to give a satisfying answer to that question, but if there were, the story probably wouldn't an exclusively economic one (although undoubtedly it'd play a role).
In general I think alt-history is pretty dumb, given the role that contingency and chance play in history. Usually alternative histories are just ways to blame the present's problem on some pivotal moment in the past, and to read one's own fanciful wishes for the present into some alternative timeline. Whatever, I suppose I'm guilty of that.