Alternative 21st Century to 2020
-Al Gore / Joe Lieberman wins 2000 against George Bush Jr / Dick Cheney
Al Gore wins, USA ratifies Kyoto, 9/11 doesn’t occur. However, due to butterflies relations with a China go south sooner than OTL. However green energy and Stem cell research are further along. Al Gore is assumed to lose in 2004 between the closeness of 2000 and the dot com bubble, but right wing domestic extremism of a Christian nature lead to multiple crises and a failed assassination attempt on Al Gore that energizes democrats leading up to the 2004 elections as GOP officials are increasingly perceived as enabling domestic extremism despite their own condemnations due to the religious right faction of the GOP becoming more dominant as more corporate GOP members find themselves seeing the religious right as a liability. USA ABM developments cause earlier tensions with a China and Russia that feed into international tensions via proxy conflicts in the Mexican Drug War and the 2nd Congo War. The Enron scandal is generally viewed as the beginning of the end for big oil, as solar energy and wind mill energy gets more subsidies while the Enron Investigations mire the oil industry in the media. The Green Party is an increasingly conspicuous politician force for liberal activism that manages to flip multiple seats in the 2002 mid term leading Al Gore to in his 2004 campaign move to the left on climate policy and civil rights to win over green voters with gestures such as repealing DADT and more taking more aggressive stances on climate policy. The green shift as some call it is derided by pundits and generally it is assumed that Mc Cain is a shoe-in for the 2004 elections. However this happens admits various bombings of schools, abortion clinics, government faculties and the aforementioned failed assassination attempt which is revealed to have been part of a coup plot by an extremist organization to get the house majority speaker into the White House with Lieberman and numerous cabinet members all targets.
-Al Gore / Joe Lieberman wins 2004 against John McCain / Jeb Bush
Al Gore, against all odds pulls off a massive Upset against Mc Cain due in part to the economic ticking up in 2004 and managing to boost in approval in a post assassination attempt speech which directly condemned religious extremism around the world and calling out multiple GOP Congress members for their enabling of domestic extremism in the USA that while divisive, is viewed as the speech that caused the GOP to loose in 2004. At the time this was seen as a historic success for reason, secularism and the third way, but Al Gore’s victory would prove a poison chalice. Al Gore’s carbon tax credit has so far seemed successful, but in his second term things were taken further with funding NASA missions that supported climate monitoring and even flirting with the prospect of a green infrastructure deal that died in congress by the time it came up for a vote. Cracking down on domestic extremism became a major domestic policy policy issue, to some justification but the degree to which Al Gore perused the issue came off as an over-reaction and as a pretext to gun control policies that alienated more independent voters.
The Gore administration also would adopt a more belligerent policy directed against religious extremism as a whole between supposed Christian extremism in Africa and Islamic extremism in the Middle East. This was atop of increasing disputes with China’s WTO violations and continued refusal to ratify the Kyoto accords which Al Gore progressively saw as something all nations must sign and even selectively sanctioned high CO2 emitting goods. Relations with Russia also soured due to their Georgia intervention and Putin’s increasing tendency to mock Al Gore in homophobic terms causing verbal altercations. The USA also would have legal gay marriage by 2008 in a highly divisive SCOTUS ruling that galvanized the religious right who already viewed Al Gore as someone actively vilifying Christians. To some degree, progressive groups in the US saw religious extremism as the biggest threat to US liberties since the civil war.
Saddam died of a heart attack in 2007, causing Iraq to fall into a secession crisis in 2007 that devolved into civil war.
However, it would be the economy down turn which ultimately brought an end to 16 years of democratic governance and the ascent of the religious far right proved inescapable with Huckabee’s rise in the GOP. 2008 also would be the year international tensions with China and Russia became extreme as Al Gore pulled the US out of the 2008 Beijing Olympics over China’s abuse of cyber espionage and the second Taiwan strait crisis that escalated into a military skirmish between US and Chinese navies that caused a global panic attack despite not escalating further. It did however cause Al Gore to with bipartisan agreement create the Cyberwar branch of the US military. Al Gore would later view his advocacy of admitting China into the WTO as one of his biggest mistakes.
