TL-191: After the End

David bar Elias

Born in the USSA said:
Deadpool 3 trailer got me thinking about what you said about the X-Men. I think an analogue could still exist as an explicitly socialist parable about internationalism and solidarity triumphing over militant nationalism
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Such a kind of fiction would depend on the beliefs and ideas of the author.

I’m generally skeptical that fiction in TTL would have mass appeal in the United States after the end of the Second Great War that’s rooted in utopian settings that reject the prevailing militaristic values of US culture. It’s why there’s no close analogue in the United States to Star Trek from our world.
 
Born in the USSA

Born in the USSA

David bar Elias said:
Such a kind of fiction would depend on the beliefs and ideas of the author.

I’m generally skeptical that fiction in TTL would have mass appeal in the United States after the end of the Second Great War that’s rooted in utopian settings that reject the prevailing militaristic values of US culture. It’s why there’s no close analogue in the United States to Star Trek from our world.
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Oh I didn't even mean it in a utopian sense, just as an analogy to conscientious objectors that gains applicability with other persecuted minorities. The latter part at least would give it staying power, given horror in the US at the Population Reduction even decades or a century later. They'd still be fighting to defend their right to exist, and would likely be more militant than OTL.
 
Lochnessmoonster

Lochnessmoonster

David bar Elias said:
By 2024, the biggest sporting event in the United States is the World Bowl, which is analogous to the Super Bowl. The Game Day for the World Bowl is a national US holiday.
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Is American football more popular outside the USA compared to OTL? In our world, it failed to attract much attention due to the international presence of soccer and baseball. The name World Bowl could imply teams outside the USA may also compete.
 

David bar Elias

Lochnessmoonster said:
Is American football more popular outside the USA compared to OTL? In our world, it failed to attract much attention due to the international presence of soccer and baseball. The name World Bowl could imply teams outside the USA may also compete.
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By 2024, American Football is somewhat more popular in some nations compared to our world. However, soccer is still a more popular international sport.

The World Bowl is still a sporting event with exclusively US teams.
 
Judge Dredd34

Judge Dredd34

Born in the USSA said:
Oh I didn't even mean it in a utopian sense, just as an analogy to conscientious objectors that gains applicability with other persecuted minorities. The latter part at least would give it staying power, given horror in the US at the Population Reduction even decades or a century later. They'd still be fighting to defend their right to exist, and would likely be more militant than OTL.
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I doubt there’d be any “persecuted minorities” except maybe the indigenous people like the Sequoyah who signed on with the Confederacy. The Destruction lead to the majority population to sign off on oppression, the government followed by outlawing legal discrimination, the police in particular is especially opposed to hate groups (see their reaction to the Confederate gangs). I’m not sure what they’d need to be militant about the need to exist, everyone joins the military or community work after graduation. So everyone’s connected and knows each others worth, and the USA as a whole ITTL is particularly anti-discriminatory. Plus the USA is more austere, strict, and conservative so marching would seem counterproductive.
 
Batguy01

Batguy01

Is there a fictional analog of Charles Holst, during and after his time as president? Mainly as a villainous satire, like say FE: Homelander from the Boys eventually becoming somewhat of an analogue for Trump.

For those newer viewers, here's the rundown who Holst is, or gonna be:
David bar Elias said:
Charles Holst, whatever else he was, definitely was on the far-left. He came from a family of loyal Socialist Party activists and union members.

Where he diverged from the vast majority of Socialist Party activists from his generation was in his embrace of political radicalism. He was, to the very end, a firm believer in the need for a Revolution to overturn the US political and economic system, in order to usher in a utopian future of rule of, by, and for the working class. Holst, had he lived in our world, would have eagerly embraced both the October Revolution and the eventual development of the USSR under Josef Stalin. As it was, Holst, as a youthful activist, celebrated the emergence of the Japanese Workers Republic, and was often heard to remark throughout his political career that the defeat of the Communist revolutionaries in the First Russian Civil War had been a seminal tragedy.

Holst was a marginal figure in the House of Representatives throughout most of his political career. His over-the-top, profanity-laden rhetoric promoting a revolution, The Revolution, made him a constant source of mockery from his House colleagues, including from almost all of his fellow Socialist Party representatives. Holst developed a somewhat buffoonish public image, but was consistently re-elected due to his ability to bring large amounts of Federal money to his New York City district.

While no one in US political circles took Holst seriously during his time in the House, the buffoonish image that he cultivated concealed a man of boundless ambition and cruelty, and with a myriad of personal hatreds. Holst also had a lifelong contempt for the US political system of checks and balances derived from the Constitution. The utopia that he imagined throughout his political career had no room for either of these hallmarks of the US government.

Throughout his political career, Holst was dogged by allegations of having connections to the world of organized crime. Although subject to at least two major judicial probes by the Bureau of Investigation while in the House, not enough evidence was gathered during either of these probes for an arrest to be made. Several US government agencies were investigating President Holst in relation to allegations of Holst accepting multiple bribes from a known New York City associate of the Norfolk Outfit (a Dixie Mafia gang) when evidence was uncovered that would lead to the Dixie Mafia Scandal.

Holst wasn’t without skills as a politician. He was one of the first US politicians to recognize, in the late 2010s, the potential of the many OptyTalk sites on the ComboNet to grant him a national audience unfiltered by “respectable” media. Holst’s rise to the presidency, however, would not have occurred without the following unlikely series of events:

-The Great Housing Crash of 2019, which caused widespread economic devastation across the United States.

-The election of Senator George Novak (S-OH) in the 2020 elections on the “National Fusion” ticket with Governor Philip Wakefield (R-NJ). Many Socialist Party activists and politicians, baffled by Novak’s obsession with creating a utopian-sounding “non-partisan” government, became opponents of President Novak when he appeared to embrace an agenda of economic austerity proposed by the congressional Business and Prosperity caucus, instead of proposals by his own Socialist Party for an ambitious agenda of public relief and public works. Charles Holst, in making himself the loudest and angriest opponent of President Novak, suddenly gained a measure of acceptance from a Socialist Party feeling betrayed by their own president, and a general public alienated by the president’s seeming monomaniacal obsession with “non-partisanship” at the expense of addressing the Great Housing Crash.

Holst, in 2024, was able to ride a wave of popular anger within Socialist Party to an unprecedented victory in the party’s nomination battle over the incumbent president. Holst won the general elections of 2024 in no small part due to the unpopularity of the Democratic Party (widely blamed for the Great Housing Crash), and due to the fragmentation within the Republican Party caused by Philip Wakefield’s defection to the now-doomed National Fusion ticket.

President Holst quickly ran into obstacles in proposing his radical and sweeping economic agenda to Congress. Both Houses by this time were narrowly held by the Republican Party, and the Speaker of the House, Representative James Davies, was a staunch political opponent of Holst. Holst, however, did not intend to govern like a traditional US president. His rhetoric, upon the expected congressional rejection of his initial legislative proposals, became more and more unhinged and violent. President Holst now openly called for his supporters/the working class (one and the same in his mind) to help in overthrowing the “class enemies” in the name of The Revolution.

It was during this stage of President Holst’s brief administration that he also started to openly use antisemitic rhetoric. Holst blamed the Jews for the Great Housing Crash, and reserved particular vitriol for Jewish lawmakers in Congress, including Senator Eleanor Lehrer (D-CA) a future president in her own right.

Historians and political observers would initially debate the nature of President Holst’s antisemitism; after all, he had never utilized this rhetoric before becoming president. Following the fall of the Holst administration, in the late 2020s and early 2030s, a number of his former confidants and associates would state for the public record that Holst had been just as bigoted while in the House of Representatives.

President Holst was already facing the prospect of impeachment in early 2027, before the shattering revelations that accompanied the Dixie Mafia Scandal. Too much of the president’s rhetoric by that point brought to mind memories of Jake Featherston. The Dixie Mafia Scandal caused Holst’s few remaining political allies to abandon him. Within a short period of time, Holst’s own Vice President was arrested in association with the Dixie Mafia Scandal, followed by the rapid and successful impeachment of President Holst on a long list of charges. Holst, at this stage, refused to accept his removal from office. He now called for his imagined supporters to come to Washington to begin The Revolution. On the morning of what proved to be his last day in the White House, in 2027, he was briefly heartened by the appearance of a huge crowd outside of the Executive Mansion. Too late, he realized that this crowd was actually here to call for his arrest. This crowd cheered loudly when the Bureau of Investigation and the local police did just that.

After an acrimonious federal trial, former president Charles Holst was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with charges stemming from the Dixie Mafia Scandal. Holst would spend the rest of his life at the federal penitentiary located in Fort McSweeney, Oregon. The fact that he was in a prison where former Confederate government officials had once been held was not lost on Holst, who continued, for the rest of his life, to claim that he had been a victim of an international “Jewish-Capitalist” conspiracy.

For a brief period of time following the fall of the Holst administration, the Socialist Party faced the possibility of electoral oblivion, in the face of the disastrous twin administrations of George Novak and Charles Holst. It’s a testament to the skill and dedication to a number of Socialist Party politicians and activists, especially one Dennis Beckford of Jamaica, that the party was able to rebuild itself and successfully elect a presidential candidate by 2044.

One long-term legacy of the Holst administration was that the sizable Jewish-American community completely deserted the Socialist Party, to the eager embrace of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Even by 2162, the Jewish community in the United States, according to most surveys, almost entirely refused to support the Socialist Party.
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And for the Dixie Mafia Scandal:
David bar Elias said:
The Dixie Mafia Scandal was worse than that. To make a long story short, it involved President Holst attempting to hire contract killers from major criminal outfits associated with the Dixie Mafia in order to target his opponents in Congress, the Federal judiciary, and the media.

Holst, according to investigators, attempted to carry out this murderous action in response to the Congressional rejection of his proposed initiative to nationalize major sectors of the economy, as well as in response to the Congressional rejection of his proposal to confiscate the private property of anyone labeled as an “enemy of the people.”

The plot by Holst, which was embraced by his Vice President, utterly failed, as the Holst administration was already under investigation by several US government agency over allegations that the president had maintained ties to organized crime (these kinds of allegations had dogged Holst throughout his political career). Holst would become the first to be impeached, removed from office, and ultimately sentenced to life in prison after a long and acrimonious trial in Federal court.

As late as 2162, Charles Holst is viewed both by the US public and US presidential historians as the worst president in US history.
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David bar Elias

Judge Dredd34 said:
What happened to African-American delivery driver Cincinnatus Driver? Last we saw him in Timeline 191 he retired to Des Moines Iowa.
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After the end of the Second Great War, Cincinnatus Driver returned to Des Moines, Iowa, where he began a quiet retirement. He was grateful to be reunited with his family, though he also mourned the loss of the prewar African American community of Covington, Kentucky. He died in 1964.

Karen Driver, the granddaughter of Cincinnatus Driver, would go on to enjoy a successful career as the political leader of the Republican Party in Iowa, and would play an important role in formulating the Northern Strategy that returned to the Republicans as a serious national political party, by focusing on expanding the power of the Republican Party in the Canadian states. Driver also played an important role in the successful recruitment of Morgan Reynolds as the Republican presidential candidate for the 1980 election.

Karen Driver retired from politics in 1995. She passed away in 2020.

By 2024, the extended Driver family still mostly lives in Iowa.
 
PsychoNeo

PsychoNeo

David bar Elias said:
Karen Driver, the granddaughter of Cincinnatus Driver, would go on to enjoy a successful career as the political leader of the Republican Party in Iowa, and would play an important role in formulating the Northern Strategy that returned to the Republicans as a serious national political party, by focusing on expanding the power of the Republican Party in the Canadian states. Driver also played an important role in the successful recruitment of Morgan Reynolds as the Republican presidential candidate for the 1980 election.
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What is the Northern Strategy? How does it compare to our timeline's Southern Strategy?
 

David bar Elias

PsychoNeo said:
What is the Northern Strategy? How does it compare to our timeline's Southern Strategy?
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The Northern Strategy was the political strategy that was pursued by the Republican Party beginning in the 1960s to expand its power in the newly admitted Canadian states. This strategy ultimately succeeded in 1980 when Morgan Reynolds, as the Republican Party presidential candidate, became the first Canadian American to be elected President of the United States.

The Northern Strategy resulted in the Republican Party successfully re-emerging as a national political force in the United States after decades as a minor third party. The success of the Northern Strategy allowed for the Republican Party to begin efforts to gain power in areas where the Democratic Party or the Socialist Party had long been dominant, to differing degrees of success.
 

David bar Elias

THE KINGFISH said:
What are the HDI of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltic States ITTL comparable to IOTL?
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By 2024, the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom of Ukraine, the Kingdom of Belarus, the Kingdom of Lithuania, the Grand Duchy of Latvia, and the Grand Duchy of Estonia are economically wealthier compared to their counterparts from our world, since they avoided decades of communist rule. However, there are variations in wealth between different regions of these countries.

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By 2024, the HDI of the Kingdom of Ukraine is analogous to the HDI of Italy from 2021 in OTL.

The HDI of the Kingdom of Poland is analogous to the HDI of Hungary from 2021 in OTL.

The HDI of the Kingdom of Belarus is analogous to the HDI of Poland from 2021 in OTL.

The HDI of the Kingdom of Lithuania is analogous to the HDI of Denmark from 2021 in OTL.

The HDI of the Grand Duchy of Latvia is analogous to Sweden from 2021 in OTL.

The HDI of the Grand Duchy of Estonia is analogous to Finland from 2021 in OTL.
 

Mr.Doctor

Could we get a breakdown of the monarchs of the rest of the eastern states. I believe what we have left is the Kingdom of Belarus, the Kingdom of Lithuania, the Grand Duchy of Latvia, the Kingdom of Finland and the Grand Duchy of Estonia
 
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