Pop historical or not, I don't know where you got that graph but it seems badly misinformed. While it's true that the amassing of considerable reserves in order to develop secondary axis into main ones should the opportunity develop was a part of Deep Operations, the idea that attacks were conducted in distributed manner and not concentrated against weak-points - or even important strongpoints, should it prove necessary - is not. Specific main and secondary axis would be selected and the former would receive major concentrations while the latter were economized. Examples are innumerable: for the Korsun-Cherkassy Operation, 3rd Ukrainian formed a shock group of 12 divisions from 4th Guards Army and 57th Army to act as the assault echelon against a mere 12 kilometer sector of front. This required stripping out the rest of the front so that 27th Army had three rifle divisions and 2 fortified regions to cover it's 90 kilometers (despite being required to make a pair of pinning attacks) and the 52nd Army was left with just 3 divisions to cover it's 60 kilometer sector of front.
For Operation Bagration, 2nd Belorussian's 33rd and 50th Armies (3 rifle divisions, a fortified region, and 8 rifle divisions respectively) were given to hold about 4/5th of its 170 kilometer front, while the entire 49th Army (10 rifle divisions, a tank brigade, 1 tank regiment, and 7 assault gun regiments) was focused in the sector closest to Mogilev. 1st Belorussian Front actually formed two shock groups: 3rd and 48th Army deployed 12 of their 22 available rifle divisions and their only tank corps on a region representing 15% of their combined frontage while 65th and 28th Army put 12 rifle divisions of their 17 rifle divisions plus a guards tank corps (and technically the Pliyev Mechanized-Cavalry Group, but that was to act as an exploitation force) against a piece of frontage merely 14 kilometers wide.
I could go on, detailing the shock groups formed for the northern wing of Bagration or such that were formed up for L'vov-Sandormierz, Jassy-Kishinev, and Vistula-Oder, but I think I've made my point. The Soviets wouldn't fritter away their strength spreading it out evenly over the front, but concentrate it where they could achieve maximum effect. That's how they were able to turn rather modest 2:1 superiorities in men and/or equipment into superiorities of 5:1, 10:1, or even 15:1 on the key areas where battles were decided.
The Unaligned movement in Reds! was still a thing beyond "Literally Just Afghanistan" up until the end of the Indochinese Revolution, where Nixon decided to do some brinkmanship against Denmark over the Kiel Canal so he could get the FBU to pull out of Indochina, which worked in Reds! Canon, but killed the Non-Aligned Movement in the process.
Would anyone be interested in people posting quotes or sets of quotes from this universe that @Spartakrod could canonize at faer leisure and according to what works for faer?
The initial thought was to annex the reclaimed SSRs into the Red May Soviet Union. Still, with the guns falling silent with the Eurasian War's conclusion, the reality was that this presented more than a few bureaucratic hurdles. Not only would there need to be a significant amount of effort to rebuild and reorganise a Russia that had fallen into years of disarray and disunity and a little under a decade of outright warlordism, but simply integrating the new RSFSR and the Central Asian SSRs into their alters wholesale would greatly expand them relative to the SSRs that lacked liberated alters. Furthermore, there was the matter that many of these people had lived in anticommunist regimes for some time, and re-collectivisation would need to take place.
Integrating them as wholly new SSRs was a perhaps more logical solution, but it did mean that the USSR would be responsible for bringing up the new sister republics to standard and also put the USSR on borders with hostile fascist states. Both these options represented the "Greater Union" resolution to the Soviet debate, so named as a nod to the German unification debates of a prior century. The Union is many but also one; it has components, but its unity is unbreakable. It is only natural for the fallen Soviet Union, when reconstituted by the other, to become one great Soviet Union even if it came with all the troublesome factional politics of a different Union and a different people.
Some instead advocated for the "Lesser Union" stratagem, where a second Soviet Union would be created, part of Compact but separate from the Red May USSR. It would be under Comintern-directed rebuilding and integration work until it was ready to stand independently with a native provisional government to help transition back to a modern Socialist Republic. This would avoid giving the Soviet Union a border with the Third Reich, allow full self-determination for the alter Soviet people, deflect claims of Soviet expansionism, and also would allow for more strategic flexibility by not obliging the USSR to treat any incursion into its alter as a direct attack on the whole of the Union. This was also popular among the Neo-Luxemburgists, who were more fond of moving towards a more unitary Union, the hoped-for Eurasian Soviet Socialist Republic.
However, the temptation to create a second Soviet Union came with the issue that the Soviet Public, as well as the people of the liberated territories, desired membership in a greater Soviet Union, and many saw the potential for the integration of another large Republic as opening the possibility for a Union as envisioned by Lenin, of many equal republics acting under a supranational body rather than a National Connfederalisation of the former Russian Empire. Furthermore, with the blood and treasure expended in the Eurasian war, many believed that it was only natural for the greater union to be created so that the sister republics' bonds would be eternally strengthened. Finally, the Zhongguowen indicated they fully intended to absorb west Zhongguo into their patrimony as part of their already formulated "one Zhongguo" policy.
The commission for "The Rebuilding of the New Order Soviet Union" would convene following the end of the Eurasian War with these arguments in mind as the revelry started to fade. Chaired by Veniamin Dymshits, the Commission had sent agents across the liberated territories to gather a new census and take stock of the state of industry in the Union. To their surprise, the territory was crawling with industry built by both Bukharin's administration and when the post-war union had yet to fall into full warlordism during the policy of OFN and CPS support as a counterweight to Germany, as well as further construction during the warlord era with or without foreign support. However, much of the industry had...diverged from each other, rail gauges, in particular, being something of a pain, with an improvised system of first using the Red May USSR to transport supplies before shifting them back into the reconstituted Union until the rail lines were standardised.
Factory complexes would be retooled to match the standards of the Comintern, with major reconstruction work taking place from Kamchatka to Pskov and sprawling networks of road and rail being laid down and paved or built up. Freight and transport trains, including ambitious plans for "Bullet Trains" designed in Nihon and currently being prototyped in the home islands to help connect the populace were starting to be rolled out, with the unemployed throughout the country finding themselves offered board and pay for partaking in the great "Resurrection" Program as part of the new five year plan, establishing homes and connecting once separated power grids while installing new ones. However even with the once vagrant and/or unemployed or the refugees who had fled into Russia to escape the Japanese or German spheres and even with the "apparated" who seemed to glide in from unknown times and places at unpredictable intervals, there was still so much work to be done and not quite enough people to do it all.
To help provide labour for the resurrection program, a work exchange system to establish ties with Dange's CPI governed India; which had triumphed in an upset election over the INC brought about by paranoia over the possibility of British reclamation and Fascist encirclement as well as continuing failures of half measure programs; was congregated. West Indian workers would be invited to Russia for a chance to work with Soviet level wages and receive free education in industrial work and modern farming techniques, the former of which would help start the Indian economy through remittances and the latter of which would be valuable in building up a west Indian light industry. Similar programs were extended to the Congo, Cuba, and Cameroon, while West China would have its own subsidiary program managed primarily by Zhongguo.
It was a massive program of labour paired with resource extraction and exploitation efforts to assess the potential of the other Russia and Central Asia for the development of socialism. Stockpiling resources was important, as the Glide was found to "slot in" expended resources after intervals of roughly a day. Iron Ore extracted from central siberia would be found replaced by the next, which while convenient; still limited resources to the rate of extraction possible from sources, one can only dig so much iron out of a single vein at once after all. But it would mean that these resources could play a great role in providing more of the huge quantities of steel necessitated by the reconstruction. It of course, meant that regions such as Magnitogorsk would have to suffer yet further environmental exploitation as the merciful relief of depletion was not a current issue and environmental concerns were overridden by the perceived need to rebuild and modernise.
Foreign products of collectives and state enterprises would flood the renewed union, raising standards of living in short order and stimulating an economy once mostly focused on brute survival and petty regional power politics. Television stations were starting to go up, with plans for how to make use of the Glide's odd electromagnetic effects to allow for more channels at once with current transmission and receiver systems already being discussed. But a television for every family was no longer some impossible fantasy, nor was the chance to enjoy luxuries such as chocolate grown in Central and South America or Africa and Southern China as well as regular access to coffee and tea.
Rationing was still in effect of course, to ensure that everyone had enough while the reconstruction was ongoing and consuming much of the New Union's resources, but for many a poorer Russian it was three square meals a day as a guarantee, and that was worth more than gold. Of course, the distribution of resources had to be worked out, and there were times when some of the differences that were easy to miss in the overassumption of familiarity caught up to them. Towns where there were none on the Red may Side, fixtures of infrastructure that the Red May USSR simply assumed would be there on the New Order side only to find nothing or something completely different, and radically different crops growing in different parts of the Union.
The west was another story though, with frequent bombing in West Siberia and Eastern European Russia leaving a great deal of physical rebuilding work to be done and endless potholes to fill. Unexploded bomb disposal was going to be a lengthy task, especially on top of the ongoing mine removal program to render the vast expanses of the former Russian anarchy safe to walk. While the larger cities had enough anti-air and priority for the OFN or CPS delivered jets donated to the Free Aviators to defend to be mostly intact, many smaller communities had to undergo lengthy and radical rebuilding programs overseen by Jane Jacobs. Many of these communities had become functional shanty towns built from whatever was at hand, and the work to reconnect and re-electrify them would be no small endeavour.
Nuclear plants would take time to establish, and there was a heavy demand for coal in coking steel, thus dam construction and the establishment of wind turbines would be a major priority as a quick stopgap solution, alongside natural gas-burning power plants and military-grade portable generators that would help keep the lights on before they had the time to finish building up fast breeder reactors to both provide electricity and cheap weapons-grade plutonium. The relatively experimental but potentially promising photovoltaic technology was also looked into, powering some smaller-scale installations in sunnier areas.
The endless sea of craters was particularly vexing, as the moonscape created by constant bombing and german weapons tests was the very definition of rough and difficult terrain. While detritus would be picked out and any munitions disarmed as safely as possible (though not without accidents), many people had to find work literally just filling in holes to smooth out terrain too rough for most forms of work, though a few of the larger ones that remained consistently full of water instead found a new life as fish ponds and watering holes for animal life.
But RK Moskowien, Karelia, and the small portions of Kaukasien, Ukraine, and Ostland that had been pushed into before the ceasefire had bee heavily affected by Germanisation and the long shadow of Generalplan Ost. Outright slaves to be bought and sold or were permanently attached to the land as neoserfs had been deliberately starved of education, and industry deemed "extraneous" by the Nazis was dismantled or sold off. And in the years of German occupation, there was another unfortunate reality; collaborators and colonists. With the extremes of natalism being pushed by Lebensborn programs to produce more settlers, many of these colonists were families with unhinged numbers of children, and more than a few with household slaves.
While many were repatriated to Germany as part of the prisoner exchange, it was impossible to stop the International Red Army from meting out soldier's justice. Slaveholding estates often found their patriarchs lined up against a wall and then opened up into by enraged soldiers whenever the freed slaves didn't lynch them first. And many of the German settlers refused to come quietly, opening fire with their private firearms or the Volkssturm militias formed by Wehrbauers as community defence options, even including casemated STuG type vehicles and other obsolete tools of armoured warfare and the occasional armed helicopter. Others had formed active terrorist movements, sometimes equally opposed to rightist collaborators while some sought to work with them.
This was of course, on top of liberal, reactionary, and sometimes even fascist terrorism elsewhere in the union, particularly in the territories of the Aryan Brotherhood, Harbin Trio, Samaran, Vyatkan, and Saint Georgian cliques. While their armies were decisively crushed and most went with wherever warm meals and clothes could be provided, others had decided to carry on resistance by other means, sabotaging work teams and projects or attempting assassinations where they could. It was not an existential threat, but it was a perplexing nuisance, particularly as clamping down harshly but incompletely tended to make things worse. And there were Russian chauvinists who felt that the International was selling out the Motherland to the foreigners, particularly the Americans and Chinese, and had waged their resistance on those lines.
But such resistance movements in absence of any particular existential need for the majority to go against the status quo with violence did limit their strength to often stochastic acts of terror or attempts at propaganda of the deed. And such tactics were the provision of dying movements lashing out by any means they could grab at to maintain relevance. Suppression tactics used to break the backs of white holdouts would be deployed and would, given time, eventually reduce reactionary terror to a thing of the past.
But that was hardly the only issue in the reclaimed territory, as urban planners found a "Havanan disaster" of car-focused urbanism and "bewildering" suburban sprawls of prefabs and homesteads and a near complete de-collectivisation of agricultural land. While there were Communist Partisans active in the region, though some were only Communist in aesthetics, by necessity most people who had come to live as second class citizens had acclimated to the reality of Nazi domination. Shamefully, many had embraced antisemitism, antiziganism, antifeminism, and the sort of genocidally violent homophobia common in Germany in the hopes of punching down at the few groups even lower than most Slavs on the ladder. Anything to avoid becoming a slave yourself, having your rations cut, or simply being shot for "resisting the law" or even just irritating the infamous RK Police.
