TLIAW: Against the Grain
- Thread starter Vidal
- Start date
While the writing quality is still excellent, the events themselves have left me feeling mixed. It's a shame that despite everything, the neoliberal turn still unfolds on schedule. I guess the social democratic model was bound to run up against certain profitability crises sooner or later.
I also noticed this slight inconsistency during the Kahn Administration:
Looking to the future, this massive economic crisis (and the Right's obstructionism) is likely to swing the next congressional elections to the Left. That is, if parties like Proletarian Democracy have something more to offer than state socialist apologia. Given the earlier emphasis on ecology, I'm honestly surprised that we haven't heard more about a figure like Murray Bookchin. Given his ties with both the Socialist Left and certain strains of libertarianism, he could be a useful bridge between the PD and the Utopians, strange as that coalition may seem. He's a figure worth looking into in any case, since he fits this context so well.
I also noticed this slight inconsistency during the Kahn Administration:
From what previous updates have hinted at, the AFL-CIO merger never happened ITTL, and the latter was eventually merged into the National Congress of Worker Organizations. Maybe it's just the AFL which affiliates with the Democrats; they always were the more moderate union.
Looking to the future, this massive economic crisis (and the Right's obstructionism) is likely to swing the next congressional elections to the Left. That is, if parties like Proletarian Democracy have something more to offer than state socialist apologia. Given the earlier emphasis on ecology, I'm honestly surprised that we haven't heard more about a figure like Murray Bookchin. Given his ties with both the Socialist Left and certain strains of libertarianism, he could be a useful bridge between the PD and the Utopians, strange as that coalition may seem. He's a figure worth looking into in any case, since he fits this context so well.
I don't really see a neoliberal turn unfolding. Liddy's admin achieved far less than Reagan, and the Dems seem pretty firmly within the Rooseveltian consensus
It's only been 18 days, give the authors time. The updates will come eventually.
42. J. Michael Crichton (NR-IL), 1997-2000
42. J. Michael Crichton (NR-IL)
January 20, 1997 - February 19, 2000
January 20, 1997 - February 19, 2000
Michael Crichton hardly expected to end up where he did - nor did anyone else. Nothing in his Long Island boyhood prefigured his later Presidency - he was a skilled writer, published in the New York Times at seventeen, but he never indicated much political interest. It became slightly more plausible at Princeton, where he met his mentor and friend Allan Bloom and got converted to Bloom's brand of conservatism (though Bloom himself never accepted the label), skeptical of 'progress' and deeply concerned with opposing the homogenizing hegemony of liberalism in the commanding heights of American culture - but even then, Crichton remained a fundamentally literary figure. Under the pseudonym John Stross, he wrote five novels in four years, many of which critiqued New Deal Democrats and their legacy [1]; under his own name, he wrote for the conservative magazines Human Events and The Individualist, primarily as a book reviewer.
The first sign of change came with his journey into reportage. Assigned to cover 1969's Asilomar Conference on Mass Connectivity Technologies, Crichton became hotly sought-after as a reporter able to explain complex technologies and make readers care about why they mattered. Though many subject matter experts disliked him, feeling that his novelistic approach went beyond the bounds of correctness and that his tendency towards contrarianism undermined his efforts to explain science where it actually was, readers adored his energetic prose and thrilling evocations of exciting and dangerous possibilities. In 1972, Crichton wrote the non-fiction book Drugs of Choice, which delved into the underground trade in opiate painkillers, amphetamines, psychedelics, and other mind-altering substances; he followed that up with 1975's Wired, about the new 'adept' culture on MECC and other compuser systems and law enforcement's efforts to fight cybercrime. Between the two books, he won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer.
