When I read the first chapter I thought I was going to be on the USSA in the novel, "Back in the USSA". Nice parallelism with the post-soviet conflicts. Wonder what the American Belarus and Lukashenko will be.
Learning to be Free Again: Electoral Wackiness in Post-Communist America
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
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- Tags
- america post-communist
Maybe - there's certainly some outside of the ex-USSR within Eastern Europe IOTL to whom Ignatieff could somewhat fit.
Probably the precise reason we're not getting a straight Putin analogue, this would all be less fun if the parties stuck together into an ER-style amorphous mass led by a guy who wins the elections every time.
As for this TL's Great Patriotic War, that simply wouldn't be the same without the threat of invasion and worse that lingered over Russia in WW2, so Canada and Mexico must have both participated. But since neither of those would be a very good "Nazi" analogue I'm guessing *WW2 looked more like the Napoleonic Wars, with a lone revolutionary state squaring off against a large coalition instead of a single menace. It was probably led by a Western European power with a lot of naval strength, Canada and Mexico both signed up (which are two very different countries with different commitments, strengths, and priorities, so a coalition uniting them is probably not very racist, British-exclusivist or radical; just more self defense than anything), and the end state would be like the situation after Tilsit: coalition blasted apart, arena of combat divided between revolutionary empire and a wary Russia, which probably becomes the guarantor of Western European security afterward on the condition of decolonization and the like.
Also that war in the Congo alluded to as an Afghanistan analogue is interesting considering America's black population. If the resistance in Congo was led by... essentially Christian mujahedeen led by Catholic bishops or something, and the NAACP is a Christian anticommunist party, could there be a spread of ideas across the Atlantic (Marcus Garvey can be reconstituted into a mascot for this sort of thing) that leads to a wing of the party identifying with the struggles of blacks across the world, and drawing the attention of the reconstituted FBI?
EDIT: To add onto the Congo thing, I guess the inspiration there is post-Soviet ethnicities making contact with peoples they were previously "sealed off" from, like Turkish Circassians' weirdly supportive relationship with Abkhazia, Ankara's own relationship with the Central Asian states and Azerbaijan, or the Ismaili people of Gorno-Badakhshan and the Aga Khan in London becoming aware of each other's existence again. Basically, the old connections the revolutionary empire tried to overwrite being reestablished, which may be good or bad for the empire's successor.
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I think there was a fascist alliance consisting of The UK, France, Italy and Japan fighting against Russia, Communist America, Left-wing Mexico, Spain, Romania, divided Germany etc. With the Anglo-French invading from both the north through Canada and the south through a US-in-exile in Cuba.
Or at least that's what I just came up with.
That UK-Japan alliance sounds reasonable, and I'm sure they'd be a little rightist after the shock of losing America to a revolution. But Mexico was annexed by the US, its last act may have not have been to fight as its ally. I think Russia may have been an anti-American neutral; neither America not the coalition against it have any obvious quarrel with it, but have just enough ideological differences to complicate any alliance. The Russians probably try to play mediator until it becomes apparent how scary a united North America under Red radicalism is, and then intervene to save the coalition after the tide starts turning.
On a somewhat related note, I don't think the concept of a "West" including North America and Western Europe exists TTL. All these references to the prosperity and good order of the entire "East", not just Russia, makes me think that all of Europe counts as Eastern, or Old World, and differences within the continent are seen as less significant than the differences with North America. This Eurasian Union, assuming it's something like our own EU, probably includes UK, France, Germany, etc. as members (well, after they ditch their weird ideas and become mainstream republics). Maybe Russia, trying to make its new friends more financially solvent and less likely to be distracted with bush wars, helps the former colonial empires reform into federations or fully spin off the colonies as capitalist republics, while the Americans whisper about revolution and drop caches of weapons on lonely stretches of beach.
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Anyone familiar with TSK knows that my maps suuuuck. I'm doing my best to avoid making one.
I'm in a bit of a pickle in RL at the moment, exams and more, so I'm sorry for not updating this TL with my usual once per week pace, but I will definitely get around to it within a week or two.
Starforce
Banned
I would guess something similar to this? Just the general vibes I'm getting. Didn't make this by the way.
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I would guess something similar to this? Just the general vibes I'm getting. Didn't make this by the way.