Kaminski was perhaps the most proud example of this, attempting to create a Russified Nazism that would offer certain dejudaised and debolshevised Russians who had fully liberated themselves from "asiatic heritage" a place alongside the Herrenvolk as the master race. A brutal, vicious monster of a collaborator who took glee in slaughtering those even less valuable than himself to his masters. His capture and trial was a sensation, not for the fact that its verdict was ever in doubt for even a moment, but for the mountain of horror presented accumulated from more than twenty years of activity. Everyone expected nothing but nightmares from the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Nazi Party cretins, for a Russian to do these sorts of things in the name of people who saw him as little more than a useful savage was nothing short of world shaking.
His defence, rested on the notion that he was only doing this to serve Russia and save his people from complete extermination and that there was nothing to indicate that a miraculous liberation was waiting and that he truly wished to repent in service to his motherland, was ultimately found unimpressive by the jury. While it had worked with the young Gorbachev, who had a proven track record of trying to preserve some forms of leftism in his influence as well as stymie the abuses of the occupation wherever he could; only to be overruled nearly constantly; Kaminski's records showed that he often pushed even farther than Kasche wanted, surpassed only in barbarism by the settler council.
His execution in 1964 would be as global of a media event as his trial, with the final words spoken to him affirming that "Today is the only day I have ever wished I was not an atheist, for a swift exit is more than you deserve and the thought of you in hell brings a smile to the face of any reasonable, decent person." in the words of the Judges convened. While his execution by firing squad would not be a public affair due to the general Soviet disdain for making public spectacles of such things, the dumping of his ashes into the white sea from the deck of the Missile Cruiser Leningrad would be widely televised.
The commission also had to reckon with the fact that even the plurality of the Union that still held to Leninism of some form had diverged from each other, and the Union's very different prewar circumstances had also created a different starting field to begin with. Irkutsk and Buryatiya for example, were in the midst of a civil war before the VOSCOM arrived and forced a ceasefire with full pardons. While Yagoda was quietly encouraged to remove himself from civilian leadership with what could charitably be called a bribe playing on his hedonistic tendencies, Sablin was both very young and also technically a mutineer. The Sovarkom and Politburo would agree on a policy of pardoning him and his mutineers, and inviting them to have a voice in the great reconstruction, albeit alongside Sergei Bessonov's presidium clique.
Of course, they weren't quite expecting Sablin to have such a devoted voting base in the provisional elections, or that he would have criticisms of the alter Union either. Particularly his criticism of the decision to allow for other parties to organise in the USSR, such as the reconstituted Socialist Revolutionaries, particularly popular in the more agrarian new SSRs such as Mongolia or the Baltics or the "we're not calling them parties but..." fission of the VKP(B) between the Soviet International Communist Front which promoted militant internationalism and social radicalism and the Soviet Bolshevik Unionist Front which stood for a more cautious, calculated approach to foreign policy and a more "broad base values" approach to social issues rather than looking primarily to the young radicals for inspiration.
Sablin argued that this "Worker's Front" approach to politics diluted the Soviet Communist experiment by watering down Democratic Centralism with multiple groups that practice different forms of it. While he was in favour of allowing for factions in the Party and vigorousness of debate and discourse, once decisions had been agreed to, unity in action was in his opinion, a necessary component of Council Democracy. A critique that was agreed with by Svetlana Bukharina, and to the surprise of many, even on the other side, Nikolai Bukharin himself, who returned from hiding upon hearing of the liberation. There were defenders of the policy, particularly the likes of Rzykov and other militarymen, but Yusupov was distinctly surprised to find a letter of complaint on his desk in Moscow.
But beyond the far east, the "army communism" espoused in Arkhangelsk, Sverdlosk, Tannu Tuva and the unreformed Stalinism practiced in Tyumen were also somewhat odd. Kaganovich was of course, obsessed with the history of Stalin and Molotov on the Red May side, positively glowing with Stalin's memory as a martyr and the man who had seen revolution spread to the Americas and half of Eurasia. He was rather less enthused with the fact that his alter was unceremoniously "promoted" to General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party (even when the Nazis mostly occupied Ukraine) after he, Beria, and Voroshilov were outmanoeuvred by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov, and Georgy Malenkov with the assent of the "Army Troika" Mikhail Frunze, Georgy Zhukov, and Vladimir Triandafillov.
He of course, brushed this off as the mistakes of an alter clearly distraught with the martyrdom of comrade Stalin, and made his plans for pursuing a career in the Comintern, having a vision to ensure that his friend's legacy would be given the proper memorialisation he felt it deserved. Kaganovich had also offered praise to the UASR for its "assistance in the realisation of comrade Stalin's economic vision", in rather stark contrast to his alter's criticism of "creeping Americanisation" in international communism and the soviet union.
Bukharin, in hiding ever since Dewey's attempted putsch in the USSR to try and take direct control of the state some time following the Edwardian restoration and the fall of Britain, however, had a different tack to his approach; hungrily looking for any and all information on the alter to see what went right, and finally put his lingering sensations of guilt to rest. He would not take a leadership role however, being old and out of practice, but his name would soon ambush Red May's Leon Trotsky in a reply to his editorials published in his paper.
The Red Army would for the time being, be managed by the old generals, at least until the military could be properly reorganised. Its spirits were high with the victory parades in Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, but its equipment needed extensive modernisation and standardisation, and the Union also needed rebuilding and demobilization of many of its excess soldiers and militias to something more suited for peacetime. Furthermore, the red army cliques also had to move towards less stratocratic forms of socialist governance, though most had the sense of duty to transfer authority over to civilian government with little prompting following the victory.
New fortifications and lines of action at the border with the Einheitspakt were created, alongside special military districts that would be the frontier of the revolution against the Hitlerite and the Imperialist. The long tarnished reputation of the Red Soldier was restored, vindicated by victory and success and managing to trade better than even with the Nazi military that had once again, proven the extent of its rot. And now they would be joined by men and women of many other nations, standing at the ready and drilling in joint exercises to get the new Red Army used to operating as part of a great international movement rather than a solitary Soviet army.
If a chance ever arose for a further war of liberation, the Union would not be found wanting.
I'm like, 70 percent positive that Bukharin being in hiding is canon to TNO timeline. It's hinted that he is during a random event pop up, so you know read that as you would.
It's cool seeing TNO Soviet's critiques of Reds Soviet Union. It's far more successful but evidently they see it as having diverged from Lenin's vision of the Soviet Union. The contrast between "unreformed Stalinists," Stalinists, and Bukharinists will be interesting to see it play out.
Also left out of the discussion is that a TNO only Soviet Union will still be bordering Germany. Any attack on it will still be treated as an attack on the Union as a whole, regardless if they're two separate countries.
The America Gambit and the worst electoral cycle in history
The New Order's American body politic had fissioned into three coalitions, the American Liberty Alliance at the right, the Republican-Democratic Coalition at the Centre, and the National Progressive Pact at the left. With the assassination of JFK as well as Nixon's resignation following major scandal and the Christmas bombing of D.C, the once reasonably certain second Nixon term presidency was replaced by the single most chaotic election season in American history as a new coalition hastily tried to rally a new set of secondary and primary elections, the NPP and RDC dealt with a reshuffling of politicians into new machines, and the spectre of war once again haunted America.
John McCormack's seatwarmer presidency had seen the fallout of the Afrikaner crisis in South Africa boil over into an all out invasion of the Entente loyalist government in Capetown as well as escalating tensions between pro and anti-entente governments in West Africa. Furthermore, there were voices even in the NPP such as anticommunist warhawk Michael Harrington who blamed "bolshevism" for the failure of the USSR, nevermind more rightist ones, who argued that the US needed to get involved in Red May's Vietnam against a "Ho Chi Minh who's revealed his red colours". Then there were the growing political issues in Indonesia, rocked with the recent deployment of redoubled Japanese forces to crush the uprisings in Malaysia and the Philippines.
Fearful of being called a lame duck for not getting involved in anything at all, McCormack left his would be successor with the dreadful responsibility of having to deal with more than one war. South Africa by agreeing to partake in the FBU's "Operation Bushwack" and announcing the commitment of American troops to the Red May Southeast Asian countries in a "non-aggressive capacity" to have eyes on the developing situation in Red May's Indochina without getting directly involved while authorising greater commitments to Australia and Liberia to keep tabs on developments in West Africa and Southeast Asia.
More contentious however, had been his disastrous handling of the invasion of Haiti by the Dominican Republic following the descent of the country into civil war between the Pro-OFN North and the Pro-Comintern uprising in the South, with Rafael Trujillo; perhaps D.C's single least favourite person, seeing his chance while Haiti was fighting itself and going for it. McCormack, fearful of being redbaited, did not reach out to Alter-Nixon for coordination on the issue, and concerned of the possibility of German nuclear weapons on Dominica in retaliation for the basing of nuclear weapons in Iceland, hesitated to land troops to confront Trujillo directly.
The Dominicans, faced with a divided foe, exploited the overstretch in communist lines as Alter-Haitian troops helped to support the offensive into the North, only to find themselves met with the bulk of the Dominican army. With the lines collapsing and panic ensuing, discipline gave way into rout, and those who could fled, either over the sea or across timelines, knowing full well what Trujillo intended to do as those who resisted were slaughtered and those who submitted were pushed into becoming a racial caste of cheap labourers. Though hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees were settled in America, the death of Haiti by incompetence and fence-sitting and another victory for Trujillo had prompted Cuba to reorient towards DeLeon D.C out of Castro's personal disgust for the whole affair and drawn widespread criticism from every side of the aisle. Pacifism would not be a winning platform in the face of yet another fascist triumph, yet another mass murderer getting a fresh batch of victims.
The right was for its part unhappy with the decision to cooperate with the Gaitainistas even as they took a more distinctly red turn to curry support from Moscow, Zhongjing*, and DeLeon Debs to the point of accepting RIVA troops to back them against the Fascists of New Grenada and the Conservatives, especially as the FBU expressed a preference for a conservative formed unity government with the Liberal Socialists to keep out the Communists and the Fascists once the tepid ceasefire finally broke and La Violencia resumed in earnest. Militant Internationalism was an ideology explicitly hostile to Liberalism after all, considering it to be only better than Fascism by degrees but ultimately a necessary precursor to the formation of the latter and the UASR had not really lessened its assaults on "our fellow western democracies" in the FBU.
The Centroamerican invasion of Costa Rica in response to the Football incident, the Cameroonian support of Kwame Nkrumah's revolution, as well as Dange's nationalisation of OFN economic assets within West India and programs of anticlericalism was considered proof positive of the "dangers of communist aggression" even as American soldiers prepared to deploy into South Africa to fight the Nazis and into Peru to support the Andean country from invasion by Triumvirate and Sphere backed Paraguay and Santa Cruz from the south following Peru's attempted intervention into Bolivia following the fall of the government to the Santa Cruzian "conquista" with the aid of a returned Peron who promised to save the Argentine establishment from the Argentine Federal Democratic People's Republic in Red May, and Velasco's Ecuador from the North, surreptitiously backed by the unaligned Peru of the otherworld.
In a fit of pressure to not appear weak, McCormack soon found himself committing America to four proxy wars simultaneously; in Peru and South Africa against Fascism and Imperialism, and in West Africa and Indochina against Socialism and Communism while the Communists were themselves committing to proxy wars of their own in The New Order's Colombia, Vietnam, Greece, and West India following the Lahore secession and the Pakistani Jihad. As if to make foreign policy more hopelessly confused, there was a policy of liberal and socialist tacit support for each other for the time being in anti-fascist proxy wars, yet bitter opposition in battles between the Blue and Red. Perhaps McCormack's cabinet had made these decisions out of the certainty of someone who isn't going to be running for re-election anyway, but he certainly left the mother of all messes for the campaign frontrunners to resolve beyond his vague promise that unlike the Deweyite war that ended in disaster, this time he would let the Generals wage the conflicts.
"Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The American Eighth Party system emerged from the ashes of a short-lived fifth and even shorter-lived sixth and the somewhat longer lived seventh system destroyed by the crisis of faith brought about by abject defeat in the second world war and then the worldmerge. Surrendering the American Pacific and signing unequal treaties with a triumphant Japan that had nuked it twice and forced it to feed its economy into the Imperial Japanese system to beget the rise of Tokyo as the centre of the world. Losing so much territory, so many lives, the pride of its navy, and even having to make concessions to the Germans and Italians to boot was a shock to America's pride. The soldiers who fought and died in Russia and Britain, attempted to make a stand in Africa, and perished in countless islands across the Pacific and the fall of Hawaii had died in vain. America had lost more of its citizens than it had in any other war in history, and for the very first time in its history as a country, it was forced to give up territory to a foreign enemy.
The system had failed, abjectly, miserably, utterly. America was alone in a world dominated by the new colossus from Berlin and Tokyo. It was not conquered by the grace of having two oceans in the path, but Sacramento and San Diego had suffered an attack unlike anything seen before in the history of the world as the Japanese atomic bomb reduced two of California's great cities to ash. Dewey's meddling in the war had resulted in the Edwardian Putsch, seen the defeat of the Soviet Union when he made a truly ill advised move to attempt to restore Kerensky out of fear of handing Europe to Bukharin only to plunge the USSR into political collapse.
He had even sent the navy to its doom at Skattegat pass, Gibraltar, and Iwo Jima with the twin "pomeranian", "Latinium", and "honshu" gambits to try and rush war winning landing forces at the enemy's capitals in one go in a move that put the USN at a permanent disadvantage against the IJN and convinced Edward to launch his coup. Three million lost souls for humiliation and disgrace. President Dewey was now reviled as the man who had lost everything and his political career would end in absolute disgrace and would be the very first American president to be assassinated after leaving office, eve if the FBI's official verdict was "suicide" upon their coroner "examining" a corpse shot multiple times in the back of the head after being stabbed several dozen times from behind.