Assigned to cover Ralph Nader's 1976 campaign, and then to follow Mazzocchi, Crichton's career became ever more intertwined with politics. Around the same time, he got in touch with the "Chicago Circle" of contrarian scientists who shared his skepticism of 'public ecology' - people like Dixy Lee Ray who believed that public ecologists systematically overstated the dangers of controversial topics like atomic energy and the fragility of the natural world, and that Wallace-era Big Science systematically reinforced this through a grant process that gave more funding for 'finding' evidence of danger than for debunking those findings when they were methodologically substandard, people like Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein who believed that those same institutions discouraged important research into controversial areas such as correlations between race and IQ, and an emerging critical mass of junior professors and graduate students who chafed under the belief that failing to meet the ideological demands of 'liberal' big science could mean a summary end to their careers, which many of them believed were already threatened by 'affirmative action'. Crichton was attracted to this group like a moth to a flame, both out of personal opinion and journalistic instinct, and he became their most effective mouthpiece.
He also became a nationally-known wolumnist. On Everything^2 [3], Crichton's snarky distillations of the world as he saw it made him a popular figure even as he found it harder to retain the last slivers of his image of objectivity; his own wolumn, Mediasaurus, obviated that issue, allowing him to go directly to the public with his critiques of academia, government, and media figures and institutions. As 'seamless' VOC (video over computer) technology became more advanced and accessible, Crichton was able to gain a new following, with cybertapes of his lectures, public addresses, and interviews passed around college campuses and corporate intranets. When important studies, especially in the 'soft sciences', failed to replicate, or newer and more conservative ones came out; when professors and grad students were expelled, fired, ostracized, or criticized for their conservative views, or in ways that could be attributed to their conservative views; when liberal politicians said embarrassing things, or things that sounded embarrassing out of context, or things that could be edited to sound embarrassing - Crichton was there.
During the Liddy era, his career entered a new phase. On the one hand, Liddy's reflexive opposition to the left dovetailed nicely with Crichton's - the former cited the latter's deconstruction of liberal claims of waste on the Nike project and the military X-27 project several times in public addresses. On the other hand, Crichton felt Liddy didn't go far enough. In particular, he felt that Liddy's 'surrender' to left-wing interests on the environment would substantially raise consumer prices for no good reason, hurting both Liddy's administration and the country as a whole, and that his lack of attention towards China - nominally neutral, but in fact (according to Crichton) engaged in a 'clash of civilizations' through trade policy, industrial espionage, and diplomatic work in India, Africa, and even Latin America - left a ticking time bomb on the table. Crichton - at the time a professor at the University of Chicago - decided that he had done enough of interpreting the world in his various ways - the time had come to try to change it.
In 1986, Crichton entered the Conservative primary for the seat being vacated by octogenarian Senator Emily Taft Douglas in Illinois. It was a tough fight; though the Illinois Conservative Party was strong in the Chicago suburbs, the alliance between the Cook County machine and downstate farming interests had kept it under the line on the state level for decades. But the Democrats went too far, too fast, nominating reformist Nader-friendly liberal Lane Evans in the primary over machine candidate Michael Bilandic, whose campaign was both marred by conflicts with local African-American politicians and undermined by the pervasive assumption that the machine candidate, regardless of effort, would automatically win. Though Evans' energetic campaign helped him win his House seat back in 1988 and a nomination as Secretary of Labor under Kennedy-Johnson, it wasn't enough to win the support of conservative Catholics and African-Americans who viewed a campaign so strongly and disproportionately supported by comfortable Anglo Chicago liberals with skepticism. Crichton won the race by three points.
That gave him an ideal vantage point from which to become a national leader of the Conservative, and later the New Republican, parties; he had enough power to justify being given a soapbox, enough connections to ensure that he could get that soapbox seen outside his existing following, and enough charisma and skill to use his platform to rally the troops and convince wavering swing voters that his agenda - oil deregulation, criminal justice, opposition to "political correctness", and an "America First" foreign policy - was one they might want to vote for. During Kahn's term, he railed against AFL-CIO corruption and inefficiency (and championed the cause of a number of 'independent' unions, more than a few of which were de facto company unions), opposed energy nationalization, and argued that the Department of Democratic Affairs went after the wrong targets, that China and India (not to mention many countries in Europe) were, or at least could be, as threatening to America as the Soviets had ever been. His frequent appearances on Common Sense allowed Beatty a sparring partner - he got higher ratings, and Crichton got a bigger audience.
