• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State

ATLF: Number 10

1997-2003: Charlotte Flannery (Labour)
1997 (Majority): James Barkley (Conservative), Martin McDonough (Liberal Democrat)
2001 (Majority): David Hornby (Conservative), Martin McDonough (Liberal Democrat)

2003-2009: Adam Armstrong (Labour)
2004 (Majority): David Hornby (Conservative), Gwen Donaghue (Liberal Democrat)
2008 (Coalition with Liberal Democrats): Peter Chadwick (Conservative), Gwen Donaghue (Liberal Democrat)

2009-2010: Simon Laity (Conservative Minority)
2010-2013: Simon Laity (Conservative- Liberal Democrat Alliance)

2011 (Alliance Majority): Helen Ridout (Labour), Louise Ryan (Liberal Democrat), Andy McGrue (Scottish National), Tim Keegan (Social Liberal)
2013-2017: Adam Armstrong (Labour leading National Government)
2015 (National Majority): Harry Denby (Conservative and Unionist Alliance), Bill Flagg (Labour), Andy McGrue (Scottish National)
2017-: Lewis Smiley (National)

Charlie Flannery was the woman who finally brought Labour out of the wilderness, promising to bring the party into the next millennium. Though not as radical as many would've liked, Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, vast investments into Education and Transport and bringing Britain firmly into the heart of Europe with membership of the Euro is nothing to sniff at. But her personal style, aloof and autocratic, grated significantly and a financial crisis combined with a polling crash led to a jittery party forcing her out in favour of her Home Secretary.

Armstrong won on his record in government and his attractive background in the military, not his left-wing creds. He sent troops into the Eurasian state of Ihkrazia in order to prevent genocide- a move that was lauded in hindsight but left him isolated in the international sphere at the time. His greatest achievement in government was probably the most ambitious climate change policies that existed at the time; although many other radical policies notoriously fell by the wayside or found themselves scrapped or heavily modified at the last minute based on the personal whims of Armstrong and his close team. A snap election called in 2008 led to a hung parliament where the Tories won the most seats but Labour the most votes; a Lib-Lab coalition was only formed after backroom manoeuvring and leaks led to the implosion of hard-right Tory leader Chadwick at the hands of his Shadow Cabinet. The coalition suffered severe unpopularity as the economy fell into recession and spending cuts became mandatory; the collapse of the coalition over the failure to pass a bill for STV led to Armstrong's resignation.

New Tory leader Simon Laity was an aggressive moderniser from the liberal wing of the party; the first openly-gay Prime Minister and the nineteenth Etonian. Pursuing an even more aggressive programme of austerity than Armstrong, he was able to govern relatively easily in a minority government as both Labour and the Lib Dems went through aggressive internal factional battles. Aside from austerity Laity showed a reformist bent: creating the posts of elected "Sherrifs" to deal with policing and crime on county levels and several half-hearted policies aimed at predatory capitalism. In 2010, he shocked the political world by announcing a political and electoral alliance with the Liberal Democrats, one which survived a split in the smaller party and a general election. However, the Eurozone continued to languish in recession, forcing ever-harsher austerity measures onto Britain as Laity's Alliance Majority was whittled away through by-elections, defections and rebellions. Surviving scandals, the odd constitutional crisis with Scotland's SNP Government and declaring war on Hendrick Rudolf's media empire, the government finally collapsed over the failure to pass an ECB loan package which mandated even further austerity measures. The failure of this vote led to the implosion of the banking industry and failure of cashpoints to dispense money. The chaos of that week ended with Laity resigning quietly (officially to spend more time with his dying husband), and Adam Armstrong being invited by the Queen to form a National Government.

Armstrong had long plotted his political rehabilitation over the Laity years, and cast his return in the midst of great crisis as an act of duty. He formed a national government, initially Labour dominated, of like-minded figures across political lines. Managing Britain's abrupt exit from the Euro, he fought hard to restore the economic credibility of Britain and restore order the country. Outside the Euro he was able to ease up on austerity, but not fast enough for some. Knowing he was already a second Ramsay MacDonald to many in his party, Armstrong stood in the 2015 election on a "National Alliance", an effective endorsement given to MPs and candidates that supported the National Government across the political divide. The rump Labour and Conservative Parties lurched to the left and right respectively, with the Tories forming an Alliance with a variety of hard-right headbangers, fringe groups and the DUP. The Nationals narrowly won a majority, and in 2017 Armstrong handed over to Lewis Smiley, a former Lib Dem who had a history of co-operation with Labour and Armstrong's right-hand man in government.
This forces me to ask a question I should know the answer to. Assuming the Nationals was a coupon thing how does a coupon election work. Do individual MPs have to apply for one?
 
I found this old thing gathering dust on an old computer of mine. Based on the half-finished footnotes I believe I had based it to some degree on a TLIAD by @Ares96 from a few years ago. I made some adjustments to the list and just wrote a few quick paragraphs tonight, not a full story but a bit of a look at the world and some of the history from the perspective of the current PM. I'm thinking about fleshing this out more in the future, perhaps in a wikibox format or something like that, but I'm not completely sure yet.
Well, fuck me sideways.

Feel free to drop a PM if you want to discuss it - as it happens, I've been thinking about fleshing out that scenario for a long-term project of mine, which is to start a Swedish-language narrative AH blog.
 
I found this old thing gathering dust on an old computer of mine. Based on the half-finished footnotes I believe I had based it to some degree on a TLIAD by @Ares96 from a few years ago. I made some adjustments to the list and just wrote a few quick paragraphs tonight, not a full story but a bit of a look at the world and some of the history from the perspective of the current PM. I'm thinking about fleshing this out more in the future, perhaps in a wikibox format or something like that, but I'm not completely sure yet.

Prime Ministers of Sweden
1946-1948: Tage Erlander, Social Democrats
-Erlander Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1948-1950: Bertil Ohlin, People’s
1948: def. Tage Erlander (Social Democrats), Axel Pehrsson-Bramstorp (Farmers’), Fritiof Domö (National Organisation of the Right), Sven Linderot (Communist)

-First Ohlin Ministry, People’s minority government (1948-1950)
1950-1959: Per Edvin Sköld, Social Democrats
-First Sköld Ministry, Social Democratic-Farmers’/Centre majority coalition (1950-1955)
1952: def. Bertil Ohlin (People’s), Jarl Hjalmarsson (Rightist), Gunnar Hedlund (Farmers’), Hilding Hagberg (Communist)
-Second Sköld Ministry, Social Democratic minority government (1955-1960)
1956: def. Bertil Ohlin (People’s), Jarl Hjalmarsson (Rightist), Gunnar Hedlund (Centre), Hilding Hagberg (Communist)
1959-1970: Gunnar Sträng, Social Democrats
-First Sträng Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1960: def. Bertil Ohlin (People’s), Jarl Hjalmarsson (Rightist), Gunnar Hedlund (Centre), Inga Thorsson (Socialist Left), Hilding Hagberg (Communist)
-Second Sträng Ministry, Social Democratic-Centre majority coalition (1960-1966)
1964: def. Bertil Ohlin (People’s), Jarl Hjalmarsson (Rightist), Gunnar Hedlund (Centre), Inga Thorsson (Socialist Left), Alf Lövenborg (Communist)
-Third Sträng Ministry, Social Democratic-People’s-Rightist-Centre grand coalition (1966-1968)

