Quick question (sorry if this has been answered before) - who do the Royalists want as monarch?
Learning to be Free Again: Electoral Wackiness in Post-Communist America
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The TVA is really beneficial to the South and its energy needs, so the National Union's Southern branches split off with their own electoral list to protest against the privatisation of the TVA.
Good question. Depending on who you ask, it is either the House of Davis, the House of Windsor, or an entirely new dynasty (probably of Duke.)
Who's gonna end up being the American version of Putin? It would be completely insane if it ends up being Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames
Imagine not thinking that Jeb! would be the American Putin
Maybe a descendant of George Washington, that makes the most sense for a wholly American monarchy in my opinion. In fact, George Washington's adopted son George W. Parke Custis' descendants married into Robert E. Lee's family, which would make them particularly attractive to David Duke's white supremacy.
A video on the Custis-Lee line, and other possible royal lineages of a monarchist Washington
Hey, Royalists got another state! Duke must be over the moon, but I am concerned about the Idahoans.
Canada as Belarus is tragically inevitable but kinda funny, as is the thought of British royals in bushranger garb.
Canada as Belarus is tragically inevitable but kinda funny, as is the thought of British royals in bushranger garb.
So good that I actually almost tried to like it for the second time. I always thought McConnel would be a great pick for a USA=PRC analogue and your use of him as Cheney's succesor is very realistic. Also like your use of real life institutions like the Clinton foundation and the Prohibition party in a completely different fashion. Lastly Nader and the Greens still making an appearance ITTL's 2000 election is a nice touch.
To be Putin, one must be a former intel official.
OTOH if one really wanted to push buttons in this ATL USA the Bushes could function as analogues of the Kaczyński brothers if one wanted to be totally deranged, unless if there was one more suitable - which would be even more scary. Since the OP is going for a generic post-Communist Eastern European vibe, the poster probably knows what they're doing. (Though I do find Canada as a semi-Belarus or a Serbia with ethnic minority issues of its own - because, of course, of Québec - to be absolutely beautiful, brilliant, and funny at the same time, considering similar jokes IOTL about Soviet Canuckistan by Americans.)
I wonder if we could see Mexico balkanized in a version of Yugoslavia?
A Central American successor state or former commie bloc member would fit better. Spain would actually be a very realistic option for this, UK somewhat less so-- but ethnic war in the UK would be a lot more significant to American observers.
Also, I think we now have enough info to guess at world fast food trends:
- Australia's gonna be weird. If that place is really becoming the new heartland of the British Empire, then it's going to need to provide a lot more tax revenue and industrialize a lot quicker than its small-ish population really allows. So White Australia is probably ending pretty soon, after which the new government may encourage immigration from the Asian colonies while convincing the colonies to stay and contribute to the coffers. I can't see them holding India, and try as they might to keep Hong Kong I think Russia would support (Republican) China's case over Britain's. But an "Australian Empire" focused on the Asia-Pacific is going to be a reliable local ally for anticommunist states, and the biggest nearby source of investment for economic ventures. As for land acquisition, they can keep Papua/the Pacific Islands, could reasonably keep Singapore, even have some protectorate/mandate deal with Malaya and Brunei. Only problem is Indonesia. The collapse of the Dutch East Indies could lead to just about anything, the worst situation of course being a united communist state with an American-built navy. But still, if any place is gonna give us Asian-but-kinda-not-but-who-really-cares fast food (orange chicken, chicken tikka, etc.) it's Australia.
- Russia/Eurasia setting the tone for European/Mideast-derived fast food's pretty exciting. Shashlik, buterbrod, and sausages of all kinds reign supreme. You get a buterbrod and put a meat cutlet on top, that's basically an open-face burger. Depending on how many Western European emigres settle there, you might see intensifications of existing trends in Russian food, like French/German-derived dishes. A road that could end in pelmeni-topped pizza, among other things.
- Japanese/Korean stuff might be big in the Russian Far East. Of course it'll be big in Korea and Japan too, but if they're communist (and if they're crazy on top of that) they may not be able to promote it themselves. Sushi and onigiri are a lot less fun when they make you think of harebrained natalist policies, harebrained anti-natalist policies, secret nuclear tests, dissidents jailed to nth generation, etc.
- Within America, even if Mexican culture isn't really respected by the communist authorities, the economic planners have to acknowledge the simplicity of tortillas, eggs, rice/beans, and sauce. South Dakotans waking up to the smell of huevos rancheros? More likely than you think. Or maybe everyone's going to be pot-roasting butternut squashes, and we'll have squash-burgers to go with the 1-cent beers.
That's easy enough - just merge Anti-Japaneseism into regular Communist doctrine. Which would make Japan, I don't know, East Korea in its southern areas and Yezogashima in its northern areas (especially Hokkaido)? As long as kana can be saved and even incorporated alongside hangeul.
An interesting inversion of North Korea's ultranationalism. But somehow the thought of a placid, prosperous country like the Netherlands or Switzerland becoming the weird one amuses me a lot more. Maybe they're kept afloat by a France that crushed its pro-democracy movements, justified itself by pointing to the horrors in Spain, and evolved into an authoritarian but economically dynamic country. And they regularly spook their demilitarized German neighbor by firing rockets into the North Sea.
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Which makes me wonder if poutine will still be a thing ITTL in North America.
7
Few people in the government of the United States had any positive feelings towards the newly insurgent Sovereign Liberal Party - among those that did, however, McAfee had several powerful allies, most notable of them being President Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff, by no means, did not *like* McAfee and his populist libertarian movement - however, what he saw within the jumped up oligarch was a liberal in the making. A libertarian, a sovereign citizen is not that far off from the neoliberalism of the Moscow Consensus, isn’t he? As long as he diffuses some of his most anti-government speech away and learns how to cooperate with everyone else, this blow to the party system can be softened, absorbed, and the entire structure maintained. The President made himself known in the coalition building process after the election of 2000 and, much to everyone’s surprise, openly favored the Sovereign Liberals, managing to push a favorable deal through for them and promising the ambitious oligarch the Speaker seat, thus giving him considerable influence in dictating day to day policy of the state. With each election, the Congress asserted more and more control from a Presidency which was getting more and more independent from the rest of the government, thus the Speaker of the House was beginning to turn into a “second head of government”, at least in internal affairs - and so it was prestigious enough for McAfee to accept it.
Everything was rapidly starting to unravel from there on out.
The Sovereign Liberals were mostly in line with Ignatieff’s gambit, but getting the rest of Congress to cooperate was going to be a task easier said than done. Just approving the Cabinet was a chore beyond any other, the debates in the House of Representatives extended for weeks, any real policy was out of the question at this point. Still, the President hoped to forge some sort of a liberal consensus within Congress - if he could convert Canada to liberalism, he can convert the House of Representatives to the same faith, too. Unfortunately, America does not have a place for idealists. Not only was the entire project unraveling before everyone’s eyes, but John McAfee turned out to be far, far different from what Ignatieff’s cursory reading of him would have led to assume. He didn’t hold ideology in high regard, or any regard, really. He wasn’t that much of a libertarian - much like many, many other populist leaders channeling the inner anger of the average American, he simply wanted to garner fame and aim for the very top. As soon as Congress bestowed him the position of Speaker of the House, he began reorganizing the government according to his own whim and yanking the strings as if it was either his own way or the highway. By late January of 2001, the Ignatieff-McAfee alliance effectively collapsed. The final nail in its coffin was the eccentric oligarch populist’s registration as a candidate in the presidential elections of 2001, dragging along a loyal fellow member of his party, Allan Thompson, to be his running mate. From then on out, the liberal and “liberal” waged a brothers’ war.
For the American political establishment, McAfee’s candidacy was a serious threat. As time went, his rhetoric was growing increasingly unhinged and anti-Eurasian, and the drama between him, Ignatieff and Congress only strengthened his popularity. The average person got what they wanted - they wanted McAfee to take the fight to the corrupt politicians holed up in Washington D.C. and he ended up doing exactly that, so he truly is fighting for the interests of the common man, fed up with this rotten establishment and their interference in the life of the sovereign citizen! And, of course, America’s system for Presidents just had to be the worst possible at keeping McAfee out of the White House - with a consolidated bloc of voters and a likely fractured opposition, he could easily sweep the election with only a narrow plurality of the vote. You know, just like how every single Presidential election prior has went.
February of 2001 saw tripartite secret talks between the National Union, the Democratic-Republican Party and Michael Ignatieff, in which the political establishment ironed out a plan how to curb McAfee’s ambitions then and there. They came to a conclusion - for once, they must stop any infighting between each other and unite under a single candidate, which, understandably, would have to be Ignatieff. For the DRUSA, this was a hard pill to swallow. They too were on a surge in the past few years, benefitting heavily from National Union fallout and the party’s merger with the Republicans, giving them a new lease of life - and they had been grooming a presidential candidate of their own for the occasion, too. Seeing that the options were either Ignatieff or McAfee, however, the party’s chairman Mitch McConnell, advised by its spiritual leader Cheney, begrudgingly agreed to place their plans in the back burner for four more years. Stephen King and the National Union had no issue with backing Ignatieff and had no hope of winning the Presidential Election themselves, anyway. The NAACP, now reformed to “NAACP and Christian Families” as a meager attempt to gain some representation beyond the African-Americans in the Black Belt, joined the pact as well, and while John McCain was stubborn as always, and considered it to be a personal vendetta to have the wind out of his populist sails be stolen by the Sovereign Liberals, he ultimately conceded when he was made clear that his entire party will defect if he hands McAfee a victory. And nobody bothered to invite the Royalist Party to negotiations, David Duke had registered his candidacy in the election as early as 1998, after all. The man knew how to make a joke last for way longer than it should.
From here on out, every single tool and every single gamble had to be invested in order to sink McAfee. Exorcise its spectre and set America back on the right track. Deals were made with the oligarchic families in charge of the country’s major news agencies, the so-called “press barons”, and one of them, Michael Bloomberg of New York, was even appointed as the incumbent President’s new running mate. The media was under his campaign’s control and immediately got to work, flooding public discourse with assurances that situation in the country will be getting better, that the Tennessee Valley Authority will remain under state control, that lingering issues between the Americans and the Chicanos will be put to rest, and that America has already achieved much in the previous decade. Deals were made with Eurasian economists to publish optimistic and assertedly reliable prognosis of future GDP growth, stating that the current economic downturn will not be permanent and membership in the Eurasian Union will propel the country like a phoenix. President Boris Nemtsov of Eurasia released a public statement that a breakthrough in negotiations with the United States has been (supposedly) achieved, and that as soon as the deal is signed and the US becomes a full fledged member of the EU, its member states pledge to allocate billions in funding to uplift its economy and integrate it into the Eastern market. An entire quarry of dirt was being dug to shovel on McAfee and his party - now, to be fair, he definitely wasn’t a hard person to smear, given that, above all else, he was still a notable oligarch and lived an eccentric lifestyle built upon the wealth he’s built up through somewhat legal means in the 1990s, but sometimes all the accusations of murdering a man in Belize and participating in drug manufacturing took it a step too far. Fearmongering was widespread, and everything was done to make the election into a two-man race, eliminating any possible major spoilers to Ignatieff’s candidacy.
Now, of course, David Duke was always there, but he had his own little niche and generally only ran for President to maintain his notoriety. The Hispanic minority fielded their own vanity candidate, the writer and publicist Sandra Cisneros, who used the election as a soapbox that the Hispanic population is growing more and more resentful of being treated unfairly in the Southwest, that the scars of the Aztlan War were still there and the conflict may renew. Nobody cares, let’s move on. Ignatieff commanded a vast coalition of everyone who did not like McAfee, which made his bloc of supporters very, very brittle. The entire campaign was shaken by fear that an independent left candidate may suddenly jump into the race out of the woodwork, steal a considerable percentage of the vote and thus hand the election to McAfee. Thankfully, instead of someone actually challenging, this bloc fielded Walter Mondale. The old, retired last leader of the USSA, having spent the last ten years in contemplation and public commentary, noticed the exact niche which the Ignatieff campaign HQ was so afraid of. There seems to be no left wing candidate in the race, so why doesn’t he offer himself, a reformed former communist, turned to a social democrat, as this savior? Mondale, buddy… Nobody, and that really means nobody, in the United States liked Mondale. There is only one thing which that name associated itself with, and it was “collapse of the USSA”. The left saw it as a geopolitical catastrophe, the right would never dare to vote for a former communist, so the only voters he managed to gather were fellow Minnesotans and a very, very small sliver of the population which could not stand either Ignatieff or McAfee.
With five times more cards in their deck and a whole lot of determination, the establishment managed to halt McAfee, much like the Red Army managed to halt the fascists near New York sixty years ago. But the damage was already done.
Everything was rapidly starting to unravel from there on out.
The Sovereign Liberals were mostly in line with Ignatieff’s gambit, but getting the rest of Congress to cooperate was going to be a task easier said than done. Just approving the Cabinet was a chore beyond any other, the debates in the House of Representatives extended for weeks, any real policy was out of the question at this point. Still, the President hoped to forge some sort of a liberal consensus within Congress - if he could convert Canada to liberalism, he can convert the House of Representatives to the same faith, too. Unfortunately, America does not have a place for idealists. Not only was the entire project unraveling before everyone’s eyes, but John McAfee turned out to be far, far different from what Ignatieff’s cursory reading of him would have led to assume. He didn’t hold ideology in high regard, or any regard, really. He wasn’t that much of a libertarian - much like many, many other populist leaders channeling the inner anger of the average American, he simply wanted to garner fame and aim for the very top. As soon as Congress bestowed him the position of Speaker of the House, he began reorganizing the government according to his own whim and yanking the strings as if it was either his own way or the highway. By late January of 2001, the Ignatieff-McAfee alliance effectively collapsed. The final nail in its coffin was the eccentric oligarch populist’s registration as a candidate in the presidential elections of 2001, dragging along a loyal fellow member of his party, Allan Thompson, to be his running mate. From then on out, the liberal and “liberal” waged a brothers’ war.
For the American political establishment, McAfee’s candidacy was a serious threat. As time went, his rhetoric was growing increasingly unhinged and anti-Eurasian, and the drama between him, Ignatieff and Congress only strengthened his popularity. The average person got what they wanted - they wanted McAfee to take the fight to the corrupt politicians holed up in Washington D.C. and he ended up doing exactly that, so he truly is fighting for the interests of the common man, fed up with this rotten establishment and their interference in the life of the sovereign citizen! And, of course, America’s system for Presidents just had to be the worst possible at keeping McAfee out of the White House - with a consolidated bloc of voters and a likely fractured opposition, he could easily sweep the election with only a narrow plurality of the vote. You know, just like how every single Presidential election prior has went.
February of 2001 saw tripartite secret talks between the National Union, the Democratic-Republican Party and Michael Ignatieff, in which the political establishment ironed out a plan how to curb McAfee’s ambitions then and there. They came to a conclusion - for once, they must stop any infighting between each other and unite under a single candidate, which, understandably, would have to be Ignatieff. For the DRUSA, this was a hard pill to swallow. They too were on a surge in the past few years, benefitting heavily from National Union fallout and the party’s merger with the Republicans, giving them a new lease of life - and they had been grooming a presidential candidate of their own for the occasion, too. Seeing that the options were either Ignatieff or McAfee, however, the party’s chairman Mitch McConnell, advised by its spiritual leader Cheney, begrudgingly agreed to place their plans in the back burner for four more years. Stephen King and the National Union had no issue with backing Ignatieff and had no hope of winning the Presidential Election themselves, anyway. The NAACP, now reformed to “NAACP and Christian Families” as a meager attempt to gain some representation beyond the African-Americans in the Black Belt, joined the pact as well, and while John McCain was stubborn as always, and considered it to be a personal vendetta to have the wind out of his populist sails be stolen by the Sovereign Liberals, he ultimately conceded when he was made clear that his entire party will defect if he hands McAfee a victory. And nobody bothered to invite the Royalist Party to negotiations, David Duke had registered his candidacy in the election as early as 1998, after all. The man knew how to make a joke last for way longer than it should.
From here on out, every single tool and every single gamble had to be invested in order to sink McAfee. Exorcise its spectre and set America back on the right track. Deals were made with the oligarchic families in charge of the country’s major news agencies, the so-called “press barons”, and one of them, Michael Bloomberg of New York, was even appointed as the incumbent President’s new running mate. The media was under his campaign’s control and immediately got to work, flooding public discourse with assurances that situation in the country will be getting better, that the Tennessee Valley Authority will remain under state control, that lingering issues between the Americans and the Chicanos will be put to rest, and that America has already achieved much in the previous decade. Deals were made with Eurasian economists to publish optimistic and assertedly reliable prognosis of future GDP growth, stating that the current economic downturn will not be permanent and membership in the Eurasian Union will propel the country like a phoenix. President Boris Nemtsov of Eurasia released a public statement that a breakthrough in negotiations with the United States has been (supposedly) achieved, and that as soon as the deal is signed and the US becomes a full fledged member of the EU, its member states pledge to allocate billions in funding to uplift its economy and integrate it into the Eastern market. An entire quarry of dirt was being dug to shovel on McAfee and his party - now, to be fair, he definitely wasn’t a hard person to smear, given that, above all else, he was still a notable oligarch and lived an eccentric lifestyle built upon the wealth he’s built up through somewhat legal means in the 1990s, but sometimes all the accusations of murdering a man in Belize and participating in drug manufacturing took it a step too far. Fearmongering was widespread, and everything was done to make the election into a two-man race, eliminating any possible major spoilers to Ignatieff’s candidacy.
Now, of course, David Duke was always there, but he had his own little niche and generally only ran for President to maintain his notoriety. The Hispanic minority fielded their own vanity candidate, the writer and publicist Sandra Cisneros, who used the election as a soapbox that the Hispanic population is growing more and more resentful of being treated unfairly in the Southwest, that the scars of the Aztlan War were still there and the conflict may renew. Nobody cares, let’s move on. Ignatieff commanded a vast coalition of everyone who did not like McAfee, which made his bloc of supporters very, very brittle. The entire campaign was shaken by fear that an independent left candidate may suddenly jump into the race out of the woodwork, steal a considerable percentage of the vote and thus hand the election to McAfee. Thankfully, instead of someone actually challenging, this bloc fielded Walter Mondale. The old, retired last leader of the USSA, having spent the last ten years in contemplation and public commentary, noticed the exact niche which the Ignatieff campaign HQ was so afraid of. There seems to be no left wing candidate in the race, so why doesn’t he offer himself, a reformed former communist, turned to a social democrat, as this savior? Mondale, buddy… Nobody, and that really means nobody, in the United States liked Mondale. There is only one thing which that name associated itself with, and it was “collapse of the USSA”. The left saw it as a geopolitical catastrophe, the right would never dare to vote for a former communist, so the only voters he managed to gather were fellow Minnesotans and a very, very small sliver of the population which could not stand either Ignatieff or McAfee.
With five times more cards in their deck and a whole lot of determination, the establishment managed to halt McAfee, much like the Red Army managed to halt the fascists near New York sixty years ago. But the damage was already done.