In fact all post-1945 US politics TLs are boring. It's always the same stuff over and over. Primary happens, guy gets nominated, defeats incumbent, oops economy is bad, loses re-election, good guy wins two terms, his successor not as good, gets into war against communists/jihadists/anti-US dictator that becomes insurgency, new guy becomes president and he is a moderate within his party, Cold War, some cranks run but they don't get much support, party splits that end up getting fixed after one or two election cycles etc. The dystopias are all the same as well - just have McCarthyist paranoia turn America into a Pinochet-esque dictatorship. There is very little vision in these TLs
I get this feeling with a lot of internet and self-published AH. I can't help but think AH is now in a similar position that science fiction was by the late 1950s. This was the time when the John W. Campbell-promoted consensus of sparse prose, flat characters, and devotion to hard science at the expense of storytelling was beginning to wear itself out. The reaction to this was the
New Wave science fiction of the 1960s-70s, which focused the human element more (notably, it brought in a lot of sixties counterculture ideas, most well-known of these being its take on sexuality, into science fiction). It made a lot of old-guard SF writers mad but it laid the ground for what came after it, most obviously cyberpunk, but its reverberations are felt today.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that AH needs its own 'New Wave.' It needs to center the human element more and care just a tad less about historical plausibility. This genre is more than just lists of dates and wikibox TLs - a lot can be done with it if you're willing to really probe what the genre can do. I've tried to do this in my own writing -
Utterly Without Redeeming Social Value (in my signature) was my attempt at a 'New Wave AH' story. In the professionally published world, P. Djeli Clark seems to be moving the genre beyond its traditional limits.
I also wonder if some of this is because so much online AH is written by history nerds who experience humanity more through media (and a relatively narrow selection thereof) than through living life (I'm afraid this sounds mean of me but I can't find a better way of phrasing it). Compare this with what Hayao Miyazaki said about the anime industry:
If you don't spend time watching real people, you can't do this, because you've never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people… It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of
otaku!
I can certainly vouch that my writing is better now that I've lived more, especially with all the interaction I got when I became a dancer. I was one of those 'AH otaku' before that, and my writing is better now than it was five to eight years ago.
Long story short, I think that AH needs new, diverse influences in it or it'll fade into irrelevance. Without this, the work produced can feel very sterile.