McCarthy isn't the best example of an unapologetic liberal as he voted for Reagan. Which probably puts him in common with Stennis TBH.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I mean sure but even in our timeline it didn’t stop Democrats from getting elected to offices statewide and federal in conservative states until the early 2010-s and that’s in our post-Reagan world. Technocratic Nixonism which seems to be where the Republican Party is heading can appeal to a broad group of people at the national level in presidential elections but it doesn’t work to overturn the democratic political machines that ITTL are going to stay staunchly embedded in a lot of the country.
Trends and laws of averages always obscure oddities of places electing unexpectedly conservative/liberal people for their demographics for particular local reasons, including a strong local party machine, this is common across the democratic world, though these machines tend to be vulnerable to sudden and unpredictable collapses because they are a swimming against those underlying trends. The electoral map of the GOP sticking with Nixonism vs a more Trade Union/White Working Class centric Democratic Party as the dominant flavours of political thought in America will be different from OTL, including I suspect more purple and larger swings as the gaps between the parties, which will make it easier for local oddities to continue. New Hampshire for example is probably going to be at the very least a lean R state if not an outright Red state, albeit one that flips in Democratic landslide years in this tl.
Joe Lieberman, Larry Macdonald, and Ed Markey are elected house democrats ATP ITTL (Lieberman being newly elected in 1980). And James Eastland, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Gary Hart are Democratic Senators ATP ITTL, the debates over bills would be so amusing to watch in both legislative branches. I imagine there’d be a lot of “How in the world are these people in the same political party” debate moments for the Dems especially in the early 80s when the bulk of legislation is getting passed. I do not envy Tip O’Neill….
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part III
The Soviet-Swedish War - Part III
Yegor Legachev, Andropov's successor, acknowledged in 1992 during his second six-year term as General Secretary of the Soviet Union that ordering additional airstrikes on Sweden was an "error," a remarkably soft choice of words considering the strategic debacle that the events of late on October 28th and then on the 29th would prove to be for the Soviets and mark an irreparable blow to their prestige that saw their hold over their Eastern European satellites steadily erode into the early 1990s over the remainder of the decade. The second wave of Soviet aircraft, both fighter-bombers and tactical bombers with escorts, that crossed the Baltic from Estonia, Kaliningrad and East Germany was intended to step up the pressure on Swedish forces by not merely attacking the vicinity of Karlskrona but executing what Ustinov had assured his colleagues would be a "decapitating" strike on the vast majority of Swedish military infrastructure with carefully-chosen targets going beyond radar stations and airbases in Scania to include the entire island of Gotland, rail and road bridges across most of Sweden's industrial belt, air bases near Linkoping and Uppsala, and even army commands at Kungsangen near Stockholm and Revingeby near Lund. For the time being, Ustinov elected not to send additional air assets across Finnish airspace to attack Sweden's northern air and army bases or electrical infrastructure carrying power from hydroelectric dams across the mountainous, rugged north, but he did at 1700, just as Soviet planes entered Swedish airspace and prepared to attack, request that the Soviet embassy in Helsinki demand from President Koivisto military consultations within three hours time.
The first wave of Soviet attacks had been small and relatively precise, and had broken through largely thanks to the element of surprise and that much of the Flygvapnet had not yet been scrambled, but also not destroyed yet on the ground. Six hours later when the second wave arrived, however, the third-largest air force in Europe was very much airborne and its pilots furious and ready to prove their mettle. Over the course of the ensuing two hours, the Soviet planes did do serious and genuine damage both to the Swedish planes and to Swedish infrastructure, in particular those flights intended to strike at rail and road chokepoints and bridges, but at an enormous and humiliating cost. In particular, over the skies of Gotland, the Swedish Air Force was supported by the Navy, and in total over thirty Soviet planes were shot down, many into the sea without a visible bailout by a pilot, while the crucial radar installations and frontline runways on Gotland were left largely intact. While airfield and army command infrastructure around Uppsala was badly damaged and one of the runways at Sweden's main civilian airport at Stockholm-Arlanda was successfully cratered, the second wave failed most of its first and second order objectives other than shooting down close to a fifth of the Swedish Air Force, though a disproportionate number of pilots bailed out and survived than on the Soviet side, where somewhere approximating a hundred planes, including heavy bombers, were downed.