Considered a possible nominee in 1992, Crichton focused on his Senate race, winning an awkwardly close race against former Governor Neil Hartigan. Johnson-Kennedy's administration allowed him to reach even higher - in a world where many men felt an inchoate and difficult-to-explain sense of threat from the administration, Crichton's assertion that the administration's policies were weak and wrong felt right to a lot of people. His critical attitude to Johnson-Kennedy's stance towards space, towards her negotiations with the Soviets [4], and towards her support for gay rights helped make him the frontrunner for the Republican nomination even before April 1995. When the economy collapsed, Crichton's support for heterodox economists like his friend Pat Choate, who had predicted that the convergence of the global economy as a result of ACTA and the "Skidelsky System" [5] created new vulnerabilities in the world economy, looked less crankish and more visionary. Jim Sensenbrenner's decision not to run for the nomination made the nomination look more like a coronation.
Though the presidential debates briefly derailed Crichton's campaign - he came across as a callous, vacuous snob talking down to a more competent woman - they were not quite enough to prevent it from reaching the station. Many McAfee voters supported his outsider image and willingness to "say what we were all thinking" more than his actual policies, ensuring that many of them voted for Crichton rather than his endorsed successor in author Peter McWilliams; meanwhile, more than a few left-leaning potential Democrats voted for candidates like McWilliams or Proletarian Democracy nominee and longtime wolumnist Louis Proyect. Crichton won by a comfortable margin in the electoral vote, masking deceptively close results in Democratic strongholds like California, Michigan, and New York.
Duly inaugurated, Crichton began to draw up his plans. His first order of business would be to tear up the remnants of Skidelsky II, clearing the way for protectionist industrial policy and an American government that could unilaterally negotiate with foreign powers. Choate, appointed Treasury Secretary after a close confirmation vote, and Undersecretary of State for International Trade Peter Navarro, drew up the Strengthening American Competitive Industries Act during Johnson-Kennedy's lame duck period, then shopped it around to likeminded members of Congress, eventually handing it to Senator Orson Swindle, a Congo veteran and ardent fiscal conservative who represented South Carolina. Though faced by strong opposition from his own co-partisans, many of whom believed SACIA to be at best a boondoggle and at worst reminiscent, in its attempts to steer American industrial capacity towards desired goals through 'incentives', of central planning, SACIA was saved by an unlikely source - the manufacturing parts of the Democratic coalition, whose willingness to stay home as affluent urban moderates switched to the Republicans helped drive Crichton's election and whose economic situation had been deeply hurt by the rise of China and Liddyist strikebreaking alike. Though Crichton's sympathies were with management in basically every respect, he could recognize a quid pro quo when he saw one, and he certainly didn't mind heterodox Democrats like West Virginia's A. James Manchin slipping in provisions mandating the government push for the use of union labor in the projects it encouraged if it got the bill closer to passing.
SACIA's passage represented a sea change in American trade policy. Since the end of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, free trade had at least in principle been a goal of both major parties - Democrats wanted to sell the crops American farmers grew and the widgets American workers produced to world markets, and Republicans wanted to buy cheap goods and pocket those farmers and workers' surplus value. Overnight, American farmers - arguably some of the most privileged in the world, subsidized and backstopped by literally thousands of government programs - recognized SACIA as a threat to their livelihoods, to their ability to play International Harvester against Tata Motors when they bought their tractors, then use those tractors to sell billions of tons of soybeans to China. Even before it began to affect their bottom line, the bill played merry hell with regional economies - land prices were lower than they'd been since the Depression, farmers stopped investing in new capital equipment and started renegotiating their existing debts, and groups like the National Agricultural Marketing Board - endorsed by ex-President Briscoe - began to threaten 'drastic measures' to backstop prices and prevent a destructive commodity glut.
