Lol indeed it is.
In fact, 1981 has been maybe a little TOO quiet. Economy recovering around the world, nothing really going on geopolitically…
Gotta find a wrench to throw here pretty soon.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
In fact, 1981 has been maybe a little TOO quiet. Economy recovering around the world, nothing really going on geopolitically…
Gotta find a wrench to throw here pretty soon.
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
A bunch of people got shot that year. Or almost got shot. Lennon, the Queen, Sadat, Reagan, the Pope, and so on.
Oh, I meant ITTL. It was a very eventful year IOTL.
And hold that thought on Sadat, we’ll be headed to Egypt in another one of the Brace for Impact updates!
Fucking called it!
On a serious note the only thing I'll rule out in Egypt is something happening to the Suez Canal since that would be a tad derivative ITTL.
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Lol extremely derivative. I’ve had enough canal shenanigans for one TL! (Well, two, since an alt-Panama canal basically starts alt-WW1 in CdM lol)
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Also - holy crap, a hundred pages! I cannot believe my weird little Jerry Ford side project has gotten this much attention and lasted this long. Thank you all for being on the ride!
The Indian subcontinent is so ideologically divided that I'm honestly impressed. Just waiting for some war to happen on that front.
I really, really can't see the GOP being reduced to wealthy suburban and rural strongholds in the North East and the Dems being being restricted to majority black seats in the South being delayed as long as 2002. Yes incumbency and split ticket voting can delay things but there's a limit. Carey's victory has delivered the anti-GOP bit of the realignment ahead of time, the next GOP President will deliver the bulk of the South into their hands with only oddities hanging on though I accept that some of those oddities might be able to hang on until the post 2000 census redistricting.
You are underestimating how effective gerrymandering can be in a state when one party can draw the districts however they want to
Gerrymandering can only get you so far. Part of what caused the 1994 GOP landslide was Dem state houses that had been elected in 1990 against an unpopular Bush Snr drawing efficient maps that had a few ultra safe GOP seats and then lots of +7 or 8 Dem seats and then you had a big swing that "burst" the Gerrymander. Now with Democrats in the White House until 1992 you're not going to precisely replicate that. Southern state houses are probably going to be more GOP friendly in 1990 than OTL so any maps drawn up will probably be fairer and less vulnerable to bursting but the overall trend of the GOP losing its former North East heartland the Democrats losing their former Old South heartland will still occur.
This isn’t true, the GOP actually got somewhat favorable maps in the south from the 1990 census because of lawsuits that made black areas get their own districts
IRL southern republicans beg to differ
The southern (especially Deep South) states that would be having 10%+ unemployment rates during the Ford administration are not gonna have any real GOP representation in southern legislatures at any point in the 1980s lol
At least in the South, I don’t disagree - but I think it’d be a steady trickle, sort of like it was pre-1980 and pre-1994, followed by the big collapse finally around the turn of the Millennium. Every retirement, etc, comes with the knowledge the seat isn’t coming back.
As for the North, I think there’s plenty of staying power for a GOP that doesn’t play footsie with megachurches
That's like saying that because of the Carter administration the Democrats wouldn't make advances in regions that were trending towards them during the Regan years. Except they did. A disastrous presidency obviously has an impact but it doesn't cancel out underlying trends.
It's your story but I just don't think it will ever be sustainable for one party to be strong in both the Old South and New England in anything other than the very short term, the cultural and political gulf is just too large.
Long term? No, definitely not. But that depends on how you define long term
Considering the Dems have a 100+ year headstart in the south compared to the republicans it makes sense. The gains republicans made in the south during the early 60s to early 70s were good compared to being basically nonexistent in previous decades but they were still a small minority of the political makeup of the south and most of them have gotten wiped out ITTL’s late 1970s.