Interesting. Of course, I would assume that it would not be exactly that (given what @Augenis used as background in his first couple of posts), though given his usage of the US as representative of general trends in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, what confuses others (including me, for a bit) is that the US starts off as a sort of USSR expy, incorporating both Canada as well as Mexico and Central America (though I would assume that even then, There Would Be Changes [TM] in the arrangement).
Starforce
Banned
My guess is that this is a reverse cold war, one of my all time favorite scenarios.
OTL, the USSR was viewed positively even among non-communist Indians because, from the 50s to the 70s, it gave India more financial, technical, and educational aid than the US. Soviet soft power was so effective that Tolstoy is a household name. Russia's less spooky republican ideology only puts it in a better position in relation to the USSA. It's especially likely Russia will try to cultivate a friendly, republican India because it probably won't get along perfectly with the KMT in the long term-- they may initially get along great, but Mongolia will inevitably become a topic of dispute.
Meanwhile, the nearest big country the US can foment Red Revolution in is Brazil. Maybe the US-Brazil split happens over the "pole to pole" ambitions of USSA hardliners, and they reach out to Russia and Britain.
So a borderline communist China which is only now deregulating its economy, and an officially communist India which (at least since the late 70s) has been capitalist in all but name?
Could ttl's China have a "Pakistan" to deal with (perhaps an independent Manchuria? Could ttl's India be aggressively holding onto and demographically altering all the former land claims of the Raj?
Chinese Pakistan: some amalgam of Xinjiang and Ningxia, which maintains persistent claims as far as Xi'an (and some extremists extend this to Yunnan). China's Muslims, who live on the southern coast, Yunnan, and Ningxia all nervous about being tarred by association. Lately there's been Uyghur resentment over the prominence of Dungans/Hui/Muslim Han in the cities (where they have concentrated heavily, to the point of eclipsing Turkic presence) and in the military, which frequently claims political power on issues that it considers a priority. Problem: it's unlikely such a state would ever be a rival of China, the populations are hilariously lopsided and so are the economies.
Indian Tibet: ...Burma? Maybe just Arakan. Way harder to end an insurgency in Burma than it is to end one in Tibet though, the Myanmar government's been learning that lesson for pretty much its entire existence.
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6
President Michael Ignatieff had several priorities upon assuming his seat in the White House - to restore the prestige of an institution which was turning increasingly powerless against an increasingly emboldened Congress, and bring the United States closer to the Eastern powers and the neoliberal bloc commanded by Eurasia, fittingly called “the Eurasian Union”. Compared to his predecessor Cheney and his rather bulldoggish policy in both domestic and foreign affairs, the soft, perhaps meek hand of Ignatieff was a nice change of pace, and while many saw it as perhaps a little too weak, a large portion of the American populace looked up to their new president. After all, he looks handsome, he speaks intelligent on the TV, and he’s Russian, Russians are smart, rich and America would love to be more like them. Also unlike Cheney, who never truly hid his identity as the leader of the Democratic Socialists and thus chained himself and the party to one another in public polls, Ignatieff was an independent. To the American people, who were growing increasingly tired of “the government” and “the parties”, this was a saving grace. Ignatieff was not going to be suspending the constitution and establishing an iron fisted rule rooting out the oligarchs and the corrupt bureaucracy, but the average person could project a lot of hopes into him.
The President’s foreign policy did not go as well. On paper, it was a rather simple pivot - towards the East and towards liberalism. But as the negotiations over joining the Eurasian Union began and America joined an entire slew of Western European and Latin American states applying for membership, issues began to arise, and it was more than just the obsolete name the organization that was in question.
Canada was the problem, and it wasn’t going away. The former British dominion was annexed into the United Socialist States during the 1940s and, after years of brutal partisan warfare, suppression and deportations, was integrated into the Union as the Canadian Socialist Republic. Within the USSA, the northern republic served an entire slew of roles, most prominent of them was the exploitation of its vast resource deposits, the extension of the Great Lakes industrial region to southern Ontario and Quebec, and the location of hundreds of forced labor camps which were constantly staffed by dissidents, political prisoners, and unruly ethnic minorities. First and foremost, however, the regime saw it as a future loyal province, more so than any other union republic outside of the core United States - Mexico was too large, the other Central American states were too far away, but Canada was majority Anglophone and right next on the border. Americanization policies were enforced, especially upon the Quebecois and the First Nations, often by force, and mass resettlement of Americans northwards staffed enormous industrial plants and oil refineries built across the republic. History was being rewritten, emphasis was placed on supposed Canadian resistance against British colonial rule and solidarity with their southern neighbours, even when there was none - entire generations in the USSA would learn that the colonists of Quebec and Nova Scotia rose up against the British during the First American Revolution, and only stayed under the Empire because the Redcoats suppressed them, and that the War of 1812 was a war of liberation.