Wayne Cryts, Vice President under Johnson-Kennedy, became one of the most prominent leaders of the movement, though other figures like Briscoe, Cryts' mentor Jerry Litton, and Nashville music legend Willie Nelson certainly did their best. Cryts had gained his fame as head of the Agrarian Front, a coalition between the COFW and family farmers united against big business and corporate landlords; he had parlayed that into two terms as Governor of Missouri, and as the farm crisis blew up many saw Cryts as a potential future President. When he led protests that temporarily tripled the size of Johnston, Iowa, the city from which the owners of Consolidated Hybrid [6], Wallaces and others alike, had refused to renegotiate the terms of their draconian copy-protection agreements for genetically modified corn, and snarled the streets of Washington with hundreds of trucks, journalists old enough to remember the Roosevelt eras wrote about a "spirit of revolution" - allegedly others saw it too, as General Alexander Haig once claimed in an interview that the Pentagon had dusted off 40s-era plans for clearing a Communist insurrection out of the capital.
On October 1, 1997, while the former Vice President addressed a crowd of COFW members at the University of Florida, Michael F. Griffin - a far-right fundamentalist who believed that Cryts was using farmers' interests as a smokescreen to impose a radical abortionist regime - shot Wayne Cryts twice, fatally. Cryts would only be the first casualty of a wave of political violence throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s - mass computing allowed radicals of all stripes to link up, advertise, define themselves in opposition to contrary groups doing the same thing, and radicalize themselves and each other. Even as the Wide Awakes, Ku Klux Klan, and Communist Political Organizations became more and more legitimate and mainstream, hardline splinters broke off - some, like the Nauvoo Legions and Organization for Black Liberation and Community Defense, based on specific ethnic and religious interests; others, like the Christian Soldiers and "black bloc", more ideological and universalistic.
Crichton responded to this with a massive crackdown, directing Attorney General Charles W. Pickering (a rare Southern leader of the Wide Awakes) to go after domestic political violence "using all available tools and methods". A multipartisan consensus in both houses passed the Political Violence Prevention Act, granting the Justice Department and FBI wide-ranging powers to surveil both real-world and online communications, summarily delegalize organizations that advocated violence, and detain people who committed or organized violent acts almost indefinitely. Though some expected these steps towards law and order to help de-escalate the situation, before the year was out this would be disproven, at least in the short term, by the death of G. Douglas Jones, a former Governor of Alabama and Judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tapped by Crichton to be one of the first eleven judges of the Domestic Intelligence Surveillance and Political Enforcement Court, four days before Christmas. The New Vikings of Alabama, a neo-pagan Ku Klux Klan splinter, took the credit for the car bombing the next day.
As 1998 rolled on, though, political violence in the East and South, as well as on the West Coast melted away. Law enforcement had invested in profiles and threat models for white nationalists for decades, going back to the Clemson bombing. Though defiant militants had vowed to continue the fight after the 'Battle of Fort Crommelin', in which the FBI raided Louis Beam's compound south of Houston during an attempt at reducing the incidence of 'white-on-white' violence (particularly between evangelical Protestant organizations and groups that adhered to less orthodox doctrines), few of these groups were especially professional with their opsec. The same was true of their counterparts on the left - though New York Governor Al D'Amato and New York Mayor Bernard Sanders both fell victim to far-left groups, committed and effective groups like Malik Bey's [7] Brownsville Defense League and Elizabeth Ann Duke's Rosa Luxemburg Communist Movement rarely survived their first successes, and less committed groups unraveled before the first hurdle.
