The Republic of Texas
Credit for some of the ideas for this scenario go to
@rvbomally and his scenario "Dixie"
Here is a little Wikibox series about an alternate Republic of Texas in the modern day and its big election in fall 2017. The basic backstory is that the CSA successfully seceded due to, among other factors, Lincoln losing re-election in 1864. However, the CSA as it was doesn’t last very long and falls apart in the 1880s and 1890s. Texas is one of the states that leaves the CSA but does not go back to the United States, instead going on their own; one of three along with Louisiana and Florida. The CSA itself goes through many developments and in the modern day is a transitionary democracy with a majority black population at last holding the power in the state. Texas develops as a relatively important and modern nation due to oil, beef, cotton, and serving as a mediatory trading nation between the United States and Mexico, as well as a strong and close relationship with the United Kingdom and the Empire, as the government of the UK is amenable to an oil-rich ally in the region, just as France aligns itself with Louisiana and Florida.
Texas develops through the 20th century into a modern and advanced nation with a centralized, if at times undemocratic, government. A Third Republic government is established in the 1920s with high hopes, but the global depression of the mid-to-late 1930s and the subsequent Eurasian War that ends in 1947 causes the Third Republic to fall swiftly in favor of the Fourth Republic, spurred on by returning Texan soldiers who fought side by side with British soldiers and spent much time stationed in the United Kingdom and France, gaining knowledge and experience of the governments there. Thus, the Fourth Republic introduces radical changes to the governance of Texas. While some transitions from a United States-style government to European had begun with the Third Republic was completed. The Fourth Republic also saw Texas move steadily to the left, as it had started to do since the 20s. A universal healthcare system was put in place, as was other elements of a welfare state as Texas was able to successfully move on from the Eurasian War a bit richer, though still having to recover.
Today, Texas is a modern liberal democracy with a healthy political culture boosted by a strong economy that puts it among its larger peers in North America—the deeply divided and federal but massive United States, the opulent and high tech Canada, and the modern and sophisticated if politically complex Mexico—and places Texas on the world stage. Texas is a world peer in petroleum engineering, green energy, telecommunications, and rail transport, and the Port of Houston is one of the largest and most modern in North America.
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Politically, the Republic of Texas is an interesting nation. Being complex from the beginning, the government of Texas has been known to swing rather wildly on issues and elections while tending towards a generally progressive sort of democracy: Texan conservatives urging caution to the Texan liberals moving forward. Together, the political parties work in sync to keep Texas as stable as it can be. The five main political parties, those with representation, are the
Conservative Party, the
Farmer-Labor Party, the
Liberal Democrat Party, the
Green Party, and the
Libertarian Party. A brief description of these parties is below.
The
Conservative Party is the current largest party in Texas, though its modern form is relatively new. The Conservatives were founded out of the old remnants of the so-called Texas Unity Party during the second republic days, which was in turn born from various conservative movements throughout the years. The modern Conservative Party is a big tent party of various conservative movements in Texas outside of right libertarians. The two largest wings of the Conservative Party are the Christian Democrats and the Federal Conservatives. The Christian Democrats, as the name might imply, are Christian conservatives—very Catholic but also with a fair number of Protestants—who espouse generally socially conservative, traditionalist views but more left wing economic views and favor a stronger government. The Federal Conservatives, meanwhile, are, in simple terms, the opposite. They are moderate on social issues, typically acting cautiously but still able to move forward on social views the majority of the population holds while holding conservative economic beliefs. They are also the most pro-small business of the large party factions as well, and are in favor of handing further power to the provinces. Christian Democracy held sway over the Conservative Party for most of the 80s and 90s, but the repeated defeats and so-called Wilderness Period from 1997-2015 in which the Conservative Party controlled Parliament for only 3 years, though had a President for 7 years, swung the party control in favor of the Federal Conservatives. Their candidates—Dade Phelan for President and Kay Granger for Prime Minister and notably Joe Straus, the first Jewish Speaker in Texas—both took power after the 2015 election and show no signs of stepping down, especially after the success in 2017.