The Velvet Revolution engulfed Canada much like the rest of the United Socialist States, but the fall of the USSA left it in a difficult position. More so than any other breakaway state, it found itself inflamed by ethnic tensions between the Anglophone majority and the French-Canadians living in Quebec, who saw the post-communist chaos as an opportunity to assert their independence after five decades of oppression. The Anglophone Canadians themselves were very divided on the independence issue, too - Americanization had its impact, undeniably so. A significant plurality, if not an entire majority of Canada’s population saw themseves not as “Canadian”, but as “American”, whether it was “inhabitant of the USSA” or “sympathetic to its southern neighbour, if not born there”. The early 1990s saw wackier and wackier proposals pile one upon another. The House of Windsor, residing in Australia, enjoyed a lot of support among the average Canadian and would surely provide the continuity a Canadian state needed, to a point where a referendum to restore the monarchy was being considered and organized. A pushback against Americanization sparked, so-called “Canadianization” - cities and streets were being renamed en masse, American goods were boycotted, the people started emphasizing their different accent instead of the American one and replacing “imported American words” with local ones, often comically so (a member of the Canadian House of Commons, Gary Schipper, even went as far as to propose an amendment enshrining “Canadian” as the national language of Canada, as opposed to “English”)
The average Canadian, however, cared little about these nationalist aspirations, and as shock therapy crashed the economy of the country, they turned towards the one political movement which they knew could manage things - the Communist Party of Canada, the local branch of the CPUSSA which didn’t even bother to change their name and won the elections of 1993 regardless. Its chairman, William R. Bennett, a communist cadre from British California, was the First Secretary of the CPC before the fall of the Union, and simply returned to his position with little fanfare. A referendum to restore the Windsor monarchy was swiftly vote manipulated into failure, the French-Canadian separatist movement was suppressed, old communist insignia was reinstated, and a budding democracy was quickly killed in its crib. Bennett’s foreign policy was rather simple and logical - during fifty years of communism, Canadian economy and society was so intrinsically tied to the United States that separating from them would lead to complete collapse, therefore, no matter what the United States does, Canada must follow. So, during Cheney’s presidency, Canada was a Communist continuationist regime, openly claiming that the fall of the USSA was a geopolitical catastrophe and the Canadian workers should maintain control over the means of production, and when the neoliberal Ignatieff took charge, it suddenly shifted to free market economics and began paying lip service to democratic procedure, even allowing some opposition parties to hold a few seats for show.
So, when the United States applied for membership in the EU, Canada lodged an application as well, an initiative which President Ignatieff supported wholeheartedly - he saw himself as someone who managed to turn Canada liberal and democratic with the force of his persona alone and wanted to enshrine this victory. Yeah… Eurasia and the rest of the East weren’t buying it. The Eurasian Union was an organization promoting peace and democracy, they weren’t going to accept a neo-communist regime suppressing protesters and curtailing civil rights. Bennett had no desire to relinquish even an ounce of his power, but, on the other hand, he and the rest of the Canadian government did not want to get left out when their southern neighbour joins the largest trade bloc on the planet. This left Canada’s negotiations to join the EU at an impasse.
Even without Canada serving as an annoying third wheel, Eurasia and friends had an entire plate of hard pills to swallow. Joining its alliance of free democratic nations was not an easy process - there were numerous terms, treaties and criteria to adopt beforehand. Inflation and public spending need to be below this or that level, democratic rights and institutions must be enshrined, institutional corruption uprooted from every branch of government and American law synchronized with common EU law. For the average nationalist minded American, who still clutched onto his or her past and remembered that a mere fifteen years ago, his country was a superpower capable of standing toe to toe with Eurasia, this… wasn’t going to fly. Aligning oneself with Eurasia and trying to achieve an Eastern level of well-being was one thing, sure, that’s fine, everyone understood that - bending to Eurasian will was another. Ignatieff and his allies in the National Union went for it, anyway, showing one pill after another down America’s throat no matter how much they screamed and flailed. The death penalty was abolished, liberalization of the economy somehow hastened even more than it already was, social programs cut in order to maintain a balanced budget, and debt was being rapidly paid off, often by taking debt from other sources in order to pay off due loans. Was it working? Well, it was difficult to quantify - you can’t exactly tell whether an economic policy was ruining the economy when it is already ruined. By the late 1990s, even returning back to 1989 levels of production was considered by American economists to be a pipe dream, to the surprise of their Eastern peers, who were a lot more optimistic towards the future.
