Wouldn't it be simpler for Andropov to just tell Wojciech Jaruzelski to follow the Soviet Union's new economic model?
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Indeed that’s the easiest solution (and would incorporate a fair amount of what the First Solidarity wanted, anyways, before Martial Law radicalized Walesa), though I guess that depends on to what extent Andropov can “tell” him to do anything. The USSR was good at keeping their satellites in line geopolitically for many decades but their ability to dictate internal matters had eroded substantially by 1981 (and indeed 1968 demonstrated the limits of Soviet coercive soft power that didn’t involve T-64s)
Thank you friend!
What’s Edwin Edwards up to ITTL? I’d imagine a fairly successful term-limited governor could get some kind of position in the White House cabinet. John Gilligan was a part of the Carter administration and I’d imagine Robert Straub could get a position with the Carey Administration
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I suppose Rosty might actually luck out in 1994; particularly seeing as its the Republicans not the Democrats who are probably going to be in power. Then again, it's possible he gets swept out earlier, maybe in 1990 or 1992.
Straub seems like a potentially good fit at Interior, maybe as head of BLM, or who knows maybe if Udall's Parkinsons gets bad and he has to hang up the spurs Straub takes over here.
As for EWE, much as I love the man's colorfulness, he never struck me as somebody who wanted to leave his carefully cultivated power base back home in the Bayou
Rosty only went down because he ran again despite being under indictment; the GOPer who beat him in '94 was the ultimate wave baby and got knocked out the following cycle by Blago (damn, that district sure has had some... special Congressional representation. Especially since Blago's successor in that seat was Rahm, whom as I understand Chicagoans absolutely love now)
The more I learn about the Warsaw Pact the more the traditional western view of them as submissive Russian puppets isn't accurate. Not to suggest they were in any way legitimate governments but that communism brought a particular set of ideological and political blinkers that adds a lot of nuance.
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Oh, absolutely. And it’s interesting how divergent the various WP states really were in their internal politics and in their relative standards of living.
Though speaking of 1990s, it'd be interesting to see how a Democratic AG and Justice Department handles the various redistricting suits between Civil Rights organizations who want maps that increase African-American representation and white Democrats who were holding on like grimdeath in Southern state legislators off of the power of party ID and downballot lag who wanted a base of rock solid black Democrats to shore up their seats. Poppy's admin sided with the Civil Rights groups, mostly because it was good politics both in terms optics and in giving the GOP easier inroads into state houses.
A Democratic Administration, especially one which might be led by a Southern Democrat will have a trickier time navigating the gordian knot between maximizing democratic partisan advantage while increasing the number of African-Americans in congress.
Southern democrats in 1980 have probably already redistricted their seats to include in African Americans or give them more representation. With the incredibly high unemployment tearing through the south in the late 70s ITTL poor to working class southern whites are going to prefer more populist candidates who are going to be on average more moderate on the race issue. So you’ll see districts gerrymandered to exclude wealthier white areas/suburbs that would be Republican friendly from being prominent.
The backlash to the ford administration will allow southern dems to incorporate black voters in the late 70s-early 80s without alienating the poor to working class voters much smoother than they were able to IRL
I think that's very optimistic. Ford's second term will give the Dems a cycle or two of delay but as with the "moral majority" the shakeout of the end of the Fifth Party System will happen. The backlash against a tired Dem administration (which will happen eventually) triggering a GOP landslide will see those legislatures flip.
If we are talking about the moral majority as a broad concept they won’t support the Republican Party nearly to the fanatical level they did IRL for a Republican revolution of 1994 to be close to possible ITTL. Modest gains sure but Republicans don’t have the infrastructure in the south to pull off a true takeover. A lot of the young(politically) conservatives elected in the 70s to early 80s that made the Republican takeover possible in the 90s have been butterflied away. Gingrich isn’t gonna be a factor, hell McConnell is very likely not going to be in office. Southern Democrats have a much higher talent pool and like 10x larger organization than southern republicans. It’s going to be a long slow process for Republicans to truly become a real competitor to the Democratic Party in the south
From a presidential electoral perspective sure at some point a democrat will lose an election likely in 1992 but that’s not equivalent to Republicans taking over the southern legislature’s
ur underestimating how reactionary the south can be if the they view a president as a adversarial force. Remember the 1982 recession has basically been sped up to between 1978 and 1980. The unemployment numbers IRL’s 1982 were horrible. There isn’t a single southern state that had lower than 5% unemployment in IRL 1982 and TTL’s 1980 has higher unemployment than IRL 1982. And the Ford administration is getting blamed for this incredibly high unemployment because of their coordination with the Fed jacking up the interest rates.
