(Almost done here...)
XIII. The End of Ideology (1981-1999)
Of course, doctrinaire communism does not, in the long term, work as an economic system in any timeline, and the combination of having a larger sphere of influence and maintaining an extreme, Stalinist hard-line actually accelerated the decline. After Molotov's death in early 1981, a divided politburo put Konstantin Chernenko into the leadership role as a compromise candidate. Several high officials in the Molotov government fled the country, defecting to the US or China, and shortly the people in power came to understand just how strained and unsustainable the Soviet Union's economy had become. Their immediate prescription, which might have bought a few months from, was to withdraw the soldiers garrisoned in Iran and Afghanistan and dramatically slash the military budget. This policy was strongly unpopular among the military, and several generals, most prominently Valentin Varennikov, rejected 'the authority of the Politburo to pursue a policy of national suicide'. The Soviet Civil War that began there would be a long and bitter affair, producing nearly as many Russian casualties as the Great Patriotic Struggle and Atomic War together. The course of the war was one of contraction, as factions holding territories distant from Russia itself gradually let go of those holdings to concentrate on the Rodina. In the end, the Warsaw pact protectorates and the East European Republics were left to their own devices and asserted independence, shifting their economies towards "Japanese-style socialism", which was an authoritarian state capitalist system in all but name, while the "'Stans" suffered civil strife of their own, driven by an Islamic Theocratic movement. Russia itself was eventually won by Varennikov, who ruled it as an impoverished, paranoid dictatorship until his assassination in 1994. Following this, the nation became a weak government with democratic forms but actual power held by a number of competing generals.
In China, communism had a failure mode more familiar to (17)Z1 scholars, with a reformist government opening the door to a revolution of higher expectations, a failure of the traditional communists to hold back this growing tide, and a promising 'new beginning' failing in a collapse to kleptocracy and raw authoritarianism, leaving Japan, which had managed to find a workable economic paradigm, as the most serious military rival to the US and Britain. Tensions worldwide dropped dramatically, since Japan's vulnerability to a concentrated conventional missile attacks made it less inclined to adventurism.
In the United States, a combination of having been entrenched for almost four decades and a settling of political fortunes to a '50/50' nation rather than the wild electoral swings of previous years meant that the bureaucracy had become by far the most important branch of the government. President Thurston Mitchell (Republican, Born in 1934, no analogs in (17)Z1 lines) was the first to not, upon election in 1980, even be granted Emergency Powers over the central issues in his campaign, Health and Human Services, because the Republicans held a Senate majority and because, due to a Neopopulist spoiler candidate, did not receive a popular vote majority. The essence of the health care issue at the time was that the entire sector was struggling due to an extremely heavy burden of regulations and government requirements. Mitchell and his party had hoped to reform those regulations, while the Bureaucracy and some Democrats preferred to nationalize the entire sector. Although no side was in favor of the maintaining the status quo, that was the end result of Mitchell's two terms.
It was during Mitchell's successor, Democrat Paul DeVore's first term that the impasse would end. DeVore was a moderate on the health issue, favoring a relaxation of regulation, but it was not that issue on which the matter turned. Rather, in the late summer of 1990, Hurricane Athena slammed into the gulf coast, striking the coast even more directly at New Orleans than (17)Z1(3)Z lines' Katrina, with similarly devastating results. The civil service, which was 100% white at the decision-making echelons, was blamed for poor response and infrastructure maintenance, and in the politics of the US at this time violations of the 'equal' part of 'separate and equal' were nearly as unacceptable as the idea of desegregation. Congress reacted to this by taking the opportunity to tighten Congressional control over the civil service. This control turned out to work in the opposite manner planned, and in the late nineties Congress appeared to be captured entirely by bureaucratic interests. Health care, along with several other highly-regulated industries, were essentially nationalized by acts of Congress. A backlash against this drove support for the Neopopulists to nearly 25%, but their actual influence on policy remained very nearly undetectable.
In the vacuum formed by the collapse of communism, new ideological movements arose throughout the world. Islamic theocratic movements became popular throughout the Middle East, threatening and in some cases overthrowing local Monarcies. These came in many varieties, both along religious-sect divisions and infused with Arab, Persian, or Turkish nationalism, and tended to consider one another as enemies. Another set of movements emerged from the New German region as Soviet influence there waned; 'returnists'. These were usually a tiny minority of the new nation, but most were willing to use terrorism and other forms of political violence to further their agenda. Returnist groups of different stripes repeatedly targeted international sporting events,the Olympic Games, which made those events into nightmares of security procedures and did not deter all of the attackers. Finally, mainly in the US and Britain, a terrorist movement that called itself 'Nihilism' (although the tenets of its documents are more akin to radical environmentalism combined with a weird Manichean atheism) inspired a number of impressionable or already deranged individuals to commit acts of terror. In the media and popular culture, these two movements were conflated into an entirely fictional bogeyman: action movie bad guys tended to be Nihilists or "German Returnists" (a point of view which no actual person seems to have held at all), and having them be revealed to have been a German war orphan by the end of the second act only stopped appearing in every other film because it quickly became a cliche.
Technological progress was slow during this period. In 1981, The US Supreme Court ruled in NBC vs Zenith that the video-tape technology had no legitimate purpose and was a tool to violate copyrights, and forced a recall of the device. Surviving units were horded by hobbyists and collectors, who were able to covertly import compatible tape from New Zealand. While the videodisc format had some early adopters, a format with a similar size and capacity to the CD was adopted for audio and video content, with a full-length movie generally requiring at least two discs. By the late nineties, a "Superdisc" format with five times the storage capacity gained widespread acceptance.
Computer architecture took a similarly strong approach to intellectual property. In business computers, the vast majority of software was delivered in cartridge form or installed to drives completely inaccessible to anyone but the manufacturer, with only limited scripting or macro languages for customization. Writing and maintaining these scripts was considered secretarial work, and so there was an increasing demand for secretaries in the 80s. This led to a mild economic boom fueled by an increase in dual-income families. Serious computer programming was a heavily licensed trade, done only in a few graduate schools and a handful of computer companies. There was no 'home computing' to speak of at all, although gaming consoles with graphics and power roughly equivalent to an Atari 5200 were introduced in the mid-90s, and by 1999, the closest thing to an internet was a US-only academic discussions tool vaguely similar to (17)Z1's usenet. Much of the consumer electronics hardware was designed and manufactured in New Zealand, which still held a slight technological edge.