In early 1999, Eurasian experts and diplomats taking part in American-EU negotiations raised the issue of the Tennessee Valley Authority, formerly known as the Tennessee Valley Industrialization and Electrification Planning Committee. During the Communist era, it was one of the most well known and important sub-committees operating under its central planning system, tasked with the modernization, industrialization and transformation of the Tennessee River Valley in central United States. During a span of fifty years, this rural, agricultural province became one of the most premier industrial regions in the Union, dotting the Upper South with dozens of gigantic nuclear and coal powered plants and thus supplying the entire Eastern Seaboard with cheap electric power. For the Communist regime, the Tennessee Committee was a success and a source of pride, an example of the glory of American communism and its ability to transform a poor backwater into a modern industrial heartland without any capitalist intervention. Eurasian observers, on the other hand, witnessed a series of poorly constructed and mismanaged power plants, gigantic pollution in the Tennessee River, and enormous nuclear power stations at risk of meltdown. And so, they presented Ignatieff and his government with a demand - the Tennessee Valley Authority must be privatized and the most egregiously mismanaged power plants closed as soon as possible.
Ignatieff and the National Union accepted. The populace did not. Why are we letting the Eurasians order us to close our own power plants? Where will the Eastern Seaboard get cheap electricity from now? Henry Perot, the speaker of the House of Representatives, decided to resign instead of accepting the privatization of the TVA. No matter, Stephen King and the National Union had a solution! When the question of privatization arises, there is no political force more in favor than the Liberals - so, let’s appoint a Liberal House Speaker and get on with this! Knowing that John Rawls was a bit too independent to be controlled, however, King instead picked out John McAfee. A formed low level cadre within RASA, the USSA’s space agency, McAfee rose to prominence as an investor and software designer in the 1990s, or, more accurately, as someone buying out other software designers and collecting the margins. The National Union and the Liberals were quick to promote him as “a good oligarch” - sure, he is a part of the business oligarch elite who built up his wealth through not exactly fair and legal means and abusing the post-communist vacuum, but at least he does not lie, cheat and steal. So, appointed as the House Speaker, McAfee promptly began to lie, cheat and steal. As it turns out, he was more cunning than either King or the rest of the National Union coalition anticipated, so instead of acceding and allowing the privatization of the TVA pass, he decided to ride the populist wave. After a few months in his new job, McAfee resigned in a television address shown nation-wide, in which he accused Ignatieff and the National Union of trying to sell the entirety of Tennessee Valley to Eurasia, and presented his list of twenty demands for King, Ignatieff, and any subsequent governments, including an end to excessive government intervention and the abolition of illegal taxation, as hypocritical as it was for him to defend the TVA and oppose government intervention at the same time. No, but you see, you have to understand, McAfee’s enemy was the “government”, no matter if they liberalize or curtail the economy, just like the Founding Fathers thought, obviously. Of course, unless he is in charge, then the government is obviously a force of good…
The National Union and the President scrambled to put out the flames, pushing through a largely inoffensive Ron Paul to the House Speaker seat and putting an end to all debates on the TVA, but at that point, the damage was already done. John McAfee became a nationwide name, floating around every single home and every single city like a spectre haunting America, which all the powers of the old America entered a holy alliance to exercise. He wrested control of the Liberal Party from Rawls in a unanimous vote and led it to surge in the polls a mere year before the election.
What was his opposition, if any?
The Democratic Socialists were the obvious one. Having grown closer with the far left Republicans throughout the past four years, they finally completed this merger of the premier left wing party in American politics, the so-called Democratic Republicans, borrowing a name from 19th century history despite having zero connection with it, and campaigning on a platform of “we freaking told you so!”