For example in 2008 Mark Pryor a dem senator from Arkansas went from winning 78% of the vote in 2008 to getting 39% in 2014. When southerners are pissed they will spite vote at EXTREME levels
There were cases even in the early 1990s that asked SCOTUS to find partisan gerrymandering illegal; one could see such a case arising to kneecap such efforts, perhaps to the chagrin of Black Democrats, as a way for PresiDem 1988-92 to avoid having to get involved in that matter between the white rural Dem machine and Black voters.
Perhaps in part that dismay leads to some lowered Black turnout in 1992, in part explaining the GOP's return to power that year?
Depends on at what level. The shakeout of the end of the Fifth Party System was definitely baked in to an extent as early as 1964-72, as Goldwater's breakthrough and the Southern Strategy's success suggests, but a 1994-style wipeout could definitely be delayed (say, until 2002ish, when there's a Black President in the WH...)
Brace for Impact - Part I
Brace for Impact - Part I [1]
The history of Bangladesh had been a sordid and bloody one, with the nation state tracing its immediate origin to the Partition of Bengal in the early 1900s by the British Viceroy Lord Curzon. [2] After the Partition of India, in an effort to form an Islamic Republic of Pakistan united by shared sectarian brotherhood in South Asia rather than an ethnic nationalism or even geographic coherence, the Muslim eastern half of Bengal had been split off from its Hindu-majority west and made the territory of "East Pakistan," united - in theory, at least - harmoniously with the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan with India wedged in between.
To say this arrangement had not worked out would be an understatement; despite being both wealthier and more populous, East Pakistan saw Urdu imposed as the state language, the Western half receive the lion's share of government officials, patronage and direct spending, and for good measure endured contemptuous discrimination as a result while treated little better than an internal colony. In 1968, as in much of the world, unrest erupted from a grab-bag of not just left-wing students but also Bengali nationalists and disenchanted civil servants tired of the ongoing arrangement. Sensing a crisis was brewing, the Pakistani government held elections intended to be equal, which the Awami League of Bengal practically swept, entitling them to form a government, only for Pakistan's aristocratic Zulfikar Bhutto of the populist-nationalist PPP to announce he would boycott the Parliament, thus triggering the Bangladesh Liberation War, in which Pakistan's military dictator Yahya Khan ordered the army to crush the Bengali revolution. India would in time intervene and destroy the Pakistani forces, but only after between five hundred thousand to upwards of three million civilians had been slaughtered in what could credibly be called an intentional genocide of Bangladesh by Pakistan.
The aftermath of the war-torn, devastated country saw the Awami League's populist, socialist leader Sheikh Mujibur "Mujib" Rahman rise to power and consolidate influence beneath himself in fairly un-democratic fashions, much as Bhutto himself was doing to the west in a Pakistan cowed by its disastrous performance and cleavage in two. [3] Mujib rapidly went to work instituting not only much-needed land reform but also crushing his political opposition, nationalizing several industries that quite noticeably did not include those owned by certain Western interests and doling out their ownership to his key cronies. With the economy in tailspin, disgruntled army officers who were not allowed in on the grift eventually staged a coup and slaughtered him and most of his family on August 15, 1975. Western leaders, despite having enjoyed cordial relations with Mujib, were not sad to see him go - he had imposed a one-party state seven months earlier that had failed to quell a simmering Maoist insurgency in the countryside, and had presided over a crippling famine in 1974 in what was already one of the poorest countries in the world.
A chaotic rotation of generals followed the August 15th Incident and subsequent unrest, culminating in General Zaiur Rahman's usurpation of the Presidency in early 1977, which quickly stabilized matters. Rahman allowed Mujib's daughter back from exile, expanded the police forces and military, and quickly set about on an aggressive developmentalist path meant to alleviate Bangladesh's illiteracy, poverty and dependence on foreign countries, most notably India and the Soviet Union. Having won a five-year term in the 1978 elections, Rahman escalated his campaign to improve agricultural productivity and began repairing relations with Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, Iran, and most critically Saudi Arabia. The latter was not just out of an attempt to become closer to Gulf states for access to oil or to improve the prestige of Bangladesh in the Gulf for foreign workers who may pay remittances - though that certainly helped - but rather as a cornerstone of his campaign of re-Islamization in Bangladesh.
