Learning to be Free Again: Electoral Wackiness in Post-Communist America
- Thread starter Augenis
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- america post-communist
This will be interesting. I wonder what Presidential Elections are like sans the EC.
Watched. This TL has huge potential, and there's a chance that it could become a gateway for Anglo users into post-Soviet politics. Love Cheney as Communist Party leader, the centrist "Constitutionalists" and the NAACP. Can't wait to see the analogues to Yeltsin and Clinton and the Chechen War.
I've said it before on Discord, but I do have some ideas regarding the larger Eurasian politics, particularly its "blue" and "red" states. For example, Kuban/Krasnodar Oblast works well as a Georgia-lite (rapidly growing city in a mostly rural region that has historical ties to, uh, free-minded yet otherwise reactionary militias), while the larger Ural-Volga region works well as the Great Lakes area, given their fairly large labour presence and liberal strongholds (Perm in particular comes to mind).
Not sure if it would be that strong, though I suppose something on the level of the Chicano movement could emerge early on. You should consider Caucasus as well.
I've said it before on Discord, but I do have some ideas regarding the larger Eurasian politics, particularly its "blue" and "red" states. For example, Kuban/Krasnodar Oblast works well as a Georgia-lite (rapidly growing city in a mostly rural region that has historical ties to, uh, free-minded yet otherwise reactionary militias), while the larger Ural-Volga region works well as the Great Lakes area, given their fairly large labour presence and liberal strongholds (Perm in particular comes to mind).
Not sure if it would be that strong, though I suppose something on the level of the Chicano movement could emerge early on. You should consider Caucasus as well.
I feel like their won't be enough immigration from the Latin American world to make a Chicano=Chechnya analogue. I think @Augenis is hinting towards a situation in either Alaska or Mississippi with the NAACP's religiousness.
Well, when I mentioned the Chicano I was talking about Turkestan specifically, but I agree with you on the second.
It's probably Mississippi.
2
The results of the election of 1992 satisfied nobody. The Democratic Socialists and Columbia Movement did not acquire the majorities or even pluralities they wanted. Minor parties such as Republicans, Democrats, Liberals and many others were frustrated at their weak showings. The NAACP was dismayed that they failed to gain a plurality in Alabama, which they hoped to collect alongside Mississippi. Beer and Barbecues voters were disappointed that they received neither beer nor barbecues. But the worst part was… why was the House of Representatives so god damn fractured? Ah, but wait! Of course, proportional representation must be at blame, allowing anyone who got over 2 percent of the vote to be entitled to seats in the lower house - but, surely, the Senate, which is elected through first-past-the-post constituencies, should consolidate into a few larger parties and…
The United States Senate elections yielded an even heavier blow to all parties than the House of Representatives election did. Thirty out of one hundred Senators were independents - local politicians, jurists, actors, or showmen, who chose to run with independent tickets and overpowered all the partisan candidates in their respective constituencies on name recognition alone. While most of them quickly organized into caucuses based on loose ideology or relationship ties, it nevertheless meant that the institution which was supposed to be a check on a largely apolitical party system was effectively incapacitated. With few other options and a parliamentary dissolution swiftly dismissed, a group which Richard Cheney described as a “Russian Roulette Coalition”. The DSA, the Republicans, the Democrats and Beer-Barbecues all joined together in a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, waiting in anticipation on which one of them four collapses first and thus forces a minority government. Before that happened, however, it at least managed to push through a wallflower with an ego far greater than his rather boring career as FBI commissioner in New England, going by the name of Lyndon LaRouche, as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. LaRouche thus assumed temporary executive powers.
The election was a bust for the Columbia Movement. But, the results of the Congressional elections did teach Norman Mailer and his peers one thing - that, in the absence of partisanship and strict ideological issues, personalities prevail over party endorsements. When the average voter stands in the ballot box and sees a list of names, he votes not for the one which represents the party which supposedly fights for his interests, but rather the name he has heard on TV. Which meant that the Columbians looked forward to the presidential elections scheduled next year. They may not claim to have great support among the American population, not when the debacle of de-collectivization and neoliberalization grew to be associated with them indirectly and Mailer specifically - but they had plenty of famous activists and dissidents among their ranks. Writers, publicists, protest organizers, who built up fame during the 1980s and could now present themselves as forces of unity in an increasingly divided country, all available in Mailer’s deck of cards.