-Fourth Sträng Ministry, Social Democratic minority government (1968-1970)
1968: def. Bertil Ohlin (People’s), Gösta Agrenius (Rightist), Gunnar Hedlund (Centre), Inga Thorsson (Socialist Left), Alf Lövenborg (Communist)
1970-1975: Bert Lundin, Social Democrats
-First Lundin Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1972: def. Per Ahlmark (People’s), Johannes Antonsson (Centre), Gösta Agrenius (Rightist), Inga Thorsson (Socialist Left)
1975-1979: Per Ahlmark, People’s
1975: def. Bert Lundin (Social Democrats), Johannes Antonsson (Centre), Eric Krönmark (Rightist), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left)

-First Ahlmark Ministry, People’s-Centre minority coalition
1979-1980: Bert Lundin, Social Democrats
1979: def. Per Ahlmark (People’s), Eric Krönmark (Rightist), Johannes Antonsson (Centre), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left)

-Second Lundin Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1980-1983: Margot Wikström, Social Democrats
-First Wikström Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1983-1984: Per Ahlmark, People’s
1983: def. Margot Wikström (Social Democrats), Eric Krönmark (Rightist), Karin Söder (Centre), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left)

-Second Ahlmark Ministry, People’s minority government
1984-1987: Margot Wikström, Social Democrats
1984: def. Per Ahlmark (People’s), Karin Söder (Centre), Eric Krönmark (Rightist), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left), Per Gahrton (Future)

-Second Wikström Ministry, Social Democratic-Centre majority coalition
1987-1991: Anne Wibble, People’s
1987: def. Margot Wikström (Social Democrats), Carl Cederschiöld (Rightist), Karl-Erik Olsson (Centre), Harry Franzén (Freedom), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left), Per Gahrton (Future)

-First Wibble Ministry, People’s-Rightist-Centre minority coalition
1991-1997: Margot Wikström, Social Democrats
1991: def. Anne Wibble (People’s), Carl Cederschiöld (Rightist), Birgitta Dahl (Socialist Left), Karl-Erik Olsson (Centre), Harry Franzén (Freedom), Per Gahrton (Future)

-Third Wikström Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1995: def. Anne Wibble (People’s), Carl Cederschiöld (Rightist), Per-Ola Eriksson (Centre), Åsa Domeij (Socialist Left), Harry Franzén (Freedom), Per Gahrton (Future)
1997-1999: Björn von Sydow, Social Democrats
-First von Sydow Ministry, Social Democratic minority government
1999-2000: Anne Wibble, People’s
1999: def. Björn von Sydow (Social Democrats), Anders Björck (Rightist), Per-Ola Eriksson (Centre), Harry Franzén (Freedom), Anders Wijkman (Future), Åsa Domeij (Socialist Left)

-Second Wibble Ministry, People’s-Centre-Future minority coalition
2000-2003: Olle Wästberg, People’s
-First Wästberg Ministry, People’s-Centre-Future minority coalition (2000-2001)
-Second Wästberg Ministry, People’s minority government (2001-2003)
2003-2011: Björn von Sydow, Social Democrats
2003: def. Harry Franzén (Freedom), Olle Wästberg (People's), Margot Wallström (Socialist Left), Anders Björck (Rightist), Per-Ola Eriksson (Centre), Anders Wijkman (Future)

-Second von Sydow Ministry, Social Democratic-Socialist Left majority coalition
2007: def. Carl Fredrik Graf (New Right), Olle Wästberg (People’s), Harry Franzén (Freedom), Margot Wallström (Socialist Left), Per-Ola Eriksson (Centre), Anders Wijkman (Future)
-Third von Sydow Ministry, Social Democratic-Socialist Left-Centre majority coalition
2011-2015: Carl Fredrik Graf, New Right
2011: def. Björn von Sydow (Social Democrats), Anna Kinberg Batra (People’s), Lars Adaktusson (Freedom), Gunvor G. Ericson (Future), Kristina Jonäng (Centre), Margot Wallström (Socialist Left)

-Graf Ministry, New Right-People’s-Future minority coalition
2015-20??: Terese Bengard, Social Democrats
2015: def. Lars Adaktusson (Freedom), Carl Fredrik Graf (New Right), Anna Kinberg Batra (People’s), Kristina Jonäng (Centre), Daniel Bernmar (Socialist Left), Gunvor G. Ericson (Future)

-Bengard Ministry, Social Democratic-Centre minority coalition
Next election, September 2019: Terese Bengard (Social Democrats), Lars Adaktusson (Freedom), Martin Wannholt (New Right), Karin Svanborg-Sjövall (People’s), Kristina Jonäng (Centre), Daniel Bernmar (Socialist Left), Maria Weimer (Future)


Only a little more than a week of 2019 had passed and Terese Bengard was already dreading the huge amounts of stress that this year would bring, as she looked out of the windows of the armoured Saab while it drove through the darkness of the early morning towards Rosenbad. Christmas and New Year’s back home in the peace and calm of Ragunda had granted her some well deserved rest to prepare her for a year dominated by a general election campaign that was slowly but surely gathering steam. Actually, it had probably kicked off on December 31st when Lars Adaktusson continued his party’s New Year's tradition of writing a scathing attack on the alcohol retail monopoly, perhaps this time even surpassing party founder Harry Franzén in rhetoric by referring to it as a “near-dictatorial form oppression” to hinder consumers from buying a bottle of champagne after 18.00 on New Year’s Eve. Still, it only took the Young Socialists five days to top that piece of poetry by equivalenting her to Saudi Arabia’s human rights abusing leaders for the crime of gradually divesting the government’s shares in Volvoil rather than closing down all of the company's wells, ignoring the fact that it would be pretty difficult to accomplish as a minority shareholder. This was going to be a long year.

As the country’s 36th Prime Minister she was always the one responsible for every decision made, no matter how big or how small, and no matter if she actually had any power to control the events. The first one to blame and the last one to praise wasn’t a fun position to be in, but looking at the portraits of her predecessor as she walked down the corridors towards her office she still felt lucky when she compared her problems to some of theirs. She may have a coalition partner with a youth league that was a constant source of annoyance, but at least she didn’t have to deal with an actual split in the governing party like Sköld and Ahlmark were saddled with in their days. She may have opposition politicians either more concerned with their own image than practical policies or in the process of slowly turning their grand old party into a special interest club for Greater Gothenburg, but at least she didn’t face the pressure and scrutiny of being the country’s first female Prime Minister like Margot Wikström did. There was no upper house with a hostile majority to handle, along with an increasingly hostile lower house. Looking back, it was almost baffling how Ohlin had managed to hold on for those two years.

In only his first five years in office Bert Lundin had accomplished things which still shape Swedish society by passing landmark employee rights legislation and a new constitution. He and Olle Wästberg were also the only two Prime Ministers in recent memory with the duty of leading the country through the death of a monarch and the first years of a new one. Wästberg in particular, who not only had to deal with the death of a King but also the loss of a friend and Prime Minister to cancer all in the midst of the worst financial crisis in decades had a tenure that she certainly didn’t envy. The hand Wibble was dealt while in good health during her first term was not particularly appealing either; having to cobble together a majority in the Riksdag with a brand new populist party that had 30 MPs, each with 60 different positions on policy any given day nearly gave her a headache just thinking about it. Dealing with them three decades later from the other side of the political spectrum was difficult enough.