Rahman's Bangladesh can be viewed as a vehicle for soft-nationalist, Islamist, state socialist developmentalism, in which Rahman defined small-s socialism as an aspiration for justice and equality that Islam already demanded and specifically and deliberately tied Bangladeshi identity to the state religion rather than purely the Bengali language and culture, which it of course shared with India. An inclusive national identity centered in Islam rather than Bengali nationhood appealed as well to the country's myriad ethnic minorities, and by 1981 the only thing that could - and had, in some corners - damage Rahman's public reputation was his decision to codify indemnity for the assassins of Mujib, earning him the ire of the Awami League and his opponents in the Army.
The failed assassination attempt against Rahman [4] in May of 1981 in Chittagong thus opened the door to a full purge via execution of his internal enemies and Rahman's further consolidation of his status as a hero to his people, despite increasingly heavy-handed behavior by his close associates. As the year progressed, Rahman became increasingly concerned about the security situation in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Shiite-heavy Eastern Province where so many Bangladeshis worked in the oilfields. To that end, Rahman made a highly-publicized state visit to the Gulf region that autumn, first to Qatar and Kuwait and then to Riyadh, before heading home via Iran and even Pakistan, where he symbolically seemed to bury the hatchet with the ever-autocratic Bhutto. The visit included key one-on-one meetings with American, British, Canadian and French diplomatic personnel in each of those countries, rocketing Rahman up the list of world leaders that the new Carey administration was familiar with as a "friendly face" in the region and boosted Bangladesh's credence in Western circles as a potentially reliable partner as India's heir apparent Sanjay Gandhi seemed to be increasingly idiosyncratic if not erratic and Pakistan continued to increasingly pursue opaque interests clear only to Bhutto and, perhaps, Hua Guofeng and the PRC foreign ministry in Beijing, with whom he was concerningly cozy.
To that end, as Rahman established himself as simultaneously South Asia and the Muslim world's most dynamic, ambitious new leader, New Delhi for its part became increasingly paranoid, feeling boxed in between its archrival Pakistan to one side (whom the Soviets were very friendly with), [5] China across the Himalayas (who Bhutto was also cultivating a strong relationship with), and now an assertive Bangladesh making itself useful and valuable to the West...
[1] Brace for Impact will be three (maybe four) updates taking us around to various parts of the Islamic world, specifically places tight with the US, to set the stage for events in late 1981/early 1982. They won't all be sequential, but I want to make sure each little corner gets its due
[2] Readers of Cinco de Mayo will recognize this name and what a blundering idiot he was
[3] Remember - Bhutto was not overthrown ITTL and has had several more years to consolidate his control over Pakistan.
[4] Successful IOTL, our main butterfly
[5] Purely subtextual, but in my head-canon Bhutto staying in power and being much more amenable to Moscow than Zia ul-Haq is one part of the reason why Andropov never pulled the trigger to go all-in on Afghanistan ITTL, which was a close-run decision with many skeptics as it was.
Interesting update. So it seems like that crisis from out of nowhere that will occur around the same time as things come to a head in Poland is going to be in the Middle East or part of the greater Islamic sphere. Since it's out of nowhere I doubt it's starts in Iran or Saudi Arabia since they've been hotspots recently. Plus we know that oil prices won't spike in the early 80's so odd are low a major oil producing state like Iraq gets shaken up. India does have Sanjay Ghandi's erratic ass running around and the Soviets have been meddling there and stoking Hindu nationalism. Not to mention...
Oh and just to add on to the discussion of how and when the Solid South cracks up, with all that cheap power from those new nuclear power plants and the right industrial policy by the Carey administration, I could see there be the building blocks to keep parts of the South more competitive even after the collapse of the old order. It's not too hard to imagine Appalachia remaining fairly swingy nor the possibility of the right sorts of inverstments in places like Mississippi could keep enough of the white vote competetive. It's no Solid South but the more states you can compete in the better.
This shoe needs to drop and could easily bring in the like of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other Islamic nations as India starts wigging out on all its minorities.
Oh and just to add on to the discussion of how and when the Solid South cracks up, with all that cheap power from those new nuclear power plants and the right industrial policy by the Carey administration, I could see there be the building blocks to keep parts of the South more competitive even after the collapse of the old order. It's not too hard to imagine Appalachia remaining fairly swingy nor the possibility of the right sorts of inverstments in places like Mississippi could keep enough of the white vote competetive. It's no Solid South but the more states you can compete in the better.
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Well add to the list that the Israelis were planning on bombing some enrichment facilities in Iraq and we also haven't heard from Egypt in a while and its the quiet ones you have to worry about. We shall see soon eneough I suppose.