The Dems didn’t “extend” their presence in regions that they didn’t already have a strong infrastructure or presence in decades prior. IRL Republicans had success in the West coast from the 80s-2000s. Throughout the 80s-2010s Republicans still are very viable if not more viable than Dems in a lot of the Midwest. And they still have decent representation in the north. So the Dems didn’t “extend” like you think they did until very recently
Republicans on the other hand ITTL will have minimal infrastructure or presence in the south going into the 1990s. They have a steep hill to climb to be competitors with Dems in the south
I agree republicans can become a viable competitor in the south during the 2000s but I feel like this sentiment doesn’t really take in the account the amount of butterflies you’ve made. There’s no Reagan years to soften the democratic belly in the south, There’s no Rush Limbaugh or conservative radio to radicalize and help mobilize the greater conservative movement in the south, nor is there Newt Gingrich to do contract with america to really cement the Republican Party as the “true Conservative party”. So I don’t see how exactly with such little cultural or political inroads made that the seats Republicans pick up in the south would be “locked” from democrats being able to win them back or be competitive. There will still be plenty of Conservative Democrats that will run in conservative areas
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He could but it's definately a 'be careful for what you wish for' situation. On the one hand I could see FJS wanting to keep the CSU separate so it's easier to shape and maintain it as his focused power center that powerplayers in the CDU can't really influence that much. On the other hand, if he wanted to cement the right's control on the CDU then such a union might be worth the fight. It risks the CDU potential to appeal to the center which is already being affected by Strauss's chancerlorship I imagine. That's an opporitunity for the SPD and maybe moreso the FDP. As it seems to be a trend ITTL for center parties to be on the rise in contiental Europe A rising FDP may be appropriate, especially if Struass flames out and the SPD botches a chance to be the winner from it. Also a CDSU would inherintly lack a specific focus on Bavaria which could make state elections there more competitive though the CDSU would have a hefty advantage.
Brace for Impact - Part II
Brace for Impact - Part II
Of all the countries of the Middle East, save perhaps Israel for its obvious importance in Judeo-Christian tradition, the place that holds the imagination of the West most is Egypt. It is the fabled home of Cleopatra and her doomed romance that brought down the Roman Republic; it is the mysterious desert land of sphinxes, pharaohs and pyramids that so fascinated European explorers, artists and politicians for decades; and, perhaps most germanely to the geopolitical environment of late 1981, it was the first country of the "third world," so to speak, that stood up to Western military and economic might under Gamel Abdel Nasser in the Suez Crisis of 1956, nearly triggering a global war and signaling definitively that the Age of Empire was over, that it was time for Britain in particular to retreat back to her island and that a strange new age was upon the world. Egypt had seemed to be at the center of two of the other most important intrigues of the last decade, those of the 1973 Yom Kippur War which broke the mythos of an invincible, impregnable Israel in the Sinai and led to the epoch-defining Arab oil embargo, and then suddenly six years later the signing of the Rose Garden Treaty, a mutual recognition of peace with Israel that brought Egypt into the Western camp more or less permanently from then on and arguably the greatest achievement of President Gerald Ford's full term in office.
Central to both of these events was the curious figure of Mohammed Anwar Sadat, who upon replacing Nasser as President in October of 1970 had stunned Egypt and indeed the world by making his presence felt not as the near-anonymous puppet vice president he had been viewed as but rather as a force in his own right, ending Nasserism both as a socialistic, Arab nationalist mission and indeed as the centerpiece of Egyptian and indeed Arab foreign policy. He had purged the government of the Nasserists who had once hoped to manipulate him, steered Egypt towards a close alliance with Iran (he was particularly close to Shah Mohammed Reza and traveled to Pakistan for his funeral) and reformed the Egyptian military so it could carry out its remarkable achievements in the Yom Kippur War but then also sought out peace with Israel, which enraged the Arab world and drove Egypt out of the brotherhood of the Arab League but into the eager arms of a generous West which rewarded Egypt with money and investment both in military kit but also economic support, important in the high-inflation and volatile late 1970s. Sadat had maneuvered through the shock of peace with the once-eternal foe of Israel by rewarding Islamist and Coptic figures with support to build a separate political base; Egypt had ditched left-wing, secular, pro-Soviet Arab nationalism from the age of Nasser for a socially conservative but pro-Western and developmentalist Egyptian nationalism.