The
Farmer-Labor Party is the Parliament of Texas’ Second Party, and the second-largest party by membership in the nation. The party began as a series of independent movements and defected Democrats in the early 1900s and 1910s, and came into power for the first time in the 1920s. Economic downturn pushed the party back down until the founding of the Fourth Republic, which cemented the Farmer-Labor Party as it is today. The party has traditionally dominated left-leaning rural, small town, and inner city Texans through leftist economic policies and moderate social policies. The Farmer-Labor Party supports Social Democracy and helped to establish Texas’ welfare programs that have proved popular enough by the modern day that no party dares take it down. The Farmer-Labor Party is a huge supporter of labor unions and farmers’ co-ops, and even Conservative-voting farmers tend to work with the F-Ls. In recent history, the Farmer-Labor Party dominated the Texan government from 1997-2015, though relied on a coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party after 2010. This weakened F-L’s position among farmers significantly, and the revived Conservative Party in 2015 pulled an upset and swung rural farmers in West and North Texas towards the Conservatives. This was further cemented with F-L’s loss in 2017. Farmer-Labor Leader Julian Castro, however, refuses to be beaten and pledges that the split with the Liberal Democrats means F-L will return to its roots by the next election, building its power among farmers and the working class rather than purely city leftists.
The
Liberal Democrat Party is, besides the third party in Texan politics, the remaining legacy of the Democrat Party in the Republic of Texas. Transformed after well over a century of being part of the Texan government, the party has changed almost as much as Texas has. The modern Liberal Democrat Party emerged in the conservative-left battles of the 1960s as a party for suburbanites who leaned liberal socially but were generally okay with a stable and conservative economic system. The party thrived during the 1980s and 1990s as the Texan population filled in the suburbs and suburban politics came to dominate the Liberal Democrats. Though they began as a party to compete for Second Party, the party increasingly moved towards allying itself with the Farmer-Labor Party as a powerful coalition to balance out against the Conservative Party. This after the disastrous attempts in the late 70s to ally the Liberal Democrats with the Conservatives that only resulted in losing seats. The height of Liberal Democrat power came in 1997 when the Liberal Party assumed the status of Second Party while Farmer-Labor took power. The coalition governed from then until 2015, though the coalition was only official after the 2010 election when the Farmer-Labor Party failed to win a majority of seats in Parliament. However, the falling out with F-L in 2015 resulted in the loss of seats, which only continued in the highly-contested 2017 elections when the Progressive Democrats split votes with F-L. With Sheila Jackson pushed to gain numbers and look into, perhaps, even beating F-L for Second Party, the plan for the next few years is to sap seats away from the Conservatives among their moderates before pushing into F-L. With any luck, it will work.
The
Green Party is Texas’ newest major party, only achieving official status in the early 2000s. Beforehand, the party was largely a political movement working outside the government to encourage green policies such as atomic de-escalation and the shutdown of atomic reactors in the Republic of Texas. While somewhat successful on a few minor levels, it wasn’t until a new push by a younger generation of left-leaning legislators that moved the Green movement towards being an actual political power. Representation was small at first, but improved massively under the leadership of Houston’s Borris Miles. With his help, the Green Party moved from focusing on activism and protesting as their primary means of power and more towards governance, pushing heavily for green energy policies in their local areas as well as green jobs, fighting climate change, and encouraging greater help for West Texas to move away from the oil droughts and towards wind and solar power. As a result, Green gained seats in conservative provinces and in 2017 improved their seat holdings. At last, Green is having to be taken seriously.
The
Libertarian Party is the smallest of the big five political parties in Texas, and one that has been perhaps the most stable since the 1990s. The party was founded in the late 1970s as a result of the Conservatives increasingly pushing for centralized Christian Democracy at the expensive of small government and upset many stalwart conservative voters. Most of them helped bolster the Federalist side of the party, but a few split off and formed the Libertarian Party. While initially popular and managed to gain almost 20 seats in Parliament, the party eventually began to languish as Texas’ economic boom in the 80s pressed them into the back of most peoples’ minds and they almost faded into obscurity with a message mostly unchanged of small government, low taxes, and pro-business. The party eventually managed to find stable leadership under Sam Johnson. His leadership kept the Libertarians in the government, but the gains he made in the 2005 and 2010 election were gradually whittled down to winning just 2 seats in 2017, despite winning nearly 7% of the vote. The gap tends to be because Libertarians are widespread and thus have failed to take more seats since 2005. Only time will tell if the Libertarians can hold on to what seats they have in the next election, with politics growing more polarized in Texas and Conservatives on the rise.