A country that had never been so thoroughly defeated before had no idea of how to handle such a setback, no idea how to process being the defeated party, how to handle the idea of having its wealth leeched by a victorious conqueror that stole what was supposed to be its century from it and left the United States a shell of what it could be. America was mighty indeed to recover from such a blow, it was still one of the four mightiest nations of the world, a superpower, but it was confused and her people angry.
From the left, Progressives dissatisfied with the lack of commitment to radical reform from the Democrats rose up alongside a Communist movement that presented itself as the only way to safeguard America from Japanese Technocracy and German Nazism. From the right, a Nationalist Party that saw the only future for the United States in preparing itself for an All-American sort of war and taking back what was rightfully America's rose as did those who looked to either God or to Fascism itself for alternatives to the failed American experiment.
Four parties would contest the elections of the 1950s to the point of being able to secure states in the presidentials while new parties sat in congress in large numbers. For the first time since the death of the Whig and the first Progressive parties, the monopoly held by the Republicans and Democrats had been shattered,, resulting in such electoral confusion that it was agreed that a seventh party system was needed to bring something that had once been alien to American politics; coalitions. The Republicans and Democrats would form the Republican-Democratic Coalition to represent the establishment liberals and conservatives, while the Nationalists and Progressives would form the National Progressive Pact to bring together the electoral efforts of anti-establishment parties to contest the juggernaut of the RDC; even if it meant unhappily accepting the Communists, Sovereignists, Ecologists, Libertarians, and Dominionists.
The New Order's Richard Nixon would cheat the process to prevent the NPP from winning an election he was guaranteed to triumph in anyway, setting up the stage for the largest ever American political scandal that would blend into the background by the fallout of the Worldmerge and the sudden exposure to a world where fascism was defeated...except in a world where America had embraced Communism. While other explanations were found in quick order for this discrepancy, the decision to extend a hand in friendship to the Vladivostok Compact against the encroaching of the far-right would prove to be a bridge too far for much of the American far-right.
The Years of Terror would see an unprecedented wave of Terrorism that killed hundreds at Nixon's resignation speech and just barely missed the man himself as he decided to leave a bit early to use the bathroom via a truck stuffed to the gills with explosives. JFK was assassinated via nerve gas stolen from US military supplies that killed him before he could be sworn in while he was being briefed on what had happened in D.C, with much of Nixon's cabinet perishing in the very same gas attack. The President Pro Tempore and the Secretary of state would be assassinated by a party of snipers who would shoot multiple others at the site, and even four-year-old JFK Junior only avoided a sniper's bullet by being distracted by a bug.
John McCormack had only barely escaped the second truck bombing that had intended to kill much of the Capitol building before military personnel on duty noticed something off and recommended an evacuation just minutes before the Truck could slam into the side of the Capitol on the same day. All part of a coordinated attack meant to crumble the edifice of American government and beget a race war that would topple the "Jewnited States" once and for all. It was a premature and ultimately self-destructive move that lead to waves of terroristic violence in the American troubles that have consumed the lives of tens of thousands. But rather than a race war, it finally convinced the general American public that something had to be done with the Klan and with Germanophiles.
The terrorism still continues, albeit winding down in what most have come to call the "American time of troubles", but the political scars left and the unprecedented amount of constitutional reform done in response to the massive crisis have made America a changed country. The country would go into the 1964 elections both more united and more divided than ever. How to deal with the changed political situation, how to deal with the new states in the Union, how to deal with a new president, and how to deal with America becoming a three-party country for the first time as the American Liberty Alliance; distancing itself from the likes of the Klan or other extreme, openly fascist sympathising rightists to stand for "All American Constitutionalism" pulled the rightmost flanks of the RDC and the NPP into itself.
America was a country in shock and mourning, already emotionally devastated by the war's disastrous conclusion and the loss of a generation, of a century perceived to be stolen from it and the long stagnation that followed. Now it was being torn apart by political violence that many thought that America had already worked out of its system with the Civil War.
The bodies were piling up and many would argue that the only reason that this period was not called a civil war was because the country actively refused to call it such. And with fears that America was no longer so safe on its side of the Atlantic and Pacific mounting, the pressure was on. The Government had to be seen as doing something, it had to stop retreating, stop consolidating, stop running away from defeat after defeat. What good was an America so fallen that it couldn't even stop armed conquest in the Caribbean?
Was JFK's legacy, was the civil rights movement, being respected when Haiti, a sister in revolution with the United States, a country born of casting off slavery, was overrun by a murderous racist and fascist dictator with his hands in the pocketbooks of dictators? Was the sacrifice of the war being honoured when Colombia was fighting for its life, or when Peron could just walk back into Argentina and help Paraguay and Santa Cruz crush Bolivia and shove Velasco back on his throne to make ready for war with Peru? Would the Founding Fathers be proud that the Nazis were prepared to cast one more corner of Africa into the abyss?
But what of Communism? What of the alter that had become the forefront of the red tide, and whose subsumption of classical notions of liberty into the proletarian mass had driven another America's loyalists to Cuba? What of the fact that the Reds once again spanned across Eurasia and were already working feelers into the Americas and were busy with a bitter struggle against another France and Britain who had joined together as the final vanguard of liberalism? What of the fact that Yusupov, Gong, and Nixon all generally regarded the means that great liberal nations interact with little ones to be little more than imperialism?
But then...that America was greater, it was victorious, it was richer, it was far more populous and its people held their heads up high with the assumption of their way of life's superiority. They didn't need to convince themselves that they were merely temporarily embarrassed; they had won. Nazism, Fascism, and whatever sort of hellish Futurism birthed out of Japan was but a memory. Russia was wounded but had healed, France and Britain were free, China was free, there were elections held in the open and even the old empires had moved towards a model of communities of nations. The great powers...talked to each other, with barbs, but with the hopes of diplomatic solutions instead of games of chicken.
The American people felt a great deal of sympathy for the Soviets, from the diaspora who fled the Reich's conquest, from the fact that they had failed them in a time of need, failed the British, the French, the Chinese. They failed them all, and the millions who had escaped Russia, China, France, Britain, and other places while they still could would never let them forget it. And now they saw that a system of greater cooperation with the Soviets had allowed triumph where they met with defeat. Perhaps they were not misguided about communism...maybe they were even right?
Certainly, many argued that America needed to move past the "cult of the uninhibited market" and the "worship of chaos actors who profited themselves at the expense of the country". Many would even argue with louder voices than ever, that America needed to implement forms of economic planning to make sure that the American economy grew in ways beneficial to America, not just its corporate sector, and that capital needed to sit down and rethink the way it interacted with state and labor. Letting the market run itself had lead to a half-century of humiliation and decline, and the people wanted a fairer America.
The Japanese labelled America a "nation of decline and stagnation", the Italians labelled it "a relic of a world that no longer exists" and the Geramns went even further and said that "America will not last the century, and will be little more than a footnote in the first chapter of the thousand year reich." If they were to be proven wrong, then things would have to change. Nearly everyone agreed on that, but the question of what exactly, needed to change was significantly less clear.
The South African War
"I am sick and tired of the hollow parrot-cry of "Apartheid!" I've said many times that the word "Apartheid" means good neighbourliness." - P.W Botha
As the heat of late spring begins to descend over the Southern Hemisphere, the stand off between Bloemfontein and Capetown could not be maintained any longer. The time for rain had stopped, now it was the time of the thunderstorm. Who fired the first shots at the informal demilitarised zone was uncertain, but what was sure was the fact that the Boers were soon on the attack. Holding the bulk of the northern army with a combination of northern whites and "civilised" Africans, the crashing wave of armour would split formations that had very few tanks or anti-tank weapons at the ready down the middle.
The Aircraft meant to guard South Africa against the African-RKs now rained death over their fellow South Africans. Explosions and plumes of dirt stitching the ground across a thousand kilometre front as the Unionist army of South Africa began to panic and rout. Hertzog had seen his chance, and would grab it with both hands in an effort to establish the dominance of his ideals as one settlement after the other fell before the advancing tide of the Afrikaners.
The droning of helicopters would deafen the ears of many who had sought refuge from the wave as people did what they naturally did in the face of armies they feared. They ran, they hid, they begged, they pleaded. The Afrikaners would not tarry with too much in the way of open bloodletting just yet though, that could come later once they had Capetown in their grips. And they were getting closer and closer to it every day as the broken army of the South scattered in many directions, outnumbered in men and every form of materiel. Even by formations that nobody quite remembered the prior existence of, but were nevertheless contributing to the onslaught towards the Union's heart.
The hope was that a fast enough blitz to the south would present the worlds a fait accompli, that South Africa was theirs, and that Apartheid would be implemented and there was nothing the wider world could do about it. Certainly men like Verwoerd and Botha hoped for such. Others like Vorster, were hoping for blood. They had an army larger than they should have had, larger than intelligence had suggested they had in the first place. Why not use it to create the pure South Africa they dreamed of?
Capetown would be evacuated, its government officials fleeing to its alter as the air raids and artillery strikes on the city began in earnest. The Stormjaers, the paramilitary assault troops of the Pro-German Ossewabrandwag organisation, in full accordance to their motto "If I retreat, shoot me. If I fall, avenge me. If I charge, follow me" had been infiltrating deep within the lines of the Unionists, cutting lines of electricity, dynamiting railways they could not capture for themselves, and letting munitions dumps erupt into the sky. Assassinations and sabotage behind the lines struck with coordinated precision, making it clear that it didn't really matter what the Unionists did, the Nationalists had been planning this for years.
ANC fighters and militants rose where they had the strength to do so, with guns in hand and battlecries in the air. They were outmatched, lacking in heavy weapons to resist all out tank shock, but they were well coordinated and brave. And the tanks could not be everywhere at once. They would resist, seeking to bog down the Nationalist assault towards Durban for as long as possible as Capetown was isolated from the rest of the world; the mother city now being shelled by artillery hoisted onto its famous table mountain.
By the coming of summer, less than five percent of the country was still in unionist hands, and the final fall seemed to be inevitable.
But South Africa was not alone, it was part of a large empire ready to defend a prize dominion and a US desperate to show it was not a fading power. And the sky broke with fresh thunder as Dassault aircraft bearing the roundels of the Franco-British Union and Hawkers of the Alliance Peacekeeper Corps raced overhead alongside American air force andnavy craft to launch their strikes on the Afrikaner positions. The earth shook and rumbled with the guns of warships off the coast, everything from battleships to destroyers aiming at anything reported to them by the aircraft above and the troops coming by assault boat.
The mother country had heard the cry of its cubs and the Griffin and Eagle would come with talons at the ready as Operation Bunker Blast was launched. A large series of amphibious attacks to catch an enemy expecting conventional overland gliding and had their radars tuned in for that particular sort of electromagnetic activity entirely off guard. A failure of intelligence that the South African National People's Republic would pay dearly for as the Alliance of Free States and OFN sought to pour in hundreds of thousands of men.
Capetown, under siege for months, with the street-by-street fighting pushing the last of the Unionists around the defensible positions of Hout Bay and its cold waters, was now being met with Peacekeepers identifiable by the purple bands around their helmets and their eagle emblem arm-bands dispatched ahead of the regular troops landing in less contested terrain. East London, which the Boers had already conquered, would face the OFN's push by primarily American, Brazilian, Canadian, Venezuelan, and Australian troops onto a relatively weakly defended sector of beach.
Hastily set up machine gun nests that weren't suppressed by Lion gunships or the withering fire of all ten of the post-war Minotaur class light cruisers whose ten 155mm guns were capable of blistering rates of fire and incredible turret traverse to track jets tried to cut down the Peacekeepers who advanced close to the amphibious skirted "Canterbury" universal tanks that delivered themselves to the shores, dropped their skirts and let loose with punchy 105mm guns to duel with the German provided "Puma" tanks that had fought in the west Russian war before being pawned off to the colonies and second-stringer allies.
The finest of the Commonwealth took on these traitor tanks provided to the Afrikaners under cover of darkness and under-the-table dealings with the pride of the English and French Knights of old. With faith in their armour, confidence in their lances, and a derring-do attitude towards the intense violence of industrialised warfare. And the Peacekeepers as a whole were all volunteers, many of them even invitational volunteers chosen from those who had shown exemplary skills in service.
They were good fighters, and the beaches were soon cleared of the Afrikaners as regular troops started to pour in from many nations. Georges Catroux, Prime Minister of the Franco-British Union, declared with Oswald Mosley; Supreme Executive of the Alliance; that Fascism would come to a firm halt in South Africa.
The OFN meanwhile, drove into Afrikaner territory after sweeping aside relatively limited resistance, crushing the Boer division that attempted to wheel around and push General Westmoreland back into the sea with the aid of Boer militia formations and a garrison division before his troops could attain too much of a foothold on the mainland. This matter was decided by the combined firepower of three carrier battlegroups, a battleship divisions comprised of all six of the Montana Class battleships, and multiple squadrons of cruisers and destroyers.
When seventy-two sixteen-inch guns fired at the same section of beach, the results were best described as whole sections of grid disappearing at a time. Men ceased to exist, vehicles were reduced to shrapnel, fortifications crumbled like children's blocks, and the terrain transformed almost immediately. It was overkill, horrid overkill, but South Africa was almost wholly occupied by the enemy unlike the other proxy wars of interest, and as such the primary sledgehammer of American naval strength in the Atlantic would be deployed here. And with the threat of antiship missiles, realised with the sinking of multiple landers, overkill was just being reasonable for William Westmoreland.
John Hackett, Commander in Chief of Allied operations in Southern Africa, including the OFN's forces, had gone so far as to claim that "We'll put the Hun's bootlickers on the run before Summer's out" as his forces began to roll the Afrikaners out of the Cape and East London areas. Certainly, the sigh of vehicles unloading onto the grasslands of South Africa and troops smiling for cameras under the shadow of aircraft passing through the light of an increasingly hot sun was an inspiring show.
But the National Socialist world was not so content as to sit back and let a chance to grab at the considerable resources of South Africa and to secure the southern flank of their African Empire just slip by. Huttig certainly wouldn't allow it, and his missives towards Fuhrer Speer would confirm the German decision that if the situation grew too dire for the Afrikaners; the Reich would stage its own "policing action" in support of the "popular will of the South African Volk", to put into action some of the best troops in the Reich that weren't tied up in the Alpine Cold War with Italy and trial some of the new ideas and weapons being rolled out in the aftermath of the Eurasian War.
Men were being gathered, and soldiers were being shipped in preparation should Hackett fail to heed Germania's warning that soldiers approaching the German border without clear indication of the limited nature of their advance would be met with retaliation. Many had been shipped in long beforehand, many under Hitler's orders to shore up his African prizes, others by Speidel when he was the de facto supreme commander of the Wehrmacht as a simple precautionary measure. Now such efforts were being redoubled.
And with every day of advance bringing the Afrikaners one step closer to ruin as their suspiciously overequipped and manned army was met with overwhelming force, that decree's day of reckoning seemed to be getting closer every day. And with separation came brutality, as the Afrikaners and their pro-Apartheid and Bantustan compradors among the English and Black population (typically from tribal elites who stood to gain from the bantustan system) started to resort to bloodier methods of holding onto what they had gained. Resulting in the SAS in turn, being given leave to simply put a bullet between the eyes of perceived enemy sympathisers.
In December of 1964, in the scorching heat of the northern South African Sun, Hackett received his final warning. "Acknowledge the zone of exclusion or face the consequences at your own peril." John Hackett would dismiss these warnings, even telling Crosland and the new President Elect in a meeting at St.Helena that he did not believe that the Nazis even had enough troops to carry out on such a threat, and even if they did, he would hardly need any reinforcement to repulse some third-stringer German colonial corps.
He would thus, make the decision to press ahead with the "Home by Christmas" offensive towards Gaborone after his troops had put Johannesburg to siege and drove the foe out of Bloemfontein. Confident that "this whole mess will be sorted in time for Boxing Day shopping, you have my word" to both AFS and OFN reporters as he sampled the famed wine of a free capetown.
Republican-Democratic Coalition
Republicans
The Republicans are a party with a bit of an identity crisis. They're often associated with conservatism now, but this was very much not what the party was founded on, and the party is heavily divided between its more cosmopolitan coastal branch and its more staunchly conservative inland groups. And even then there's divisions between whether to accept or reject social progress, with most Republicans having come to embrace civil rights in honour of the memory of those killed for passing a highly progressive civil rights act and simply opening relations with the VOSCOM at all. And with the purge of America's most open and overt aficionados for the Third Reich or Fascist Italy, Republicans who had sympathies in that direction have had to disavow such leanings.
The party, like the democrats, had a crowded "clown car" primary with a surrealistically crowded Primary that was driven as much by the personal egotism of the people who wanted to define the shape of the Republican Party as it was a a lack of identity for the modern Republican party in the first place. To simply name the "serious forty two" who showed up to more than three debates we have the following, not counting the even greater number who dropped out before then.
Nelson Rockefeller
Barry Goldwater
Pete McCloskey
Henry Cabot Lodge Junior
Theodor McKeldin
George Romney
George H.W Bush
William F Buckley
Frank Meyer
Milton Friedman
William Miller
Spiro Agnew
Gerald Ford
Bob Dole
Jacob Javits
Nancy Kessebaum
Barry Goldwater
John Lindsay
Kermit Roosevelt Jr
Joe McCarthy
Linwood Holton
Ray Garland
Mark Hatfield
Everett Dirksen
Peter O'Donnell
Clifford Case
Edward Brooke
John Tower
H.R Haldeman
Wallace Bennet
Charles Percy
Dan Evans
Arthur MacArthur
Hamilton Fish III (Red May)
Hamilton Fish IV (New Order)
Howard Buffet (Red May)
Howard Buffet (New Order)
Fred Trump (Red May)
Hugh Scott
Raymond Shafer
John Chafee
Charles Taft II
To go over but a few of the horrendous free for all primary race all knife fighting to decide what the Republican Party even was in the wake of Nixon's scandal and the Years of Terror we shall take a look at perhaps the most important names in trying to steer the future of a party that was now stained with the legacy of both Thomas Dewey and Richard Nixon.
The frontrunner, Nelson Rockefeller faced challenges from left and right within his own party. To the right was a gaggle of inland republicans such as the Libertarian leaning "anti-extremist" firebrand Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative "boat steadier" Wallace Bennet, from the centre was another Utah native George Romney who emphasised a technocratic and Paternalistic form of consensus driven conservatism that would work on evidence-based policy to deal with inequality and discrimination as well as America's foreign threats and George H.W Bush who advanced a "compassionate" conservatism that would use a trinity of state, charity, and faith organisations to uplift people out of poverty and disadvantage.
From from the left, Pete McCloskey who represented perhaps the last "Lincoln" and "Roosevelt" Republican who envisioned a progressive form of Republicanism that would be against pointless wars and in favour of environmentalism and sexual liberties while maintaining a strong, market driven economy and Theodor McKeldin. The latter holding the surprisingly radical opinion of socialised childcare and educational reform in his children's issues focused campaign meant to help what he called America's most vulnerable population while maintaining a firm but fair foreign policy.
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr represented the new face of the Business Republicans as well as the "Asia Understander" who promised a strong return to the Pacific that the US had been shut out of for a decade, to reinforce the cause of "Liberty and the Enlightenment" in Red May's Southern Asia and a "return to form for the oppressed masses of the asia of our own world, languishing under the Tokyo Empire" as well as "restoring the light of Liberty to Africa and to places lost to the red tide or the grey vise." He was also enamoured with the idea of the United Nations, and wished to resuscitate an organisation that was increasingly becoming a go-between for the Alliance of Free States and the Communist International to yell at each other on more neutral ground where "hang up" wasn't an option to end a discussion and the occasional place to organise feel-good things everyone could agree on like the Smallpox eradication program.
The sheer number of nonentity and protest candidates in the primary left the campaign a protracted slaughterhouse of blame games, finger-pointing, Nixon and Dewey-baiting, arguing over who was racist or not, squabbling over the extent of civil rights, knife fighting over foreign policy and fiscal policy, and also trying to promote competing strategies for how to oppose the campaign of fascist and reactionary terror in the country and the presence of a renewed Communist International and the million and one foreign policy crises.
Many of course, considered it quintessentially a sign of the modern Republican party that in "the worst primary race in American history", they could only get one Woman and one non-white man, and could barely even scrounge up a few Catholics. The brutal slugfest required multiple innovations in televised debate and did much to convince the RDC that the Republicans would not be a particularly serious component of the coalition for this cycle, especially with the defection of many of its members to other organisations. While centrist Spiro Agnew would claw his way to victory despite his ties to Nixon, in the secondaries against the Democrats he would promptly be crushed.
Democrats
The Democrats would rally around a generally progressive "Dynastic Liberalism" model for the party as its political energies gathered behind a contested and rather crowded primary, though thankfully somewhat more sane than the unholy and ungodly disaster of the Republican Primary.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Eugene McCarthy
Edmund Muskie
Edna Kelly
Jean Kirkpatrick
Sala Burton
Samuel Yorty
James Roosevelt
Channing E Phillips
George Washington Collins
Louis Stokes
James William Fullbright
George McGovern.
Robert Kennedy (New Order)
With the Dixiecrats splitting off into the ALA and taking on a new, anti-cklan and more dogwhistle-focused tack, the Democratic Party had definitively rallied around a Rooseveltian progressive liberalism and a finalisation of the work of the New Deal. The question of course, was how to do it and where it should end, and also how hawkish the party should be as John McCormack left the country with four wars to fight and the possibility of even more in the future. Many were hoping that things wouldn't escalate in West Africa or Indochina for the moment, as tense ceasefires and politicking became the word of the day, trying to jockey for position while recovering from damages dealt by earlier conflict.
LBJ pushed the "great society program" that would focus on an elimination of poverty and racial injustice through the Federal government's powers and the mandate given by a weakened far right and a more fractured body politic. It would be combined with a hawkish foreign policy that would seek to defend the free world from totalitarian tyranny and support those fighting for liberty worldwide, drastically transforming and expanding the social welfare system. He promised to use his influence to ensure that Congress would work together on the annihilation of poverty and homelessness, and that in his America, not only would nobody go hungry again, the country would roar onto the world stage and put an end to aggression and war by revolutionary and reactionary forces.
George Washington Collins, a veteran of Chicago Politics, agreed on many of these programs, but had a preference to work with local and state governments rather than a top-down effort to realise this vision, and one that would seek to create a world-class public transportation system and a redesigning of America's cities to realise a vision of walkable metropoli and racially integrated neighbourhoods. While he was somewhat reluctant to run for office, the urging he got from Jane Jacobs to combat the legacy of Robert Moses and build the country's cities and ruralities into a harmonious machine that would be the envy of two worlds, where the wealth of a nation was turned towards its common prosperity, and also that Nazism and Fascism would be consigned to the ash heap of history and the legacy of Hitler and Mussolini would be scoured from the planet by all means possible.
James Roosevelt campaigned on the legacy of his father and his never-accomplished plans, seeking to complete the New Deal to entrench the power of America's free labour unions and tie the Democratic Party to the AFL-CIO in a way that would make the Democrats synonymous with strong unions and organised labour to fight for higher living standards in the U.S. He also wanted to make America a force in the United Nations, one committed to rooting out the legacy and the presence of fascism, while seeking to work with the communists in a way that will moderate them into participating into the democratic project just as they will also work to push a shift away from empire for the FBU to ensure that a progressive, civic republicanism will be the order of the day for the whole of two worlds.
Eugene McCarthy, a product of the Minnesota farmer-labour system that stuck with the Democrats, would draw on that experience to build a stronger labour system for America without submitting to the pressures of hawkishness and rejecting the idea of collaborating with "colonial, imperial, and fascist regimes that oppose the welfare of the common man" to achieve American security. While he would work with the AFS, it would be as a conscientious, independent force, not as a tool of London to provide the Empire with more warm bodies to keep its subjects in order. And this conscientious, independent America would serve as the world's conscience, progress but with reason and fairness. Workplace Democracy was also a particular pet cause of his, and he would ensure that Americans would practice the virtues of the democratic republic at work and school as much as government.
George McGovern's policies were built around rebuilding what he believed were a world of shattered international systems to try and diplomatically bring anti-democratic powers to heel and ensure that the world's wealth be shared with America and that America helps better the world in return. Some called him naive, but he also pushed strongly for environmental policies as well as nuclear arms limitations out of a fear that the world was sitting on a landmine. He was not enough of a fool to believe that governments that build their whole ideology on slaughter and murder like Italy and Germany could be reasoned with in this way, but by taking to the Communists, and even the Japanese and working out common ground, the beast could be starved until inevitably it has to eat itself and at last; return the home of Voltaire and Garibaldi back to international community.
At the opposite end was Jean Kirkpatrick who was absolutely open to cooperation with the Alliance of Free States in opposition to "political extremism", though married to a policy of cold realpolitik that would work to destroy the countries that cannot and will not be brought to terms with the progressive, liberal order, particularly Nazi Germany whose Autarkic system ensures every country trapped in its sphere of influence is shut from America. Toleration of Communist governments and non-fascist right-wing dictatorships that show signs of democratisation potential will be enacted to build the anti-nazi coalition, and to try and drive wedges in the Communist and Japanese blocs to eventually force them to come to terms with the "Atlantic ideal of liberty".
Then there was Hubert Humphrey who argued for the need for a "National Bureau of Planning" and the introduction of "deploying the assets of the democratic republic in the interest of the democratic republic, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people use its assets in a manner determined through the people", pointing to the successes of the UASR's military victory over its versions of Germany and Japan and the fact that even the FBU engaged in a significant deal of technocratic planning. He also planned for the formation of tripartite organisations to coordinate the work of labor, the state, and enterprise into a well-tuned machine that would enact a deeply ambitious "income doubling plan" to double America's per capita GDP within two terms.
James William Fullbright, stalwart of the Wilsonian Southern Democrats and an out-and-proud Anglophile, was absolutely in favour of unifying the OFN and the AFS into a single organisation that would work to oppose both the VOSCOM and the Axis powers. He also pushed for membership in the United Nations without hesitation or delay, as well as a campaign to secure the United States a permanent security council seat to counter the "Communist slant" of the current permanent seven with the FBU, India, and Egypt against the UASR, Russia, China, and Argentina while adopting a "states focused" approach to the desegregation problem, which was seen by many detractors as a way to appease the ALA and get their support for his completion of the "Wilsonian revolution" and his dreamed of Congressional Government amendment to fulfill Wilson's ambitions for a parliamentary system.
Samuel Yorty, a California, represents a much stranger form of outsider politics, trying to appeal to the Wilsonian element of the Democrat party and to those who feel that the bulk of the work of civil rights is already done and the focus should instead be on cleaning up America's cities, restoring pride and faith in the country, and asserting its place on the world stage against all enemies of liberty. Observers though, note that he makes frequent usage of red, grey, and even race-baiting in veiled, dogwhistle terms to criticise those who are against his law and order domestic policies and "make the world safe for democracy" foreign policies. Others, however, note that his highly personalistic and charisma-focused approach to politics was like "some nightmare fusion of Juan Peron and a Hollywood Diva." Fitting one supposes, for the Mayor of Los Angeles infamous for burning through councillors the way some politicians burn through cigars.
Sala Burton, representing a more socially liberal wing of the Democrat Party pushed for "Amnesty, Abortion, and no Drug War", seeking to secure the women's vote through a campaign of bodily autonomy and guaranteeing no-fault divorce while also pushing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs such as Cannabis. She also campaigned for the abolition of the draft and amnesty for draft dodgers past and present, arguing that the future of war was dependent on willing and proud soldiers, not those forced to serve, and that the Eurasian war had proven that the old ways built around sheer numbers were too costly, too bloody, and too horrible for the American public and that new, more efficient ways would be pursued.
Louis Stokes, a black war hero who had suffered the tender mercies of a German Prisoner of War Camp and was almost killed in the slave labour factories in Germany before enacting a daring escape into Sweden, built his policy around awakening America's potential as a nation of nations, opening its doors to immigration to boost the economy and integrating the lost and opportunities starved peoples of the world while also ensuring those already in America benefit as much as possible. And as a man who had seen the horrors of war from the worst possible side of it, he would ensure that America would only ever go to war when it was absolutely needed, and that America's boys would remain safe with him, but whenever genocide reared its ugly head there would be no mercy and no respite for the murderers of humanity.
Edmund Muskie, a rising star in New England politics, wished to centre environmental issues in his campaign, to provide economic opportunity through changing America's infrastructure with a new wave of mass public works. New, cleaner power systems, new, cleaner factories so that the air and water could be as safe to breathe and drink as it was two centuries ago. He would campaign on a program of New Federalism, restoration and devolution of power and autonomy of the states under a progressive framework to deeply entrench the civil rights and new deal agenda in a more responsive, locally focused manner while also combatting the spectre of the Imperial Presidency, calling to mind the legacy of Dewey's disastrous mismanagement of his position as commander in chief to lose the second world war and condem three quarters of the world to slavery. He would also promise to champion democracy and autonomy across the world, and to work to ensure a beautiful, clean world for a thousand generations to come.
Edna Kelly was often considered the "anti-kirkpatrick" in that she also advocated herself based on her extensive foreign policy experience, but unlike Kirkpatrick did also centre women's issues and advocacy and pushed for a calm, conflict-averse foreign policy except when absolutely needed to prevent a direct threat to America or an important ally while still being "unquestioningly hard on fascism and genocide." A major advocate for refugees, she also argued that the long malaise America was suffering from was because its population growth had slowed to a crawl and the "best and brightest of the world no longer come to our shores because we turn away too many hoping for something better than the jackboot", citing her record in settling those fleeing from the German conquest of the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and Africa in America.
The New Order's Robert Kennedy wanted to honour his brother's legacy by being the President his brother would have been. He would run on a populist and deeply liberal program, one where right to work laws would be repealed and many measures of civil rights and progressivism would be locked in via constitutional amendment. He would fight hard for American interests on the dual global stage, so that wealth could once again flow into America and America could build friendships on the global stage for mutual betterment. He also advocated for extensive childcare programs to raise the American birthrate, stating that the US would be left behind by the "tidal wave of the Lebensborn" if they didn't reverse course. He also copied workplace democracy and educational reform pitches from other candidates, and said that "I would truly democratise this country" with his proposed electoral reforms, including the power of recall vote. He also advocated for "no mercy for the far right terrorists who are destroying this country on behalf of the Fuhrer and Duce" promising nothing less than the "complete and final destruction of the legacy of the Klan and a new reconstruction so thorough that the likes of Atlanta and New Orleans will gleam with as much futuristic glory as New York and Chicago. A reconstruction that will end the division of North and South in terms of wealth and development, and a reconstruction that will end racism by destroying poverty."
National Progressive Pact
People's Progressive Party
The People's Progressive Party was an insurgent force in American politics ever since its founding by Henry Wallace. Absorbing the left flank of the Republican and Democratic parties, the old Farmer-Labour party, the Democratic Socialists of America, many civil rights activists, and a gaggle of populists and reformists, the People's Progressive Party represented the sum totality of the reformist left in the country. They wanted and would fight for change, and in the words of People's Progressive Party Campaign Groundworker Bernie Sanders "If America is to live up to its ideals of democracy, then its going to have to build a system to work for everyone, rather than just the 1%. And our progressive party can make that happen in a huge way." The People's Progressive Party's nature as a disparate collection of countless forces meant that it was also rather internally divided even if they agreed to act in coordinated concert once a course of action was settled on, even if none of them would ever call it Democratic centralism.
One of the Stalwarts of the party and certainly one of the most controversial was Henry "Scoop" Jackson whose hawkishness arguably exceeded even Kirkpatrick as he advocated for pursuing a full throated cold war even with the Alliance of Free States. The American way stood for progress and democracy and would oppose every single other superpower bloc even if it meant that the United States had to stand alone against however many worlds it may come into contact with. Every American would be lifted out of poverty and be proud to fight for the American way against Imperialists, Technocrats, Nazis, Communists and anyone else who stood against the real American way, not the lies and ochlocratic despotism pushed by the so-called Union of American Socialist Republics.
Perhaps closer to Kirkpatrick in foreign policy but more radical in his domestic policies was Michael Harrington of the Democratic Socialists. While openly embracing the label of Socialist, Harrington was in Nixon's words "someone who would proudly hold the gun to Karl Liebknecht's head on Ebert's orders." Angrily denouncing the "rampant bolshevism" of the Communist International and the "sacrifice of national sovereignty to the international party apparatchiks in Red May-Pyongyang", Harrington's prior breaking of bread with the Communists had ended and his anti-communist credentials bubbled to the surface louder and prouder than ever before. While dedicated to the usage of Democratic Socialist politics to empower worker ownership and labour unions, democratise the workplace and electoral system, and redistribute America's great wealth; he would oppose the UASR to his last breath and made vague promises of committing Americans to fight "communism in Alter-Vietnam."
Martin Luther King Jr is the youngest candidate so far, and has gotten in thanks to the amendments to the constitution removing age restrictions on the office of presidency or congress in response to "the December of Terror" and the threat it posed to the presidential succession. Thirty four years old at the start of the year, the young African American pastor has seen the horrors of the American Troubles and believes that the time has come for a radical rethink about what America is or means to deal with the spectre of racism, poverty, misogyny, alienation, and exploitation. Believing that if America is to unhypocritically fight fascism and imperialism abroad, that the country must address its fascistic elements and imperialism within and make amends for the crimes of the past and present, so that the country may genuinely live up to its promises so that it can stand for freedom within and without. MLK hopes for a constitutional convention after a program of expanding the presence of his movement to the point that it can invoke the power of transformation to enact a truly radical transformation of the United States from the ground up, so that at last it can be free of the legacy of a constitution built to uphold slaver power, landlord power, and bourgeois power and embrace a true democratic socialism.
Walter Reuther represents the Industrialist USA which had folded into the progressives. Walter Reuther unlike much of the Progressives is more than happy to break bread with the Marxists as well as anarchists and syndicalists owing to his history in the industrial union movement. Reuther hopes to combine worker power and racial and gender liberation to create a grassroots movement that will be able to, even if thwarted by the congressional system, be able to push for what it wants through grass roots power and direct action to make it clear that the American people can have their liberation either the gentle way or the hard way. Reuther is also controversial among many for his suggestion that the Vladivostok Compact is "in many ways preferable" to the "colonial imperialism" of the Alliance of Free States and rejection of Scoop Jackson's "militant isolationism" as the politics of "rank insanity born out of the sort of advanced ideological rot that comes with unadulterated American exceptionalism."
Robert F Kennedy, of the Red May Revolution timeline, fresh off his successes in democratising American Havana came in with a surprise entry into the People's Progressive Party race. Agreeing with his counterpart on utterly purging the entire basis of the political right in the United States and ensure that America would never need fear a revolution because it would be so progressive that nobody could find fault in America. He would not merely destroy the far right in America through liquidating their organisations but by attacking the basis of far-rightism and its support network. Giving people progressive networks to build communities with and remove them from the caresses of alienation shows them that people of other colours were fellow friends and neighbours, not strangers and threats. To ensure every American has stable employment and a strong union to fight for their rights, and that a radical welfare reform leaves none behind to ensure that every American has healthcare and access to university education to cleanse their minds of poison. He also advocated for programs of worker ownership, workplace and school democracy, as well as subsidised childcare and free daycare so that every American could feel comfortable having "one or a dozen kids, as is their choice."
Shirley Chisholm, a relatively young black woman, also sought the ticket for the progressives, hoping to go for a social issues focused campaign that would centre grassroots activism and movement building to combat America's historic injustices in a way that would ensure that the country could be saved without another civil war that might remove the US as a beacon of democracy when the two worlds need it most. Building up democracy at home, school, and the workplace were all huge cornerstones of her platform, with an effort to build up more participatory systems being a running theme in her campaign so that the average American would be constantly involved in the electoral process; as well as a campaign to push the voting age down to sixteen, arguing that if this is the age that the state recognises the right to drop out of high school and pursue work, then it is the age of adulthood full stop.
Darlington Hoopes, with the Socialist Party USA caucus of the Progressives, while an old man in a generally youth dominated party, was a man with a tremendous deal of experience with the system and with pushing socialist policies from within the American system. A Quaker and pacifist, Hoopes wanted an end to America's ambitions to destroy fascism by feeding it with the sorts of wars that build the vast milieu of dispossessed veterans that birth it. And when America must go to war, it would do so with an eye towards humanity in all cases, to minimise casualties of itself and its foes and abolish the culture of cruelty so that whatever war is fought is fought with honour and pride. All while also ensuring that its returning veterans would be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve after having been asked to risk death for it.
Roger Nash Baldwin, of the American Civil Liberties Union, was an old man in a generally young party, but was a man who would push for a civic libertarianism, court reform to ensure a more democratic judicial process, elimination of terrorism without expanding on police powers and the potential for police brutality, and positive rights to be enshrined in the constitution. It was not enough for Americans to be guaranteed freedom from oppression, they needed the freedom that could only come from not fearing hunger or poverty and being guaranteed their right to negotiate in work as well as politics. He also advocated for prison reform, to end "revolving door prisons" by ensuring that prison made people better, rather than merely punishing them, and that the security of the old would be better looked after.
Social Nationalists
The Social Nationalists are defined first and foremost, by their desire to achieve America's ends by military means with a particular emphasis on trying to militarily strongarm Japan into giving back America's lost territories while also intimidating America's other enemies into respecting the OFN's way of life and sphere of influence. Even if it means sometimes engaging in outright nuclear brinksmanship to try and get their way. They are economically incoherent, with many favouring vast dirigiste controls over the economy to better militarise it to achieve the desired payback against the former Axis powers. Some would even accuse their most extreme wing of Ultranationalism, those who see nuclear war as a worthy price for the debt of honour owed by America's defeat. Others are more moderate, most are even progressive in a certain way.
John Connally is that sort of hawkish progressive, who disagrees with Jackson on their views of an American sort of civic nationalism as well as their attitude towards the Republican-Democratic Coalition. Connally sees the RDC as workable with, and is less interested in the threat of Communism and more interested in the humiliation America suffered at Germany and Japan's hands and castigated Nixon for "abandoning that American land still in the hands of Tokyo." His policy was to "revive pride in America" by making "America something to be proud of" with major public works programs to generate full employment and advance its level of development and technology to a world leader, pulling up its living standards while also forming an "unbreakable bloc of liberty" in the Americas by consolidating the OFN as an equal subbloc of the AFS to the EDF and uniting the New World nations into a "pan-american accord of defence and cooperation".
Curtis LeMay on the other hand is someone marked by his enthusiasm for a military solution to crises near or far, stating that these places need to be made safe for democracy by force as all other options have and will certainly fail, and in particular calls for an attempted invasion of Dominica to end "Trujillo's fascist threat to our shores". Curtis LeMay pushed for "military discipline and efficiency in the economy", and the building of a sense of camaraderie that would revive morale and prepare the country for wars near or far. He would approve of Civil Rights, as the army was already integrated and it was needed to bring the country together, while all parts of it would be expected to contribute to the resurrection of the armed forces and the public sector so that the nation would no longer be looked down on as a "runt of the litter".
