Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Thande
Donor
It's not FPTP, therefore it's PR...
No, territories by definition don't elect MCPs, though they may have nonvoting delegates to represent them (same sort of arrangement as the OTL USA).
No, but it's the beginning that eventually leads to that.
I need to put in a bit about him being an aeronaut as well
Edited that in too, thanks.
I love that Mumby is in Britannia Province, which covers a similar area to Iowa, which I think is about as similar to Lincolnshire as you can get in North America.
It's not FPTP, therefore it's PR...
"What's happening?"
"Well, Cromwell's dissolved the Rump Parliament, and is now putting up a new 'Assembly of Saints' to be elected by the different congregations. Apparently it's inspired by the Jewish Sanhedrin, or something."
"You mean the congregations get to choose the MPs?"
"Well, so it would appear, yes."
"That sounds like some form of proportional representation!"
Thande
Donor
The reason I named it that was that the equivalent town in OTL was named for a Lincolnshire immigrant, so I imagine that's why he went there in real life too
The reason I named it that was that the equivalent town in OTL was named for a Lincolnshire immigrant, so I imagine that's why he went there in real life too
The greatest density of Mumbies in North America OTL is in neighbouring Nebraska, so this is just yet another example of art imitating life.
EDIT: Also, it would be just like my family to choose the place that sounds most like home. They'd probably have gone either there, or to New Britain, just because we are that unimaginative.
Thande
Donor
Dodged a bullet there then. I remember someone commenting on the strangeness that we (in OTL, as well) applied the term New Britain to somewhere as inhospitable as Labrador.
The Mumbies are hard, Puritan stock, they'd probably love the inhospitable wastes of Labrador.
The reason I named it that was that the equivalent town in OTL was named for a Lincolnshire immigrant, so I imagine that's why he went there in real life too
Apparently, the reason why so many Swedes settled in Minnesota was because the area reminded them so much about Scandinavia. There was also a whole influx of Danes, Finns and Norwegians in the area (Mondale comes from the Norwegian name Mundal).
I recently watched the Emigrants movies from the 1970s, two epic Swedish movies starring Max von Sydow based on a series of novels about a Swedish family from Småland emigrating and settling in Minnesota. After having watched the two three hour movies, I decided to check on Wikipedia where in Minnesota they had filmed it. Turned out they hadn't filmed it in Minnesota. They had filmed the parts set in Småland in Småland, and then for Minnesota, they had just drove down an hour or so down into Scania and let that be stand-in for Minnesota.
What makes it fun was that the movies have a bunch of American actors and even a whole bunch of native Americans in it, featuring a Sioux rising and everything. It strikes me as a bit absurd to take all of them to the Old World and then have them pretend that this is the American Frontier.
I think that was me. There was a New South Wales in northern Manitoba and northern Ontario a century before there was a New South Wales in Australia.
Last edited:
Thande
Donor
The Norwegian and Swedish connection in Minnesota and North Dakota is very striking; when I was doing those maps of US state legislatures, I would go down the Ballotpedia results pages(which of course also has the names of the candidates) and a large number of them had names which could've have blended quite easily into the Riksdag or Storting.
It's striking also how long those connections lasted, and that there were entire communities in North America where they continued to speak the same language their grandparents had spoken before coming over the Atlantic. There's a point in The Path to Power, where in the US congressional election of 1940, Lyndon Johnson persuades the Norwegian ambassador to go to some place in Minnesota and hold a speech in Norwegian urging the Minnesotans to vote for the Democratic candidate.
It's often forgotten that European immigrants kept their languages, living in bilingual communities for generations. Wisconsin still conducted political meetings in German well into the 1950s. It really wasn't until the World Wars and the Cold War that there was this severe cultural shift to abandon the languages and fully assimilate into the White-American culture.
Thande
Donor
It may not be unconnected that it was also around that time that a lot of states started to get rid of unique political practices and standardised everything (term lengths and limits, legislature a miniature copy of the federal one, lieutenant-governor elected in the same way as federal vice-president, officially adopted a state flag, fully partisan legislative elections, etc.)
Which is a real tragedy, if you ask me. I want to see a pluralistic America where each and every one of the states is a "laboratory of democracy", if you ask me.
I mean, we're looking at a federal nation with 50 constituent states and over 300 million citizens. America has the potential to be so much more than the roughly homogenous thing it is right now.
Yep, centralization in full force, both administratively and culturally.
It's only homogenous in the dominate culture. I'm Native and we live in a completely different world.
Well, there's also the 'not wanting one province to dominate the others' effects to consider - there's still the precedent of Fredericksburg TTL afterall. The Supremacists who are running things out West may try it as a "good government" measure - make the capital a small city to keep influence out of the hands of the Urban Elites. Big cities also tend to be filled with, ugh, Catholics and immigrants, and even worse, Catholic immigrants.
I'd expect that building a shiny new capital is something the newly created governments may try to do out of sheer Confederal pride - "look what we can do when we can run our own affairs, we're REAL confederations dammit". And in someplace like Westernesse that looks like it's about 3/4 frontier it might be done to encourage western settlement.
Well, while cultural homogeneity also is something that I'm not entirely happy with, I was thinking here more about political homogeneity. All fifty state constitutions look alike with only peripheral differences.
I'm afraid I really know very little about Native American culture and government. If you'd wish to enlighten me, I'd be more than interested in a conversation via PM.
While the western Supremacists are likely a bit different, weren't the Supremacists founded in the big city?
Anyway, I'd think there'd be a mixture - Michigan and Drakesland seem most likely to use an existing big city to me.
Thande
Donor
I have been persuaded there will be at least one example of what Hobelhouse describes.
Anyway, here are some flags. Bear in mind I try to make these realistic in the sense that they aren't always aesthetically wonderful--I sometimes think the flags our vexillologists make on here are brilliant, but too good for what a real country or state would adopt, especially when they often have to make a quick decision.
Anyway, here are some flags. Bear in mind I try to make these realistic in the sense that they aren't always aesthetically wonderful--I sometimes think the flags our vexillologists make on here are brilliant, but too good for what a real country or state would adopt, especially when they often have to make a quick decision.
Last edited: