Steve Jackson Games Forums - New Reality Seeds

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Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Micah Davis (Post 2345563)

I'm genuinely curious as to why we would expect that the U.S. government would be more reactionary. When were there progressive majorities in the Senate but not in the House? When did the Senate save us from a war or the reduction of minority rights? Where did that happen?

Hamlin-3 has already demonstrated it has an extreme government intent on concentrating power in as small an area as possible with it's insane 16th amendment. I would only expect it to continue to treat everything outside its densest population centers as vassals or helots. The USA really only worked because power and wealth were well distributed and this is the exact opposite. I'd expect at least 1 more civil war before the end of the century, followed by general grinding oppression. This USA would probably lose Texas and California to Mexico once they realized the nation was self destructing.

Re: New Reality Seeds

New York City has never been the majority of the majority of the population of New York, and, until the 1920s, the rural population of the USA had always outnumber the urban population, so if NYC cannot completely control NY politics, I doubt that any other major city would have much luck. In addition, suburbs are usually fiercely independent of the central cities, so they would act as an important counterweight, especially as previously established populations would move out of the cities as new immigrants came into the cities if they were allowed to do so. You would end up with a much more diverse USA though, as Asian immigration would have likely not been restricted during the first half of the 20th century, and the Southern states would have likely become a Mecca for European immigration after WW I, especially since the USA may have stayed neutral without Wilson.

Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Micah Davis (Post 2345563)

There is a broad assumption among some that "more progressives." means a better more stable US. This may not be the case simply because one parties desired changes steps on someone else's rights and or traditions.

Also concentrating power tends to create internal stresses in any nation and turning the Senate onto the House 2.0 woudl essentially tell all smaller states "you don't matter." and when there is the inevitable push back, the larger states will react probably with violence.

This would also apply to getting rid of the electoral college as well.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine your preferred ideology being locked out of power. This tends to rapidly erode the legitimacy of the State

The reason making the Senate an elected vs appointed body did not as it did not really change the balance of power all that much or at least to a dangerous degree,

Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyneras (Post 2345572)

I mean, the fact that you can't offer evidence that the Senate has ever been good in our timeline somewhat undermines your point. London was the head of the Westminster system, sometimes called the "dictatorship of democracy", and even though it has members with histories as nation states (e.g. Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales), it hasn't actually devolved since the rise of the Irish Republic, which coincided with full manhood suffrage and had been coming for half a decade. It's also not true that wealth and development were evenly spread out across the country. The South was poor during Jim Crow, it was far more rural, it was broke. Today, the distance between Mississippi and Maryland in median income is thirty-five thousand dollars - nearly 4/5th the median income in Mississippi.

If Hamlin-3 legislators were trying to cut out the South, they would've been to make states in accord with the military districts - Leaving the South with less Senators than New England. Not making it so that everybody got co-equal representation based on the population of their states.

Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Micah Davis (Post 2344442)

Fremont-1 is named for John C. Fremont, who led the Radical Democracy Party - In Homeline’s history, a forgettable spoiler run against Lincoln but a prominent player in Union politics in the post war years of Fremont. Fremont diverged with a series of inconvenient military losses leading to Lincoln’s defeat in the election of 1864 by General McClellan. McClellan, in turn, suffered an assassin’s bullet and George Pendleton, an opponent of the war, became president and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The Confederacy escaped Union rule in 1866, less nearly half of its able-bodied white men under forty, a weary, barely stitched together wreck. The North spent its unvented fury on every plausible internal target for its loss - The presidency, the spoils system, and even its venerable constitution. In 1880, a war between a reformed, mobilized USA and the perpetually poor, agrarian backwater of the CSA ended with massive slave revolts breaking out across the CSA and the USA burned Richmond to the ground. The USA re-wrote the CSA’s constitution in line with its own and forbade slave holders from ever voting again. White emigration to the USA and Canada rendered the soon-to-be-rechristened Free Republic of Dixie majority black, while land reform and an intelligent industrial policy set the agrarian South on the path to industrialization decades earlier than Homeline.

