Hmm, I'm not sure a completely apolitical role like that of the Japanese empire (who has no involvement at all in governance) would be the mostly likely outcome - after the Imperials fall, the Tories will still exist, and might support a less political but still strong institutional role for the monarch, although maybe not King Albert himself. Maybe people would look at a strong executive as a defence against a future Rutherford - what is the heir to the throne like? Or one of Albert's siblings?
Maybe look to the example of the Spanish monarch's role after the Transition to Democracy in Spain - he is involved in politics but all laws he signs are also signed by the relative minister, and it is that minister who is responsible for the contents of that law.
If Albert can be persuaded (read that word as you like) to abdicate, there are certainly acceptable alternatives. The heir to the throne is a minor and still malleable, so a regency might be arranged, and if that's unfeasible for some reason, some of Albert's siblings disagree with him and not all of those are married to foreign monarchs.
There will certainly still be Tories, and even some who aren't Tories will have a sentimental attachment to the monarchy or will want to preserve it as a symbol of national unity. But there will also be those who want to get rid of the monarchy entirely due to Albert's support of the Imperials, and the anti-monarchist faction will probably be bigger than at any time in modern OTL history. The monarch's postwar role will have to be a compromise between the two - if not an apolitical monarchy, than certainly one with a reduced political role and carefully circumscribed emergency powers. We'll see how the debate plays out during the 1920s.
I'd expect the unwritten rules that keep the British monarch to be enforced more strongly - perhaps a written constitution for Britain and the Empire, a way to break with the Rutherford quasi-dictatorship?
I rather think that given the experience with Rutherford, who upended so much of the established order, there will be calls across the political spectrum to codify the "unwritten constitution" of Britain.
Normally I'd totally disagree, citing the idea that our unwritten constitution relies on the honour of those involved, and thus makes it harder to subvert then a written one. But recent events in OTL and TTL have made me reconsider.
Unfortunately, honour is a relative notion. And history is, to be honest, pretty unforgiving to polities that trusted the "honour" or their politicians. This, by the way, emphatically includes direct democracies.
A political system that depends on honor will eventually run into a dishonorable person who the collective can't or won't control - and even for the honorable, "there's no
rule against it" can be a very seductive idea in a time of crisis. A written constitution at least ensures that everyone knows the boundaries and that they can be judicially enforced, although it too depends somewhat on the honor of those charged with enforcing it.
I do think an experience with near-dictatorship would make many people want to codify the constitution so that there is less abuse of the unwritten rules. Whether everyone can agree on how to do so is another story.
That was enjoyable. It's nice to see Roosevelt be actually not racist for once.
Is it too much too ask to see Wilson's reaction when the Indians finally win their Republic?
TTL's Roosevelt has had a different life from OTL, including earlier travel in Africa and a close wartime partnership with one Harriet Tubman.
And while Wilson will no doubt be displeased at India winning the war, he'll have seen it coming for some time, so I doubt there would be (in teg's words) a Sovereign-level villainous breakdown.
Yes, I have to agree, this one's just sad. And I can't pick out just how, in any way, he differs from the OTL one either.
His racial views are a bit more extreme than OTL (although his OTL views were racist even by the standards of the time). My working assumption is that the South Carolina gave added impetus to the "fecund dusky hordes" strain of racism, and that Wilson, whose family was either in or near South Carolina during the war, absorbed it during childhood. For him, the Indian revolution is South Carolina all over again, the natural subjects overwhelming their betters through sheer numbers.
I'd have thought ITTL Wilson might have had a political moment during the Mesoamerican war, but I guess it would have been too much of a gear shift for him to dislodge himself from his tenured academic position in time to get on the bandwagon as a politician.
He's a senator at the time of his debate with TR; he may have come to that position during the run-up to that war. He'd have been an interventionist, either from academia or from Congress.
I'd say I expected Wilson to muster more powerful prose, but actually I'm pretty hard pressed to think of any ringing phrases he managed to produce OTL.
Well, he's a long-time professor at what he
thought would be an academic debate. TR ambushed him by treating it as a stump speech, but TTL's Roosevelt has even less regard for the rules than OTL's.
If we want to or have to credit Wilson OTL with being above the average of the USA's more mediocre Presidents, it has to be for his willingness to push through elements of the Progressive agenda [...] A lot of what did pass in his administrations was so watered down in practice that it almost might not have been done at all--and the meaning of that became clear when, under FDR amidst the Great Depression the New Deal gave substance to the ghost.
If I had to describe his politics in one word, it would be "messianic." He was a son and grandson of theologians, and he had a vision of peace at home and abroad: a league of nations, self-determination of peoples, the Fourteen Points. Like many messianists, his reach exceeded his grasp: what he
gave us was a segregated Federal workforce, Over There, and one of the most severe periods of domestic repression the United States has ever seen. (And the Federal Reserve. I'll give him that.)
I consider him a tragic figure in some ways, and I feel a little guilty for making him TR's strawman - but he
was strongly racist, and something like the Indian war would bring out the very worst in him.
And out of intellectual curiosity, what was the ethnic composition of that audience? All white, or did some some minorities get to hear Wilson insult them?
It was a Washington audience running heavily to members of the political class, so it was mostly white but had some minorities.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who appreciated the update. I'll fill in the Mughal blanks next, and after that it will be time to wrap up the Indian war and the Imperial Party with it.