But the Inland West (and, to a lesser extent, the Appalachians) was different. There was just too much of it to hide in, and too many people willing to take to the mountains for their beliefs and resist anyone who attempted to make demands of them. Amidst the farm crisis, more than a few people had lost everything - not merely their material possessions, but their way of life too. Some turned to radicalism, either political or religious; the rise of religious social conservatism after Rangeley led many to the Republican Party (particularly after the Molinari Amendment expanded protections for health providers and employers who chose not to cover abortion, contraception, and certain other controversial procedures), but it also led many others beyond it. In the west, meanwhile, where Wallace, Roosevelt, and Briscoe had between them helped put one-sixth of American land (including more than 80% of Nevada and Utah) under federal command, the policies that had once backstopped farmers' abilities to export and expand were now constricting them under the burden of rising loans, taxes, and insurance premiums. Though Republican members of Congress like John S. Wold and Barbara Vucanovich spoke to these farmers' anxieties and attempted to bridge the gap between them and the White House, they were no match for a rising intellectual skepticism of Wallace-era farm policy as inherently corrupt and corrupting, creating a class of rent-seeking landowners and corporations (including Consolidated Hybrid) who extracted subsidies from government and gave the nation less and less in return. Meanwhile, mining towns faced a similar issue, as prices for coal and metals cratered with the loss of export markets.
The first shot in the Sagebrush Rebellion was fired by Cliven Bundy, a 51-year-old cattle rancher hit hard by Bureau of Land Management policies remaining the same in the wake of massive shifts in the agricultural economy. His and his family's standoff with BLM officials at his Nevada ranch turned into an occupation of their branch office in North Las Vegas. Though initially non-violent, the fact that many Bundy supporters were armed - and that more than a few of them had ties to or connections with members of the Nauvoo Legion and Posse Comitatus - led Crichton and Pickering to undermine Governor Reid's attempts at mediation by authorizing an attempt to drive them out by force. The ensuing firefight - the Battle of Lamb Boulevard - led to the deaths of thirty-seven Bundyites (including Cliven himself and three of his sons), eighteen federal agents, and fifteen civilians. The Sagebrush Rebellion would, before the end of Crichton's presidency, claim the lives of more than ten times that number across the West, including Governor Reid, accused of deliberately lulling Bundy into a false sense of security.
Still, most people don't remember Crichton's administration for its years of lead - certainly, those were part of it, but most of the country saw very different economic effects from SACIA. Though manufacturing faced a difficult 1997 as vital parts and inputs suddenly became more expensive, factories across America which had faced disinvestment, layoffs, or outright shutdown found their fortunes revitalized. Employment as a percentage of the working-age population jumped from lows of 70.9% during the depths of the recession to 76.1% and rising by Election Day 1998, reaching 78.2% by the end of his Presidency; though the Mountain West and Appalachia saw much smaller gains, states like Michigan and Ohio saw much stronger growth.
This led to an interesting dynamic. Many of these factories and enterprises were unionized or cooperativized: cooperatives were often unable or unwilling to shut down, while even non-unionized shops or union shops that had decertified or accepted 'voluntary restraint' in the depths of the crisis now wanted to secure the labor rights they felt were owed to them. But these unions felt little loyalty to the Democratic Party they saw as having hung them out to dry - many of them, instead, saw Crichton as 'their guy' and the New Republican Party as their party. Matters came to a head at the NCOW Convention in spring 1998 - intended as a coronation for Karen Silkwood, longtime heiress to Eddie Sadlowski's throne, a series of shock victories on both local and national levels by pro-Crichton figures like former DDA Secretary Lane Kirkland, Michael Burgess of the AFSCME-AFP, and David McKinley of the NOE led not only to McKinley's election as NCOW President but also to a qualified endorsement of more than a few Republican candidates. Though more liberal and socialist members and members of agricultural unions walked out, forming the American Workers' Organizing Center two months later, the damage had been done.
Faced with the possibility of a Republican surge, House Minority Leader Bronson La Follette made a desperate move. Meeting with Utopian and Proletarian leaders, La Follette negotiated a popular front - the Democrats would stand aside for some of the other party's candidates in exchange for a free hand in some of their own districts. Though many members of both parties rejected the idea - more than a few conservative Proletarians like Norman Podhoretz, like their union counterparts, viewed Crichton as at least someone they could do business with, and many Utopians found both parties to be too statist for their taste (a few outright sympathized with the Sagebrushers) - the Alliance for Progress was able to at least staunch some of the bleeding. Though Speaker Sensenbrenner remained in power in the House and Senate Majority Leader John Rowland actually expanded his power, fears of a left wipeout were unfounded. Perhaps the most surprising development was the election of three Representatives considered pro-Sagebrush Rebellion (though they disavowed violent action): Helen Chenoweth in Idaho and Ellen Craswell in Washington under the banner of the Frontier Party, and Merrill Cook as an independent in Utah.
