Stretch
Donor
Well what about Local 58? The Mysterious Flesh Pit? (Wendigoon made a very good video covering the latter not long ago)
Alternate Wikipedia Infoboxes VI (Do Not Post Current Politics or Political Figures Here)
- Status
Idk man I like being a clockwork automatonpresented without comment because really there's not really any comment that could help
The System of ‘36, also called the Long Party System, or the 5th Party System, is the political era that began with the Election of Huey Long as President of the United States in 1936. The era began with the mass realignment of electoral coalitions in favor of economically interventionist factions of the Democratic Party in the wake of the Great Depression. By the late 1940s and 1950s Long’s authoritarian practices had entrenched Democratic political dominance in all but a few states, all while the Democratic Party was purged of anti-Long elements. The Era saw Long win a record 5 straight Presidential Elections, with wide Democratic majorities in Congress after 1938.
The System fractured in the wake of the 1954 Election, which made apparent that the Republican Party was merely a token opposition to Long. Emerging in its place was the Liberty Party, while the Labor Party emerged to challenge the Left of the Democratic Party. In the wake of Long’s Death, the Walker Putsch and the Quasi-Revolution, the apparatuses that supported Democratic dominance collapsed outside the South. With the Eisenhower Administration agreeing to a mostly free election, the opposition united behind a Constitutional Union ticket of noted philanthropist Herbert Hoover to win the election of 1956, ending the System of ‘36 and beginning the System of ‘56.
The System fractured in the wake of the 1954 Election, which made apparent that the Republican Party was merely a token opposition to Long. Emerging in its place was the Liberty Party, while the Labor Party emerged to challenge the Left of the Democratic Party. In the wake of Long’s Death, the Walker Putsch and the Quasi-Revolution, the apparatuses that supported Democratic dominance collapsed outside the South. With the Eisenhower Administration agreeing to a mostly free election, the opposition united behind a Constitutional Union ticket of noted philanthropist Herbert Hoover to win the election of 1956, ending the System of ‘36 and beginning the System of ‘56.
Neat! If you're looking for a cool Huey timeline you should check out A Perfect Democracy by @MasterSanders
I just realized even though I did a write-up for it ages ago, I never posted the election that folowed this, so here it is.
*
As mentioned, Kim Dae-jung’s first term as President of Korea started very amicably, as the 1988 Seoul Olympics allowed the country a massive amount of positive publicity and made Kim and the Democratic Party very popular with the public. Furthermore, his initial policy agenda was hard to object to as it was focused on reforming the economy to reduce corruption in the chaebol, the (mostly southern) conglomerates that dominated the economy, something almost the whole country was behind (though the Democratic Justice Party, predictably, railed against it).
What became a major issue of debate between him and Prime Minister Kim Young-sam, and consequently the fault line that ended the Democratic Party’s brief status as Korea’s dominant party, was the issue of how to develop the economy going forward. The President was adamantly in favour of what was nicknamed the ‘Sons Policy’, after Aesop’s fable of the Old Man and his Sons; as he explained in a 1989 address to the nation, just as the sons could not break a bundle of sticks but easily snapped them when taken from the bundle, Korea had ‘broken’ the economies of much of the north and of his native Jeolla over the years and needed to bind them back together with the rest of the nation to make the country unbreakable.
Kim Young-sam, a native of prosperous Geyongsang, adamantly disagreed, and accused the President of reverse discrimination for overrepresenting Jeolla and the North in his Cabinet. In particular, he vocally condemned the President’s sympathies to former communist Hwang Jang-yop, who was immensely respected in the north. In 1990, this tension finally boiled over and Kim Young-sam organized a motion in the National Assembly to expel Kim Dae-jung from the Democratic Party. The vote narrowly passed, but as Kim remained President, he easily had the leverage to respond to this, and did so by persuading the Democratic members who had voted for him to join him in forming a new political party- the Progressives, which took their name from Cho Bong-am’s old political party.