Her immediate predecessor as leader, Björn von Sydow, was someone she often rang when she had difficulties making a decision, and whether it regarded foreign relations, campaign strategies or his big passion railways she could always trust him to deliver sound advice. Her first response when he asked her to take up where he left off and lead the party back into government after his heart attack in 2014 was to say no, but he persisted. She let him convince her then and she would still let him convince her in their conversations four years later. In contrast, Carl Fredrik Graf, her immediade predecessor as Prime Minister was someone she had a considerably frostier relationship with, which wasn’t that surprising considering she was the one who snatched his job away from him. Though out of all the people who had sat in the same office as her in the years and decades before there was one person that she truly wished she could have the opportunity to talk with. What had it been like for Gunnar Sträng during those stressful weeks and months when 1966 turned into 1967, Sweden joined the Nuclear Club and an international crisis was sparked? What was it like to have every journalist in the world focusing on little Sweden whilst President Rockefeller and General Secretary Podgorny were more eager to talk to the Swedish Prime Minister than every previous Soviet or American leader combined? In comparison her problems just seemed so tame.

*RING*RING*

Deep in her train of thought, she was thrown right back into reality by an obnoxiously loud phone.

*RING*RING*

Reaching to pick up the phone before the ringtone gave her a migraine, she snuck a quick glance at the old copper clock on her desk. 05.54. Maybe it really was for the best if she spent less time pondering the tumultous times of the office’s previous occupants. She had enough excitement to deal with anyway.

-click-

“Hello?”

As one of the few MPs I've had any interaction with, I am really curious why you made the former Liberal MP for Uppsala leader of the Future Party.
 
Well, fuck me sideways.

Feel free to drop a PM if you want to discuss it - as it happens, I've been thinking about fleshing out that scenario for a long-term project of mine, which is to start a Swedish-language narrative AH blog.

I may take you up on that offer. Right now I'm back to attempting to focus entirely on studying for my exams with this being my little distraction, but you could hear back from me in a couple of days or weeks.

As one of the few MPs I've had any interaction with, I am really curious why you made the former Liberal MP for Uppsala leader of the Future Party.

With the Future Party sort of being a version of the Greens that tilts more towards the right than the left, I needed centre-right politicians with some good environmental credentials and her focus on environmental policy and recent decision to buck the party line on the air travel tax made me take a look in her direction. ITTL her support of nuclear power would obviously make it an uphill struggle for her to win the leadership, but not impossible. The Future Party is far more accepting of pro-nuclear views than the Greens, with a pretty large minority of the party being favourably inclined towards nuclear power.

ITTL the most vehement anti-nuclear power activists generally end up in the Socialist Left rather than the Future Party, so opposition to nuclear power is not really the same litmus test for leadership candidates or big priority in parliament that it is for our Greens. In part this is due to the Future Party from its inception placing greater emphasis on abolishing Sweden's nuclear deterrent rather than ditching nuclear power, which in comparison seems like an issue of lesser importance. This is also one of the factors that pushed the party towards the right on the political spectrum, because the Future Party finally presented an alternative to centre-right voters who were opposed to nuclear weapons but didn't want to vote for the Socialist Left, the only party campaigning on getting rid of them at the time.
 
Last edited:
I may take you up on that offer. Right now I'm back to attempting to focus entirely on studying for my exams with this being my little distraction, but you could hear back from me in a couple of days or weeks.

With the Future Party sort of being a version of the Greens that tilts more towards the right than the left, I needed centre-right politicians with some good environmental credentials and her focus on environmental policy and recent decision to buck the party line on the air travel tax made me take a look in her direction. ITTL her support of nuclear power would obviously make it an uphill struggle for her to win the leadership, but not impossible. The Future Party is far more accepting of pro-nuclear views than the Greens, with a pretty large minority of the party being favourably inclined towards nuclear power.

ITTL the most vehement anti-nuclear power activists generally end up in the Socialist Left rather than the Future Party, so opposition to nuclear power is not really the same litmus test for leadership candidates or big priority in parliament that it is for our Greens. In part this is due to the Future Party from its inception placing greater emphasis on abolishing Sweden's nuclear deterrent rather than ditching nuclear power, which in comparison seems like an issue of lesser importance. This is also one of the factors that pushed the party towards the right on the political spectrum, because the Future Party finally presented an alternative to centre-right voters who were opposed to nuclear weapons but didn't want to vote for the Socialist Left, the only party campaigning on getting rid of them at the time.

It certainly is interesting. Only problem I really see with the particular choice of Maria Weimer is that of all the parties in Sweden today, and historically too, the Liberals actually strike me as the party who probably would be most pro-nuclear arsenal, and that anti-nuclear people would probably be found in most abundance in the Centre Party.

I mean, I've met Liberals who feel that Bengt Westerberg is the best politician Sweden's ever had, that are proud of the label feminist, of perfectly equal parental leave, quotas on company boards, etc.

Oh, and they also are adamant that Sweden should join NATO, that we should have conscription, and that it wouldn't be too bad an idea to have a bunch of nuclear missiles on Gotland standing on constant alert to annihilate Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Putin's summer dacha, 24/7.

Basically, Charles Kennedy on most policies, except on defense, where they think Ronald Reagan was a bit of a pussy.
 
It certainly is interesting. Only problem I really see with the particular choice of Maria Weimer is that of all the parties in Sweden today, and historically too, the Liberals actually strike me as the party who probably would be most pro-nuclear arsenal, and that anti-nuclear people would probably be found in most abundance in the Centre Party.

I mean, I've met Liberals who feel that Bengt Westerberg is the best politician Sweden's ever had, that are proud of the label feminist, of perfectly equal parental leave, quotas on company boards, etc.

Oh, and they also are adamant that Sweden should join NATO, that we should have conscription, and that it wouldn't be too bad an idea to have a bunch of nuclear missiles on Gotland standing on constant alert to annihilate Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Putin's summer dacha, 24/7.

Basically, Charles Kennedy on most policies, except on defense, where they think Ronald Reagan was a bit of a pussy.

Yeah those are all fair points, I'm fully aware that Weimer isn't the best choice and if I ever did something more with the concept there are probably a bunch of people on the list I'd swap out for other more fitting candidates. Admittedly the choice could be justified with ITTL's Weimer being very much in favour of a strong national defence, just not the nuclear part of it, or being more favourably inclined personally but accepting of the party line, like Löfven with nuclear power. Though that could be a bit of a cop out.

Again, this was basically an old thing I finished over an evening after I was so worn out from studying that I had read the same chapter on constructivism in my international relations book two times in a row without even realizing it until the last page, so you'll have to excuse the somewhat subpar quality.
 
Democracy Delayed: Brother Jonathan

While Britain serenely remains in the Edwardian era and drifts into odd genteel fascism before having a rude awakening the 1950s/60s, what's happening across the pond?

1913-1924: Woodrow Wilson (Democratic)
1912 (with Thomas R. Marshall) def. Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive), William Howard Taft (Republican)
1916 (with Thomas R. Marshall) def. Charles Evans Hughes (Republican)
1920 (with Thomas R. Marshall) def. Frank Orren Lowden (Republican)

1924-1925: Thomas R. Marshall (Democratic)
1925-1925: Samuel M. Ralston (Democratic)
1924 (with Bennett Champ Clark) def. William E. Borah (Progressive), Frank Orren Lowden (Republican)
1925-1929: Bennett Champ Clark (Democratic)
1929-1930: Benjamin Gitlow (Progressive)
1928 (with Al Smith) def. Bennett Champ Clark (Democratic), Theodore E. Burton (Republican)
1930-1937: Benjamin Gitlow (National Government)
1932 (with Huey Long) def. William Z. Foster ('Continuity' Progressive)
1937-1940: Benjamin Gitlow (National-Democratic)
1936 (with Huey Long) def. Douglas MacArthur (Republican), scattered Independent Progressives
1940-1954: Huey Long (National-Democratic)
1940 (with Burton K. Wheeler) def. Wendell Willkie (Republican)
1944 (with Burton K. Wheeler) def. Fiorello LaGuardia (Republican)
1948 (with Estes Kefauver) def. Henry A. Wallace (Republican)
1952 (with Estes Kefauver) def. Vito Marcantonio (Republican)

1954-1957: Estes Kefauver (National-Democratic)
1957-1965: Walter Reuther (Republican)
1956 (with George Romney) def. Estes Kefauver (National-Democratic)
1960 (with George Romney) def. George Smathers (National-Democratic)
 
List of Leaders of the Social Credit Party of New Zealand
1982-1985: Bruce Beetham [1]
1985-1988: Les Hunter [2]
1988-1992: Terry Heffernan [3]
1992-1993: Chris Leitch (Acting)
1993-1993: John Wright [4]
1993-1997: Heather-Ann McConachy [5]

[1] - Bruce Beetham had been the Leader of the Social Credit Political League for a decade when, at the 1981 Victory Conference, he proposed that the name of the organisation be changed to the 'Social Credit Party', firstly to recognise that it was now a political party of the ordinary sort, and secondly to avoid having to explain to voters on the doorsteps what a Political League was. This motion drew some opposition from the hardcore Douglasites, who took Major Douglas' 1934 injunction to Social Creditors not to organise themselves into political parties as Holy Writ. But Beetham had the mana of a participant in Government, and his proposal won out.

The Muldoon's National Government had won one seat fewer than they needed for a majority in 1981, and therefore needed the two Social Credit MPs (Beetham and Garry Knapp) to support them on a case-by-case basis. Among the victories of the Socred team in that Parliament were the change of the royal inheritance system to Equal (as opposed to Male-preference) Primogeniture and the change of the NZ electoral system to STV - which was designed to ensure that a centrist party like Social Credit would always have a number of seats in Parliament. Unfortunately, just as this historic achievement was passed through, Beetham and Knapp voted for Muldoon's high dam on the Clyde River, thus alienating their environmentalist support basis and those who had voted for them to keep Muldoon tame or out of office entirely. The first STV election saw Knapp out, Beetham in by the skin of his teeth in the Wanganui-Manawatu five-seater, and Social Credit outclassed by the new free-market liberals in the New Zealand Party, who took 7 seats. Ashamed and weakened by increasingly frequent heart troubles, Beetham resigned as Leader at the next Conference.

[2] - There was only one possible successor. Socred Finance spokesman for over a decade, Les Hunter had been key in the transformation of Social Credit into a plausible party of responsibility. Now, in 1984, he had been elected by the people of Northland to join Beetham in Parliament. As the author of the book 'And Now Social Democracy' he was well-placed to lead Social Credit to the left of the New Right-influenced Lange Government. The theory was that with the New Zealand Party agreeing with Roger Douglas in every particular, the only space for a third party would be on the Old Left. So it proved: the NZP suffered catastrophe after catastrophe in the 84-87 Parliament, starting with Bob Jones' resignation from Parliament after four months because he'd rather go fishing, and only getting worse from there under the inexperienced leadership of Josephine Grierson. As such, in 1987, the only minor parties to be elected to the second STV Parliament were Social Credit and the Maori rights party Mana Motuhake. Both had only one MP, and Les Hunter wasn't one of them.

[3] - Hunter did the honourable thing and retired from politics at the next Conference. He had been a major figure in the Beetham era, but the feeling was that a new generation was needed to restore Social Credit's fortunes. Unfortunately, Garry Knapp - the central figure of the first stage of the 1980s reformers - had lost his seat and the rest of them (Alasdair Thompson, Stuart Perry, Neil Morrison, etc.) had slandered each other rigid during the selection battle to replace Bruce Beetham as Socred candidate for Wanganui-Manawatu. In the event, it went to the Wanganui native Terry Heffernan, who was elected to Parliament as the only Social Creditor in 1987 and re-elected narrowly against a falling national vote in 1990. At the same election, three Greens came in, becoming the new default third party.

Heffernan was a solid local MP and pleasantly anodyne political figure, able to attract the sensible bourgeoisie of New Zealand to centre-left critiques of Rogernomics, but he was not a natural leader. He was forced by his party after the defeat of 1990 to join the Alliance with the Greens, NewLabour, Mana Motuhake and some centrist rebels from the National Party. But he wasn't happy. First, the Alliance parties resolved to stand only one or two candidates in each electorate, rather than simply continuing to stand individually and calling on their voters to transfer to the other parties. Second, and more decisively, Heffernan was passed over as Leader in favour of Jim Anderton of NewLabour. As soon as Winston Peters was thrust out of National and started his own populist party, Heffernan and his supporters flocked to his banner - although it didn't do them any good, as their influence was curtailed before any of them won any seats.

[4] - The Social Creditors remaining in the Alliance were deeply embarrassed by the flight of their Leader, but continued despite the other parties' frustration with their lack of members, openness and money. One candidate to replace Heffernan, Party President Chris Leitch, had been Alliance candidate at the Tamaki by-election, but had brought shame on Social Credit when he lost a court case over a traffic violation two days before polling day - without telling anyone that he was up for trial beforehand. As such, he was handily beaten by John Wright, recently defected from National.

Wright, a stocky businessman with a strong repertoire of distasteful jokes, was not an easy fit with the liberal-lefty side of the Alliance, which resulted in him being selected for the unwinnable three-seater of North Canterbury instead of the more amenable Christchurch North electorate. In the event, neither was won in 1993, and Wright had to resign to make space for one of the MPs elected in the Alliance surge of 1993.

[5] - Of the 18 Alliance MPs elected to hold the balance of responsibility in 1993, only three were Social Credit members. The biggest contingents were from the Greens and NewLabour, and even the microscopic Liberal Party (48 financial members) had three MPs, the same as Social Credit. Fortunately, the Alliance surge had kept NZ First down to four seats - a poke in the eye to the traitor Heffernan.

The new Social Credit Leader, the first woman to be elected as sole Leader of a political party in New Zealand (three weeks before Labour chose Helen Clark), was Heather-Ann McConachy, newly elected MP for the North Shore five-seater. She was by no means new to Social Credit, though - he father, Nevern McConachy, had been a key member of the Beetham/Hunter era of modernisation and came just 520 votes short of election in 1978. But most importantly, she was a breath of fresh air for a party that had hitherto been seen as masculine and cranky.

McConachy came to power at the most dramatic time in NZ political history, just weeks after Kiwis had voted for a hung Parliament for the first time since 1981. This time, National had one more seat than Labour (39 versus 38) with the Alliance holding the balance of responsibility. Jim Anderton committed them on election night to uphold Jim Bolger's National Government - a diktat for which he was pilloried by the Greens and the left-wing elements of NewLabour. The Alliance went along with giving Bolger supply and confidence for the first few months, but the Alliance backbench rebelled at the first opportunity on a minor matter related to health cutbacks.

The Greens and most of NewLabour formed the NewAlliance faction which handed power to Helen Clark's Labour Party in conjunction with the four NZ First MPs. Clark's first, two-year premiership, was riven with division between the NewAlliance, the still-influential Rogernomes in Labour, and the right-populist contingent in both Labour and NZ First, and is widely regarded as one of the worst Governments ever to have been inflicted on New Zealand - and undemocratically at that. McConachy, however, kept Social Credit as part of the Anderton-aligned Alliance and outside of the new Government. This attracted early criticism from the rank and file, until they realised how unpopular the Fifth Labour Government was with the general population.

Even so, the voters were heartily sick of both sides of the Alliance, and none of them were re-elected in 1996 - not even supposedly unbeatable local blokes like Anderton and the Green Leah McBey escaped the cleansing fire of NZ's turn to a straightforward Birch-Peters Government. Within Social Credit, the pain of defeat was sharp: having been in Parliament since 1978, they still thought that they had the power to become NZ's third party once more (bolstered by the fact that the last pre-Alliance poll had had them on 6%). But it was not to be. McConachy was blamed, somewhat unfairly, for the electoral defeat of the Anderton bloc, and forced to stand down as Leader at the next conference, when - like a teenager sucking on a comfort blanket - the membership cuddled its knees and changed its name back to the Social Credit Political League label under which they'd once been popular, in the hope that this would be in some way Good.

They were wrong.
 
Finally, a genuinely interesting and original spin on “left-wing Republicans, right wing Democrats.” But this looks like a body-politic a lot more to the left than OTL.
 
Finally, a genuinely interesting and original spin on “left-wing Republicans, right wing Democrats.” But this looks like a body-politic a lot more to the left than OTL.

In the background of Democracy Delayed, Britain never gets into WW1, and as the war never really spreads out into the Atlantic neither does America. A lot of Wilson's wartime authoritarianism is avoided as a result, and the Democrats tighten their grip on politics. The Progressive Party sticks around, socialists and communists affiliate to it and eventually overtake the Democrats once that party burns themselves out over an economic crisis in the 1920s.

The Anti-Bolshevist War kicks off in 1929 which basically kills the Progressives in the water, gives the Democrats a second wind and slowly leads to the Republicans taking on the mantle of the left.
 
Governors of North Dakota

1929-1932: George F. Shafer (Republican — Independent Voters Association)
1932-1934: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Republican — “Creditist” Nonpartisan League)
1934-1935: Ole H. Olson (Republican — “Anti-Social” Nonpartisan League)
1935-1936: Lydia Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1936-1939: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1939: Quentin Burdick (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1939-1959: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1959-1960: Arthur A. Link (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1960-1973: Quentin Burdick (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1973-1981: Thomas S. Kleppe (Republican)
1981-1989: S. F. "Buckshot" Hoffner (Democratic League for Social Credit)
1989-2001: Ed Schafer (Republican)
2001-2005: Ed Schultz (DLSC)
2005-2013: Duane Sand (Republican)
2013-0000: Leonard Peltier (DLSC)

(See Prairie Fire)

In the early 1920s, Bill Langer was at a crossroads. The Nonpartisan League, a radical agrarian bloc founded by socialist flax farmer Arthur Townley, had swept to power across the state in 1916. Langer himself, a young lawyer from Mandan, had been elected Attorney General. Their achievements included a ban on corporate farming, workmen's compensation, a progressive income tax, and the nation's only publicly owned bank, along with state-run grain mills and railroads. But the radicals faced powerful opposition both inside the Republican Party and out, and in the wake of the postwar agricultural collapse, a conservative campaign put paid to the experiment and forced NPL governor Lynn Frazier out of office. Meanwhile, the League was suffering from internal splits that pitted Langer against Frazier and Townley, and the onetime Attorney General briefly left the party.

Then, destiny struck. A chance encounter with Alfred Orage, a traveling lecturer on Theosophical mysticism and political philosophy, introduced him to the work of C. H. Douglas. Langer quickly came to believe that farmers' lack of purchasing power lay at the root of his state's woes. Returning to politics, he worked to convince fellow NPLers of his views. While unsuccessful in transforming the League into a social credit organization, after the Depression began he was able to get elements of monetary reform added to the platform, and in 1932 he was selected as the NPL candidate for Governor, despite opposition from Frazier and other more conventionally socialist leaders.

Langer was duly elected and immediately placed a moratorium on farm foreclosures and mortgage payments. He then - to great controversy - ordered the Bank of North Dakota (BND) to begin issuing citizens with bundles of scrip known as "Dividend Certificates" (or "Billybucks"). Unlike the similar experiment then being tried by the Aberhart government in Alberta, these certificates were not designed to depreciate rapidly. They were simply an alternative currency, one that allowed Langer a degree of control over the money supply and additionally encouraged people to spend their money in-state. The governor opened dozens of new BND branches, encouraging North Dakotans to deposit their money with the state government rather than in private institutions. Ultimately, he admitted, the goal was to force private finance out of the state entirely.

While Langer's push for Social Credit was popular with rural voters - who still made up over three-quarters of the population - it didn't go down as well in the cities of the prosperous Red River Valley. Among the business classes of Grand Forks and Fargo, both on the Minnesota border and both connected commercially to the wider world, it was believed that Langer was even worse than Roosevelt. There was also mistrust among the traditional socialists of the NPL, who believed Social Credit was bunk and Langer was setting himself up as a strongman.

In 1934, the governor fell afoul of federal law when it became known that he was forcing state employees to purchase copies of the NPL newspaper. That was not in itself illegal, but some of those state employees were now drawing their salaries from New Deal assistance money, and diverting federal money for party-political purposes was against the law. Langer was threatened with arrest; he barricaded himself in the governor's mansion and proclaimed North Dakota an independent republic before finally surrendering to the authorities. He would later imply that it had been a mere dramatic protest, but flags and iconography of the Republic of North Dakota can be seen across the state to this day.

The interregnum did not last long. Langer successfully portrayed the case as a conspiracy against the democratic will of North Dakota, and his wife was elected in his stead in the special election. The governor was acquitted in a retrial due to procedural mistakes in the original conviction. Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, the nation's foremost proponent of Social Credit, served as an adviser for the defense. Lydia Langer took up where her husband had left off, abolishing partisan politics in the state legislature and imposing greater and greater restrictions on private banking in the state. By this point, the split in the NPL had become formal, with the socialists becoming an appendage of the national Farmer-Labor movement and Langer's adherents being reorganized into the League for Social Credit.

During his second term, Langer again fell afoul of federal law when paying state employees in Billybucks was found to be a crime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. By this time, he had already abandoned some tenets of Social Credit. The Compensated Price system described in Douglas's writings had been briefly attempted but dropped after it was found to be completely unwieldly, and the dividend of free Billybucks had been drastically cut. Nevertheless, the idea of a state currency remained popular and federal interference unpopular, and Langer was once again returned to office after another brief interlude under his protege Quentin Burdick. He would remain in power until his death.

From the 1940s until 1959, Langer ran North Dakota as a virtual one-party state (although there were, of course, no parties in the legislature). He was a prominent voice for isolationism, and LSC members of Congress opposed the Second World War, the UN Charter, and the Korean War, advocating for peaceful trade with the Soviet Union and a reduction in defense spending. Langer backed Bronson Cutting's third-party Presidential bid in 1940 but declined the offer of the vice-presidential spot, recommending Representative William Lemke instead. He also refused to join Cutting's national Social Credit Party, likely contributing to its doom.

North Dakota's economy grew slower than those of its neighboring agricultural states throughout the 1950s, with access to credit limited by the monopoly the BND enjoyed outside Fargo and Grand Forks. However, the Dividend and the state currency encouraged local spending, keeping family businesses afloat and preventing the incursion of chains that began to crop up elsewhere during the decade. Langer died in office in 1959 and was given a lavish public funeral that drew unfavorable comparisons to Communist personality cults; he was succeeded by Senator Quentin Burdick. During the 1960s, some members of the burgeoning American counterculture began to take note of North Dakota's unique economic system - in particular the Billybucks and the NPL's still-extant ban on corporate farming - and the state soon became a popular destination for back-to-the-land hippies. (The most prominent of these transplants being former US Representative Bernard Sanders, who has run a dairy farm outside Minot since the early seventies and was well known as the last unreconstructed Creditist in Congress.) In the "Zip to Zap" of 1969, young people from around the country descended upon a tiny farm town for one of the first great rock music festivals. The Theosophical mysticism which Alfred Orage had spread during his time as a gubernatorial adviser in Bismarck and which had entered folk religion was a source of fascination for many of the new arrivals.

Ironically, just as the wider world was taking note of North Dakota, the state was beginning to change. The discovery of the Bakken Formation led to a fossil fuel boom, and oil workers began to flood into the western half of the state - the former heartland of the Social Credit movement. Meanwhile, the Seventies' sociocultural backlash led many of the League's traditional voters towards conservatism. Straight-out Republicans took power for the first time and began to deregulate the financial sector. Recognizing that the autocratic Langer model was dead, Governor Burdick, who had always been a more conventional left-liberal, led a somewhat forcible merger between the League and the state's tiny Democratic Party. The new Democratic League for Social Credit would form a new political coalition consisting of liberal farmers, hippies, and the state's relatively large Native American population - who had never been very impressed by Langer but whose cause Burdick had championed in Congress.

Today, many features of the Social Credit era - the ubiquitous BND branches, the Billybucks - still exist, but their future is in doubt as the state becomes increasingly polarized between a conservative, gas-fueled Republican Party and a Creditist-in-name-only alliance of Indians and organic farmers.
 
Last edited:
Governors of North Dakota

1929-1932: George F. Shafer (Republican — Independent Voters Association)
1932-1934: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Republican — “Creditist” Nonpartisan League)
1934-1935: Ole H. Olson (Republican — “Anti-Social” Nonpartisan League)
1935-1936: Lydia Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1936-1939: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1939: Quentin Burdick (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1939-1959: William "Wild Bill" Langer (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1959-1960: Arthur A. Link (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1960-1973: Quentin Burdick (Independent — League for Social Credit)
1973-1981: Thomas S. Kleppe (Republican)
1981-1989: S. F. "Buckshot" Hoffner (Democratic League for Social Credit)
1989-2001: Ed Schafer (Republican)
2001-2005: Ed Schultz (DLSC)
2005-2013: Duane Sand (Republican)
2013-0000: Leonard Peltier (DLSC)

(See Prairie Fire)

In the early 1920s, Bill Langer was at a crossroads. The Nonpartisan League, a radical agrarian bloc founded by socialist flax farmer Arthur Townley, had swept to power across the state in 1916. Langer himself, a young lawyer from Mandan, had been elected Attorney General. Their achievements included a ban on corporate farming, workmen's compensation, a progressive income tax, and the nation's only publicly owned bank, along with state-run grain mills and railroads. But the radicals faced powerful opposition both inside the Republican Party and out, and in the wake of the postwar agricultural collapse, a conservative campaign put paid to the experiment and forced NPL governor Lynn Frazier out of office. Meanwhile, the League was suffering from internal splits that pitted Langer against Frazier and Townley, and the onetime Attorney General briefly left the party.

Then, destiny struck. A chance encounter with Alfred Orage, a traveling lecturer on Theosophical mysticism and political philosophy, introduced him to the work of C. H. Douglas. Langer quickly came to believe that farmers' lack of purchasing power lay at the root of his state's woes. Returning to politics, he worked to convince fellow NPLers of his views. While unsuccessful in transforming the League into a social credit organization, after the Depression began he was able to get elements of monetary reform added to the platform, and in 1932 he was selected as the NPL candidate for Governor, despite opposition from Frazier and other more conventionally socialist leaders.

Langer was duly elected and immediately placed a moratorium on farm foreclosures and mortgage payments. He then - to great controversy - ordered the Bank of North Dakota (BND) to begin issuing citizens with bundles of scrip known as "Dividend Certificates" (or "Billybucks"). Unlike the similar experiment then being tried by the Aberhart government in Alberta, these certificates were not designed to depreciate rapidly. They were simply an alternative currency, one that allowed Langer a degree of control over the money supply and additionally encouraged people to spend their money in-state. The governor opened dozens of new BND branches, encouraging North Dakotans to deposit their money with the state government rather than in private institutions. Ultimately, he admitted, the goal was to force private finance out of the state entirely.

While Langer's push for Social Credit was popular with rural voters - who still made up over three-quarters of the population - it didn't go down as well in the cities of the prosperous Red River Valley. Among the business classes of Grand Forks and Fargo, both on the Minnesota border and both connected commercially to the wider world, it was believed that Langer was even worse than Roosevelt. There was also mistrust among the traditional socialists of the NPL, who believed Social Credit was bunk and Langer was setting himself up as a strongman.

In 1934, the governor fell afoul of federal law when it became known that he was forcing state employees to purchase copies of the NPL newspaper. That was not in itself illegal, but some of those state employees were now drawing their salaries from New Deal assistance money, and diverting federal money for party-political purposes was against the law. Langer was threatened with arrest; he barricaded himself in the governor's mansion and proclaimed North Dakota an independent republic before finally surrendering to the authorities. He would later imply that it had been a mere dramatic protest, but flags and iconography of the Republic of North Dakota can be seen across the state to this day.

The interregnum did not last long. Langer successfully portrayed the case as a conspiracy against the democratic will of North Dakota, and his wife was elected in his stead in the special election. The governor was acquitted in a retrial due to procedural mistakes in the original conviction. Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, the nation's foremost proponent of Social Credit, served as an adviser for the defense. Lydia Langer took up where her husband had left off, abolishing partisan politics in the state legislature and imposing greater and greater restrictions on private banking in the state. By this point, the split in the NPL had become formal, with the socialists becoming an appendage of the national Farmer-Labor movement and Langer's adherents being reorganized into the League for Social Credit.

During his second term, Langer again fell afoul of federal law when paying state employees in Billybucks was found to be a crime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. By this time, he had already abandoned some tenets of Social Credit. The Compensated Price system described in Douglas's writings had been briefly attempted but dropped after it was found to be completely unwieldly, and the dividend of free Billybucks had been drastically cut. Nevertheless, the idea of a state currency remained popular and federal interference unpopular, and Langer was once again returned to office after another brief interlude under his protege Quentin Burdick. He would remain in power until his death.

From the 1940s until 1959, Langer ran North Dakota as a virtual one-party state (although there were, of course, no parties in the legislature). He was a prominent voice for isolationism, and LSC members of Congress opposed the Second World War, the UN Charter, and the Korean War, advocating for peaceful trade with the Soviet Union and a reduction in defense spending. Langer backed Bronson Cutting's third-party Presidential bid in 1940 but declined the offer of the vice-presidential spot, recommending Representative William Lemke instead. He also refused to join Cutting's national Social Credit Party, likely contributing to its doom.

North Dakota's economy grew slower than those of its neighboring agricultural states throughout the 1950s, with access to credit limited by the monopoly the BND enjoyed outside Fargo and Grand Forks. However, the Dividend and the state currency encouraged local spending, keeping family businesses afloat and preventing the incursion of chains that began to crop up elsewhere during the decade. Langer died in office in 1959 and was given a lavish public funeral that drew unfavorable comparisons to Communist personality cults; he was succeeded by Senator Quentin Burdick. During the 1960s, some members of the burgeoning American counterculture began to take note of North Dakota's unique economic system - in particular the Billybucks and the NPL's still-extant ban on corporate farming - and the state soon became a popular destination for back-to-the-land hippies. (The most well-known of these transplants being former US Representative Bernard Sanders, who has run a dairy farm outside Minot since the early seventies and was well known as the last unreconstructed Creditist in Congress.) In the "Zip to Zap" of 1969, young people from around the country descended upon a tiny farm town for one of the first great rock music festivals. The Theosophical mysticism which Alfred Orage had spread during his time as a gubernatorial adviser in Bismarck and which had entered folk religion was a source of fascination for many of the new arrivals.

Ironically, just as the wider world was taking note of North Dakota, the state was beginning to change. The discovery of the Bakken Formation led to a fossil fuel boom, and oil workers began to flood into the western half of the state - the former heartland of the Social Credit movement. Meanwhile, the Seventies' sociocultural backlash led many of the League's traditional voters towards conservatism. Unreconstructed Republicans took power for the first time and began to deregulate the financial sector. Recognizing that the autocratic Langer model was dead, Governor Burdick, who had always been a more conventional left-liberal, led a somewhat forcible merger between the League and the state's tiny Democratic Party. The new Democratic League for Social Credit would form a new political coalition consisting of liberal farmers, hippies, and the state's relatively large Native American population - who had never been very impressed by Langer but to whose cause Burdick had championed in Congress.

Today, many features of the Social Credit era - the ubiquitous BND branches, the Billybucks - still exist, but their future is in doubt as the state becomes increasingly polarized between a conservative, gas-fueled Republican Party and a Creditist-in-name-only alliance of Indians and organic farmers.

P H R E S H
 
P H R E S H

There really aren't many ways to introduce SoCred in an American setting, but the Bank of North Dakota came to mind immediately.

Langer wasn't actually involved with Social Credit IRL, although the guy I have as the national face of the movement, Bronson M. Cutting, was. Cutting was also a friend of Ezra Pound's and died in a plane crash in 1935 while he was still pretty young, so lots of AH potential there, and the vignette challenge is still open...
 
Well, here's some more.

Social Credit Party of America presidential tickets

1940: Bronson M. Cutting / William Lemke (6.3% PV, 4 EV)
1944: did not contest
1948: Bronson M. Cutting / Robert A. Heinlein (0.8% PV, 0 EV)
1952: Ezra Pound / Eustace Mullins (0.6% PV, 0 EV)

Outside North Dakota, Social Credit is a dirty word to many Americans. The Peltier administration has been in talks with DLSC leaders to eliminate the term from the party’s name out of a belief that it’s begun to harm their reputation in the rest of the country. Even Ralph Ampleman’s seminal free-verse manifesto “Prairie Fire—” only refers to the ideology as the “Dakota system.”

The reputation isn’t entirely unwarranted. The national Social Credit Party was founded in 1936 by Bronson M. Cutting, then sitting as a Republican Senator for New Mexico. Cutting was an unusual figure – unlike the populist farmers who led the creditist movement in other countries, he was an aristocratic progressive, a Northeastern WASP who had originally moved West as a tubercular convalescent shortly after graduating from Harvard. He was a freethinking type and exchanged letters with an array of fringe figures, including the brilliant and volatile poet Ezra Pound and the Theosophical creditist Alfred Orage. After crossing the aisle to support Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Cutting became passionately interested in the monetary elements of the New Deal and began to press for the end of fractional reserve banking. In 1934, he lectured the Senate on Social Credit and urged his colleagues to incorporate Orage and Douglas’s ideas into the Banking Reform Act. He was unsuccessful.

Undeterred, Cutting left the Republicans the next year to start his own party for banking and monetary reform. It was a bit of a one-man band. Orage, a hard partier and heavy drinker, had died in 1934 and Langer, embroiled in his own political and legal struggles and smelling failure on Cutting already, declined to affiliate his League with the national party. Believing the time was not yet ripe, Cutting decided against running for President in 1936 and instead lent his support to a motley crew of Congressional candidates – many of whom had dubious ties to Father Charles Coughlin or other right-wing demagogues. None were elected, and Cutting’s only company in the next Congress came from the formally independent League candidates in North Dakota.

Over the next four years, Cutting’s relationship with Ezra Pound became closer, and the Senator began to spend almost as much time attacking Roosevelt’s foreign policy as he did stumping for monetary reform. While he never broke out the louder dogwhistles of “warmongering international financiers,” he didn’t disavow the endorsements of anti-Semites either and didn’t seem bothered by the increasingly odious asides Pound had begun to slip into their correspondence. When he finally ran for President in 1940, it was as a firm isolationist – a sentiment which set him notably apart from Roosevelt and Willkie and won him a significant percentage of the vote in the Upper Midwest and New England. He won North Dakota outright and came a close second in South Dakota and Minnesota (where Senator Ernest Lundeen would defect briefly to Social Credit before losing re-election in 1942).

After Pearl Harbor, Cutting bowed to necessity and declared himself in favor of war with Japan and Germany. Nevertheless, he remained a trenchant critic of wartime government policy, opposing censorship and Japanese-American internment and directing Lundeen to vote against several appropriations bills, and was reluctant to break off his relationship with Ezra Pound even after Pound became a propaganda broadcaster for the Mussolini regime. In December 1942, Cutting, Lundeen, and several Social Credit party officers were charged under the Smith Act with advocating the overthrow of the United States government; they were acquitted in a rare legal blow to the Roosevelt administration, but the party suspended campaigning in 1944 out of fear of further reprisals.

