Haig’s Gamble (1993)
In the end, it was a stubborn current account deficit, more than anything else, which killed the Combined Syndicates of America.
The CSA had attained the relative height of its prosperity following the end of the Second Weltkrieg: its Civil-War damaged industry largely reconstructed by the time Russian and Anglo-French soldiers were shaking hands across the Rhine in 1949, it was in a superb position, as the only large-scale industrial economy not essentially reduced to rubble, to become the world’s industrial powerhouse, while its decidedly unideological willingness to trade with anyone who could put up the money ensured that it retained this position well into the 60s. By the early 70s, however, the rest of the world was beginning to catch up: the Japanese-dominated Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’s escalating industrialisation and Western Europe’s continuing recovery meant that the CSA no longer enjoyed the position that it once did.
A series of commodity shocks in the early 80s, for which the CSA’s key industries (by this point deeply complacent, starved of any real internal development over the preceding twenty years and coasting on thirty-year-old market dominance) were entirely unprepared, exacerbated the situation: when Robert McNamara was installed as Chairman in 1985, he was faced by increasing inflation, a stagnant industrial sector and a pool of reserve capital which had been whittled down alarmingly in recent years.
McNamara’s efforts to right the ship of American Syndicalism were three-pronged: firstly, at the urging of cyberneticist Anthony Stafford Beer, all enterprises above a certain size would be linked to a proposed distributed decision-making network, vastly increasing the economy’s ability to react to sudden changes in incentives; secondly, industrial management techniques originating outside the CSA would be incorporated into the CSA’s industrial sector; and finally, “syndicalist democracy” would be reintroduced on a limited scale for the first time since the early 1940s.
The first prong, resulting in the creation of CYBERSYN, proved of limited use due to the project’s technological limitations, and was largely defunded by the early 90s. The second prong, far more wide-ranging in its impact, was something of a success: the importation of just-in-time manufacturing techniques from Japan, and the introduction of the home-grown Six Sigma process improvement programme across a swathe of industries, helped the CSA regain some of the competitive edge that it had lost during its two decades of complacency (although these roll-outs sparked labour tensions – by 1990, the average worker in the CSA increasingly identified the Syndicalist Union Party’s higher-ups with
those pencil-necked assholes in suits who timed your bathroom breaks.)
The third prong, involving the reintroduction of (indirect) elections for Governors of CSRs, had the most intriguing effects. The electoral process established for Gubernatorial elections was enormously convoluted, involving non-secret balloting of workplaces to elect delegates, who in turn elected a candidate (required to be a member of the Syndicalist Union Party in good standing nominated by at least one quarter of his CSR’s delegates to the Chamber of Syndicates and one fifth of his CSR’s union representative) to the office of Governor. This process, clearly intended to ensure that the Governorships remained in the hands of SUP loyalists, nevertheless provided the most accurate gauge of public opinion in the hinterlands for decades. The elections of November 1988, the first under this new system, saw candidates from the reformist wing of the SUP elected everywhere they stood (most notably, Max Baucus, James Stockdale and Dennis Kucinich). While subsequent elections in 1990 and 1992 weren’t quite as comprehensive a victory for any particular faction, it was clear by the time McNamara officially resigned his office in February 1993 that a significant level of factional discontent was bubbling below the serene surface of the SUP’s rule over the CSA.
It was against this backdrop that Alexander Haig ascended to the office of Chairman in 1993: succeeding McNamara largely due to the lack of any obvious alternative, and still somewhat tainted by his close identification with the Northwest Montana Insurgency, he and his inner circle grasped the need to head off any challenge to his rule from within the SUP as soon as possible. The solution that he proposed was a surprisingly radical one. For the first time in fifty years, an open election would be held for the Chairmanship, with Haig running as the Syndicalist Union Party’s candidate: his inevitable and crushing victory over whatever handpicked opponent could be put forward as a plausible opposition standard-bearer, made possible by the SUP’s theoretically absolute control over what electoral infrastructure existed, would hopefully cement his hold on power.
The election, announced in March 1993, was scheduled for November. The process under which it would be conducted was designed to curtail the influence of the reformist faction to the greatest extent possible: in a break with McNamara’s system of “syndicalist democracy”, which would allow reformist Governors to exert pressure on voters in their CSRs, a secret ballot was instituted, with responsibility for tabulating the votes and ensuring the overall integrity of the election falling to a commission headed by the Speaker of the Chamber of Syndicates Walter Mondale (a man of decidedly orthodox Syndicalist views). Furthermore, the ban on parties other than the SUP from standing was lifted.