The
Elections of 2017 proved to be tightly-contested, just as was expected when they were called in late July and preparations began, as specified in the Constitution, in early August for a parliamentary election on November 2 and the first round of a presidential election a month later, on December 2. The election was called for by the Conservatives operating as a narrow minority government and passed by all parties, largely in an attempt to better solidify their positions against the Conservatives and, for Farm-Labor, perhaps win back Parliament after just 2 years. The primary issues surrounding the election were ongoing violence in southern Brazil, messy regime change in China, infrastructure spending, fights over petroleum and green energy, and the parties’ stance on integration of the Texan telecommunication and financial networks with the rest of North America. The Conservatives favored a policy of aloofness with Texas better able to manage its own affairs and continue its close ties to the United Kingdom while Farm-Labor and the Liberal Democrats both favored greater integration with the rest of North America. The election took a particularly hard turn towards foreign policy and economics as social issues of the past decade were increasingly put to rest by both parties, particularly the Federalist wing of the Conservatives wishing to move on in order to control the government.
For President, the Conservative Party ran current President of Texas Dade Phelan, a native of Sabine Province whose was able to combine a personal ideology of the Federalist Conservatives while still able to work in bipartisan efforts to please larger sections of the country. While broadly appealing, however, he was regarded as rather boring and weak on foreign policy, and was at a severe disadvantage to the Farmer-Labor candidate, Terry Canales. Canales, from South Texas Province, was the upstart candidate whose massive online and populist campaigns accelerated him to a media and leftist darling who was polling well ahead of Phelan going into September. Even with the Liberal Democrats running cross-aisle candidate Don Huffines (and both Green and Libertarians declining to run Presidential candidates), the campaign was obviously one of Conservative against Farm-Labor as polls showed a tight parliamentary contest. Then Hurricane Donna happened.
The hurricane, at first expected to be a relatively normal one for hurricane system, instead turned north and ripped into Houston, largest city in the nation. While Texas had invested rather heavily in coastal hurricane defense, Houston was more unprepared than most of the coastal region. The hurricane flooded highways, drowned homes, and tore apart power lines and infrastructure. As a resident of Beaumont right near the coast, Dade Phelan was no stranger to hurricane season and was the first major politician in Houston after the storm had subsided enough to allow transportation into the city. Phelan proceeded to spend considerable time and cost aiding victims of the hurricane, though to no small amount of accusations of using it to political advantage, especially when he was joined shortly after by Prime Minister Granger. Ultimately, his quick response to the crisis and maintaining a clear and strong voice on the matter of the hurricane and efforts by Conservatives to mitigate disasters and aid in relief allowed him to gain on Canales.
The November election eventually resulted in a Conservative victory, with a narrow majority in Parliament achieved for the party. Much of this came from fierce competition between left-leaning voters in North Texas, Gulf Coast, and South Texas between the Liberal Democrat and Farmer-Labor, resulting in Conservatives picking up seats they otherwise struggled to win. South Texas is of particular note with Conservatives actually carrying the largest number of seats in the normally highly-left state while giving up seats in North Texas. Accusations of political tampering with the votes of displaced Texans from the hurricane were rife, though ultimately and independent commission afterwards found little evidence of tampering of any sort. With the election secured, all eyes turned to the Presidential election in December. As mandated by the Constitution, Presidential elections are held one month after parliamentary elections and 2017’s was no different. Though the Conservatives were at an advantage due to their victory in the parliamentary elections, it was still a tight race all the way until the end. In the first round, no candidate succeeded in gaining the 50% of votes needed, and Canales even succeeded in getting a larger share than Phelan. Ultimately, though, more voters for Huffines or non-voters showed up for Phelan in the so-called “Christmas election” on December 16 to carry Dade Phelan once more to the Presidency, albeit by a narrow margin of 51.6% to 48.4% for Canales. Thus, the 2017 election cycle for the Republic of Texas ended, marking just another exciting time for Texans as they moved on to celebrate Christmas and look forward to the year to come.
The larger version of the federal election map:
