TL-191: After the End
- Thread starter David bar Elias
- Start date
Alright, at least the preparedness is better and the world ITTL isn't as hammered by the looks of it.
With that, was Holst ever really on the far-left? Makes him look syncretic/third-positionist allying with them and his anti-Jewish rants.
He probably took up the far left by default. Being a Fascist or right wing populist would've seen him compared to the CSA and likely wouldn't have gotten his career off the ground in that case.
He seems Stalin-esque to me, although thankfully constrained by a functioning system of checks and balances as well as less competent in general. As for his connections to the Dixie Mafia, that wouldn't necessarilyindicate far-right sympathies. DBE might have to correct me here, but my estimation is that the Dixie Mafia has no real political program beyond ensuring it's able to continue operating; while there's no way they're not overwhelmingly White American and hostile towards immigrants and people of color*, I suspect that, if nothing else, the more successful Dixie gangs would steer a more neutral path in deference to the bottom line.
*I'm not sure whether they consider Jews to be either of these, because IIRC there were a few Jews in the upper echelons of the Freedom Party and Featherston may not have been remarkably antisemitic. This doesn't necessarily hold true for White American criminal organizations, but it might. Also I could be entirely wrong about this, but I guess I'll find out about that.
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Remember what David said - this virus, for those who get infected, is more deadly than OTL Covid. So barring further word from David, I call it a wash.
Understood. Realizing it, perhaps I grossly oversimplified it without putting too much thought to it.
Yes, winning the over a certain number of electoral votes is still necessary to win the presidency. By 2021, a presidential election going to the House of Representatives has not yet happened.
Yes. In 2021, several great powers, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Republic of Bharat, the Empire of Brazil, the Republic of China, the German Empire, the Russian Republic, and the United States of America, all claim territory in Antarctica.
There are several other countries that have territorial claims in Antarctica backed by different great powers. For example, the claims by Australia and Chile are backed by the United States, the claim by Argentina is backed by Brazil, and the claim by South Africa is supported by Bharat.
My god, this is a dark list of Presidents... I reckon after so many one term Presidentes ending their administration in disgrace or deeply unpopular... the overall citizenry would be very disenchanted. This should create some fertile ground for counter culture movements throughout the 2020s and 2030s.
Charles Holst, whatever else he was, definitely was on the far-left. He came from a family of loyal Socialist Party activists and union members.
Where he diverged from the vast majority of Socialist Party activists from his generation was in his embrace of political radicalism. He was, to the very end, a firm believer in the need for a Revolution to overturn the US political and economic system, in order to usher in a utopian future of rule of, by, and for the working class. Holst, had he lived in our world, would have eagerly embraced both the October Revolution and the eventual development of the USSR under Josef Stalin. As it was, Holst, as a youthful activist, celebrated the emergence of the Japanese Workers Republic, and was often heard to remark throughout his political career that the defeat of the Communist revolutionaries in the First Russian Civil War had been a seminal tragedy.
Holst was a marginal figure in the House of Representatives throughout most of his political career. His over-the-top, profanity-laden rhetoric promoting a revolution, The Revolution, made him a constant source of mockery from his House colleagues, including from almost all of his fellow Socialist Party representatives. Holst developed a somewhat buffoonish public image, but was consistently re-elected due to his ability to bring large amounts of Federal money to his New York City district.
While no one in US political circles took Holst seriously during his time in the House, the buffoonish image that he cultivated concealed a man of boundless ambition and cruelty, and with a myriad of personal hatreds. Holst also had a lifelong contempt for the US political system of checks and balances derived from the Constitution. The utopia that he imagined throughout his political career had no room for either of these hallmarks of the US government.
Throughout his political career, Holst was dogged by allegations of having connections to the world of organized crime. Although subject to at least two major judicial probes by the Bureau of Investigation while in the House, not enough evidence was gathered during either of these probes for an arrest to be made. Several US government agencies were investigating President Holst in relation to allegations of Holst accepting multiple bribes from a known New York City associate of the Norfolk Outfit (a Dixie Mafia gang) when evidence was uncovered that would lead to the Dixie Mafia Scandal.
Holst wasn’t without skills as a politician. He was one of the first US politicians to recognize, in the late 2010s, the potential of the many OptyTalk sites on the ComboNet to grant him a national audience unfiltered by “respectable” media. Holst’s rise to the presidency, however, would not have occurred without the following unlikely series of events:
-The Great Housing Crash of 2019, which caused widespread economic devastation across the United States.