-Mike Huckabee [2009-2011] / Mitt Romney wins 2008 against Joe Lieberman / John Bell Edwards
Huckabee’s victory in 2008, despite Huckabee’s own attempts to differentiate radical Christian extremism from good Christians confirmed the worst fears of progressives. In practice, Huckabee found himself constrained by the Supreme Court and the more liberal wing of republicans. Huckabee did however keep to his more economic populist rhetoric and pushed through protections to Medicare while perusing more aggressive trade policies against China and even sending ABMs to Taiwan, South Korea and so on in a general pivot to Asia. Huckabee also cut spending to green energy but didn’t pull out of the climate accord, instead getting rid of carbon tax credit in favor of cap and trade. Huckabee on green energy proved shockingly mixed, but elsewhere he proved extremist. In 2010 funding to planned parenthood was cut and bailouts to critical industries were made with little investigation into the banks. He also increased US military spending as usual. Huckabee intentionally avoided pushing on religious right policies much to the chagrin of his base, mainly due to not wanting to give the SCOTUS the chance to overrule homophobic policies and wanting to gain political capital from solving the down turn. He did however, try to re-impose DADT and rhetorically pushed on Christian oriented America along with giving the churches back their tax exemptions. He also cut stem cell research and climate funding in NASA in favor of a moon centric space program. Huckabee also tried to mend relations with Russia, seeing them as a potential ally against China and wanting to drive a wedge between China and Russia. An action which worked out for the time being.
Than, in 2011 an anarchist shot Huckabee. The motives are unclear-theories are wide ranging as to the killer’s true intentions as in the polarized climate of 2010’s a census of narrative simply didn’t exist. What is known is that the killer had lost much of their livelihood to the recession. Whatever the truth, the act triggered the third red scare in the United States as communist China was blamed and investigations into the assassination made conspiratorial connections to socialist and progressive groups along with the PLA and Chinese hackers. Mitt Romney however, was more moderate and tried to avoid falling into the chaos but ended up making only a confusing speech amid a renewed round of Christian extremist attacks and rioting around the United States instigated by Romney’s own policies later that year. This all came at the same time as the Arab spring which became to the US another theatre of proxy conflict with China and Huckabee’s push for a war with Iran who he decried as a supposed proxy state for China like North Korea, “China’s nuclear vassals” as Huckabee and later Romney saw it. US activity was already stretched due to heavy involvement in Africa, but Romney would escalate the drug war in Mexico while threatening Iran with bombing runs if they peruse nuclear weaponry.
-Mitt Romney / Ben Carson wins 2012 against John Bel Edwards / Edd Rendell
The energized right was able to win against the underwhelming ticket Democrats had in 2012, with Obama being sidelined due to fears of him being seen as “too extreme” much to the derision of the green-socialist wing of the Democratic party that was targeted by the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party who was terrified of the red scare environment that the media had pushed with criminal investigations that had no rhyme or reason. The only consistency being the political orientation and constant attacks on the activist organizations that just 6 years prior helped Al Gore win a 2nd term. This move to the right by Democrats came as a shock given the failings of Joe Lieberman in 2008. Primaries became more aggressively curated to defend against left wing radical entryists as they were referred to.
Romney’s first elected term proved very divisive, with his overtures to amnesty and social conservative policies being mixed in results as he proved more amicable to businesses than Huckabee was with more business based tax cuts and managing to nominate SCOTUS justices that moved the courts more to the right, but not enough to repeal Roe v Wade entirely. The ”2008 travesty” was however, redefined to mean civil unions and not marriage. Romney however, would find stiffer opposition to his policies from worker strikes (including a general strike) and labour protests and Democrats in state and local primaries saw socialists and progressives pulling upsets and flipping both houses of Congress in 2014 in a general back lash against the perceived theocratic governance and corporatism of the Huckabee-Romney administration. Yet despite these gains, the entrenched conservatives in the Democratic party managed to contest the 2016 convention and force Edd Rendell in as the nominee despite Hillary and Obama also being in a dead heat with Edd Rendell. This leads to Romney managing to win in 2016 in spite of his unpopular policies and widespread social unrest across the spectrum due to Edd alienating the bulk of the democrat base and ongoing international crises and conflicts making people less willing to switch administrations despite Romney’s perceived incompetence.