Crichton and many of his supporters felt that the results of the 1998 midterm vindicated his approach. Foreign policy - dealing with the fall of the two-decade hegemony of the China Socialist Party, for instance, and the shock victory of Lin Yifu's People and Prosperity Alliance (backed by Guo Taiming's commercial empire), or with unrest in India as booming Sindh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra sought to renegotiate their relationship with the central government, or with the rising influence of nationalist intellectual Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union and America-skeptical nationalists like Ri Young-hee in Korea and Francis Seow in Malaya, or the First Iraq War developing into a proxy war that implicated powers as far away as France, West Africa, and Indonesia - was a dead end both practically and morally. The proper position of the United States was to maintain the American standard of living, and engagement with the rest of the world would only result in the position generations of policymakers had spent centuries cultivating being eroded, in American advantages leaking away where the rest of the world could take them up and use them against American interests. Globalist intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani could argue from their ivory towers that Crichton's isolationism was harmful, backwards, and dangerous - but others, like Crichton's advisors Sam Huntington and Pat Buchanan, thought it was appropriate, and more than a few Republican members of Congress made wink-nudge comments about being unsure of Fukuyama and Mahbubani's ultimate loyalties.
But there was still much to be done on the domestic front. The unrest of the past two years might be more or less over now, but its root causes remained in place; many regional economies continued to suffer deeply. Suicide rates, crime rates, and rates of drug abuse in rural, non-industrialized areas had shot up in 1997 and not come down in 1998; meanwhile, many urban areas had been hit hard too, as prices rose and incomes outside of manufacturing failed to match them. The financial sector, which had invested heavily in agricultural land, export-oriented businesses (including software and computer services), and foreign businesses they were now doubly unable to recover losses from, also faced issues - though Crichton's desire, backed by an unlikely alliance with Johnson-Kennedy-era Treasury official and public intellectual Robert Brenner, to allow the banks to fail in order to discourage future risky practices like the ones that had made them vulnerable and allow newer banks to compete on fair grounds was stymied by Nancy Teeters' Federal Reserve and Bill Cunningham's House Select Committee on the Financial Industry, they still lost a lot of capital and found themselves newly in love with risk aversion.
Barry Farber, a former Governor of New York who returned to the office in 1998, was widely considered one of the most interesting figures in American politics - not many politicians would be endorsed by both the Democratic Party and the Wide Awakes. His ardent support for European-style social democracy and genuine sense of pluralistic cosmopolitanism dovetailed with his deep anti-Communism and support for an "all-out war on crime" to make him both a thorn in Crichton's side on protectionism and a key ally on what was often euphemistically titled "judicial reform". Appointed to head a blue-ribbon commission on fighting crime alongside former Governor of Oregon Richard Lamm, a FPE Republican, Farber came out with a 450-page report recommending a slew of reforms to the system - more federal agents and investigators to disrupt interstate drug trafficking networks, amendments to the NHIA to change its practices around the prescription of addictive drugs like painkillers and amphetamines (including, controversially, a proposal for a national version of Lamm's "Death With Dignity Act", legalizing and publicly funding euthanasia to reduce the number of long-term recipients of painkillers), more funding for local police to go after local crooks, a national database of crime to help coordinate between law enforcement agencies, a series of relaxations of evidentiary requirements and increases in sentencing (particularly mandatory minimums) to prevent activist lawyers and judges from "interrupting the course of justice", and a significant expansion of the prison system to deal with it all. The Farber-Lamm Committee Report, shorn of a few of its more controversial aspects, became the Law Enforcement Support Act, and passed Congress in early 2000.
Its passage was made easier by a notable scandal in the media. Crichton had long had a difficult relationship with the American news media - familiarity had bred contempt in both directions, Crichton's pungent criticism of many legacy institutions had only been amplified by his perception that their reporting on him was biased as a result, and many reporters and editors viewed Crichton's open contempt for them as beyond the pale, with liberal magazines like Modern Times and The New Republic particularly opposed due to a combination of sincere outrage at his policies and a desire to appeal to a readership who deeply disliked him. Stephen Glass had once been considered Crichton's most likely successor, but when his editors at Modern Times (all the way up to founders Robert Reich and John F. Kennedy Jr.) turned against Crichton, Glass turned with them, doing deep dives into the effects of Crichton's policies on rural and poor urban areas, on would-be immigrants caught in legal limbo, of railroaded innocent victims of LESA and its state-level counterparts, of corruption in the AWOC, of lurid happenings at Republican conventions. In 1999, one of his victims struck back, with Attorney General Pickering suing Glass over allegations that Pickering had helped cover up his son's affair with a lobbyist in order to protect his son's potential future career in politics. [8] During discovery, Pickering's (private) lawyers discovered that many of Glass's previous articles appeared to be embellished or outright invented. The "Shattered Glass" scandal gave credence to Crichton's charges that the American news media in general, and the liberal parts of it in particular, were unreliable, poorly run, and more concerned with the party line than the truth.
Going into the 2000 election, Crichton's presidency was controversial. His supporters admired his tough stances - his "American interest" (or, as some commentators put it, "America first") trade policy, his war on crime, his willingness to push back on liberal initiatives on race, gender, and sexuality, and in general the fact that he seemed to share the concerns and anxieties of his core voters. More than a few Americans had gotten jobs that they attributed to his policies, too, and while inequality had worsened a big chunk of voters were better off than they had been four years ago. To his detractors, though, he appealed to the basest instincts of the American public, hiding racist and sexist comments in criticism of advocates for equality, pursued a xenophobic trade policy that massively enriched his corporate donors but immiserated most Americans through higher prices and lower wages, and ruthlessly quashed scientific research into topics like global warming. Polls indicate that Crichton would have faced a tough race in 2000 - but not necessarily, perhaps not even likely, an unsuccessful one.
But events intervened. At an event marking the beginning of the new millennium on New Year's Day 2000, Crichton had a private and moderately profane conversation with former nominee Bob Dornan in which he referred to several Chinese and Asian-American politicians with racist language, outed Texas Senator Michael Huffington as bisexual, and referred to former President Johnson-Kennedy as a "bitch" who "whored out" her husband for political favors and conspired with the media through her Kennedy relatives to steal the 1992 election. He also made reference to a number of classified military technologies, including an implication that the United States had violated the Convention on Weapons in Space and knew of Soviet and Chinese violations of the same. Although Crichton had ensured his lapel mike was off, Dornan had not, and the recording was picked up by reporters for the Washington Post. Though Post management decided not to release or report on it for national security reasons, the recording was nonetheless leaked online in February.
Though Crichton felt he could have continued, dealing with the fallout of the leak would have been a "distraction", and he felt that - despite his significant differences from his Vice President - he could trust his successor to carry on his mission. On February 19th, three weeks after becoming aware of the recording and five days after the leak, Crichton resigned from the Presidency, and retired from politics. He would continue his commentary on current events and his controversial media presence until his 2008 death of cancer.