The National Union… eehhh… a dumpster fire. King’s party was haemmorhaging voters left and right. The branches of the party in the Southeast, disgusted with the party’s pro-TVA privatization policy, outright refused to appear on the same ballot and declared their own, independent run, denying the Unionists a region they traditionally received a lot of votes in.
The Democrats? John McCain’s entire existence for the last four years was collecting more and more parties under his wing in order to stay relevant. The people were no longer electrified by his freshman status and his rhetoric was not cutting it, so he annexed the Constitutionalists. And then a small Libertarian party. Even the Women’s Rights Movement got folded under his wing. All that it ultimately achieved, however, was the longest name on the electoral ballot.
The Royalists? Surprisingly still alive and kicking. Ignatieff’s presidency was a field trip for David Duke and his increasingly unhinged rhetoric, and if one wanted to express just how much they hated being kicked around by Eurasia (and hated minorities, Jews and Norman Mailer, but that’s kind of obvious for Duke), then they’d vote for his campaign.
What about any other newcomers? One after the other, scandals regarding intoxicated rural Americans stabbing their children or drowning each other in wells contributed to the rise of the Prohibition Party. Headed by William Clinton, a former chief of the Arkansas Communist party who supposedly received an epiphany after the fall of the Union and founded the Clinton Foundation with his wife in order to raise awareness about alcoholism, it had one and only goal - for someone in the government to pay attention and notice that Americans are drinking themselves to death, god damn it! The environmentalist lobby within the National Union finally broke off, marching out with Ralph Nader in its vanguard in order to found the Greens. Neither of these parties held any national aspirations, however.
Nobody could stop the Sovereign Liberals. Thus, 2000 was a story of how McAfee broke the party system.
The President’s foreign policy did not go as well. On paper, it was a rather simple pivot - towards the East and towards liberalism. But as the negotiations over joining the Eurasian Union began and America joined an entire slew of Western European and Latin American states applying for membership, issues began to arise, and it was more than just the obsolete name the organization that was in question.
Canada was the problem, and it wasn’t going away. The former British dominion was annexed into the United Socialist States during the 1940s and, after years of brutal partisan warfare, suppression and deportations, was integrated into the Union as the Canadian Socialist Republic. Within the USSA, the northern republic served an entire slew of roles, most prominent of them was the exploitation of its vast resource deposits, the extension of the Great Lakes industrial region to southern Ontario and Quebec, and the location of hundreds of forced labor camps which were constantly staffed by dissidents, political prisoners, and unruly ethnic minorities. First and foremost, however, the regime saw it as a future loyal province, more so than any other union republic outside of the core United States - Mexico was too large, the other Central American states were too far away, but Canada was majority Anglophone and right next on the border. Americanization policies were enforced, especially upon the Quebecois and the First Nations, often by force, and mass resettlement of Americans northwards staffed enormous industrial plants and oil refineries built across the republic. History was being rewritten, emphasis was placed on supposed Canadian resistance against British colonial rule and solidarity with their southern neighbours, even when there was none - entire generations in the USSA would learn that the colonists of Quebec and Nova Scotia rose up against the British during the First American Revolution, and only stayed under the Empire because the Redcoats suppressed them, and that the War of 1812 was a war of liberation.
The Velvet Revolution engulfed Canada much like the rest of the United Socialist States, but the fall of the USSA left it in a difficult position. More so than any other breakaway state, it found itself inflamed by ethnic tensions between the Anglophone majority and the French-Canadians living in Quebec, who saw the post-communist chaos as an opportunity to assert their independence after five decades of oppression. The Anglophone Canadians themselves were very divided on the independence issue, too - Americanization had its impact, undeniably so. A significant plurality, if not an entire majority of Canada’s population saw themseves not as “Canadian”, but as “American”, whether it was “inhabitant of the USSA” or “sympathetic to its southern neighbour, if not born there”. The early 1990s saw wackier and wackier proposals pile one upon another. The House of Windsor, residing in Australia, enjoyed a lot of support among the average Canadian and would surely provide the continuity a Canadian state needed, to a point where a referendum to restore the monarchy was being considered and organized. A pushback against Americanization sparked, so-called “Canadianization” - cities and streets were being renamed en masse, American goods were boycotted, the people started emphasizing their different accent instead of the American one and replacing “imported American words” with local ones, often comically so (a member of the Canadian House of Commons, Gary Schipper, even went as far as to propose an amendment enshrining “Canadian” as the national language of Canada, as opposed to “English”)
The average Canadian, however, cared little about these nationalist aspirations, and as shock therapy crashed the economy of the country, they turned towards the one political movement which they knew could manage things - the Communist Party of Canada, the local branch of the CPUSSA which didn’t even bother to change their name and won the elections of 1993 regardless. Its chairman, William R. Bennett, a communist cadre from British California, was the First Secretary of the CPC before the fall of the Union, and simply returned to his position with little fanfare. A referendum to restore the Windsor monarchy was swiftly vote manipulated into failure, the French-Canadian separatist movement was suppressed, old communist insignia was reinstated, and a budding democracy was quickly killed in its crib. Bennett’s foreign policy was rather simple and logical - during fifty years of communism, Canadian economy and society was so intrinsically tied to the United States that separating from them would lead to complete collapse, therefore, no matter what the United States does, Canada must follow. So, during Cheney’s presidency, Canada was a Communist continuationist regime, openly claiming that the fall of the USSA was a geopolitical catastrophe and the Canadian workers should maintain control over the means of production, and when the neoliberal Ignatieff took charge, it suddenly shifted to free market economics and began paying lip service to democratic procedure, even allowing some opposition parties to hold a few seats for show.
So, when the United States applied for membership in the EU, Canada lodged an application as well, an initiative which President Ignatieff supported wholeheartedly - he saw himself as someone who managed to turn Canada liberal and democratic with the force of his persona alone and wanted to enshrine this victory. Yeah… Eurasia and the rest of the East weren’t buying it. The Eurasian Union was an organization promoting peace and democracy, they weren’t going to accept a neo-communist regime suppressing protesters and curtailing civil rights. Bennett had no desire to relinquish even an ounce of his power, but, on the other hand, he and the rest of the Canadian government did not want to get left out when their southern neighbour joins the largest trade bloc on the planet. This left Canada’s negotiations to join the EU at an impasse.
Even without Canada serving as an annoying third wheel, Eurasia and friends had an entire plate of hard pills to swallow. Joining its alliance of free democratic nations was not an easy process - there were numerous terms, treaties and criteria to adopt beforehand. Inflation and public spending need to be below this or that level, democratic rights and institutions must be enshrined, institutional corruption uprooted from every branch of government and American law synchronized with common EU law. For the average nationalist minded American, who still clutched onto his or her past and remembered that a mere fifteen years ago, his country was a superpower capable of standing toe to toe with Eurasia, this… wasn’t going to fly. Aligning oneself with Eurasia and trying to achieve an Eastern level of well-being was one thing, sure, that’s fine, everyone understood that - bending to Eurasian will was another. Ignatieff and his allies in the National Union went for it, anyway, showing one pill after another down America’s throat no matter how much they screamed and flailed. The death penalty was abolished, liberalization of the economy somehow hastened even more than it already was, social programs cut in order to maintain a balanced budget, and debt was being rapidly paid off, often by taking debt from other sources in order to pay off due loans. Was it working? Well, it was difficult to quantify - you can’t exactly tell whether an economic policy was ruining the economy when it is already ruined. By the late 1990s, even returning back to 1989 levels of production was considered by American economists to be a pipe dream, to the surprise of their Eastern peers, who were a lot more optimistic towards the future.
In early 1999, Eurasian experts and diplomats taking part in American-EU negotiations raised the issue of the Tennessee Valley Authority, formerly known as the Tennessee Valley Industrialization and Electrification Planning Committee. During the Communist era, it was one of the most well known and important sub-committees operating under its central planning system, tasked with the modernization, industrialization and transformation of the Tennessee River Valley in central United States. During a span of fifty years, this rural, agricultural province became one of the most premier industrial regions in the Union, dotting the Upper South with dozens of gigantic nuclear and coal powered plants and thus supplying the entire Eastern Seaboard with cheap electric power. For the Communist regime, the Tennessee Committee was a success and a source of pride, an example of the glory of American communism and its ability to transform a poor backwater into a modern industrial heartland without any capitalist intervention. Eurasian observers, on the other hand, witnessed a series of poorly constructed and mismanaged power plants, gigantic pollution in the Tennessee River, and enormous nuclear power stations at risk of meltdown. And so, they presented Ignatieff and his government with a demand - the Tennessee Valley Authority must be privatized and the most egregiously mismanaged power plants closed as soon as possible.