Bombing runs in Iran conducted with drones would lead to counter attacks by Hezbollah in American soil and Mexican soil that escalated into the general troubles of North Korea which after 2013 had destabilized massively due to Kim Jong Un dying in an accident causing a secession crises that broke the whole country down into warring military functions and Kim family members, some believed to have access to nukes.
This break down was something that the Romney administration and China felt the need to intervene in rapidly with a covert attempt to install Kim Jong Nam in a back end agreement with China done around congress that got leaked. This leak caused a significant scandal at home, leading to various attacks by North Korean militias in South Korean military bases in retaliation. The prospect of escalation was hard to mediate and the Korean Crisis would continue for another 3 years without resolution in back and forth skirmishes NK couldn’t escalate and the US or China feared to escalate due to the prospect of nuclear terrorism looming. The Romney administration was increasingly viewed as the presidency of deadlocks both domestic and foreign.
In Latin America, the US aggressively worked on overthrowing Chavez on the fears that China was using Venezuela as a potential proxy site and on broken Cold War logic that increasingly was turning out to not make sense with regard to China. This led to an embarrassment on the part of the US government when a PMO tried to storm Caracas only to be ambushed.
-Mitt Romney / Ben Carson wins 2016 against Edd Rendell / Joe Biden
Ongoing riots persisted as the deadlocked Romney Administration slumped back for another 4 years through a highly controversial electoral college win where Edd Randell won over 50% of the popular vote. Said win had no flipping of the house or senate, meaning the conservative agenda increasingly was reliant on the courts which shrunk to 8 seats and later 7 seats by obstructionist democrats who say Romney as having negative mandate. This unprecedented obstruction would however not be enough to stop democrats from gaining seats in 2018 with the most left wing party since FDR. Automation also was hitting cars more and despite the economy having recovered since 2014 and the third red scare, socialists and progressives had managed to probe a powerful political force that democratic officials eventually capitulated to after a string of failed elections. Obama in this world became a forefront of the progressive movement having moved to the left economically in the 2000’s and towards democratic socialist economics. Positions that had in 2008 and 2016 kept him from winning primaries which systemically tilted to the now diminished conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Obama however, would be governor of Illinois from 2010 to 2018 where he had faced investigations from the government during the third red scare, he was clean but the idea was to destroy his 2014 prospects. All of this failed to stop what was increasingly the face of the party.
The democratic socialist take over of the Democratic party after 2016 was at first celebrated by the GOP, as they believed such a radical move to the left in the climate of Cold War with China and the belief 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections repudiated the secularism of Al Gore’s time. However the results of 2018 caused the GOP to retreat to more radicalism and perpetuating the third red scare to limited effect, having been found by courts to have overstepped repeatedly on investigations into political opponents on ties to the PRC in ways that violated the 4th amendment due to extrajudicial information gathering by grass roots organizations and the compromising of corporate data from Amazon and Google. The high degree of information privacy the 2013 rulings set for better or worse persisted across the decade and the 6 years of judicial and legislative deadlock.
Than in 2019 the Seoul Catastrophe occurred, with the meddling in the North Korean civil war by the Romney administration leading to retaliation in the form of nuclear terrorist attack on Seoul. The abject horror of this event was amplified as many people over all this time had managed to feel the world one where things were overall in order whatever stumbles on the part of the administration. Within the context of the multiple foreign policy scandals that mired the Romney age, blame was split yet again with blame thrown around and rebuilding plans for South Korea or resolutions to intervene in North Korea were fiercely argued between people who agreed on nothing. The 2020 elections became dominated by the North Korea issue, and the a China issue by extension as China had already sent PLA forces into the northern border despite threats by local factions in North Korea to do to Beijing what had been done to Seoul. Nuclear weapon usage had been also carried out by a couple of the factions tactically.
Romney’s lame duck presidency also eroded the GOP as a whole, with the nominee being the rather mediocre Florida Governor Rick Scott after Ben Carson got wrapped up in a financial scandal that broke his initial front runner status. Democrats meanwhile had a very clear and obvious choice- ardent democratic socialist... Barrack Obama?
Obama primarily ran on a plan to solve the NK crisis and rebuild relations around the world. He also ran on universal healthcare, a green infrastructure plan and corporate accountability. He won the nomination and managed to win against Rick Scott (Carson dropped out due to personal issues) who had the ill advised idea of running on an isolationist platform.