Margaret Chase Smith hopes to unify the NPP with a program meant to appeal to as much of the pact as possible, adopting positions even if they come from Gus Hall's Communist party at the same time as or Allen Ginsberg's Florists. While a warhawk, her commitment to trying to staple the disparate elements of the nationalists together made her politics more than a touch incoherent, waffling on everything from welfare to racial justice depending on what the polls said. She advocated for the US' outright leadership within the AFS, to take the torch of liberty into its hands out of the old empires of western Europe so that the US' "inheritance" could be realised and that "Liberty without Empire" as a project could be finalised.
Finally was George Kennan who was the mastermind of his doctrine of "armed containment" that would be applied to any of America's enemies large or small, to ensure that revolutions and reactions would be kept to a minimum and starved of their vital oxygen, while working to normalise politics in America through rebuilding trust in the system through populist measures and careful technocratic allotment of the OFN's great resources to the average citizen while promoting business and employment where possible as part of an effort to rebuild pride in the United States. He advocated for increased technocratic planning measures in America to best determine what was in the country's interests and in the interests of liberal democracy as a whole, as well as his own "income doubling plan" to ensure that America would be as rich as it ought to be.
International Communists
The International Communist Party of the United States of America, born of a merger of virtually every marxist group in the United States into one, consolidated Communist party; had elected to of course, once again support Gus Hall in a bid for presidential nomination that largely served to raise awareness for their causes and build a ground game in the down-ticket elections; angling for growing presences in legislatures and municipal governments. Hall had gained both boons and banes from the worldmerge, where while there were whispers of a new red scare in the face of a true, powerful Communist movement, he was vindicated with a potent example of what a Communist America could achieve. It had emboldened the party, and provided it with a never before seen unity as the International Communist Party of the USA applied for, and received Comintern membership and organisational support and its optimism for the future was never higher, as it presented Communism as America's best hope against Fascism or falling victim to British imperialism.
The international Communist Party would, through its seats in congress; including a few from the recently redistricted and reformed electoral systems in what was once American Havana as well as Greenland, D.C and Puerto Rico as well as in the steel belt, Atlanta Georgia, and California; would also gain prominence as a frequent means of brokering deals with the Communist Bloc such as vital computer technologies, soil regeneration methods to accelerate recovery from the second dustbowl, and an affordable loan written to help finance the Alaska project. While they weren't the biggest party by any means, they had clout and tight discipline, and were some of the best go betweens with the reds.
Hall once again faced a challenge from the American Exceptionalist Jay Lovestone, but once again considered it barely worth his time to even acknowledge as the increasingly old "Patriotic Socialist" seemed less credible every day. Let him ramble on about the "American way to Socialism" to his grave, Hall understood the future of the party and knew it to lay in Internationalism. Not the old order in a red coat of paint. He regarded Lovestone as part of an old guard who couldn't recognise that the future lay in the UASR and the Comintern, and that the revolution in America would come as part of a greater whole, rather than standing alone or buying into any thesis of exceptionalism on the US' part. No he would not take Lovestone seriously.
He also faced challenge from Eugene Dennis, who argued that the party needed to commit more to the Bukharinist model, that America's differing levels of development meant that there would be a need for some greater forms of class collaboration between the proletariat and more progressive wings of what he believed was still a distinct farmer class and a petit-bourgeoisie that still had some progressive values left to it. He also regarded Gus Hall's path of accepting the Comintern's general stance of benign neglect and some lowkey support if not exactly flowery welcome towards queer communities as potentially alienating to a country that still generally saw such people as aberrant. This too, Gus regarded as a disease born of parochialism.
Bill Epton, an advocate of more Chinese Communist inspired doctrine including a commitment to people's war and a focus on the colonial periphery, had his own rivalry with Hall but kept it cordial. With a strong focus on race, Bill Epton also advocated for a redressing of "every wrong done to the native populace" and the honouring of treaties made and then broken with the "Indian people of this country". He also was understandably quite focused on dismantling the regime of "home grown blue clad nazi stormtroopers" as he often referred to the Police, hammering home his points on police brutality and its instrumentality in the breaking of labour action as well as worker solidarity across racial lines. Foreign policy wise, one would be remiss if they didn't mention his policy of "unlimited warfare upon the DominiKKKan Fascist State and complete vengeance for the martyred people of Haiti."
Paul Mattick, representing the anti-bolshevik left communist end, had come around to accepting the Comintern even if he had reservations about the "partyification of the republic of worker's councils", but with the abolition of the natural born citizenship requirement for the presidency, had decided to put his hat into the ring. His policy was focused on the establishment of worker's councils and the intensification of labour power and a worker's republic. The Communist Party was to be a tool of the Worker's Soviets, not their leader, and rapid progress towards communism was to be established through the quick distribution of power to the hands of the working class and the elevation of the worker's and farmer's committees as well as a program of breaking up the repressive power structures of capital and racialism. He also advocated for pressuring the Comintern towards taking a more worker's soviet focused stance, away from the party structures that the Comintern generally represented, and for the usage of state power as a means of class warfare against fascist and reactionary regimes to break them apart from within. He would start small of course, but every effort he intended to take was meant to build worker power.
Anne Draper meanwhile, a veteran of Labor activism, born to Polish immigrants, and one of the most prominent trotskyists in the country as well as a champion of Marxist Feminism, hoped to channel the growth of the Marxist movement towards a program of momentum building, of securing increasingly more radical steps and movement building until the Worker's party was so entrenched that any effort to roll back its advances would result in conflict the bourgeoisie could not afford nor win. A tightly disciplined party built around a vast countersociety with its own news sources, its own experts, and its own programs would ensure that the International Communist Party was in every step and facet of life. And of course abroad, all effort would be put into the destruction of fascism and reaction.
Free Florists
Born of the Beat Generation and the rising Bohemian influenced counterculture, Allen Ginsberg's Free Florist Party have a strongly anti-war streak, generally anti-capitalist economics if not as rooted in Marxism as Hall's International Communists, and a powerful affiliation with culturally libertine movements. The primary hotbed of sexualities to lie outside the norm in the United States and some of the most steadfast in their opposition to war and empire, the Florists skew young and more middle strata than the Marxists who are generally of lower-income groups. New to politics and rather incoherent, the Florists had largely rallied behind Ginsberg once again, hoping more to at least pressure the rest of the NPP to consider their issues than seriously expecting a shot at winning the election on a platform of sexual liberation, pacifism and environmentalism.
Other major figures included the feminists Gloria Steinem, Hilda Mason, and Bella Abzug, with Abzug representing the Ecofeminist wing of the party, Mason the black rights movement, and Steinem the more liberal feminist end of the movement who clashed with the others on her stringent anti-pornography stance. However all of them essentially backed Ginsberg's efforts, as the Free Florist Party had a habit of trying to resolve factional disputes before the primary season to focus efforts on movement building and local, grassroots organising so that they could have the ground game to make a serious go at the presidency, already celebrating the handful of seats they won in Congress to get their foot in the door on the anti-nuclear testing and anti-pollution ticket.
American Liberty Alliance
Unionists
With the terrorist attacks in the United States, the Dixiecrats needed to reinvent their image, instead deciding to focus more on rabid populism while working to leave the question of segregation to the states and instead coat their programs in the language of "constitutional egalitarianism, opposed to the elevation of special privilege" such as affirmative action and desegregationist busing, or "punitive redistricting". Of course the general recourse on the issue was to largely ignore it, focusing on "communities being hollowed out by unchecked and unplanned urbanisation", "nationalising the key industries of our country to protect them from the foreign vultures", and "sharing our wealth to end the scourge of poverty and eliminate the appeal of godless communism and murderous fascism." That they were often called corporatists ended up being adopted as a term of pride, though they were opposed to the "warmongering" and "secular opportunism" of the Nationalists, who tended to come from the North, Midwest, or the Pacific Coast anyway. Many others instead, identified the Unionists as the Southern interests party, given that despite the name the entire core of the party was in the former Confederacy.
Russell Long, at the leftmost flank of the Unionists, wanted to bring back the legacy of his famous father with an ambitious "share our wealth" program resurrected from the grave of seeming political irrelevance as well as a complete reform to elderly care and the approach to unions, seeking to integrate unions into the political system in a social corporatist system that would bring America's classes together in a nation where none would be idle and none would be able to hoard the entirety of the wealth. A redistributionist and a collaborationist view of America's problems, Long saw an opportunity to expand the progressives into the deep south at the expense of the dying dixiecrats, hoping to vacuum up the politically liberated African American voting bloc to solidify his electoral bloc. In a break with much of the rest of the ALA, he pushed for a profoundly anti-german policy, declaring that no nation that put its boot down on the throat of the Jews would be tolerated to last the century.
George Wallace served as the centre of the Unionists, even if he acknowledged the irony of a grouping that mostly appealed in the South being called the Unionists. He would take a "local sovereignty" focused approach to segregation, though he denounced the Klan, the Legion and other "terrorist organisations who have spilled American blood." His populist economics wouldn't go quite as far as Long's proposals of a maximum wealth cap, but he promised to "build up rural and inland America" and that he would "protect American jobs" with extensive subsidies, public works programs, and protectionist barriers to build up American industries, particularly in the underindustrialised parts of the country. He also seized on "expansion of social security and healthcare provisions, and shielding our unions from Yankee businessmen looking to sell the average American out for a quick buck by not paying his workers what they're owed" while also promoting small businesses and land reform. Of course, he would very much like people to not talk about all his dogwhistles.
Strom Thurmond, once part of the nationalist caucus in the NPP, had masterminded the effort to form a new ALA that would stand for state's rights. Essentially standing at the right of his party, Thurmond wanted to destroy the basis of communism, fascism, atheism, and "a disrespect for america's founding values and cherished traditions of Federalism" within the country through populist economics, morality laws, and...using federal power to enforce race baiting laws and ending the general progress of the civil rights movement then and there. He also advocated for an "America first" foreign policy, against both the Fascists and the Communists, but not subservient to London either. The OFN and AFS would become one, but only on America's terms, because only America had what it took to restore the two worlds to "sanity" while also taking the deeply controversial stance of withdrawing recognition and diplomatic contact with the UASR.
Other candidates, such as Lester Maddox or Iris Blitch generally fit somewhere on this spectrum between the three, with the curious exception of Jimmy Carter who certainly talked a big southern democrat game...only to be personally amicable towards northern interests and anti-racist groups while also having ties towards more "new liberal" groups that wished to open the economy up more. What he actually believed in was anyone's guess, beyond that he probably wasn't the harmless smiling southern folksman he appeared to be.
Federalists
The Federalists, built around a program of state's rights, reduced government intervention in the economy, confronting "Union corruption", vigorous and confrontational foreign policy, "American pride", and "moral majoritarianism" was a new face on the right, formed by Ronald Reagan who felt that the RDC and the NPP had left the "real America" behind in their race to seek detente with "leftist thugs just because the fascists are even worse when we should be confronting the bad from both sides" in a program that was best described as "what you'd get if you waged a campaign of conservative populism but rejected any actual populist policies as contrary to doctrinaire market fundamentalism".
Of course, Reagan would be the frontrunner, as he helped to found the party in the first place, and was seeking a war on drug abuse pushed by "communist recruiters and fascist narcos" and blamed the New Deal and the "culture of entitlements and handouts" for the long economic malaise instead of the orthodoxy that the unequal treaties and the closure of global markets had essentially strangled the American century in the crib. Instead he argued it was because that government had strangled the power of the market and stifled the free exchange of ideas and money with red tape, regulations, and "economic mob rule" by unions that he argued were corrupt middlemen who'd rather put their own parochial interests over what was good for the nation. He also advocated for a strong "law and order" approach to domestic issues, including "arming our boys and girls in blue to fight the scourge of domestic terrorism and organised crime ripping through the countryside."
While many criticised the Federalists as Reagan's cult of personality, including ironically, Barry Goldwater when he flatly rejected joining the party, he wasn't unchallenged in it, even if only for appearance's sake. Prominent in this was Robert Welch which some believed only was in the party to make Reagan look more sane by advocating actual conspiracy theories, biblical literalism, and being rhetorically against democracy. And of course to play the part of the "yellowbelly" that Reagan could easily knock down as a strawman were some nonentities that seemed to only show up for Reagan to get zingers against in the primary debates.
Dominionists
The Dominionists were a new party and one of the founders of the American Liberty Alliance, having always been there to some degree but really having their time to shine with the collapse of the previous American party system. Believing in a radically American Nationalist form of Christianity and a strongly identitarian vision of what it means to even be American, the Dominionists have often been accused of if not fascism; then at least overt reactionarism. Tacitly remaining quiet on the issue of segregation though certainly not without racism, they instead focused their energies on what they saw as the more important issues of morality, community decay, a loss of faith in God and the country, and an over-enthusiasm for wars on distant shores instead of building God's own Republic in the U S of A. The farthest right wing of the NPP, especially in the wake of the demise of Yockey and the National Vanguard Sovereignists, the Dominionists go beyond conservatism into outright ancien' regime sympathies in the hopes for a return to an imagined, more innocent time.
Phyllis Schlafly is the matron of the Dominionists, believing the obviously miraculous nature of the worldmerge is God's sign to her that she needs to step into politics even if she regards it as a man's game. Bringing a sarcastic, witty form of populism that aims to rebuild an alienated and divided country as God's own Republic and to crush elements that would culturally divide or disturb the United States of America, Schlafley notably also calls for a near full withdrawal of the OFN from foreign affairs. Believing that the outside world is essentially godless and should be left to its demise. What interventions she does advocate are built around promoting and safeguarding a very American evangelical idea of Christianity and a perversely dominionistic view of what democracy entails to spread an all-american civilisation in a gradual crawl over the worlds until the day of rapture.