The losses for Sweden were, to put it mildly, staggering, but the bloody nose suffered by the Soviets was worse. This was an air force that was intended to support the mighty Red Army in rolling over hapless and supine NATO forces across Central Europe at will should the balloon ever go up; in two fights during the same day, the Soviet Air Force had been fought to an effective draw, if not worse, by little Sweden. As darkness fell over Western Europe and Soviet planes flew home to lick their wounds and regroup, and Sweden's tired pilots were given a temporary reprieve, the Politburo met again to consult and decide on a further course.
Andropov and his allies such as Legachev and, surprisingly, Grishin argued against further attacks. The Soviet Union's point had been proven, Sweden had been thoroughly punished, and it was time to step back and be satisfied. Clear in Andropov's grim advocacy for a stand-down was that the two attacks had clearly not gone according to plan and that the Soviets were embarrassed enough already; it was politically and ideologically inconvenient to admit such a thing publicly, especially after only one day, but everyone in the room in the Kremlin that night understood the subtext.
Ustinov's counter was strongly subtextual in its drawing upon history as well, calling upon those present to "recall Barbarossa was not countered in one day," a hilariously exaggerated accounting of Swedish capabilities. Ustinov pushed for a sustained, round-the-clock bombing campaign of Swedish military installations and critical infrastructure for the next seven days, a suggestion that only Chernenko seconded but appalled most everybody else. The consensus emerged, thus, of another attack the following morning once the Baltic Fleet was in place to act in support, concentrated again on Gotland, coastal installations and this time the considerable network of air hangars and bases across Sweden's isolated north that served as a sort of national redoubt, this time crossing Finnish airspace to do so. Andropov begrudgingly agreed, but it did not escape the back of his mind that one more attack may be all the Soviets were able to muster before NATO became even more involved...
I am sure there will be plenty of material sent through various neutral countries to the Swedes. Most of the NATO markings will be scratched off.
Win win, they get to see how it works on Russian hardware, and possibly gets rid of the older stuff.
Huh? I get that Andropov can’t just rule by decree, but you’d think he’d show a bit more backbone in a situation like this. He was reluctant to attack Sweden in the beginning, and the losses the USSR has suffered would seem to prove him right. The political side of things makes a peace settlement tricky, but it’s bizarre to me that a couple of warmongering morons are able to drag the rest of the Politburo into such a foolish course of action with no clear exit strategy.
Got to give them warmongering morons the rope to hang themselves and give Andropov the perfect excuse to purge them.
Also they might be in a mood to just purge him. They already picked a fight with Sweden, starting a coup might not be a bad idea.
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
I don’t see a Soviet coup short of a WWIII scenario, which could theoretically result from this though KingSweden’s future hints seem to suggest this war is ultimately just a brief flashpoint.
man this war is going to have such an impact on cinema- its just straight up an underdog story where the plucky fighter pilots of a democracy stand up to an evil empire. i think this would make movies like top gun much more popular, and it could even have an impact on Return of the Jedi (still one year out)- maybe the space battle of Endor gets more focus
Sweden pretty surely can recover its damages in few years. Bigger problem has Soviet Union which has lost lot of respects on eyes of western communists and other left-wing groups. And pretty certainly Sweden joins to NATO ASAP which just weaken strategic situation of USSR further.
It's more that nobody in the at this point overly consensus-driven Politburo wants to be the person to admit that Sweden has punched them too hard to respond and everyone is sort of just stuck while they look for a way to save face. Andropov is more skeptical than the ultra-hawks here, but he's not a peacenik by any means. Also consider that Andropov and Ustinov were tight allies in the Brezhnev era and Ustinov was key to Andropov getting the first chair.
Good point! I think it definitely would have an impact.
Yeah, definitely not. The KGB or Soviet Army isn't going to coup freaking Andropov out because of this debacle. It took a lot for August 1991 to happen; this isn't even close.
A good old fashioned purge by Andropov at the end of all this, especially putting his former friend Ustinov out to pasture, is much likelier.
Exactly. Sweden's still a Top 15 economy at this point and will surely get plenty of aid, especially once it goes into NATO
This makes me wonder, in Western popular opinion, in terms of personalities who in the Soviet government, is getting the heat for this?
Blame is probably pretty generically aimed just at “the Kremlin”, though Andropov as the face of the franchise is probably collecting a uniquely high amount of flack. At the very least, Western fears about him are surely seen to have come true, and whatever goodwill he built with the success of the Moscow Games is kaput