Learning to be Free Again: Electoral Wackiness in Post-Communist America

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.
I think would see probably Japan divided into east and west. East japan will probably look like that.. west japan.. Different story
 
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Enlighten me, what is the runoff system?
A system of two election rounds for elections where only one person can the winner (presidential elections, FPTP constituencies, etc.). If nobody receives 50% or more of the votes in the first round, the two candidates with the highest amount of votes advance to the second round (the runoff)
 
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The President-elect, Nancy Pelosi, had a full table of issues to address immediately after her inauguration. The most striking and annoying one was, of course, America’s eternal pain in the butt, Aztlan. Ever since the Aztlan War of the 1990s, the American Southwest, especially the state of Texas, was locked in a very uneasy armistice. The Republic of Aztlan might have been destroyed and the Raza Unida Party dissolved, but all of the disgruntled Hispanic-Americans remained, their wishes for autonomy, cultural rights and unity with Mexico were never addressed, and the tensions between English and Spanish speakers in the region continued to grow. With each passing local election, the New Raza Unida party started to consolidate its control over Hispanic-dominated areas, to a point where some even referred to them as the Hispanic equivalent of the NAACP - their political machines paled in comparison to the thousand-headed hydras which clutched onto Mississippi and Alabama, however. Nor did this satisfy the radical, separatist oriented, younger Hispanic population, which viewed this as kowtowing to the illegal American regime. This resentment manifested itself in underground organizations such as MEChA, and from there, as the 2002 East Coast apartment bombings, a violent reminder to the rest of the United States that the Aztlan War was, indeed, a thing, and its effects should have probably been resolved when they could have been resolved.

The 2005 Presidential election did not see a Hispanic candidate such as Sandra Cisneros, but it did see an aspirant - Marianne Williamson. The Renaissance Spiritual Fellowship, a New Age cult which somehow became a competitive political party, did not spend their time in Congress doing anything meaningful - the candidates she elected on her list would blurb and filibuster about “taxes on the soul” and “transforming the American state to connect the dead and the living” at day while lavishly embezzling from the treasury at night. Nothing except for one thing, however. Even before the election of 2004, Williamson and her party were perhaps the strongest supporters of Hispanic rights you coud possibly find. She entered the political arena by promising the families of terrorist attack victims that she will bring their children and husbands back, unite the worlds of the dead and the living, and bring peace between the peoples of America - and, anything else be damned, but she is going to at least live up to this one promise. The people of the Southwest loved her, they voted for the Renaissance Spiritual Fellowship en masse, and when Williamson announced her campaign for the 2005 Presidential election, they showered her with support again. America’s political establishment, which previously treated Williamson as no more than a joke which went too far, finally pulled the plug on her, giving her the McAfee treatment and gathering the evidence necessary to sick the law enforcement upon her. Despite being a cult leader, Williamson showed more political acumen than McAfee and instead chose to resign, all while openly denouncing the entire political spectrum and retreating to Texas in order to gush all over about how she’s been purged and Washington has been overtaken by demonic forces. In the 2005 race, Williamson essentially ran a campaign without actually running one - she and her party stormed the Southwest, calling for anyone who can vote to write in her name, not in order to somehow get her into the White House, but to show resistance. And resistance they showed, writing her in by the millions and even managing to collect 25% of the total vote in Texas, which, in the massively divided election which 2005 was, meant that the plurality of the vote went to her. There were legitimate fears of a second Aztlan uprising, one which the international public would surely throw their full weight under. Mexico, now under a collective farm organizer turned successful businessman turned populist president, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, eyed the situation with great interest. Resolving this crisis fell on President Pelosi’s shoulders.

In February of 2006, Marianne Willamson suddenly disappeared. Gone, reduced to atoms. Well, maybe not that, but… still. Williamson was last seen early that month, in the city of San Antonio, before all traces of her vanished, her presence on the internet and in public life completely ceased, and the world was left to wonder what happened- wait a minute. Didn’t the FBI pull off these kinds of hijinks by the hundreds during the Communist era? The people caught on unsurprisingly quickly, several impromptu protests broke out across the country, Mexico immediately dragged the United States to the International Court of Justice, but at that point, there was little they could do about it. Lacking a leader, the Hispanic resistance movement haemorrhaged momentum by the hour, and its more radical members retreated to plotting terrorist acts underground, which they had already gotten accustomed to during the years prior anyway. Eventually, the resistance starts to cease, the Renaissance Spiritual Fellowship unravels itself with several more arrests over accusations of corruption and graft, and by the end of 2006, the entire scandal is only mentioned in bars from time to time, and even then often in a positive light. Pelosi showed her spine and showed those Mexicans what for!

And she takes no prisoners.

It had become tradition at this point for newly elected Presidents of the United States to make their way to Moscow for their first foreign visit. Meet their peer in Eurasia, talk big words about peace in the world after the Cold War, eternal friendship between Eurasia and America, so on and so forth… Pelosi turned around and took her first plane to Beijing, where she shook hands with the President of the Republic of China, Wang Wenhuan. Eastern news outlets, obviously appalled, immediately began printing hysterical headlines. Say, “Svoboda’s” very own “Pelosi’s retreat to her Chinese teacher” - China had built a reputation as the world’s largest illiberal regime, under the authoritarian rule of the Kuomintang, and the fear was that the new President of the United States was going to not just copy a few pages, but write a sequel to the whole book. Pelosi made sure to assert that these fears were completely unfounded, and yet, it was easy to tell that her Presidency was going to be a lot more table-smacking than Ignatieff’s. She understood that she lives in a system where the position of President has turned pretty weak (although Ignatieff started to amend that somewhat in his second term, though more out of necessity because the fragmentation of the House of Representatives was starting to turn governance difficult), and yet she decided to stretch her powers as much as she possibly could. In each and every State of the Union speech, President Pelosi made sure to lash out at the Congressional parties, expressing her disappointment at revolving door coalitions, constantly changing Speakers, and failing trust in the political system. When Speaker of the House John D. Hastert, delegated by the Democratic-Republicans, dared to make a counter-speech in 2007 where he defended the incumbent administration, Pelosi ripped apart a transcript of his speech behind his back, for the cameras and the whole world to see. She refused to associate with any political party, refused to act as partisan as Cheney or as weak as Ignatieff, and constantly made a big deal of the people’s will invested in her to act. And the American people came to appreciate their “mama Nancy”. A lot. She consistently ranked among the most popular politicians in the country, the first President of the United States to maintain a steady positive approval rating in the dozens throughout her whole term. This sort of dirigisme, as it turns out, was sorely missed by a rather uncomfortably large percentage of the population.

It helped that the period from 2005 onward was one of pretty good feelings. Optimism in the market was high, the economy was recovering, cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles no longer resembled drab Communist era blockytowns and began to embrace Eastern style modernity (in the city centers, at least). And as long as this positivity continues, there was hope that America’s rather awkward teenage phase was over and they can go back to being a modern state again. That America’s learned to be free again.

At the end of 2007, the Democratic-Republican Party gathered to a summit in Philadelphia to congratulate their steady rise in the polls, after almost a year of successful governance in coalition with Labour, Prohibition and the National Union - a coalition with about as much unifying ideology as a bowl of week old porridge has taste, but at least it actually worked. After all the formalities in the open, the upper echelons of the party gathered in a separate chamber, with no journalists or cameras to bother them, in order to discuss the reality of the situation. As Mitch McConnell, the chairman of the party and Dick Cheney’s handpicked successor, put it, they were really really not doing well. Economic growth was slowing down a lot faster than they could have possibly predicted, and there is no way to resolve this, because during the past three years, they’ve completely drained the country’s finances. They spent all the money they had and more, there was no reserve left, and the money wasn’t even spent intellgently. Erecting a monument for Douglas MacArthur, a hero of the anti-communist side of the Second American Civil War, cost ten times the amount of money it was supposed to cost. Then removing the Communist era statues attached to both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge… and it’s just these little things adding up, you know? Thankfully, the country was not yet in the middle of a massive recession and the election was near, so what they need to do is put on their smiley faced, bunker up, hope the entire situation does not unravel itself before November next year, and hope that they can cover up their trail in the next four years. The voters are pretty stupid, y’know, so they shouldn’t suspect a thing, as long as you feed them the right statistics and cover up the wrong ones.

That’s a lot unravelled and the American people described in a not very flattering light, it’d sure suck if someone was secretly filming the proceedings and leaked them to the public. Ah wait, that’s exactly what happened.

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the aftermath of the Philadelphia speech, entire city squares were engulfed by the frustrated populace, demanding resignations, demanding a reshuffling of the cabinet and an end to this constant, damn, frustrating, constant lies to the average people. Tires were burned, flags flown, effigies smashed, in a display of nationwide unity not seen since the Columbia Movement. McConnell accepted the authenticity of the recording and resigned, but at that point, it was far, far too late. The right and the left wings of the party broke and shattered, their leaders faking anger at Mitch’s designs - but none were as great at faking anger, and lots of it, than the President herself. There were legitimate reasons for her to be pissed, sure, but above all else, Pelosi was relieved. They were so close to directing the hatred of the people not just at the Democratic-Republicans and Congress, but at the President as well - and yet, she managed to surf through the storm not only effectively unscathed, but also solidified herself as the defender of the average people from the big bad evil swamp in Washington.

All poll predictions made last year had to be discarded. Even a demigod could not have saved the DRUSA at this point. Not when they had less than a year to do so.

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Pelosi showed her spine and showed those Mexicans what for!

And she takes no prisoners.
Ominous!

Pelosi turned around and took her first plane to Beijing,

Even more Ominous!
That America’s learned to be free again.

Doubt
That’s a lot unravelled and the American people described in a not very flattering light, it’d sure suck if someone was secretly filming the proceedings and leaked them to the public. Ah wait, that’s exactly what happened.

Is this a reference to any specific Eastern European event or just a turn in the story.
There were legitimate reasons for her to be pissed, sure, but above all else, Pelosi was relieved. They were so close to directing the hatred of the people not just at the Democratic-Republicans and Congress, but at the President as well - and yet, she managed to surf through the storm not only effectively unscathed, but also solidified herself as the defender of the average people from the big bad evil swamp in Washington.
Man that ominous music just gets louder!
All poll predictions made last year had to be discarded. Even a demigod could not have saved the DRUSA at this point. Not when they had less than a year to do so.

There’s a lot to take part from that image, looks like chaos!
 
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