• 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

Least favorite alt-history story?

I don't remember if I've discussed Lee of the Union here before but it's a similar start, Lee sides with the Union, wins the war in three months and then gets elected President in 1864 after Lincoln emancipated the slaves right after the rebellion is crushed. The difference being that Conservatism is crushed for all time. The Democrats are liberal because besides the Southerners they always were, Grover Cleveland passes Social Reforms, his wife is the first Female President, TR defeats the Kaiser with Carrier Airstikes, neither the Conservatives or the Socialists are ever an issue and President Eleanor Roosevelt announces that secret US Jet fighters have destroyed a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And then the Author himself became a very important Campaign Manager for Barry Obama.

Does this exist, like in full?
 
On Lee, W.E.B. DuBois said it best:

No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.
 
The fans kept it going, and once the critics got tired and stopped appearing in the thread, The Congressman returned.

Said fans were also working from his notes, so yes, you get The Congressman's.... vision. Just with the fans' own... stuff added in.

...So, yes, it's arguably been getting steadily worse.
 
I wouldn't say worse (since I tend to be selective on what AH fiction read so I only have a small pool of reference) but AH fiction I've had the biggest change of opinion on towards the negative would be Rumsfeldia. I haven't read the original FLG in a while but I remember liking it as an experiment in "the 70s but even worse" but lost interest the series went into the 80s and its scope got away from the POD.

Eventually it just kind of seemed to devolve into a parody of the original FLG.
 
Yeah, I mean when it got to the point that the USA annexed half of Canada with no warning or foreshadowing- an update so preposterous it immediately had to be retconned by the author- I really did feel the timeline had lost any sense of purpose.
 
Yeah, I mean when it got to the point that the USA annexed half of Canada with no warning or foreshadowing- an update so preposterous it immediately had to be retconned by the author- I really did feel the timeline had lost any sense of purpose.
Yeah, that's where I jumped off. I think it was one of the only things where there was serious pushback from the audience on it.
 
Did Dick Cheney's army of weaponized sentient gorillas ever see action?

Unfortunately not.

Though I'll give Drew the credit of pointing out-in-universe-how ludicrous they were by making their production one of Rumsfeld's impeachment clauses as a way for anti-Rumsfeld congressmen to make a "point and laugh" moment at the newly disgraced Rumsfeld.
 
Gumbo, particularly the first part, was pretty interesting and had inventive aspects. Honestly it's been years but I recall it being decently grounded. I'd go back and read.

Rumsfeldia, OTOH was just one huge, childishly blunt ideological piss-fest with absolutely no attempt at plausibility grounding which felt like it had been written by someone who had never got over Dean not winning Iowa.

It's a classic example of someone taking a timeline too far and too long.
 
Ah, yes, New Deal Coalition Retained... My views there remain the same as before:

While The Congressman's tendency to take old dead Nazis and rehabilitate them posthumously by having them have revelations which seem to amount to "Actually, no, it's not the Jews that are the problem, it's the Communists! Oh, but we should keep all the Nazi aesthetics, of course!" certainly does make me a bit, shall we say, uncomfortable, (well, and Mandela supporting Apartheid Lite, and a whole bunch of other things, of course), it really is the small things in that timeline that makes me into Not A Fan.

For example, consider Japan. So he decides to make Mishima Yukio into the Prime Minister. I wouldn't really call it plausible, certainly the way in which Mishima's party completely replaces the LDP as the big tent centre-right party in a single election in that timeline is ridiculous when you consider how political parties operated and worked in 1960s Japan, but I mean still, the idea of Mishima Yukio as Prime Minister of Japan, it is still an interesting idea, and could make for a very intriguing character study, and study of the Japanese right-wing mindset and psyche with all its internal contradictions and inconsistencies. There's a good story hiding behind that idea waiting to be written.

Problem is that The Congressman doesn't seem to be interested in writing it. It's not that he misunderstands Mishima, it's that he doesn't really seem that interested in trying to understand him, let alone exploring him. His brand of conservatism in the story basically consists of "Thatcherism with Japanese Characteristics". There are no hints of an exploration of the Japanese far right's schizophrenic attitude towards the West in general and the United States in particular. The fact that Mishima Yukio had called for Hirohito to abdicate for losing World War II is not brought up. While it is mentioned that there are rumours of Mishima's homosexuality, readers are assured that his wife and some Japanese military commander involved with the attack on Pearl Harbor vouched for him being as straight as a ruler, and it never was hindrance to his political career from then on. This despite the fact that there exists more than an abundance of evidence that not just did Mishima like to frequent Tokyo's gay bars, he even took young male lovers. We have them going on record detailing the sexual role playing games involving samurais he liked to play with them.

And that's the thing with New Deal Coalition Retained. Every once in a while, you do actually come across ideas that are genuinely good and worth exploring (the very opening premise of it being the Republicans who push through Civil Rights is actually a truly excellent idea), but they are seldom given much attention, and often left entirely unexplored.

queen_nixon.png
 
I've read that, and it ends with him offering to give Spain to the Islamists. It may have been al-Qa'ida.

