Democrats infighting and blowing winnable elections - a tale as old as time.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Nice to see the Socialist Party get a win even if it is fleeting, it means they're still a viable third-party. I wonder when sewer socialism goes international for other emerging socialists.
Probably not.
The US Socialists had to (OTL and TTL) compete with the Democrats, a much more established party of the left in a society much more primed to embrace capitalistic instincts but which their one major Achilles heel was (OTL/TTL) a perceived problem keeping their noses clean. That’s a big part of what made sewer socialism a thing, but also made its precepts very, VERY easy for Democrats to incorporate into their own platform.
By contrast, in Europe socialism competed so much against landed gentry that didn’t exist to the same extent in the US, and parties there tended to have much of the left to themselves
Please, I'm running on copium when it comes to the socialist party, don't let them die out.
As soon as I saw what that post was about I was waiting for you to post something like this haha
I aim to please!
On a more serious note, I'm constantly flattered that there are some people in this thread who care what I have to say. So I appreciate you looking out!
I wonder if any Confederate socialists would advocate for achieving socialism by nationalising slavery? Common ownership of the means of production could be stretched to include owning slaves by a socialist government who labor to produce goods in a twisted, Confederate-esque application of logic, seeing as even CS socialists seem to have been more racist than that one uncle several drinks in at a family gathering
The first Philippine update in the thread. Great Job King. I guess in the Cincoverse, Spanish would be my second language instead of English.
From each irrespective of their ability, to each insufficient for their needs.
It also says something about the strength of our author's writing that he can get someone to be so partisan for a fictional political party.
Love the look into the internal workings of the New York Democratic Party - I always love those deep drives (i've long been a proponent of local timelines that would focus on matters such as this and once tried my hand at one. So when a majo TL delves into such topics, even briefly, it makes me happy! 
). Sad to hear about TR's eldest two sons, though its not surprising considering the brutality of the GAW, and Roosevelt's strong nationalism and militarism in both OTL and the ATL. At least we still have Quinton!
I also see the general trend of the NYC Socalist party following a similar trajectory to that of Milwaukee in OTL: an openly Socialist mayor with a party backing him, defeaed by a combined oppsiton after a single term, and then a long-lasting Socialist mayor who largely exists without a strong backing for the party amongst the edlermen and has to be more personalist as a result. Interesting!
Would love to see how Milwaukee and Duluth are doing in that regard in the ATL, as I suspect the Socialists are stronger and more entrenched in both. How's Viktor Berger doing in the Cinqo-verse so far? I suspect he was far less anti-war here, and with a stronger Socialist party, he's probably far more influential in Washington. Also, even though he was getting up there in years, it would be easy to butterfly away his OTL death, as he was struck by a cable car.
). Sad to hear about TR's eldest two sons, though its not surprising considering the brutality of the GAW, and Roosevelt's strong nationalism and militarism in both OTL and the ATL. At least we still have Quinton!I also see the general trend of the NYC Socalist party following a similar trajectory to that of Milwaukee in OTL: an openly Socialist mayor with a party backing him, defeaed by a combined oppsiton after a single term, and then a long-lasting Socialist mayor who largely exists without a strong backing for the party amongst the edlermen and has to be more personalist as a result. Interesting!
Would love to see how Milwaukee and Duluth are doing in that regard in the ATL, as I suspect the Socialists are stronger and more entrenched in both. How's Viktor Berger doing in the Cinqo-verse so far? I suspect he was far less anti-war here, and with a stronger Socialist party, he's probably far more influential in Washington. Also, even though he was getting up there in years, it would be easy to butterfly away his OTL death, as he was struck by a cable car.
Not necessarily. The current CdM Dems are simmilar to post Southern Strategy Dems of otl .
Not at all fictional if some one supports Dems irl.(But thats for pol chat.)
That's a huge part of it for sure. There are several TLs I've started reading/posting in that aren't what I'm looking for that I've quickly stopped reading. Not saying those TLs are bad, just that they aren't what I am looking for. This TL has managed to keep my interest for years at this point. I get a little bit of joy when I get the notification that we've got another post from our author - especially when it is about something I have no idea about because then I use it as a springboard to learn a bunch of stuff.
All that being said, the double standards in US elections are grating. Before you roll your eyes compare and contrast the Liberals in 1916 vs the Democrats in 1917. Let's back up a bit: We had several posts explaining how the Liberals were essentially split between the old-line conservative wing (Butler, Lodge, Mellon, Lowden, etc) and the more moderate/progressive wing (Hughes, Root, Stimson, Yates, etc). A low-intensity civil war has been brewing on the Liberal side for years by 1916 - go back to the post outlining how conservative and moderate Libs shanked each other in Illinois in 1914 if you don't believe me. This split was so bad that it was explained that the thought of dealing with the resurgent conservative wing of the Liberal party was listed as a reason Hughes hung up his spurs in the first place.