[1] Notable examples include The Patient, a murder mystery which critiqued the National Health Insurance Act for allegedly shortchanging doctors and giving patients inadequate care (including pressuring long-term disabled patients into 'consenting' to medical euthanasia, a practice banned federally by the Supreme Court in Neumann v. Colbert (1973)); Room 301, which critiqued New Deal attitudes towards education and the administrative-bureaucratic class it created; and Red Star, which argued that liberal American naïveté was allowing the Soviet Union to commit industrial espionage and threaten its critics in the United States. A particularly odious example came in the original version of Red Star, which briefly mentioned a Congressman Eugene Gore of New York, blackmailed by the Soviets (using, it is implied, his pedophilia) into verbally attacking the CIA; this mention was removed in the editions published after 1973, under Crichton's own name. [2]
[2] OOC: To those who think that this is in poor taste - I would agree, but Crichton actually did this IOTL. After Michael Crowley of The New Republic wrote a negative review of State of Fear, Crichton put a segment about a Washington-based political columnist named Mick Crowley raping his two-year-old nephew into his next book, allegedly including a comment about his character's small penis on the notion that Crowley would never sue if it required him to publicly identify himself with a character with a small penis.
[3] Everything^2 (founded in 1972 at the University of Minnesota) is a question-and-answer site similar to OTL's Quora or Zhihu. Users submit questions and answers and rate both based on accuracy, insight, usefulness, and other useful attributes; particularly well-credentialed or well-respected users tend to gain personal followings, with figures like teacher Stephen Covey and former Congressman Chris Matthews parlaying their fame into published books and positions in more traditional media. Popular throughout the '70s and early '80s, it fell out of fashion due to persistent problems with pseudoscience and scams (especially alternative medicine) harming its reputation for reliability, as well as a reputation for right-wing political radicalism that led many more liberal or apolitical users to desert it for alternative platforms; nevertheless, its aging users ensure that it remains a large and well-used enterprise.
[4] Finding an odd kindred spirit in ex-Representative Gore Vidal, Crichton actually supported (or, at least, seriously mooted) an Americo-Soviet "Alliance for Stability" against the rising powers of the Global South, but believed that the Nancy's Peak Accords marked a return to the dead status quo of the Wallace Doctrine, and that Johnson-Kennedy was unable or unwilling to take her efforts to the logical conclusion - America had to commit either to contesting global power with Moscow or to a public, comprehensive, and thoroughgoing alliance.
[5] Created after a 1974 series of meetings (led by then-Chancellor Robert Skidelsky) between the finance ministers of the largest world economies, the Skidelsky System consisted of a set of informal regulations intended to reduce volatility in international trade. This system collapsed after the 1995 crash, when the Republic of China unilaterally left the system in order to reduce exposure for domestic banks and enterprises; a short-lived "Skidelsky II", which encompassed ACTA, the European Federation, and the Soviet Union, lasted from October 1995 to December 1996, when it disbanded in advance of Crichton's election.
[6] Formerly Pioneer Hi-Bred, Consolidated Hybrid had taken advantage of its pioneering (no pun intended) research into genetic modification of crops to win a series of Supreme Court victories that gave it wide-ranging authority over what happened to their herbicide-resistant high-yield crops after farmers bought it, and proceeded to use that authority to milk farmers dry.
[7] Born Clark Edward Squire.
[8] Charles Pickering Jr. had, in fact, carried on an affair with a lobbyist, but Pickering Sr. had no knowledge of or involvement in covering it up.
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Thank you all - I just started a new job and moved to Brooklyn, so that dropped a car battery on my spare time. But I'm back now!
Pre-reading first impressions...
Michael "Jurassic Park author" Crichton? No fucking way.
Michael "Jurassic Park author" Crichton? No fucking way.
Okay, now post-reading impressions. I couldn't digest much of the political jargon, so I had to make do with what I did understand. Here are some highlights.
All in all, a very interesting presidency.
Ah fuck. Also, Everything-Squared as a Quora equivalent; going on the latter nowadays is a far-cry from when only actual experts were permitted on the site. Also, more dominant KKK is a bad thing.
I have a feeling this will be problematic, and will be exposed by a Snowden-like whistleblower sooner or later.
Oh shit. Not American political instability again!
Well that's just upsetting.
I guess I'll like him, then.
Nice...
I don't like the sound of this...
That just cements it that I don't like his presidency.
Aaand he gets Nixoned.
All in all, a very interesting presidency.