The first wrench to their plans came in early 1992, before the Congressional elections even took place, during the debates on America’s new presidential election system in the nation’s provisional assembly. Mailer campaigner for a two-round runoff presidential election system, the same as the one in force in Eurasia, and abandoning the Electoral College for good. Cheney, however, cracked his peer’s gambit, and put forward an ultimatum - either the second round is abandoned as well and a simple majority vote for President implemented instead, or the DSA, which still held a large chunk of the legislature, walks out, eliminates any quorum which the assembly might have, and paralyzes the entire government. Mailer chose to not have a gun pointed to the head of his interim government and acceded to a single round system, this so-called “compromise” becoming only one of many curses inflicted upon the United States during its rather chaotic years of government structure formation. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t hope to be held. Now that the reins of power shifted from Columbia to the DSA, the ire of the average American over their failing situation would naturally target them. Was it a good idea for America to elect a DSA-led legislature and a Columbian President? Perhaps not, but to Mailer and his crew, the only thing worse than a deadlocked government in the midst of massive economic recession and social decay… would be those damn communist cadres returning to power again. It was not just an election, it was a crusade to make sure 1990 does not die in vain, and they were sure to express this messianic belief in their electoral rhetoric, no matter how little sense it made in the end.
The Presidential candidate put forward by the anti-communist camp was Anthony Lake, a rather little known diplomat who nonetheless had a strong base to build up on the campaign. The revolution which swept the United States in the 1930s did not subjugate every single American citizen under its wing - almost three million of them managed to escape the nation, settling in neighbouring countries and from there, when the American revolution began to expand outside its orders, to Europe, Australia and Asia. These were the members of the upper class and the former political elite who avoided the clutches of vigilante mobs and revolutionary kangaroo courts, Loyalist soldiers who crossed the northern and southern border to escape the Reds, and dissidents who managed to escape the USSA throughout the fifty years of its existence, and they organized themselves into the American diaspora. As invincible and all-powerful as the Communist regime appeared, they never abandoned hope that it will come to pass one day, and spent their time writing sorrowful poems while waiting for that inevitable fall. During the Cold War, they became a tool of the Eurasian government, organizing into organizations such as “The Voice of America”, which sought to connect with the oppressed peoples of their homeland through radio communication. Between their isolated communities, the American ideals and traditions of old were essentially conservated - unwilling to integrate into the foreign states they ended up in, they fostered each other’s memories of the nation they used to live in, its unique political system, its civic culture, its… uh… institutional racism… It was the reason why many emigres found themselves disappointed upon their return - the America they remembered passed away five decades ago, and what they witnessed had been unbelievably altered by the Communist era. Anthony Lake was, specifically, a leading staff member of the remnants of the American diplomatic service, which broke ties with their homeland upon the outset of the revolution and declared itself to be a government-in-exile recognized only by each other - he returned to his homeland in 1991, met with crowds of those who still recalled his exploits in the name of American liberty overseas. He was tacked on with Gore Vidal, a writer and famous campaigner of the Columbia Movement from the Mondale days, as his running mate and tossed straight into the bloodhound ring - and Vidal, though a composed and erudite individual who sought to act as professional as possible, ended up pulling the ticket downwards, because it meant that Lake could never rid himself of the perception that he was just the “Columbian candidate”. And you did not want to associate yourself with Columbia - not when the people still perceived it as being the bastards who crashed the economy and closed the collectives.
The story of the early Democratic Socialists of America is very much a story of Richard Cheney. A bulldogish Communist party cadre who built up a largely inconsequential career in Wyoming through the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of the few members of the cabinet of Walter Mondale who avoided getting under fire, likely because his position as Minister of Heavy Military Engineering was completely inconsequential - thus, when the lifespan of the CPUSSA came to an end, few protested his rise to head this burning, dying remnant of what used to be America’s vanguard party. Cheney could be out-charismaed by a jar of Communist era condensed milk, but he had one advantage over his immediate political opponents - while Mailer and Columbia were busy worrying over ideals and dreaming, he was playing politics, and the twenty years of political practice he had was a lot better than Mailer’s zero. He also had a rather fortunate skill, or maybe a habit of pulling out former Communist cadres from deep within his party’s ranks as if they were cards in a deck, and seeing those cadres turn out a lot better than initially imagined. He pulled out the rather inconsequential LaRouche and placed him in the position of Speaker, thus giving temporary control of both executive and legislative power to a man who owed his post-communist career to him. He pulled out the similarly inconsequential Patrick Buchanan, a staffer in the USSA’s Ministry of Propaganda during the 70s and 80s, and dragged him along as his running mate - ignoring that Buchanan was turning increasingly unhinged since the fall of the Communist regime, ranting every once in a while about how the United States must reassert dominion over Canada and Central America and force all the formers back into their collectives. As long as he shuts up during the campaign, he can rant all he wants afterwards.