W.A Criswell was perhaps more socially moderate than Schlafley in that he believed that there was no issue with abortion as life only began after birth in his views and preachings, and he had never voiced support for the segregationists whose movement was collapsing all around him. However, he was an anti-papist and strongly condemned the allowance of Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Jews to serve as President of the United States. He advocated for a strong charity network as opposed to Schlafley's greater preference for state-provided welfare, though he was not fully opposed to Welfare on principle, knowing well its power as a populist tool, adopting a number of new deal economic positions like free school lunches and breakfast and church provided meals on weekends. He also strongly advocated for conflict against "the Pagan Japanese" to liberate the "lands lost to us by ignoble defeat" and to push back the "godless influence of the Communists".
Rationalist
The most mocked, scorned, laughed at, and routinely dismissed wing of the NPP to the point of being infamous for generally placing behind independents within the NPP during its secondary elections and looking to repeat history even in the ALA with a slightly less crowded field, the Rationalist Party nevertheless continues its vainglorious quest in the cause of Market Liberalism, private property rights, economic deregulation, supply-side spending controls, deficit hawkishness, tax cuts, and an unbending commitment to dying on stranger and stupider hills than any other party.
The only party to consider an abolition of the age of consent to be a cause worth spending political capital on, and the only political group brave enough to ask whether it is appropriate for Parents to force their children to pay for room and boarding or be sold off onto a deregulated adoption market. And perhaps the only ones ideologically blinkered enough to earnestly believe that the best way to win the cold war lies in a privatised military for hire in pursuit of economic freedom. The party has been considered a joke since its foundation, and continues to be perceived as a joke thanks to the transparency of its forefathers Ludwig von Mises' support for Nazi Germany, something they routinely try to bury to no avail.
F.A Harper is the increasingly aging head of the Rationalist Party and often described as "New Order America's most prolific masochist" and the "number one glutton for punishment in the USA" as every one of his secondary election efforts has ended in humiliation and derision and even by taking his party to defect to the ALA and away from the NPP he remains a man perceived as a joke. Try as he may, he has yet to find a policy that lines up with his beliefs that doesn't earn him further mockery from across the political spectrum, and the word is that he's come to start preparing Murray Rothbard to take his place instead as time catches up to him. With a confused foreign policy that is best described as "selectively isolationist" and an inability to resolve its internal debates on many social issues such as racism and homosexuality, the Rationalist Party's prospects for the 1964 secondary election looks bleak, and Harper himself faces challenge from a gaggle of political nonentities, many of which deride him as far too restrained in his opposition to "statism and socialism" for believing in such things as the necessity of paved roads and rejection of the possibility of private nuclear armament ownership.
And as if to kick him in the balls, John Hospers, Roger MacBride, and David Nolan had each launched a secondary challenge at what Nolan called "the Harper dictatorship", taking on a more openly Randian objectivist platform, all while Rothbard took the bold, daring position of arguing to repeal the 18th amendment because women voting created the welfare state. All while Harper is often photographed looking wistfully at tall cliff faces, unguarded skyscraper rooftops, and noosed ropes.
The worst election of all time
The Election of 1964 was to put it politely, a colossal clusterfuck of a Mongolian persuasion. The Republican Primary was a "disastrous shitshow" that took many gruelling months to resolve with microsects upon microsects fissioning the party's base into oblivion. Republican factions ate each other alive until at last, Wallace Bennett was standing atop a mound of political corpses by being so bland and milquetoast that no strong feelings against his Christian Mormon Conservatism could really manifest. Wallace was progressive enough on racial issues to avoid alienating the more liberal Republicans, pro-free market enough to keep the Goldwater club on board, and internationalist enough to appease the coastal business Republicans.
Of course Bennet had gotten to his position after "the primary equivalent of the fucking Somme" to quote one observer and by managing to not offend enough of the Republican party to get to where he was, he did not look forward to his chances in the upcoming secondaries with his Democratic Rival.
The Democratic primary was more civilised, all in broad agreement of mourning JFK and rooting out the spread of terrorism in the country as well as reasserting America's role abroad. Most were less than happy to be saddled with McCormack's commitment to bushfire and proxy wars to avoid looking weak. But they promised that now that it's started, they'd finish them on terms favourable to American interests and the human race. Of course, RFK was an emotional wreck, Kirkpatrick was blatantly cynical, McCarthy was uncharismatic, and ultimately Johnson had the mojo and the clout within the party to ultimately dominate the primaries, promising a place for many of the other candidates in his cabinet.
The Johnson-Bennett secondary was best described as the result of a freight train impacting a very tired deer, as Johnson's media machine and forceful personality overwhelmed the relatively meek and quiet Mormon and it was clear that the American populace wanted a Great Society, not free marketeering.
The ALA ultimately came down to Reagan vs Schlafly vs Long vs Harper in what could be described as "the greatest trainwreck of a secondary election on this earth." Schafly and Reagan would spend long hours needling each other with barbs over minute differences in proposed policy, Harper would be interrupted with derision whenever he spoke, and Long was very clearly not happy to be in a room with three free market fundamentalists who often tried to gang up on the Kingfish's heir in the debates only for him to snap back with equal vitriol.
Long was called a fascist, a demagogue, the product of the southern democrat machine and the heir to the Kingfish's corruption and dictatorial governance. Reagan was called an opportunist, an empty suit who believed whatever the donors told him to, and the puppet of his occultist wife who "does the kind of weird stuff they used to burn people at Salem over". Phyllis Schlafly was called a hypocrite, an idiot with a "room temperature IQ score", a grifter who only selectively quoted the bible, and at one point was told that "the greatest mistake the "libbers" ever made was permitting you to get an education" by an exasperated Reagan. Meanwhile Harper was frequently interrupted with reminders that Rationalist Party sex scandals happened as often as "days ending in y" while all three tore into him for being an open atheist.
Meanwhile, Francis Parker Yockey, already under investigation by the FBI and Secret Service, was met with outright revulsion by all four other candidates who questioned why he or the Sovereignists as a whole were even allowed to attend. Reagan called him a "Sauerkraut sellout on orders from Berlin", proudly sticking to his campaign slogan of not dignifying the renaming of the german capital as some petty victory over the third reich. Schlafly called him a "monstrous pervert and incomprehensible gibbering lunatic at the helm of a club of bullies". Harper decried him as "a tyrant, a mass murderer in waiting, and a man who dreams of finishing the holocaust". And Long called him perhaps most succinctly "a man who writes about as well as he'd lead", publicly humiliating him by opening up a used copy of Imperium, reading passages from the text, and then asking him to clarify what the unhinged nonsense meant.
Ultimately, Reagan would win by collusion from Schlafly and Harper to try and keep Long out and what was most likely in hindsight, ballot stuffing and delegate intimidation to try and prevent the Unionists from getting in and packing the race with statists. Reagan of course, had big plans for "leadership of the free world" and "making America great again", while Johnson was already taking notes on how to rip into him.
Finally, the NPP organised around Reuther in the Progressives with the endorsement of most of the other candidates after a rather amicable and low stress primary that was mostly "loudly agreeing with each other and trying to outpromise each other" except on the more divisive issue of Foreign Policy, though Jackson and Harrington's hawkishness alienated many. The Social Nationalists consolidated around Smith as the unity candidate, hoping that her status as a woman would help get their movement credentials amidst the progressives, while the Florists and Communists predictably endorsed Gus Hall.
The NPP managed to have its secondary pass by with relatively little incident, with Reuther and Hall ultimately agreeing to endorse Smith as a "unity candidate" in exchange for her promising to protect and eshrine the cause of organised labour and the American worker and farmer, while Ginsberg wranngled environmental concessions from her as well as a promise to primarily focus on Fascism as the primary threat to America and to ensure that "all Americans are represented" while offering her, to the surprise of himself as much as anyone else, guarded praise for her feminist platform. Of course, the Communists, Progressives, and Florists weren't expecting her to win, but rather sought to use her as a way to ride the coattails of a more "respectable" candidate and build their groundgame.
Johnson would meet Reagan, Smith, and a few smaller, non-coalition candidates like a Yockey he didn't even bother to hide his contempt for, the Syndicalist Ruth Rothstein of the "American Labor Party", the woman having been radicalised by the "long depression" and the work that assorted Union organisations did to keep the poor from starving, with the ALP eyeing potential integration into the NPP by proving itself in an independent run, Rachel Carson of the "Earth Party" which was mostly interested in raising awareness for Environmental issues, Jacqueline Vaughn of the "Social Justice Party" which was essentially doing a protest run to centre civil rights as an issue, Robert Shelton of the "Imperial party" which everyone knew was an attempt to save the Klan's ass with immunity for as long as possible, and JB Stoner whose National States Rights Party criticised the National Vanguard Party for being "too Europhilic and too unamerican".
Johnson gave Stoner one look before procuring a transcript of Stoner's speeches that he regarded "Hitler as too moderate" and that he "only wished that the Christmas bombings were nuclear" and that "JFK got what was coming", and had recordings of these played to "watch the Klan fucker squirm".
Reagan he dealt with by repeatedly questioning "so Reagan, you mind telling me what kind of Hollywood magic you plan to use to increase military and police spending while cutting taxes and slashing the budget? Because it looks to me like you're advocating for borrowing money until we have to sell the White House back to the Franco-British Union or take loans from the Reds or god forbid; the Krauts and Tokyo" while also citing off his planned lists of interventions, ruthlessly staying on point on asking Reagan how he intended to pay for any of it.
He also produced copies of the history of the UASR and read aloud the passages where the austerity measures imposed by the Republicans in response to the depression, repealing and rolling back hard won concessions to the working class, lead to the Communist Party going from "a reformist pressure group to a party large enough for a constitutional convention and angry enough to revolt when the conservatives tried to just kill their way out of the hole they made". His point in essence, being that Reagan's hopes for defeating Communism and Radical labour by proving them right about what the American elite when they were already a permanent fixture of politics would do to them would only end in "you being the little tinpot king of Puerto Rico."
He also cited that "you can hate welfare and economic planning all you want but managed economies have outgrown ours and half measures haven't dug us out of this hole" while also attacking Reagan's amorphous politics, fluidic coalition composition of whomever had his ear, "interesting" list of donors, and "a foreign policy built on the assumption that we can do whatever we like, but will never get hit back for it" before attacking his avoidance of combat duties in the second world war to decry him as a chickenhawk. A tack that the other candidates soon followed up on, though Reagan's witticisms ensured he was never entirely a verbal punching bag, and the naked contempt he had for Stoner and Yockey to the point of "I would honestly rather have President Satan with the Beast of revelations himself as a running mate than vote for you because at least they won't have the audacity to tell me that genocide is good" going down in television history as a putdown directed at Yockey.
Smith he had more respect for, the two debating at length about the role America needed to play abroad, particularly whether as a leader of the free world or as a partner, and where America needed a firm hand and where it was better off working indirectly. Many said that it was a debate mostly of agreeing loudly while yelling at Reagan and the "three stooges" of Stoner, Yockey, and Shelton to shut up whenever they butted in with some inane non-point. The "three ladies" of Vaughn, Rothstein, and Carson were treated with more respect, though not by Reagan. While there were questions of their naivete, Johnson and Smith had come to see them as well meaning and that they needed to be listened to at least somewhat if America was to avoid being devoured by the problems that felled its alter.
Of course, the six smaller candidates couldn't really compete at the same level as the three major coalitions in terms of ad space and campaign funds, and most of the "three stooges" were under serious investigation by the FBI with Shelton even being arrested and Yockey and Stoner both being taken in for questioning regarding funds that the Secret Service determined had come from states currently under embargo such as Dominica and Germany. Reagan was attacked by both the NPP and the RDC for his "fairy tale economics" and "fundamentally nonserious approach to hard questions of budget, poverty, and growth" as well as his general noncommittal to any coherent stance on civil rights as well as the fact that the ALA had in fact, allowed the National Vanguard into its ranks.
The competition between Smith and Johnson was much more even, and Johnson would privately admit "had she not been a woman in a less than enlightened country I'd be seriously concerned at the possibility of deadlock" before at last election day came with LBJ being declared the winner at having achieved the majority of votes in the three-horse race.
His victory speech accepted the gracious concession of Smith, the "smiling for the camera" concession of Reagan, and the "glad to even be here" concession of the Three Ladies while Johnson joked about being happy to see "the three stooges" being absent. He declared that now would be an end to the long darkness, and that at long last the United States of America would return to its proper place in history, and that the spirit of international cooperation and justice that had defeated the Nazis in one world would be repeated here and that now would be the beginning of the end of poverty and homelessness and a new phase of "our Democratic Republic."
He declared that the ideology that had torn through the country for the past two years would be banished forever from its shores, for no American would ever be so wanting as to need to look for someone to blame. And the long withheld promise that "all men are created equal" would at long last be fulfilled in letter and spirit, without terms or conditions. He expressed hope that "with our inclusion into the United Nations, and with the bringing together of the OFN and AFS, that we can create the world that would truly be safe for democracy and that one day soon, we may live to see a world without the form of government of fascist autocracy and reactionary despotates."