Meanwhile, Democrats were having a similar split of their own in NY between their "conservatives" of Hearst/Murphy (I'm using the quotes because Hearst is only conservative compared to the rest of the party, not compared to the rest of the overall electorate) and progressives of Smith, Sulzer, Roosevelt, Norris, et al.
Clearly the two major parties are changing and adapting and going through all the growing pains that entails. Big deal, that happens all the time in the US - OTL and ITTL. What's your point? My point is that in 1916, Liberals were able to circle the wagons despite all the intra-party bad blood and come together long enough to get Root over the finish line and get him a Liberal House and Senate to boot. Their infighting didn't cost them electorally at all. Meanwhile Democrats don't put the knives away when elections roll around and look what just happened in New York City.
Liberals lose elections, sometimes in spectacular fashion, but they don't blow winnable elections. Only Democrats do. That's the double standard.
A Toast to the Devil: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Politics
"...Carnarvon Street's theaters, cafes, nightclubs, and smoking lounges; but the true appeal of the city lay in the blocks north and west of the train station, in the opium dens of Chinatown and the brothels, saloons and gambling rooms of Gastown. For those from Washington, which had entered the Union with a strict prohibition on alcohol in its constitution, or Oregon, which had banned most varieties of alcohol after a long, divisive legislative battle that was given a massive boost by wartime distilling restrictions, Vancouver was an easy train ride away (or, in some cases, a journey by boat from the Seattle docks, where liquor flowed like the Puget Sound beneath their feet) and became an enormously appealing weekend destination for all manner of debauched behavior.
The backlash to "Sincouver" sullying the reputation of the city finally crested in late 1917, however, in part thanks to the election of Henry Herbert Stevens as British Columbia's Premier earlier that year on the Tory line. Stevens had sat on the Vancouver City Council thanks in part to his reputation as the "Vice Crusader," writing polemical exposes of "sinful" establishments in the city and helping oust a chief of police who was not on the take but insufficiently opposed to the operation of such businesses. This reputation had next powered him to serve as a Member of Parliament for Vancouver, from which he had taken on an outsize role in escalating the infamous Ishii Maru incident in 1914 involving Indian immigrants attempting to disembark in Canada and triggered a riot afterwards. In January 1917, he had won an election to become the new leader of the British Columbia Conservative Party, had easily won a by-election to a safe Tory riding, and then called snap polls in which the Tories were returned in a majority, losing only two seats. It was clear, and early on, that Stevens was not at all like his predecessor, the populist and nativist but reformist Richard McBride - Stevens was a devout Methodist, a proud member of the anti-Catholic Orange Order, and he viewed the world in starkly moral terms, which often influenced him to be highly critical of Canada's large, lumbering, and oft-corrupt business conglomerates, as Canada would discover when he briefly served as Prime Minister in the early 1940s.
By late 1917, Stevens had built up enough support in the BC Legislative Assembly to pass the Liquor Abolition Act, which prohibited all alcohols of greater than 4% from being manufactured, sold, consumed and possessed in the province, one of the harshest such laws in North America (many prohibitionist polities simply regulated the sale of alcohol and did not make a crime of its personal use). He was aided by a pair of companion bills that expanded the ranks of the British Columbia Provincial Police, regarded as one of Canada's finest and most professional, and gave them and the Vancouver Police broad powers to "inspect establishments suspected of breaking the law," an intentionally vague stipulation.
The first months of 1918 in Vancouver were thereafter thus dominated by what came to be known as the "Rum Raids," in which BCPP and VPS constables kicked down doors and dragged people out into the street to be publicly humiliated for "taking drink," and beer, wine and liquor ran freely down the streets as barrels and bottles were destroyed on the spot rather than confiscated. The heavy-handedness of Stevens' police state morality quickly sparked backlash, however, not least amongst Vancouver's Catholics when a German-majority church was raided at dawn on a Saturday and had its sacramental wine - which exceeded, naturally, the four-percent limit - confiscated and smashed on the parish steps, staining them red like blood; it was a series of events that Catholic Canada would not forget soon, even after Stevens scrambled, under considerable pressure from Ottawa, to avoid such embarrassing episodes again and pass an amendment to the law that exempted sacramental wine specifically.
As an effort to combat vice in Vancouver, however, the gambit worked; 1918 saw about half as many visitors to Vancouver drinking establishments as the year before, and 1919 fewer still, which badly damaged the city's economy at a time when Canada as a whole was struggling. It also inspired a massive spike in organized crime, with boats from Asia now laden with liquor, and trans-border smuggling of booze by rumrunners and bootleggers now flowed in both directions, concluding in the violent "Whiskey War" of early 1920 in East Vancouver between Italian, German and Chinese smugglers that left twenty-seven dead in shootings, bombings and stabbings over the course of two months. Organized crime, already a staple of Vancouver due to its opium, gambling and prostitution, did not wither from the prohibition of alcohol in that province but rather flourished.
BC's unusually harsh prohibition, compared to selectively enforced laws in the Prairies or milder alcohol bans with substantial exemptions such as in Ontario or the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, left Quebec as the sole province that had no regulation of alcohol whatsoever other than ordinances against public drunkenness. This was in part due to Quebec's French Catholic majority and large Irish minority, which steadfastly refused to commit to a set of laws that had become hugely associated with punishing Catholics politically, and also, ironically, due to Anglo-Irish business interests in Montreal who held major stakes in the import of Irish whiskey to Canada, in particular from Ulster, and did not want to add a layer of difficulty to their trade, which often involved the Ontario Provincial Police and local Orange Lodges. This unusual alliance of Quebec's parishes and Orangemen likely helped avoid a federal ban in Canada, and also boosted Montreal's economy, as it became a magnet for people looking for drink and leisure not only from Canada but also firmly teetotal New England.
The Canadian prohibitionist movement crested with Stevens' moralizing out West in 1918; after Stevens had returned to Ottawa after his Tory government was defeated two months before the 1921 federal elections, a Liberal-Progressive coalition government modified British Columbia's laws to exempt beer and wine entirely and decriminalized personal use of hard liquor in 1922, before fully decriminalizing public consumption and sales in 1930, two years before Ontario fully repealed their own liquor prohibition. Canada's history of prohibition was not unlike that of the United States - tacitly supported federally, governed state-by-state, and hugely beneficial in the formation of organized crime syndicates - and it certainly would not be the last time that the politics of public morals would clash with the politics of what was pragmatic and workable..."
- A Toast to the Devil: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Politics
The backlash to "Sincouver" sullying the reputation of the city finally crested in late 1917, however, in part thanks to the election of Henry Herbert Stevens as British Columbia's Premier earlier that year on the Tory line. Stevens had sat on the Vancouver City Council thanks in part to his reputation as the "Vice Crusader," writing polemical exposes of "sinful" establishments in the city and helping oust a chief of police who was not on the take but insufficiently opposed to the operation of such businesses. This reputation had next powered him to serve as a Member of Parliament for Vancouver, from which he had taken on an outsize role in escalating the infamous Ishii Maru incident in 1914 involving Indian immigrants attempting to disembark in Canada and triggered a riot afterwards. In January 1917, he had won an election to become the new leader of the British Columbia Conservative Party, had easily won a by-election to a safe Tory riding, and then called snap polls in which the Tories were returned in a majority, losing only two seats. It was clear, and early on, that Stevens was not at all like his predecessor, the populist and nativist but reformist Richard McBride - Stevens was a devout Methodist, a proud member of the anti-Catholic Orange Order, and he viewed the world in starkly moral terms, which often influenced him to be highly critical of Canada's large, lumbering, and oft-corrupt business conglomerates, as Canada would discover when he briefly served as Prime Minister in the early 1940s.
By late 1917, Stevens had built up enough support in the BC Legislative Assembly to pass the Liquor Abolition Act, which prohibited all alcohols of greater than 4% from being manufactured, sold, consumed and possessed in the province, one of the harshest such laws in North America (many prohibitionist polities simply regulated the sale of alcohol and did not make a crime of its personal use). He was aided by a pair of companion bills that expanded the ranks of the British Columbia Provincial Police, regarded as one of Canada's finest and most professional, and gave them and the Vancouver Police broad powers to "inspect establishments suspected of breaking the law," an intentionally vague stipulation.
The first months of 1918 in Vancouver were thereafter thus dominated by what came to be known as the "Rum Raids," in which BCPP and VPS constables kicked down doors and dragged people out into the street to be publicly humiliated for "taking drink," and beer, wine and liquor ran freely down the streets as barrels and bottles were destroyed on the spot rather than confiscated. The heavy-handedness of Stevens' police state morality quickly sparked backlash, however, not least amongst Vancouver's Catholics when a German-majority church was raided at dawn on a Saturday and had its sacramental wine - which exceeded, naturally, the four-percent limit - confiscated and smashed on the parish steps, staining them red like blood; it was a series of events that Catholic Canada would not forget soon, even after Stevens scrambled, under considerable pressure from Ottawa, to avoid such embarrassing episodes again and pass an amendment to the law that exempted sacramental wine specifically.