Fremont is in TL8 in 1994 and has one of the largest branches of White Star on any timeline, which has been embedded for nearly two decades selling clean energy systems and buying up cultural products from the FRD. Much of the patrol's work lies in thwarting Homeline Black nationalists from sharing the Secret with the FRD (many of America’s most famous Black leaders have politically active “twins” in the FRD) and Argentinian nationalists (Argentina avoided the Argentine Riddle in Fremont). Some patrolmen question the wisdom of this - The fiercely egalitarian and democratic FRD and USA lead a world alliance of democratic nations as powerful as any on Homeline.

the European Great Powers might well intervene and depending on when the happened the Union might face face a long term Indian war as well.

A later attempt at Reconquista might well end up in a long term insurgency as Southerners are very stubborn culturally and weak or not woudl prepare for another war with everything they had,

Even in this world there was talk of insurgencies after the civil war and it would require little in the way of resources to wage guerilla warfare on Yankee elite and each time an ordinary expendable Wilkes Boothe took out someone of importance, the Union would grow weaker and poorer.

The whole deal could end up just falling apart and both sides being in ruins.

That would make for an interesting world as the US would be another backwater in the Americas ethnically European but politically Latin American . Along comes WW1, WW2 and the whole mess and you have a very different world,

Re: New Reality Seeds

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Originally Posted by SimonAce (Post 2345578)

The South did conduct a successful insurgence campaign in our actual world. They drove out military occupation through attrition and “redeemed” the South from the “Black Republicans” in contravention to popular rule. Then in the 1890s, they persuaded the North to leave their oppressive racial policies intact through the Senate and the Supreme Court and enacted Jim Crow.

Generally speaking, most secession scenarios realistically end with the South as the new Mexico, “so far from God and so close to the United States.” The Union was still a rich, industrializing country and the South wasn’t. It’s either a Herrenvolk democracy propped up by European powers or a single-party state of freedmen (Picture something like Ba’athism in Iraq and Syria, where a minority with the money and guns rules) supported by a bloodier, more imperial United States.

But I thought it would be fun to have a Black republic in North America for players to visit, so I bent history down the proper course to achieve it. If “North America as Latin America” is more interesting to you than go for it.

Re: New Reality Seeds

Try this one...

In our world Hitler wasted vast resoures on battleships like the Bismarck or the Scharnhorst. Hitler liked the show and display of launching a battleship. But Hitler had only a few battleships. Both Britain and the USA had navies more than three times as large. Germany's battleships achieved little or nothing, but their U-boats were a terror.

The Nazi U-boats were a serious threat and danger. Also, Germany simply had more U-boats and experience with them. Had Hitler realized that Germany could never keep up with Britain in surface ships but he had an advantage beneath the waves it wouldn't have won him the war, but the horror imflicted on the allies could have been vastly greater.

On this Q5 world Hitler decided that putting all of the Kriegsmarine's resources into submarines. The Battle of the Atlantic is beginning, with Germany having many more U-boats and better resources to support them.

Homeline is working on getting the Liberty ships built earlier. Still, in this world sheer numbers might not be enough. Moreover, the Nazis seem to be getting ahead in jets and rocketry and Hitler has publically spoken of Hermann Oberth's proposed space mirror weapon. Homeline has noticed Cabal activity in Europe. Our they having one of their wars with Midwinter Aton? And will this feud lead to a hell world?

Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyneras (Post 2345556)

The change in nature to the Senate in Hamlin-3 means there is no functional difference between the House and Senate...

Another bad problem is the the senate would have many hundreds of additional members, and most would eventually have to be paid pensions. And these pensions are huge, compared to the private sector.

Re: New Reality Seeds

A minor expense. At worst, an additional $1 billion per year in total, which is not even a rounding error in a multi-trillion dollar federal budget.

Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:

Originally Posted by DangerousThing (Post 2346352)

Another bad problem is the the senate would have many hundreds of additional members, and most would eventually have to be paid pensions. And these pensions are huge, compared to the private sector.

Ther same as any other federal employee. Yes they can get 80% retirement, if they are in office 67 years. They get paid a bit better then a 1 star general and there are more generals.