The Progressives were obviously to the left of the Democrats, and Kim Young-sam quickly set about denouncing them as ‘seeking to subvert democracy’, a claim most of those sympathetic to the President dismissed as ridiculous but the conservative press in Korea was happy to parrot. However, as the Progressives were a minority faction in the National Assembly, Kim Young-sam remained Prime Minister and very publicly continued to clash with Kim Dae-jung’s policy agenda. The two men did still mostly pass policies related to anti-corruption reforms, but the issue of whether Korea should move towards interventionism as the President wanted or stick to neoliberalism as the Prime Minister advocated was an extremely divisive topic.
Since the Democrats had implemented term limits that restrict the Prime Minister of Korea to one term, Kim Dae-jung was ineligible to run for a second, and thus during the early 90s Kim Young-sam was widely expected to win. Most people regarded the Progressive nomination as a poisoned chalice, and the battle for the nomination was not hard-fought- except, that is, by Hwang Jang-yop. His important role in the ‘Sons Policy’ conflict had massively bolstered his public profile, and in the north and Jeolla he was seen as a hero; in the south he was lambasted by the press as a traitor for his avoidance of the Korean War by studying at Moscow University from 1949 to 1953, but his campaign was true to the Progressives’ mostly social democratic vision, vocally disavowed ‘governments that called themselves socialist only to build feudalism’ and declared as President he would make Korea egalitarian as well as rich.
While Hwang was certainly popular with the Progressive base, most of its leadership saw him as having little to no chance of beating the widely-respected Kim. However, soon a new development caused a major split in the right- Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai, was nominated by the until-then moribund Democratic Justice Party. Chung was a greatly respected figure, one of the main lobbyists for Seoul to host the 1988 Olympics and an unusually philanthropic businessman by the standards of chaebol leaders. He supported the reforms to reduce corruption, but ran a campaign based on reconciling the inequality of the north and south (something he was passionate about as a northerner by birth himself- he was from Kangwon, on what had been the border between the North and South) while also being more lenient on the chaebol, arguing they should be coerced towards philanthropy.
Chung’s presence denied Kim Young-sam the straightforward path to victory that Kim Dae-jung had been offered five years prior. The Democrats were further hurt by an effort to establish a two-round system, which failed due to public protest and perceptions it was a cynical trick to improve their chances of victory, and by widely praised performances by both Hwang and Chung in the presidential debates.
Even so, Hwang was not quite able to overcome the intense hatred for him and his policies in the south, and so Kim won election on a fairly tight plurality. The results were strongly geographically polarized- Kim was shut out in the north and Hwang only took the Jeolla region of the south. Despite his surprising performance, though, Chung marked a last hurrah for the Democratic Justice Party rather than a new beginning- its members had mostly been wiped out in the legislative elections earlier that year, and as the Democrats established themselves as the new, post-dictatorship face of the Korean right, the party would soon come to an end.
Despite the impression given by Kim Dae-jung retiring from politics to become a lecturer at Cambridge University, however, for the Progressives the 1992 election was only the beginning…
Babe it’s rivalry week, time for your annual game against Iowa.
This is from that one timeline where the Mountain West expanded into Louisiana, right?
Nope some idle shuffling of teams as we trudge towards the death of College Football.
Do link that timeline though, if you have it. Mountain West in Louisiana sounds dope as all hell
The complex originally consisted of two pads (LC-18A and B) that were used by the US Navy to launch the Vanguard rocket and the US Air Force to test the PGM-17 Thor missile respectively, while both were later used to launch Scout rockets. LC-18A was decommissioned in 1965 while the last launch from LC-18B was in 1962.
Both pads were out of service until the late 1970s when they were taken in hand as part of the Ares Mars Exploration Module test programme. A $14mn rebuild (1978 dollars) saw the two existing pads and blockhouse demolished and the complex extended to the former LC-31 historically used to test Minuteman and Pershing ballistic missiles.
The rebuilt LC-18 included a single pad and service structure designed to support Super Joe: the rocket that would verify the entry, descent and landing system for the Ares MEM. Super Joe boosters were delivered to Port Canaveral by barge from their assembly site in Dade County, 400km south of the Cape, transported the last few miles to the launch site by truck and erected by gantry crane. A temporary laydown and storage area was built to the north west of the pad.
After the completion of the Ares test programme, Super Joe became the first stage of the Vesta I, which launched 8 times from LC-18 before retirement in 1995. The complex was mothballed in 1997, and the pad and service structure were levelled in 2001.
- Status