dcharles
Banned
Well, sort of....
Wow! You wrote a 3100 word answer in response to a 17 word comment. Six pages!
Props.
Well, sort of....
This is what happened in a way, the local Militia called the Popular Force, and the Regional Force that was a National Guard equivalent for each Province grew in capability, but in no means equipped to deal with a conventional invasion, but by 1970, had the VC/Insurrection problem contained. This was the RF/PF, or Ruff Puffs to US Troops.I have heard of one US scheme that just possibly might have worked. It involved Marine squads learning Vietnamese, and, deployed to individual villages, lending themselves to all sorts of non-military Peace Corps sort of work to gain trust and confidence, and then drilling up local cadres of villagers to be a self-defensive militia presumably not interested in simply joining the "VC" when the Yankee and Saigon backs were turned; this scheme allegedly worked on a small scale trial basis, but I have to wonder if it could have been undertaken on the necessary mass scale
Tricky Dick was very liberal in some ways. I've mentioned in tha past that Noam Chomsky was on record that he thought was the last liberal President the US had.This is why I am skeptical, even if one supposes as many do that Nixon for instance was some kind of liberal, that liberal agendas would prevail.
Looking at his career overall, and at his candid personal attitudes (and those of his trusted handpicked men) as revealed in various ways post-administration (such as the Frost interviews and interviews with former officials, the tapes, etc) he was first and foremost an opportunist, interested in power for power and glory's sake--to show up the well-off snobs who snubbed him in college back in Whittier and so forth. He was "liberal" to the degree he judged the overwhelming consensus of his age to be liberal, but given an opportunity to turn to reactionary solutions he took it. Whatever would position himself as the great leader was his ideology. Per the Constitution's apologists in the Federalist Papers and so on, this is fine, "ambition checks ambition" and all that, in the liberal quasi-market oriented mindset that holds that a properly designed constitution harnesses self-centered drives just as competitive free markets harness private greed to public good, via the ability of third party prospective employees or customers to walk away from a bad deal and seek out good ones. (Not that the Framers were up on Smith's Wealth of Nations; rather we have here parallel evolution of different aspects of one ideological paradigm developing to account for an emerging liberal world order). I should note I am using the word "liberal" in two different senses in this single paragraph! Formally speaking it is a world view that seemed downright reactionary by the 1960s (and still more so in the 1930s and '40s) strongly expressed by the Jacksonian Democrats of the mid-19th century and the ruling parties of Britain, which had in context radically progressive aspects at the time versus Old Regime type aristocratic authoritarianism and paternalism, but in the context of the concrete grievances and concerns of the vast majority of practically close to propertyless working people in the 20th century was conservative in denying this public legitimate redress in the form of massive social democratic intervention in market outcomes. In peculiar American parlance on the other hand, the labels of "socialist" or even "social democratic" were to be avoided as radioactive as the fundamental "common sense" of American ideology, which say the Libertarian Party captures very succinctly (and in the context of "Reagan Revolution," St Ronnie himself put it as "government is not the solution, government is the problem"). Therefore the New Deal consensus enabled mainstream politicians to embrace the continuities between classic liberal thought and collective ad hoc governmental interventionism and claim (with some justice I think, toward the sentiments if not the logical content of classic liberalism, which politically speaking Americans embraced as an expression of populism) that they were the real liberals. In fact it was the deep conservatives who were most faithful to the logic and formalism of what people like Jefferson and Jackson were driving toward, leading logically to Libertarian claims that "that government that governs least governs best, that government is best that governs not at all." Of course classic conservatives (in the American rather than European context) have and had plenty of vested interests that require a very strongly interventionist state on their behalf--property rights, in Libertarian mythology, defend themselves via dispersed populist self-interest (untrustworthy partners acquire bad reputations and so forth, very bad actors outrage the common-sense proprieties and are put down by vigilante action, etc) but in fact the sort of property rights that emerge from capitalist competition are tightly centralized interests of a vanishingly few people, and a mystique of state majesty is quite necessary to sustain them--the alternative would be something akin to industrial feudalism, as rival gangs of the very rich freely employ mercenary enforcers against each other with a Mafia-like ruthlessness. Society's contradictions cannot be wished away with verbal formulas; institutions exist and the question is, who controls them and to what purposes. The New Deal consensus held that by and large, provided their bad tendencies were kept in prudent check by judicious government supervision and strategic intervention, the evolution of the centralized corporate order served well enough, and we need not be concerned if the masses of people paid little attention to the details of government and left those complexities to collegial deals struck between formal representatives of elected state power and the corporate elites pursuing enlightened self-interest--provided that gross and outrageous forms of private interest were judiciously deterred, the smarter magnates would let their hired managers reach consensus fair deals with legitimate working class interests. That's what Americans meant by "liberal" in the post-war years. We could justify calling Nixon that in that he was consistently pals with the corporate elites all through his career, and inheriting the New Deal consensus that considerable scope for forms of government intervention were legitimate no matter what Thomas Jefferson might have thought about it, there was plenty of scope for his own personal stamp of glory without stepping on his patron corporation toes. But the notion that this somehow guaranteed he'd be what we'd call progressive on issues like racial equity, gender equity, working class prosperity, safety of the public from sharp corporate practices either fiscal or environmental, and so on, involves a leap of faith that should corporate collective interest veer toward raising profits via cutting corners, the Constitutional political side of things would automatically rebuff them. That was the New Deal faith, and the Democratic party was supposed to provide reasonable vigilance in protecting the common citizen from extremes as a quid pro quo for securing the basic right of the privileged to enjoy their wealth and power--for the common good.Tricky Dick was very liberal in some ways. I've mentioned in tha past that Noam Chomsky was on record that he thought was the last liberal President the US had.
Now, the end of the beginning has come. This is where the fun begins.
-JustStars
Yea, honestly, the premise is inherently kinda dumb, as for why in place of a proper PoD with an actual reason, Kennedy is just hit on the head by a very heavy book on the Buchanan presidency.Probably the closest JFK could have come to a backdown would be an open trade of the missiles in Cuba for the Jupiters in Turkey. For an argument that this would not have been politically disastrous for JFK, see my post at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...issile-crisis-going-hot.336178/#post-10006914
Indeed, a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom, who were picketing the White House with placards reading INVADE! and APPEASEMENT IS FOR COWARDS, when asked about a Cuba-Turkey missile trade, said "Sure, we'd go for that." https://books.google.com/books?id=3EHqCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA117
When I came to Jason's last name I really did think it was Sneed the first time I read it and I was disappointed to learn otherwise lol.“Approaching Election Day, the polls were strikingly competitive, jumping between Goldwater and Kennedy’s Favour. But, come Election Day, Goldwater had a narrow lead. Expectations for Democrats in the Senate and House were far starker, their once large majorities were now possibly within grabbing distance of Republicans for the first time since a decade before. It was to be down to the wire.”
- Jason Seed, ‘Elections in the United States: from Washington to the Disputeds’
When I came to Jason's last name I really did think it was Sneed the first time I read it and I was disappointed to learn otherwise lol.
Anyway, great stuff I'll be watching and reading for more.
I will not eat a single morsel of food until Sneed seizes the means of production and becomes the proprietary of a feed and seed.I do not know what you mean, his last name is Sneed, always has been. There was never a Daniel Reed or a Jason Seed, only Jason Sneed.
-JustStars