Ignatieff and the National Union accepted. The populace did not. Why are we letting the Eurasians order us to close our own power plants? Where will the Eastern Seaboard get cheap electricity from now? Henry Perot, the speaker of the House of Representatives, decided to resign instead of accepting the privatization of the TVA. No matter, Stephen King and the National Union had a solution! When the question of privatization arises, there is no political force more in favor than the Liberals - so, let’s appoint a Liberal House Speaker and get on with this! Knowing that John Rawls was a bit too independent to be controlled, however, King instead picked out John McAfee. A formed low level cadre within RASA, the USSA’s space agency, McAfee rose to prominence as an investor and software designer in the 1990s, or, more accurately, as someone buying out other software designers and collecting the margins. The National Union and the Liberals were quick to promote him as “a good oligarch” - sure, he is a part of the business oligarch elite who built up his wealth through not exactly fair and legal means and abusing the post-communist vacuum, but at least he does not lie, cheat and steal. So, appointed as the House Speaker, McAfee promptly began to lie, cheat and steal. As it turns out, he was more cunning than either King or the rest of the National Union coalition anticipated, so instead of acceding and allowing the privatization of the TVA pass, he decided to ride the populist wave. After a few months in his new job, McAfee resigned in a television address shown nation-wide, in which he accused Ignatieff and the National Union of trying to sell the entirety of Tennessee Valley to Eurasia, and presented his list of twenty demands for King, Ignatieff, and any subsequent governments, including an end to excessive government intervention and the abolition of illegal taxation, as hypocritical as it was for him to defend the TVA and oppose government intervention at the same time. No, but you see, you have to understand, McAfee’s enemy was the “government”, no matter if they liberalize or curtail the economy, just like the Founding Fathers thought, obviously. Of course, unless he is in charge, then the government is obviously a force of good…
The National Union and the President scrambled to put out the flames, pushing through a largely inoffensive Ron Paul to the House Speaker seat and putting an end to all debates on the TVA, but at that point, the damage was already done. John McAfee became a nationwide name, floating around every single home and every single city like a spectre haunting America, which all the powers of the old America entered a holy alliance to exercise. He wrested control of the Liberal Party from Rawls in a unanimous vote and led it to surge in the polls a mere year before the election.
What was his opposition, if any?
The Democratic Socialists were the obvious one. Having grown closer with the far left Republicans throughout the past four years, they finally completed this merger of the premier left wing party in American politics, the so-called Democratic Republicans, borrowing a name from 19th century history despite having zero connection with it, and campaigning on a platform of “we freaking told you so!”
The National Union… eehhh… a dumpster fire. King’s party was haemmorhaging voters left and right. The branches of the party in the Southeast, disgusted with the party’s pro-TVA privatization policy, outright refused to appear on the same ballot and declared their own, independent run, denying the Unionists a region they traditionally received a lot of votes in.
The Democrats? John McCain’s entire existence for the last four years was collecting more and more parties under his wing in order to stay relevant. The people were no longer electrified by his freshman status and his rhetoric was not cutting it, so he annexed the Constitutionalists. And then a small Libertarian party. Even the Women’s Rights Movement got folded under his wing. All that it ultimately achieved, however, was the longest name on the electoral ballot.
The Royalists? Surprisingly still alive and kicking. Ignatieff’s presidency was a field trip for David Duke and his increasingly unhinged rhetoric, and if one wanted to express just how much they hated being kicked around by Eurasia (and hated minorities, Jews and Norman Mailer, but that’s kind of obvious for Duke), then they’d vote for his campaign.
What about any other newcomers? One after the other, scandals regarding intoxicated rural Americans stabbing their children or drowning each other in wells contributed to the rise of the Prohibition Party. Headed by William Clinton, a former chief of the Arkansas Communist party who supposedly received an epiphany after the fall of the Union and founded the Clinton Foundation with his wife in order to raise awareness about alcoholism, it had one and only goal - for someone in the government to pay attention and notice that Americans are drinking themselves to death, god damn it! The environmentalist lobby within the National Union finally broke off, marching out with Ralph Nader in its vanguard in order to found the Greens. Neither of these parties held any national aspirations, however.
Nobody could stop the Sovereign Liberals. Thus, 2000 was a story of how McAfee broke the party system.