Gore: I understand how you feel Joe. But this is not time for jingoism. It's a time for healing. Our top priority right now is to understand why these people are so angry at us - and maybe find some way to assuage that anger. We're going to go to work right away on a plan to create a Palestinian state - maybe also to return East Timor to Indonesia and Spain back to Syria. We may have forgotten that Spain used to be ruled from Damascus - but they haven't. And they're still humiliated by the loss.
 
Can we actually talk about how the central point of making Rumsfeld a pantomime caricature of the New Right makes absolutely no sense and basically is NDCR-level stuff?

I mean he was a Nixonian figure. He was shut out under Reagan. Like Bush and Dole he's a pre-New Right figure. And under early Nixon he was actually regarded as pretty liberal.

I don't think it's accidental that him and Cheney's later notoriety was based on a period of weakly ideological state power exercise/abuse. And that their careers stretched over forty years. They're both adaptive functionaries who I don't think ever had anything close to grand designs other than party, power, and country.

If I was doing something like Rumfeldia I'd take Nixon/Iraq War-style power dysfunctionalism to its plausible logical extreme rather than try to shoe-horn in a tale of PRIVATISE AIR.
 
Can we actually talk about how the central point of making Rumsfeld a pantomime caricature of the New Right makes absolutely no sense and basically is NDCR-level stuff?

I mean he was a Nixonian figure. He was shut out under Reagan. Like Bush and Dole he's a pre-New Right figure. And under early Nixon he was actually regarded as pretty liberal.

I don't think it's accidental that him and Cheney's later notoriety was based on a period of weakly ideological state power exercise/abuse. And that their careers stretched over forty years. They're both adaptive functionaries who I don't think ever had anything close to grand designs other than party, power, and country.

If I was doing something like Rumfeldia I'd take Nixon/Iraq War-style power dysfunctionalism to its plausible logical extreme rather than try to shoe-horn in a tale of PRIVATISE AIR.

No, I agree entirely.

Personally, I had similar feelings, and kept thinking "It feels a bit like Drew assumes that all people on the right have basically the same homogenous ideology". I think that it is a bit ideological provincialism, whereby you see ideologies close to your particular position as being clear and distinct, but the further away you go from it, the more "well, that's basically the same thing". Kind of like how some Labourites might be able to expound endlessly on the specific points of contention between the Bevanites, the Gaitskellites, Tony Blair's New Labour, Gordon Brown's New Labour, Ed Miliband's particular position, Corbynistas, etc., but basically take the view that the Tories are all just basically Thatcherite clones.

The Tea Party's ideological outlook on foreign policy, for instance, draws far more on the heritage of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard than it does on the early-2000s neo-cons, and so it strikes me as kind of weird that in Rumfeldia, which was explicitly created with the intention of "what it would be like if the Tea Partiers got what they wanted", they had it being led by figures associated prominently with the very neo-cons that the Tea Party was a reaction against.

It is made all the more frustrating by that Gumbo actually has fairly well-rounded portrayals of characters that in most other ATLs would have been straight-up two-dimensional villains, like Richard Nixon and George Wallace.
 
No, I agree entirely.

Personally, I had similar feelings, and kept thinking "It feels a bit like Drew assumes that all people on the right have basically the same homogenous ideology". I think that it is a bit ideological provincialism, whereby you see ideologies close to your particular position as being clear and distinct, but the further away you go from it, the more "well, that's basically the same thing". Kind of like how some Labourites might be able to expound endlessly on the specific points of contention between the Bevanites, the Gaitskellites, Tony Blair's New Labour, Gordon Brown's New Labour, Ed Miliband's particular position, Corbynistas, etc., but basically take the view that the Tories are all just basically Thatcherite clones.

The Tea Party's ideological outlook on foreign policy, for instance, draws far more on the heritage of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard than it does on the early-2000s neo-cons, and so it strikes me as kind of weird that in Rumfeldia, which was explicitly created with the intention of "what it would be like if the Tea Partiers got what they wanted", they had it being led by figures associated prominently with the very neo-cons that the Tea Party was a reaction against.

It is made all the more frustrating by that Gumbo actually has fairly well-rounded portrayals of characters that in most other ATLs would have been straight-up two-dimensional villains, like Richard Nixon and George Wallace.

Yeah, this is definitely a thing, but IIRC Drew is middle-aged so you wouldn't expect someone of his age to be at teen-levels of opposition analysis. As you say it's even more mysterious given Gumbo. It feels like some weird combo of political fan service and just thinking 'ah fuck it, hate those guys'. As I say - went on too long.

You're right to touch on the neo-con point because I think that's highly relevant here. Rumsfeld and Cheney weren't true neo-cons, but they fitted in really well with that crowd in a post-ideological, domestic disinterest way. I've literally just remembered that Dick Cheney has supported same-sex marriage since the Bush period and so before most elected Democrats. They're really the worst people to base some ideological screed like Rumsfeldia around.

Rumsfeldia is kind of like writing a British Thatcherite dystopia based around Jim Prior simply because he had a combustible personality.
 
Back
Top