Frankly I don't find the idea of a wealth-based elite to have much headway. Dictatorships may only need a plurality of the population to support them but Rumsfield doesn't even have his own party streamlined into a body to follow him in lock step.
Mind you, I'm not arguing that money in politics can't make headway, but there are limits to what it can do. Nelson Rockefeller was never the Republican nominee IOTL, Mitt Romney didn't win, etc. Money requires something more, and as Jonathan notes, Money doesn't really have much of the ability to get Ozzie and Harriet to follow everything happening around them, when money is very obviously making their lives inherently worse.
Someone was talking about Reagan before, he was able to dismantle the New Deal Consensus (Or what was left of it after Nixon, Ford and Carter) because he was able to present to the American people a restoration to (1) a Nostalgic past that they could have a cultural memory too and (2) was able to make Joe Schmo feel that it wasn't some radical transformation and (3) was able to point to things and say "Yeah, you're standard of living is better." Rumsfeld in no way can offer this, to anyone.
At the very least its impossible under this sort of situation to really imagine that Rummy could have won a second term without having built bridges to some other group, which is something that he in no way has done.
And while Churchill quotes about voters being all idiots are fun, and while a lot of folks do tend to think that way about the average american, and the american from the other half that they don't view themselves to be in, its hard to imagine that there can be some sort of Wiemar-extent failure in this timeline. The 1970's were rocky, but at this point the chaos in the Average America's life is inherently coming from one source, and to expect enough of them to simply keep supporting that source, just because they voted for Nixon or Reagan IOTL is simply beyond plausibility.
And before I get told by someone else to shut up and stop trying to kill a timeline, I'm not: I'm simply noting that there's not really a capacity to suspend disbelief anymore for me at this point.
Even with this, I just can't see Canada 'handing over' their provinces to the United States. This isn't a game of Victoria 2, that sort of stuff can't just happen. Also, the level of guerrilla resistance to American occupation would be substantial, and threatening to nuke resisting cities would be several dozen bridges too far for the average American voter.
Neither do I. Nor can I see the administration being able to spin the Canadians shot Ralph Nader so let's invade Canada. It just comes off as too big a leap even with the Rumsfeld propaganda machine. Also would the Canadians in those provinces really agree to be handed over to the US just like that? It's a long way from disliking the government of your own country to wanting to be part of another country.
For me this is the blue whale we're jumping over after all the Sharks back in 1984. I'm still reading, just to see how the coup plays out.
I suppose. At that point it was "dystopia for the sake of dystopia" which Drew wrote quite well for most of the seventies, but as we go though the eighties, there just too many moments where I think "This is just silly".
I mostly agree with Japhy's snarky assessment of this series. Not all of it, but he makes a lot of good points. He did a decent "Theoretical Look Forward" of it in the PMs and Presidents thread.
Yep. I still don't think he gave James Gavin a proper chance; just swept him aside to get to his dystopia faster.
I really, REALLY don't like Crapsack Worlds for the sake of Crapsack Worlds. This is one of them.
Even if that's so, it didn't HAVE to lead to chaos. Moreover, it didn't NEED to -- but, like gawkers at a trainwreck, we all fixedly watched it become one, anyhow.
I haven't commented on this since the previous thread, but I would agree with the people arguing that the timeline has moved from improbable to impossible. That isn't to say that it isn't interesting to read, but the timeline moved into satire of neoconservatism a long time ago.
Rumsfield and his staff are just too lacking in self-awareness. Congress is too willing to pass these crazy reforms, and unless every party ran a candidate in every district and split the vote by unprecedented levels, I doubt that the Republicans would experience any of the electoral success they are seeing here. There would be literal political anarchy and motions for impeachment the moment Rumsfield tried to have Carter committed and use Ralph Nader as a casus belli.
As far as Canada is concerned, the only recourse I can see is the United Nations General Assembly passing a "Uniting for Peace" resolution to condemn and sanction the US government. While used only once in the organization's history to defuse the Suez Crisis, the resolution theoretically has the power to overrule the Security Council.
It would also open Pandora's Box as far as international relations are concerned, but that would be a small price when the US is threatening to invade Canada and has already blockaded Malta.
As someone who's been following this from the very beginning - and oh lord was that a long time ago - I find myself more or less agreeing with all of these posts.
I still like the original F, L & G very much. While it also had its quirks and implausibilities - the biggest one in hindsight being the creation of the Hughes Network, which was just putting together Fox News decades before it came into existence, in a different media environment - I could by and large suspend my disbelief and enjoy the story. I can no longer do so with Rumsfeldia, and haven't really for quite a while. Hence why I haven't posted in this thread since April. The thing about the US taking over chunks of Canada was just the icing on the cake for me.
Rumsfeldia to me is clearly the Bush Administration and its events transplanted into the 1980s, only on steroids. To me this is problematic, partly because what happened under the Bush Administration OTL was only possible because of the slow drift to the right of the American voting public through the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, in this TL there is nothing to suggest that liberalism itself, of the FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ variety, has been tarnished in the eyes of the American people. Indeed, if you look at TTL in 1980, the last good presidents the U.S. had (and seen that way by the people of TTL) were all liberals. I would rather suspect that LBJ looks much greater, in comparison to what followed him in TTL's 1970s, than he does IOTL as an example. Since liberalism has not been discredited thoroughly ITTL, it's hard to see the public sitting back and watching as the Great Society, the New Deal and much, more more are unraveled - particularly considering Dixiecrats and many Republicans were still in support of large portions of it at this time.
I'm increasingly regarding F, L & G and Rumsfeldia as two separate TLs, if not also two separate stories. The former for me is more grounded in realism - quirks notwithstanding - while the latter increasingly resembles the back-story of dystopian works of fiction like Judge Dredd, V For Vendetta, Soylent Green, Robocop, The Running Man or the Fallout games, to name a few examples. If it had been like that from the beginning, I wouldn't have so many issues; in FaT, for example, you pretty much see what the theme is right from the start. F, L & G wasn't like that, though, at least not in the beginning.
I don't want to tear the whole thing apart, my hat goes off to Drew for having written this long, but I do believe in stating an honest opinion when something doesn't gel right. If I get flak for this, then so be it. At least I explained myself.