-The election of Senator George Novak (S-OH) in the 2020 elections on the “National Fusion” ticket with Governor Philip Wakefield (R-NJ). Many Socialist Party activists and politicians, baffled by Novak’s obsession with creating a utopian-sounding “non-partisan” government, became opponents of President Novak when he appeared to embrace an agenda of economic austerity proposed by the congressional Business and Prosperity caucus, instead of proposals by his own Socialist Party for an ambitious agenda of public relief and public works. Charles Holst, in making himself the loudest and angriest opponent of President Novak, suddenly gained a measure of acceptance from a Socialist Party feeling betrayed by their own president, and a general public alienated by the president’s seeming monomaniacal obsession with “non-partisanship” at the expense of addressing the Great Housing Crash.
Holst, in 2024, was able to ride a wave of popular anger within Socialist Party to an unprecedented victory in the party’s nomination battle over the incumbent president. Holst won the general elections of 2024 in no small part due to the unpopularity of the Democratic Party (widely blamed for the Great Housing Crash), and due to the fragmentation within the Republican Party caused by Philip Wakefield’s defection to the now-doomed National Fusion ticket.
President Holst quickly ran into obstacles in proposing his radical and sweeping economic agenda to Congress. Both Houses by this time were narrowly held by the Republican Party, and the Speaker of the House, Representative James Davies, was a staunch political opponent of Holst. Holst, however, did not intend to govern like a traditional US president. His rhetoric, upon the expected congressional rejection of his initial legislative proposals, became more and more unhinged and violent. President Holst now openly called for his supporters/the working class (one and the same in his mind) to help in overthrowing the “class enemies” in the name of The Revolution.
It was during this stage of President Holst’s brief administration that he also started to openly use antisemitic rhetoric. Holst blamed the Jews for the Great Housing Crash, and reserved particular vitriol for Jewish lawmakers in Congress, including Senator Eleanor Lehrer (D-CA) a future president in her own right.
Historians and political observers would initially debate the nature of President Holst’s antisemitism; after all, he had never utilized this rhetoric before becoming president. Following the fall of the Holst administration, in the late 2020s and early 2030s, a number of his former confidants and associates would state for the public record that Holst had been just as bigoted while in the House of Representatives.
President Holst was already facing the prospect of impeachment in early 2027, before the shattering revelations that accompanied the Dixie Mafia Scandal. Too much of the president’s rhetoric by that point brought to mind memories of Jake Featherston. The Dixie Mafia Scandal caused Holst’s few remaining political allies to abandon him. Within a short period of time, Holst’s own Vice President was arrested in association with the Dixie Mafia Scandal, followed by the rapid and successful impeachment of President Holst on a long list of charges. Holst, at this stage, refused to accept his removal from office. He now called for his imagined supporters to come to Washington to begin The Revolution. On the morning of what proved to be his last day in the White House, in 2027, he was briefly heartened by the appearance of a huge crowd outside of the Executive Mansion. Too late, he realized that this crowd was actually here to call for his arrest. This crowd cheered loudly when the Bureau of Investigation and the local police did just that.
After an acrimonious federal trial, former president Charles Holst was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with charges stemming from the Dixie Mafia Scandal. Holst would spend the rest of his life at the federal penitentiary located in Fort McSweeney, Oregon. The fact that he was in a prison where former Confederate government officials had once been held was not lost on Holst, who continued, for the rest of his life, to claim that he had been a victim of an international “Jewish-Capitalist” conspiracy.
For a brief period of time following the fall of the Holst administration, the Socialist Party faced the possibility of electoral oblivion, in the face of the disastrous twin administrations of George Novak and Charles Holst. It’s a testament to the skill and dedication to a number of Socialist Party politicians and activists, especially one Dennis Beckford of Jamaica, that the party was able to rebuild itself and successfully elect a presidential candidate by 2044.
One long-term legacy of the Holst administration was that the sizable Jewish-American community completely deserted the Socialist Party, to the eager embrace of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Even by 2162, the Jewish community in the United States, according to most surveys, almost entirely refused to support the Socialist Party.
So basically in our world, he'd be an unapologetic "tankie", for lack of a better term.
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Also is any equivalent to the internet by 2021 and how much of a role does it play into everyday citizens lives?
German Kaiser Wilhelm IV
Banned
Nice! I am willing to make a map of the claims in the antarctic in TTL, but idk what areas they claim
Indeed. The American Nightmare counterculture of the late 2020s and late 2030s certainly reflects the widespread disillusionment in the US following the Great Housing Crash and the respective disasters of the Novak and Holst administrations.
The Holst administration is seen by most of the US public, after his removal from office, as a bitter end to the hope that the Socialist Party had once represented to Flora Hamburger and those like her.
I’m afraid that I am also not certain as to how extensive each territorial claim would be in Antarctica by 2021.
In 2021, the equivalent to the Internet of our world is the ComboNet, while the closest equivalent to Google is the OptyCon (the legacy of a collaborative project between two US government departments and a US technology company in the late 2000s. Technology is somewhat less advanced in 2021 in comparison to our world. The analogous technology to OTL smartphones are only just coming on the market.