As an effort to combat vice in Vancouver, however, the gambit worked; 1918 saw about half as many visitors to Vancouver drinking establishments as the year before, and 1919 fewer still, which badly damaged the city's economy at a time when Canada as a whole was struggling. It also inspired a massive spike in organized crime, with boats from Asia now laden with liquor, and trans-border smuggling of booze by rumrunners and bootleggers now flowed in both directions, concluding in the violent "Whiskey War" of early 1920 in East Vancouver between Italian, German and Chinese smugglers that left twenty-seven dead in shootings, bombings and stabbings over the course of two months. Organized crime, already a staple of Vancouver due to its opium, gambling and prostitution, did not wither from the prohibition of alcohol in that province but rather flourished.
BC's unusually harsh prohibition, compared to selectively enforced laws in the Prairies or milder alcohol bans with substantial exemptions such as in Ontario or the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, left Quebec as the sole province that had no regulation of alcohol whatsoever other than ordinances against public drunkenness. This was in part due to Quebec's French Catholic majority and large Irish minority, which steadfastly refused to commit to a set of laws that had become hugely associated with punishing Catholics politically, and also, ironically, due to Anglo-Irish business interests in Montreal who held major stakes in the import of Irish whiskey to Canada, in particular from Ulster, and did not want to add a layer of difficulty to their trade, which often involved the Ontario Provincial Police and local Orange Lodges. This unusual alliance of Quebec's parishes and Orangemen likely helped avoid a federal ban in Canada, and also boosted Montreal's economy, as it became a magnet for people looking for drink and leisure not only from Canada but also firmly teetotal New England.
The Canadian prohibitionist movement crested with Stevens' moralizing out West in 1918; after Stevens had returned to Ottawa after his Tory government was defeated two months before the 1921 federal elections, a Liberal-Progressive coalition government modified British Columbia's laws to exempt beer and wine entirely and decriminalized personal use of hard liquor in 1922, before fully decriminalizing public consumption and sales in 1930, two years before Ontario fully repealed their own liquor prohibition. Canada's history of prohibition was not unlike that of the United States - tacitly supported federally, governed state-by-state, and hugely beneficial in the formation of organized crime syndicates - and it certainly would not be the last time that the politics of public morals would clash with the politics of what was pragmatic and workable..."
- A Toast to the Devil: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Politics
I’m honestly just flattered anybody reads my bloated musings, lol
Incidentally much of that update is cribbed from the real 1917 mayoral election, with the important difference that Mayor John Mitchel, whose grandparents and parents were Confederate soldiers, isn’t mayor, and the anti-Socialist backlash over their opposition to Liberty Bonds doesn’t annihilate Hillquit.Love the look into the internal workings of the New York Democratic Party - I always love those deep drives (i've long been a proponent of local timelines that would focus on matters such as this and once tried my hand at one. So when a majo TL delves into such topics, even briefly, it makes me happy!
I also see the general trend of the NYC Socalist party following a similar trajectory to that of Milwaukee in OTL: an openly Socialist mayor with a party backing him, defeaed by a combined oppsiton after a single term, and then a long-lasting Socialist mayor who largely exists without a strong backing for the party amongst the edlermen and has to be more personalist as a result. Interesting!
Would love to see how Milwaukee and Duluth are doing in that regard in the ATL, as I suspect the Socialists are stronger and more entrenched in both. How's Viktor Berger doing in the Cinqo-verse so far? I suspect he was far less anti-war here, and with a stronger Socialist party, he's probably far more influential in Washington. Also, even though he was getting up there in years, it would be easy to butterfly away his OTL death, as he was struck by a cable car.
Berger is still the chieftain of the House Socialist caucus and will be for some time; Milwaukee is sort of the intellectual heartland of American socialism ITTL, after all
Jesus Christ dude hahaha
Thanks to Rizal (and a lesser extent Bonifacio) Tagalog never takes off as the PI’s Lingua Franca, so depending on where you’re from Spanish could even be your first language (my thinking is Manila is virtually unilingual while native languages are much more common in northern/southern Luzon and the Visayas)
What can I say, I have a fucked up sense of humor and sometimes it unintentionally produces something like this,