LBJ Cabinet
President: Lyndon Baines Johnson
Vice President: Edmund Muskie
Secretary of State: Henry Kissinger
Secretary of Defence: Arleigh Burke
Secretary of War: William Winter
Secretary of the Army: Henry Mucci
Secretary of the Navy: Henry A Schaede
Secretary of the Air Force: Gordo Saville
Secretary of the Treasury: Henry Fowler
Secretary of Housing and Development: Jane Jacobs
Secretary of Transportation: Alan Boyd
Secretary of Planning: Hubert Humphrey
Secretary of Education: Maurine Neuberger
Secretary of Labor: Eugene McCarthy
Secretary of Welfare: Martin Luther King Jr
Secretary of Health: Alan Macy Butler
Secretary of Agriculture: Roswell Garst
Secretary of the Interior: Gaylord Nelson
Secretary of Commerce: Glen H Taylor
Secretary of Energy: Georges Charpak
Secretary of Civil Rights: Shirley Chisholm
Secretary of Media: Tony Schwarz
CIA Director: Edward Lansdale
FBI Director: J Edgar Hoover
Attorney General: Roger Nash Baldwin
Speaker of the House: Edna Kelly
President Pro-Tempore: Philip Hart
RDC Whip: Robert Kennnedy
Ambassador to the United Nations: Harry Truman
Civilian US Representative to the AFS-OFN: Jean Kirkpatrick
Military US Representative to the AFS-OFN: General Creighton Abrams
US Representative to the Entente Global Economic Development Organisation (EGEDO): James Roosevelt
*Constructed city in Zhongguo, meaning "Central Capital", to commemorate the formation of the Worker's Socialist Republic of China.
is it sad that, if this world continued into modern day, that I could see chuds and schmucks voting for the Rationalists to "own the Libbes". In other news, it was fun seeing LBJ slam Reagan and the three bootlickers (Yockey, Shelton and Stoner) and, at least for a world where the Axis somehow won, a 'realistic' election.
I know the whole point was to balance out the new Cuban states, but how the hell did they justify giving two senators each to Greenland, a place with a population around a tenth that of Wyoming, and the Panama Canal Zone with even less than that
I know the whole point was to balance out the new Cuban states, but how the hell did they justify giving two senators each to Greenland, a place with a population around a tenth that of Wyoming, and the Panama Canal Zone with even less than that
Kissinger sat with Harry Haywood with a relaxed poise, folding his hands his opposite reached for a mug of hot chocolate and took a long but understated sip. In the Cafes of DeLeon D.C, Haywood was a man who cast a deep shadow as the most decorated American commander of the European theatre of the World Revolutionary War, with a record rivalled only by Smedley Butler in the Pacific or Lau Sing Kee in South America. The Black Bolshevik was a tall and imposing man even in his older years, and looked through the papers handed to him by the Secretary of State through his reading glasses in the pale January sun; Nixon's Foreign Commissar turning a page with a practiced hand.
"Bold move I must say Henry, bringing me this intel." He said, looking at his rather younger counterpart from the other timeline with a hawk's gaze, as if studying him for any cracks in the facade while Kissinger offered a little smirk.
"You hate Nazis, I hate Nazis. It's the basis of a great relationship I'd say, especially when we have a shared interest in keeping Speer in check in Africa." He said, nonchalantly admitting to his overall goal.
"Deutsch...or I suppose you still call it German, Central Africa is a monument to murder. A lake built on the drowning of millions and a mercenary's playpen for plunderers and pirates." Haywood said without betraying any particular emotions but clearly seething internally. As one of the architects of the "Atlanta school" of diplomacy, African colonialism, particularly the sort where stretches of Africa were held directly under the a foreign colonial power instead of at the very least, the decency of a client state, were a particular sore spot for him.
"I couldn't agree more. Our reports in the region call it the second coming of King Leopold. The most depraved businessmen on earth let loose in a place where the only law is Reichsmarks and Bullets. You and I might have some differences, but I think we can agree on that having to stop, or at least for Muller's little Safariland to be a bit scarier for the hyenas he's set upon it." He said, taking a look at some of the documents handed to him by Haywood in the secured building, particularly MRD and GRU information on huge concentrations of Nazi soldiers amassing near South Africa.
He frowned, and part of him wished he was twenty years younger to put some bullets into the heart of the feldgrau uniformed troopers he was seeing on march in shorts or riding upon panzers.
"Your troops are about to get hit with more than a million of the Unity Pakt and Triumvirate's best." He said frankly.
"So soon after the Eurasian War?"
"They never really did stop their wartime reserve training programs, and their African Divisions remain untouched."
Kissinger drew his lips into a frown and shook his head. "Lyndon's not going to like to hear about this, especially that they managed to get the drop on us."
"With the way that Hackett's managing his troops it wouldn't have mattered. You can't prepare when your commander refuses to believe the threat is even real." Haywood replied frankly, having seen this in action all too often in his service in Eastern Europe. That got a nod out of Kissinger, he had seen it too, with how many people were willing to refuse to believe the nazis or the italians had ambitions in the Americas until Trujillo and Peron signed deals with Rome and Germania.
"I know you don't have the highest opinion of the South African government, but I'm gonna make a plea here for some cooperation on your end." Kissinger said after finishing off another sip of his coffee.
"The South African Union's made good concessions but I don't think they fully appreciate that the kind of people who run the Boer show are never going to be happy with anything less than complete power. Especially as they've stuffed their movement full of land-hungry settlers from Europe who make their living off of keeping half the blacks poor and half of them in their pockets." He added. He was no communist, but he appreciated the material interest focused view of the world, more rational, more logical than high and mighty idealism.
"I need the SAFers to get squeezed a bit until they learn to cut a better deal so that they can actually mobilise some support from the ANC and African rebels in Italian, Iberian, and German Africa. Voting rights aren't enough, we need land reform to get the people really crazy for the cause but Capetown won't give enough." He finished, noting that Haywood was nodding all the while.
"On that we are agreed. The Einheitspakt and the Triumvirate have most of the cards in the region, especially when Speer isn't going to just let you walk into his Reichskommissariats without sending a call to the boys at the luftwaffe, you're going to need sabotage behind the lines to weaken that." Haywood said, taking a look at some of the intelligence reports he'd been handed to earlier once again and scrutinising them.
"The Nazi domination of Africa is focused on the most valuable colonies; Namibia's Uranium mines and germanisibility, Tanzanian and Kenyan farmland, Congolese minerals and rubber, you get the idea, so let's focus on that. Where we can work most easily is Congo. Our side of the fence has a Congo in our camp, and Cameroon's next door. We can't topple RK Central Africa, but we can make a mess there." Haywood explained, bringing out a map of Africa on the Red May side of "the fence," as they called the boundary between timelines.
"We're of course going to need to ask for something in return. Yorubaland, Benin, and Ghana need to be recognised, and we will once again kindly ask for you to keep your nose out of our Vietam. The Empire is not your concern, especially if you want our continued understanding regarding the Vietminh in your Vietnam to last. We'd also appreciate if your department also normalises things with India and doesn't lose its head over Castro." He said flatly, though he raised a finger before Kissinger got in another word.
"We will however, work to maintain the popular front in Colombia, I understand that's a sore point, but we also want to keep the Gaitanistas on our side of the fence happy. We're also prepared to help put the Kaibosh on Fuentes in Guatemala and Arias in Panama and put a bit of a hole in Peron's "Union of Sovereign Latin Nations" plans as well as recognise your...integration of Cuba." He said, laying out some of his cards with a casual tone as if he knew it was a great hand from the get go.
"I can work with that." Henry nodded, thinking to himself and how he'd write up his report to LBJ regarding the progress made before he carried on.
"We'll also be happy to give preferential treatment to Palestine on your side over Mutti's Israel or Canaan or whatever he wants to call it on our side. You wouldn't believe the number of people I had to deal with who think Speer and Mutti's big ceremony over it is proof they've turned a new leaf." He said, almost bitt in his second sentence.
"You don't think Speer is genuine?" Haywood smirked.
"Hell no, you don't get to be Hitler's best pal by not agreeing with him on half of everything, and I feel like some of Congress has forgotten that he wrote up the reintroduction of slave labour to Europe. And Mutti?" Kissinger almost looked like he stepped in something.
"The guy just wants his little Fiume Faire on a place that Italy considered a pain in its ass anyway, nevermind that the guy's an unhinged warmonger. The guy hears of how hard things that fall from space hit the ground and starts babbling about putting tungsten rod satellites over our heads." He scoffed, shaking his head.
"Agreed, which is why comrade Boggs gave her enthusiastic veto to Schmidt's attempt at getting his foot into the UN." He said with pride at the SIno-American delegate to the UN's lack of hesitancy in ensuring that the Nazis never set foot in Kabul, Paris, or Metropolis.
"Ah the United Nations, neat project. Maybe Harry's gonna get some use out of the Veto." He said, almost grimly chortling at the thought of the ancient Missouri machine product trying to live his dream of high office at the UNSC.
"Personally finding a tiebreaker for the security council now that we've got India, yourselves, and Brazil on board is going to be a pebble in my shoe." He grumbled before Kissinger gave it a thought and then looked over at Haywood, and one could almost imagine the light bulb over his head flicking on.
"Why not Japan? Look I know they're bastards, but they're predictable ones who want a neat little working world system, it's not like Germany or Italy where they're still looking to paint the map. And you've said that the Japanese here aren't quite as kooky as the ones you knew." He said, noting the raised eyebrow from Haywood in response.
"The global imperialist hegemon of your world? That Japan?" He said.
"Harry, I know It'll be a hard sell I know, but if we can find some split between Tokyo and Berlin we could make it work. We just need something to dent Speer and Mutti's image and do some of Ikeda's laundry. It'll be a long term project mind you, but if we play our cards right we might get Tokyo to cool its heels too." He concluded while Haywood frowned.
"Hard sell is an understatement, Henry. You know that Zhongguo would be exceedingly hard to convince and that there are existing conflicts between the CPS and both of our spheres." He said, tapping his fingers on the table.
"I know how to sell myself to different parties to keep a policy going for a long while, and to be honest I don't think Johnson's gonna stick with just two terms if he can help it. I'm willing to keep this project up well into the next decade, but I think it'll be worth it for a world where Speer eats shit." He said, getting a belly laugh out of Haywood in return.
"Now whatever my reservations are, Speer getting acquainted with the Pavement is something I'd like to see." He smirked.
Like both @Imag3HQ and @dex10awesome said, the fact that you made me actually stomach and enjoy Kissinger being alive is impressive Spartakrod. The fact that New Order Japan is maybe going to have to be a tie breaker infuriates me greatly, mainly the unending hate I feel towards the entire system they have set up, but I can see the logic and imagining the jackboot goosesteppers and Speers 'reformists' getting fucked over does make me happy. Shame might what happens to the Gang of Four, the only good path in Kraut land. All in all, this plus the election in America thread we're great
I mean most of the time if I heard that Kissinger plans to withold information to a allied country in order to cause more damage to their war effort and make them more siceptible to the USA I would say it's completely evil but considering it's white South Africans who refuse to do anymore than the bare minimum of not being rascist I'm having a hard time complaining.
I mean most of the time if I heard that Kissinger plans to withold information to a allied country in order to cause more damage to their war effort and make them more siceptible to the USA I would say it's completely evil but considering it's white South Africans who refuse to do anymore than the bare minimum of not being rascist I'm having a hard time complaining.
I mean, the impression I'm getting from the conversations is that they are sharing that info, the CinC for the African conflict just isn't listening...
Which should really prompt the Anglo-French Union's government to step in and reign him, but I'm getting the impression this whole thing has developed into a "MacArthur, the 38th Parallel, and the Yalu" type of situation.
I mean, the impression I'm getting from the conversations is that they are sharing that info, the CinC for the African conflict just isn't listening...
Which should really prompt the Anglo-French Union's government to step in and reign him, but I'm getting the impression this whole thing has developed into a "MacArthur, the 38th Parallel, and the Yalu" type of situation.
Hackett believes that the German army is essentially finished after the Eurasian War and is letting his biases from his own timeline colour his perception of German prioritisation of a presence in Africa. Whereas in Reds! Hitler generally agreed that Africa was more the domain of Mussolini and that Germany's destiny was more towards a conquest of Northern Eurasia and an eventual conquest and partition of the UASR, the African RKs are considered of tremendous value to the Reich of TNO as they provide everything from luxury agricultural goods to precious minerals to cheap uranium and cobalt as well as the prestige of accomplishing the dream of German Mittelafrika where the Kaiserreich could not.
Plus, the last time there was a colonial conflict with Germany over Africa it was a cakewalk, with all German colonies in WW1 falling in pretty short order followed by chasing around some guerillas.
Of course, they're not the same Germany, this isn't the same war, and the Arikaschild troops are some of Germany's best, specifically trained and readied for slugfest or bullrushes into the African territories of rivals os well as overwhelming Cameroon and South Africa, whereas the Russian border had most of its strength stripped out after the west Russian war because surely the Russians couldn't come back for round four right? May as well move their high-quality troops to the borders with the Triumvirate and to other sphere of influence friction zones.
Plus, Hackett's the guy who lead the Peacekeepers to fight the Revolutionary International Volunteer Red Army to a standstill in the Horn of Africa (with extensive support from Egypt and Arabia mind you) in the prior decade and successfully swept out the Mau-Mau, he clearly knows what he's doing right?