The trial and subsequent association of Social Credit with treason tainted the party’s brand permanently. Cutting had abandoned his seat to run for President in 1940, and after Lundeen’s loss they were shut out of Congress permanently. The 1948 campaign was an embarrassment, most memorable for Vice Presidential candidate Bob Heinlein – a California State Assemblyman who was by then the party’s highest-ranking officeholder – describing his practices of nudism and free love in a magazine interview. Cutting retired from politics after the dismal result, and the party collapsed.

The tiny national membership, however, had always contained an outsize share of fascists and anti-Semitic cranks, and it was this element who proceeded to pick up the pieces after anyone with sense had left. These dregs hit upon the idea of nominating Ezra Pound for President as a publicity stunt. The poet had been involuntarily committed to a federal psychiatric hospital after being arrested by American troops in Italy. He was uninterested in freedom and focused on his writing, and a possibly apocryphal story describes him being unaware he was a Presidential candidate until told by a visitor after the election. The ensuing media attention, far out of proportion to the ticket’s importance, generated such public disgust that it doomed Pound to life behind bars, even after his renunciation of the "stupid, suburban prejudice" of anti-Semitism.

The lavish Pound for President campaign ultimately bankrupted the party; the remnants of Social Credit dissolved into the far right underground shortly thereafter.
 
Last edited:
ATLF: The West Wing

2003-2007: Josiah Bartlet / Robert Russell (Democratic)
2007: Matt Santos / Vacant (Democratic)

2006: Arnold Vinick / Ray Sullivan (Republican)
2007-2011: Matt Santos / Eric Baker (Democratic)
2011-2019: Will McAvoy / James Ritchie (Republican)

2010: Matt Santos / Eric Baker (Democratic)
2014: Eric Baker / Nancy McNally (Democratic)

2019-: Jenna Jacobs / Allan Wolfe (Republican)
2018: Sam Seaborn / Marcus Croft (Democratic), Franklin Hollis / Matt Skinner (Independent)

All things considered, Santos did rather okay. A lot of back-and fourth between Congress eventually produced a watered-down educational reform package which is genuinely considered to be a success; but on healthcare he found himself on the rocks, campaigning for milquetoast reforms that even he thought were miserable compromises that managed to piss off everyone. The perception that the man he'd beaten was effectively running his foreign policy didn't endear him to his party base either. A Democratic rout in the 2008 midterms was inevitable, and Santos' inexperience showed embarrassingly as the world plummeted into recession and his administration appeared paralysed, especially with the departure of his Chief of Staff over the budget that was basically for him by the Republican leadership.

Governor Will McAvoy of Nebraska wasn't quite a Vinick Republican, but there were enough Vinick types on his campaign to make it clear where he stood, and his re-appointment of the Secretary of State removed most doubts. Running on jobs and straight-talk, his aggressive, interrogatory approach to debates and campaigning won him the primaries and two general elections. With massive majorities in Congress, McAvoy pursued aggressive de-regulation and tax cuts, cutting what was left of the welfare state to the bone (while his articulate explanations of such policies earned him praise from the beltway media as an ideas man). Contemptuous to the right almost as much of the left, McAvoy threw only the odd bone to values voters, like a watered-down "religious freedom" bill in the aftermath of the Supreme Court legalising gay marriage. But his abrasive, dismissive approach to anyone and everyone who disagreed with him or got in his way grated across the aisle, and twenty-odd years of articulate put-downs from both sides of the aisle, as the economy stagnated and poverty skyrocketed, was bound to create a reaction.

Over the 2010s, Congresswoman Dr. Jenna Jacobs had re-emerged as a darling of the Republican right, especially after a video of the late President Bartlet "mansplaining" the Bible to her went viral among right-wing circles. After twelve years of waiting their turn with moderates who paid only lip service to values, the party faithful revolted in a big way.

Meanwhile, it was Senator Seaborn's time to claim his destiny. Trouble is, many in the Democratic rank-and file weren't keen to go along. Too familiar, too keen to hug the centre, too impatient to take the nomination. His close relationship with the late President Bartlet (and his effective endorsement of Sam shortly before his death) should've been an asset in a party that practically deified him, but it only invited negative comparisons and more perceptions that Seaborn was running for the wrong reasons. A stubborn challenge from left-wing firebrand Helen Stackhouse (granddaughter of former Senator Howard Stackhouse) blindsided the Seaborn campaign and exposed to it's tone-deafness to the clamouring voices of the left and social-justice campaigns. But reportedly the man himself was most taken aback by the fellow Bartlet alumni who remained neutral throughout the primaries, or even backed the challenger. The ones who who were behind Seaborn grated as well; Josh Lyman's tenure as DNC Chair was blamed for the Democrats languishing at a state level and Vice President Baker's disastrous campaign in 2014, fulfilling perceptions of a "Bartlet clique" unwilling to help those outside their membership.

Seaborn eventually got the nomination, but the race remained far too close for comfort. He came across as aloof and elitist, prone to the sort of speechifying that Bartlet and McAvoy had mastered but that he had become rusty at. The perception of the Seaborn campaign was one of complacency and Chaos, the Jacobs campaign painting it as one stuffed with "yesterday's men", typefied with the on-off participation of Lyman in the campaign. But Seaborn maintained a narrow and steady lead against a far-right extremist, and he went into election night picking out his cabinet. And then Jacobs won Iowa. Then Florida. Then Pennsylvania. And then Seaborn was finished, and the Democrats reassembled a circular firing squad.

As of 2019, three Bartlet alumni still appear to have some of their best days ahead of them. Former Chief of Staff C.J. Cregg, after resigning from the Hollis foundation in protest of its founder's increasingly quixotic political aspirations, went back to EMILY'S LIST and is credited with the Democrats maintaining narrow majorities in both Houses of Congress, where Will Bailey is on track to become House Majority Leader. And Congressman Charlie Young, having just won re-election, is reportedly sitting down with Governor Stackhouse to discuss "the future", to the betrayed fury of the Senator from California.
 
Last edited:
Based on a few ideas I've had for way too long, just thought "fuck it", embrace the perception of my personality and divergent interests my b r a n d. I have a love-hate relationship to the The West Wing , and this basically comes down to two ideas: how utterly unthinkable a female president is in the vacuum of the show, but mainly candidate Seaborn showing himself to be David Miliband with better hair. Probably a bit harsh on Sam, (although a lot accounts of Mili-D when he worked at Number 10 described him as likeable, passionate, super-smart, basically an Aaron Sorkin character) but there's a fine line between destiny and entitlement and I do wonder how being told that you're going to be President one day by basically everyone would get internalised.

And yeah, and I hated The Newsroom.
 
Which Bartlett alumni backed Stackhouse? It doesn't seem clear whether Charlie did then or not - theoretically Toby's the one I find easiest to see doing that, but it seems like he'd be seen as clearly destructive to anyone he backed.
 
Which Bartlett alumni backed Stackhouse? It doesn't seem clear whether Charlie did then or not - theoretically Toby's the one I find easiest to see doing that, but it seems like he'd be seen as clearly destructive to anyone he backed.
It’s Toby- but C.J. and Charlie caused more grief for Sam because of how they both hedged their bets until it became impossible to Stackhouse to win. Should’ve been more clear tbh.
 
Back
Top