All that was missing now was an opponent, whom Haig’s connections in the Bureau of Internal Security were happy to provide. For ten years, David Duke had been a prominent and noisy critic of the SUP in the Gulf and Texarkana CSRs, rallying locals against the Chicago government and enjoying close but unspoken ties to “The Ragin’ Cajuns”, a small-scale terrorist group fighting for the creation of an ethnoseparatist Cajun CSR on the model of the New Afrika and Sequoyah CSRs. An astute observer would have noticed that his decade of public fulmination against governmental corruption and treachery had accomplished very little, and that, while many of his associates received significant custodial sentences, nothing particularly bad had happened to him. A
very astute observer, willing to tail his car at irregular intervals to an assortment of back-roads in the Mississippi delta, would have – correctly – supposed him to be a long-standing informant for the Bureau of Internal Security. As a foil to Haig, he would be perfect.
Duke’s political grouping, the Popular Democratic Party, was granted certification within days by the CSA’s electoral commission, and provided with some public funding and guaranteed airtime on the CSA’s broadcasting system. As a hedge against the entrance of further candidates into the election, there would be two rounds of voting, the first to ensure that the CSA was forced into a binary choice between Haig and Duke. In comparison to Duke’s noisy entry into the race, the response of the SUP’s nascent reformist caucus was an altogether lower-key affair.
A loose assortment of Governors and Congressmen, brought together at first by their response to the Plains Massacre, had been holding regular discussions since late 1992: in response to Haig’s announcement, they agreed between themselves that one of their number should run for the post of Chairman. It was decided that this responsibility should ultimately fall to Congressman James Traficant, a locally-popular representative of broadly reformist sympathies. His nomination papers, signed by Governors Stockdale, Baucus and Kucinich, were received by the electoral commission in early April 1993, with his candidature being approved shortly afterwards: the SUP, untroubled by the addition of a minor politician to the list of candidates for Chairman, granted him funds and airtime without demur.
Forced into the unfamiliar environment of an election campaign, and unsure about the precise extent of their general popularity, the SUP was nevertheless initially sanguine about their prospects of victory: with polling suggesting that about 70% of the population wanted the reformist caucus to cooperate with the SUP rather than seize control over its apparatus, the Haig camp was more worried about what an overly decisive victory in the first round of voting would do to party unity than they were about the possibility of an unexpectedly close contest. That Haig had badly misread the public mood became clear in early July, when a series of internal polls suggested that Traficant had replaced Duke as Haig’s key opponent, and was within touching distance of first place.
The reaction by the SUP’s official campaign was one of blind panic. Traficant’s scheduled airtime and funding was abruptly pulled, with the electoral commission citing “financial discrepancies”; candidate nominations were reopened, with the previously apolitical John Glenn (pilot on the first manned spaceflight) and Lane Kirkland (head of the AFL, by now much diminished from its "One Big Union" days during Foster's chairmanship of the CSA) entering the election as fellow independents and immediately receiving sustained airtime; and a series of attack adverts against Traficant, alleging large-scale corruption, alcoholism and multiple marital infidelities, were launched by the SUP.
These interventions had little impact by this point in the electoral cycle: the public, exhausted by fifteen years of consumer price inflation, irritated by McNamara’s efficiency and management reforms, and increasingly discomforted by the high toll of SATPO’s counter-insurgency operations in Northwest Montana, had flocked to the Traficant campaign. The final nail in the Haig campaign’s coffin came in early September, when Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa (a man whose impeccable political instincts would lead in the late 90s to his briefly becoming the richest man in the world) tacitly agreed to assist the Traficant campaign with messaging and vote harvesting: trucks bearing pro-Traficant messaging became a feature of the last two months of the election.
In desperation, the Haig camp turned to Mondale to cancel the election: Mondale, increasingly embarrassed by the whole affair, and not desiring to burn the SUP’s remaining goodwill to rescue a man not entirely liked by the party from a mess of his own making just to prevent the election of a congressman who, his reformist sympathies notwithstanding, remained a member of the SUP on paper, refused point-blank. Haig would have to hope that residual sympathy for the SUP as the natural governing party of the CSA would be sufficient to see him through.
The night of 9 November 1993 was far worse than the SUP had feared: as the results began to trickle in, it was clear almost immediately that Haig would come in a distant third to Traficant and Duke. While Traficant was the clear winner of the election, his inability to win a majority of the vote meant that a second round of voting (excluding Haig, Glenn and Kirkland) would be held in two weeks.
In the sole debate between Traficant and Duke (initially intended to be a Haig-Duke affair), Duke played his part to perfection: his bizarre and incoherent performance, suggesting the annexation of the Pacific States of America and New England and alleging that the Traficant campaign was funded by the Rothschild banking family, pushed virtually every undecided voter into the Traficant camp. The election of 23 November 1993 was a foregone conclusion, with the first directly-elected Chairman of the CSA giving a victory speech in the early hours of 24 November promising a radical new direction for the country. Barring miracles, Haig’s political career was over.