Against both the clique of Communist cadres represented by Cheney and the idealistic dreaming of the United States of old represented by Lake, a third candidate stood, aiming to bring the country to an entirely different direction. Noam Chomsky was a name often mentioned among the streets and corners of communist America, usually in whispers. Among the numerous dissidents who fought against the regime with the pen or with the Browder Cocktail, he was the most prominent, yet at the same time most unique. To him, socialism was a necessary end goal, but it must be a voluntary association of persons, not the totalitarian regime espoused by the USSA regime - with this ideology at hand, Chomsky prolifically criticized both the state he lived under and the Eastern democracies which his fellow dissidents saw as a shining light of liberty. Because of the latter, he was briefly allowed to be published in the 1960s, before the regime finally put a lid on him and deported him over the Atlantic. Having returned back to his home nation at last and reunited with his past literary circles, Chomsky witnessed that it was replacing one set of shackles with the next - blindly following Eastern neoliberalism without any regard for the people themselves and what they might truly want, and thus he raised the banner of Quixotic candidacy. His electoral staff was filled with the same Don Quixotes and the rare Sancho Panza, one of whom, the poet Gary Snyder, he picked out as his running mate. No party backed him, and if any one did, then Chomsky would have certainly denounced it. Neoliberals, tricksters, and/or Communists, all of them. They would just dilute his message.
A common urban legend in 90s America says that Dick Gavett, leader of the Beer and Barbecues party, had to be physically restrained from entering the Federal Election Commission headquarters in order to register as a fourth candidate in the race. While nobody can prove the truth of this rumor, especially since Gavett himself avoids clearing things out on purpose to maintain the magic, it would certainly not be out of left field. Electoral irregularities were the norm both in 1993 as well as 1992, to a point where Russian observers invited to find electoral irregularities tossed their hands to the air and returned a few weeks later because they found their presence to be pointless - as one observer points out, both DSA and Columbia local quarters in Iowa set up stalls next to polling places and distributed locally produced corn and porkchops to everyone who announced that they voted for their candidate, and saw neither themselves nor the opposing party as engaging in something frowned upon. Of course, many of the voters intelligently attested to both DSA and Columbian stalls that they voted for them, it’s not like they could check... Media across the country did the absolute hardest to spin the election into a two man race - at best, a three man race. The worst thing that could happen is the election getting swarmed with candidates and thus someone abusing the one-round electoral system to get elected with twenty percent of the vote…
Though, in truth, there was a lot of reason for the election to be seen as a three man race. Each one of the trio represented something different, and each one of them being elected would be proof that America has chosen a direction.
If Lake is elected, that means the US has firmly determined itself to succeed the tradition which fifty years of communism south to stamp out. That it sees itself, first and foremost, as a continuation of what it used to be like before, that the light of the Founding Fathers never died and the USSA was merely a hiccup.
If Chomsky is elected, that means the US has chosen to bring forth something new, to represent something unique, and say goodbye not just to the Communist period, but to its traditions of old and the neoliberal democracy put forth by Eurasia. That it sees in itself the ambition to innovate, even if unsure whether this innovation will lead them to new heights or send them to new lows.
If Cheney is elected, that means the scars of communism will take a long, long time to heal, if they ever even manage to. That America’s back has been broken by communism and a new generation will have to grow up before it will be able to stand up and move on.
America had a choice. America did what it does best.
The United States Senate elections yielded an even heavier blow to all parties than the House of Representatives election did. Thirty out of one hundred Senators were independents - local politicians, jurists, actors, or showmen, who chose to run with independent tickets and overpowered all the partisan candidates in their respective constituencies on name recognition alone. While most of them quickly organized into caucuses based on loose ideology or relationship ties, it nevertheless meant that the institution which was supposed to be a check on a largely apolitical party system was effectively incapacitated. With few other options and a parliamentary dissolution swiftly dismissed, a group which Richard Cheney described as a “Russian Roulette Coalition”. The DSA, the Republicans, the Democrats and Beer-Barbecues all joined together in a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, waiting in anticipation on which one of them four collapses first and thus forces a minority government. Before that happened, however, it at least managed to push through a wallflower with an ego far greater than his rather boring career as FBI commissioner in New England, going by the name of Lyndon LaRouche, as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. LaRouche thus assumed temporary executive powers.
The election was a bust for the Columbia Movement. But, the results of the Congressional elections did teach Norman Mailer and his peers one thing - that, in the absence of partisanship and strict ideological issues, personalities prevail over party endorsements. When the average voter stands in the ballot box and sees a list of names, he votes not for the one which represents the party which supposedly fights for his interests, but rather the name he has heard on TV. Which meant that the Columbians looked forward to the presidential elections scheduled next year. They may not claim to have great support among the American population, not when the debacle of de-collectivization and neoliberalization grew to be associated with them indirectly and Mailer specifically - but they had plenty of famous activists and dissidents among their ranks. Writers, publicists, protest organizers, who built up fame during the 1980s and could now present themselves as forces of unity in an increasingly divided country, all available in Mailer’s deck of cards.
The first wrench to their plans came in early 1992, before the Congressional elections even took place, during the debates on America’s new presidential election system in the nation’s provisional assembly. Mailer campaigner for a two-round runoff presidential election system, the same as the one in force in Eurasia, and abandoning the Electoral College for good. Cheney, however, cracked his peer’s gambit, and put forward an ultimatum - either the second round is abandoned as well and a simple majority vote for President implemented instead, or the DSA, which still held a large chunk of the legislature, walks out, eliminates any quorum which the assembly might have, and paralyzes the entire government. Mailer chose to not have a gun pointed to the head of his interim government and acceded to a single round system, this so-called “compromise” becoming only one of many curses inflicted upon the United States during its rather chaotic years of government structure formation. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t hope to be held. Now that the reins of power shifted from Columbia to the DSA, the ire of the average American over their failing situation would naturally target them. Was it a good idea for America to elect a DSA-led legislature and a Columbian President? Perhaps not, but to Mailer and his crew, the only thing worse than a deadlocked government in the midst of massive economic recession and social decay… would be those damn communist cadres returning to power again. It was not just an election, it was a crusade to make sure 1990 does not die in vain, and they were sure to express this messianic belief in their electoral rhetoric, no matter how little sense it made in the end.
The Presidential candidate put forward by the anti-communist camp was Anthony Lake, a rather little known diplomat who nonetheless had a strong base to build up on the campaign. The revolution which swept the United States in the 1930s did not subjugate every single American citizen under its wing - almost three million of them managed to escape the nation, settling in neighbouring countries and from there, when the American revolution began to expand outside its orders, to Europe, Australia and Asia. These were the members of the upper class and the former political elite who avoided the clutches of vigilante mobs and revolutionary kangaroo courts, Loyalist soldiers who crossed the northern and southern border to escape the Reds, and dissidents who managed to escape the USSA throughout the fifty years of its existence, and they organized themselves into the American diaspora. As invincible and all-powerful as the Communist regime appeared, they never abandoned hope that it will come to pass one day, and spent their time writing sorrowful poems while waiting for that inevitable fall. During the Cold War, they became a tool of the Eurasian government, organizing into organizations such as “The Voice of America”, which sought to connect with the oppressed peoples of their homeland through radio communication. Between their isolated communities, the American ideals and traditions of old were essentially conservated - unwilling to integrate into the foreign states they ended up in, they fostered each other’s memories of the nation they used to live in, its unique political system, its civic culture, its… uh… institutional racism… It was the reason why many emigres found themselves disappointed upon their return - the America they remembered passed away five decades ago, and what they witnessed had been unbelievably altered by the Communist era. Anthony Lake was, specifically, a leading staff member of the remnants of the American diplomatic service, which broke ties with their homeland upon the outset of the revolution and declared itself to be a government-in-exile recognized only by each other - he returned to his homeland in 1991, met with crowds of those who still recalled his exploits in the name of American liberty overseas. He was tacked on with Gore Vidal, a writer and famous campaigner of the Columbia Movement from the Mondale days, as his running mate and tossed straight into the bloodhound ring - and Vidal, though a composed and erudite individual who sought to act as professional as possible, ended up pulling the ticket downwards, because it meant that Lake could never rid himself of the perception that he was just the “Columbian candidate”. And you did not want to associate yourself with Columbia - not when the people still perceived it as being the bastards who crashed the economy and closed the collectives.
The story of the early Democratic Socialists of America is very much a story of Richard Cheney. A bulldogish Communist party cadre who built up a largely inconsequential career in Wyoming through the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of the few members of the cabinet of Walter Mondale who avoided getting under fire, likely because his position as Minister of Heavy Military Engineering was completely inconsequential - thus, when the lifespan of the CPUSSA came to an end, few protested his rise to head this burning, dying remnant of what used to be America’s vanguard party. Cheney could be out-charismaed by a jar of Communist era condensed milk, but he had one advantage over his immediate political opponents - while Mailer and Columbia were busy worrying over ideals and dreaming, he was playing politics, and the twenty years of political practice he had was a lot better than Mailer’s zero. He also had a rather fortunate skill, or maybe a habit of pulling out former Communist cadres from deep within his party’s ranks as if they were cards in a deck, and seeing those cadres turn out a lot better than initially imagined. He pulled out the rather inconsequential LaRouche and placed him in the position of Speaker, thus giving temporary control of both executive and legislative power to a man who owed his post-communist career to him. He pulled out the similarly inconsequential Patrick Buchanan, a staffer in the USSA’s Ministry of Propaganda during the 70s and 80s, and dragged him along as his running mate - ignoring that Buchanan was turning increasingly unhinged since the fall of the Communist regime, ranting every once in a while about how the United States must reassert dominion over Canada and Central America and force all the formers back into their collectives. As long as he shuts up during the campaign, he can rant all he wants afterwards.
Against both the clique of Communist cadres represented by Cheney and the idealistic dreaming of the United States of old represented by Lake, a third candidate stood, aiming to bring the country to an entirely different direction. Noam Chomsky was a name often mentioned among the streets and corners of communist America, usually in whispers. Among the numerous dissidents who fought against the regime with the pen or with the Browder Cocktail, he was the most prominent, yet at the same time most unique. To him, socialism was a necessary end goal, but it must be a voluntary association of persons, not the totalitarian regime espoused by the USSA regime - with this ideology at hand, Chomsky prolifically criticized both the state he lived under and the Eastern democracies which his fellow dissidents saw as a shining light of liberty. Because of the latter, he was briefly allowed to be published in the 1960s, before the regime finally put a lid on him and deported him over the Atlantic. Having returned back to his home nation at last and reunited with his past literary circles, Chomsky witnessed that it was replacing one set of shackles with the next - blindly following Eastern neoliberalism without any regard for the people themselves and what they might truly want, and thus he raised the banner of Quixotic candidacy. His electoral staff was filled with the same Don Quixotes and the rare Sancho Panza, one of whom, the poet Gary Snyder, he picked out as his running mate. No party backed him, and if any one did, then Chomsky would have certainly denounced it. Neoliberals, tricksters, and/or Communists, all of them. They would just dilute his message.
A common urban legend in 90s America says that Dick Gavett, leader of the Beer and Barbecues party, had to be physically restrained from entering the Federal Election Commission headquarters in order to register as a fourth candidate in the race. While nobody can prove the truth of this rumor, especially since Gavett himself avoids clearing things out on purpose to maintain the magic, it would certainly not be out of left field. Electoral irregularities were the norm both in 1993 as well as 1992, to a point where Russian observers invited to find electoral irregularities tossed their hands to the air and returned a few weeks later because they found their presence to be pointless - as one observer points out, both DSA and Columbia local quarters in Iowa set up stalls next to polling places and distributed locally produced corn and porkchops to everyone who announced that they voted for their candidate, and saw neither themselves nor the opposing party as engaging in something frowned upon. Of course, many of the voters intelligently attested to both DSA and Columbian stalls that they voted for them, it’s not like they could check... Media across the country did the absolute hardest to spin the election into a two man race - at best, a three man race. The worst thing that could happen is the election getting swarmed with candidates and thus someone abusing the one-round electoral system to get elected with twenty percent of the vote…
Though, in truth, there was a lot of reason for the election to be seen as a three man race. Each one of the trio represented something different, and each one of them being elected would be proof that America has chosen a direction.
If Lake is elected, that means the US has firmly determined itself to succeed the tradition which fifty years of communism south to stamp out. That it sees itself, first and foremost, as a continuation of what it used to be like before, that the light of the Founding Fathers never died and the USSA was merely a hiccup.
If Chomsky is elected, that means the US has chosen to bring forth something new, to represent something unique, and say goodbye not just to the Communist period, but to its traditions of old and the neoliberal democracy put forth by Eurasia. That it sees in itself the ambition to innovate, even if unsure whether this innovation will lead them to new heights or send them to new lows.
If Cheney is elected, that means the scars of communism will take a long, long time to heal, if they ever even manage to. That America’s back has been broken by communism and a new generation will have to grow up before it will be able to stand up and move on.
America had a choice. America did what it does best.
So, who was the first leader of the USSA when the Second American Revolution struck? I'm going to take a guess and assume someone who was a bigwig in the CPUSA IOTL was their first leader.
The Communist takeover of America is stated to be in the 1930s, so it's probably either Foster or Browder.
I'll say William Foster, I suppose.
Debs was deady by then, yes, but he was revered as a founding father of communism in America.
Did his regime practice the crazier bits of Foster's path in Kaiserreich like "legalizing suicide" and "kidnapping children from stubborn families"?
Majority or plurality? Cheney only has the latter and you made it clear the new-USA has ditched FPTP.
Only for the House of Representatives. It's stated it's still used for the Senate.