That was not to say that Sadat's accommodation with Israel was popular with all Islamists, because it most certainly wasn't, and the decision had destabilized Egypt. Sadat took the view that Soviet-backed hatchet men such as Hafez al-Assad in former ally Syria and longstanding Libyan crackpot Muammar al-Gaddafi were behind much of the internal unrest that plagued Egypt in the early 1980s, but Islamist officials and military figures opposed to Sadat were a big part of it, too. Matters came to a head in June 1981, when a failed coup was put down and followed by a mass crackdown that included the shuttering of independent press and mass arrests which only served to make Sadat more unpopular, culminating in a botched assassination attempt on him on October 6, 1981, in which an Islamist sleeper agent in the Army, Khalid Islambouli, fired his machine gun at Sadat's grandstand during the annual victory parade. Sadat was badly wounded, losing his right hand, and his Vice President, General Hosni Mubarak, was killed; [1] also killed that day was the Cuban ambassador and James Tully, the Irish Minister of Defense, shocking both of those foreign lands.
The Muslim Brotherhood, while not directly responsible for the attack, had long been a thorn in the side of Sadat's government as an independent power structure in Egypt, the country of their founding - no more. Upon his leaving the hospital on October 10, 1981, Sadat stood up before a small nest of microphones, held up the bandaged stump where his right hand had been, and declared, "Allah has graced me by sparing my life; Allah forgive me, but I cannot be as gracious as He towards those who have attempted to destroy Egypt!" [2] What followed throughout the autumn of 1981 stunned Egypt and indeed much of the Arab world, as Sadat carried out one of the most ruthless purges of political opponents in any country since Stalin. After torturing as much information out of the attempted assassins led by Islambouli as possible, the captured cell of soldiers were publicly executed by hanging. Figures attached to two groups of potential perpetrators, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, were next on the list. Those already in prison found themselves facing firing squads in courtyards; those who weren't were assassinated by death squads or simply disappeared. Prominent Islamic polemicists like Aywan al-Zawahiri and Tala'at Qasim were murdered in their homes, while the infamous "Blind Sheikh," Omer Abdel-Rahman [3] who had allegedly given a fatwa to the killers for Sadat's murder, was publicly executed just to make a point. Even more moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood were given life sentences, tortured and murdered in an orgy of death that lasted deep into 1983 and left organized Islamist opposition to Sadat within Egypt a husk.
It was not only Islamists who found themselves on the chopping block, however; many of the military opponents of Sadat who had attempted to overthrow him in June of 1981 were declared traitors and shot, and prominent Nasserist critics of the regime were arrested and publicly tried. The hope in the West of an open, free and progressive Arab superpower in Egypt had in the space of a year been utterly dashed, but also left Sadat stronger than ever and, conveniently, still very much in the pro-Western camp. The speed, breadth and ferocity of his purge in the wake of his survival had left observers slack-jawed and Iranian SAVAK agents kicking themselves that they had not pulled something like that off themselves; Egyptian "advisors" in Iran became a coming occurrence through the rest of the 1980s to help "steer" Iran's nascent but very much controlled democracy.
Most crucially, an angry Sadat ready to take his pound of flesh off any enemy rather than conciliate was an important wild card as storm clouds started to gather over the Middle East; he was friendly with Israel and Iran, hostile to pro-Soviet states like Syria, Iraq and Libya, and detested Islamists such as the ultra-fundamentalists who were increasingly bringing the viability of Saudi Arabia into question. In other words, he was a ruthless bastard, but exactly the ruthless bastard the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and Iran needed...
[1] Everything up to now is more or less OTL; however, here it is Sadat who is shot in the hand, and Mubarak who dies.
[2] Any Muslim readers are welcome to correct me if this flies dangerously close to blasphemy and would thus be extremely unlikely for a Muslim leader to publicly declare on TV
[3] Zawahiri of course needs no introduction, while Omer Abdel-Rahman was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Small detail -- if Sadat manages to cling to power TTL until he's the same age Mubarak was OTL when he was toppled from power... then he'll still be in charge as late as mid September 2001. Yeah yeah yeah, that's probably not going to be a date of any importance TTL, but I just thought I'd note the coincidence.