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by Sudbrazil » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:53 am
by New yugoslavaia » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:59 am
by Nazeroth » Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:57 am
by Bolslania » Wed Sep 23, 2020 1:11 pm
Nazeroth wrote:im considering a Neo-Pagan Iceland(it has the largest growing population of pagans and maybe a dramatic shift could have happend.)
or maybe a new right-wing spain trying to re-influence some former colonies.
by Sarderia » Thu Sep 24, 2020 11:46 pm
by Plzen » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:16 am
Sarderia wrote:RESERVATION
Name of state/organisation: Republic of Turkey
Territory reserved: Turkey proper, Cyprus, Aegean Islands (except Crete and the Cyclades), Azerbajian
by Reverend Norv » Fri Sep 25, 2020 7:19 am
by Plzen » Fri Sep 25, 2020 8:55 am
Reverend Norv wrote:-snip-
by Bolslania » Fri Sep 25, 2020 10:42 am
Plzen wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:-snip-
Reservation noted. As long as I see a draft that clearly had effort put into it in 24 hours, I’m willing to let you hold the spot for longer. The short reservation duration is there just to discourage people who tag RPs and then never follow up on them.
The United States remains the heart of western civilisation, but western civilisation is no longer the heart of the world...!
by Reverend Norv » Fri Sep 25, 2020 5:03 pm
by Reverend Norv » Sun Sep 27, 2020 2:33 pm
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Federal Presidential Constitutional Republic with a Conservative Outlook
[with Arcadian influences and powerful neutral institutions]
History Since 1945"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln, 1838
It was only with a century of hindsight that historians would recognize the seventy years after 1945 as the Pax Americana. Despite the tensions of the Cold War and then the War on Terror, despite the varied and frequently unsuccessful military adventures of the United States, those seventy years witnessed an extraordinary triumph: for the first and last time in history, most of the world's nations were mixed-market democracies. American media was more globally dominant than any cultural product in history. Norms of human rights and self-determination forged - if not always respected - in the United States were the explicit foundation of every global institution. Even as China began its rise, the US remained the wealthiest society in human history - a prosperity purchased at the price of global climate change, one of the two forces that would ultimately bring the Pax Americana to an end. The other force that proved deadly to the American Century was, ironically, the ultimate incarnation of American power and American values: the free and open internet.
The peril of this new technology first became apparent in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump. Historians agree that the four years of the Trump Administration were among the most significant in American history. Trump shattered American prestige abroad, and undermined an entire global order predicated on American security guarantees and support for democratic governments. And at home, Trump's unprecedented undermining of the legitimacy of American democratic institutions paved the way for the next fifty years of deepening chaos - and, ultimately, for the Reckoning.
Trump's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic sealed his fate in the 2020 elections. After the Supreme Court refused to halt the counting of mail-in ballots in four states, Joseph Biden was inaugurated as president. Although Trump never accepted Biden's legitimacy and continued to amplify damaging misinformation through the Trump News Network, Biden was fairly effective: he passed major climate and infrastructure bills - neither of which would prove sufficient to the coming crisis - and admitted the District of Columbia as the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. But white supremacist terrorism continued to dog the country, and the Biden Administration struggled to spur recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic - a struggle made harder by the refusal of millions of Americans to accept the COVID vaccine.
As a result, Biden was defeated in the 2024 elections by none other than Donald Trump, who remained the overwhelming choice of the Republican Party. To Biden's credit, this would be the last presidential election for fifty years in which the loser accepted the result without reservation. Trump's second term marked the complete collapse of the global position of the US. After Polish forces engaged in a series of firefights with Russian troops, Trump refused to guarantee American support for the U.S.'s allies in Eastern Europe; NATO collapsed by 2027. At home, thwarted in his most authoritarian ambitions by an already-conservative Supreme Court, Trump expanded the court with five new justices of his own choosing. Governors in New York, California, and Illinois began openly discussing their potential authority to nullify federal law.
The true danger in which the US found itself was revealed for the first time in the Crisis of 2028. With the president in ailing health but resistant to all expert advice, the US did even less to contain the SARS-28 pandemic than it had eight years earlier in responding to COVID-19. Half a million Americans died. The East Coast experienced its first true megatsunami, causing $200 billion in property damage and all but annihilating Atlantic City, New Jersey. And the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, Jr., was assassinated in Raleigh, North Carolina: setting off a wave of political violence in North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona that left thousands dead.
In the end, moderates within both parties secured a desperate but successful response: they overrode the normal primary process by changing nominating rules at the conventions, and selected a "unity ticket" of Democrat Steve Bullock and Republican Larry Hogan. Bullock would serve as Hogan's vice president for the ticket's first term, and then they would switch roles before running for reelection. Activists in both parties denounced the arrangement as an elitist sham, and threatened to reject the result. But the unity ticket won an overwhelming Electoral College landslide, and violence petered out.
The Bullock-Hogan government, strange as it was, served adequately for eight years - easily winning reelection in 2032. It briefly restored a minimum of comity and functionality to Washington, albeit that this feeling was not shared among political partisans outside the Beltway. It orchestrated a major shift toward natural gas and nuclear power in American energy production, and successfully deterred Chinese aggression in Vietnam. Its most consequential achievements were the Armstrong Project - which would culminate in Armstrong Station, the first permanent human settlement on the Moon - and the 28th Amendment, which ended court-packing by fixing the size of the Supreme Court at fifteen justices: five chosen by each of the two largest parties in Congress, with the remaining five serving shorter terms and chosen by unanimous vote of the existing members, so as to be acceptable to both parties. The "Buttigieg Plan," named after Bullock's Secretary of State, survived intact until the 2070 Constitution.
The plan also helped make Pete Buttigieg the next President of the United States in 2036, sixteen years after his first run. While Buttigieg ran as a Democrat, he was widely regarded as a successor to the Bullock-Hogan unity government; as such, he was opposed by strong partisans on both sides but supported by a decisive majority of the country. His election was denounced as a corrupt bargain, and greeted with protests but not with serious violence. Buttigieg's one-term presidency proved a catastrophic failure, though largely due to circumstances beyond his control. A Chinese-backed coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo provoked an escalating American response that ended with sixty thousand troops committed to a bloody jungle war. Desertification in Mexico and northern Central America provoked crop failure and an unprecedented influx of migrants: roughly one million in eighteen months. White nationalist groups warned of an irreversible invasion, and began firing on migrants at the border. The same desertification created a long-foreseen calamity: the Colorado River finally ran dry, cutting off water to much of the American Southwest. As Los Angeles struggled to ration what water remained, agriculture across California ground to a halt. For the first time since the 1930s, thousands of Americans starved to death in what could only be described as a famine.
The result was the collapse of the bipartisan "government of national unity" that had held since the Crisis of 2028. In 2040, both parties reverted to grassroots primary processes dominated by committed partisans: men and women who had spent the last twelve years exposed to online extremism rather than to the Bullock-Hogan-Buttigieg Beltway consensus. By requiring the governor of Pennsylvania to count 15,000 absentee ballots, the Supreme Court handed the election to Democrat Rachel Harkins: the first female president of the United States, and a far more committed progressive than President Buttigieg.
But Harkins' tenure, like Buttigieg's, was overwhelmed by America's accelerating slide toward the Reckoning. Millions of conservative voters rejected the result of the election, and registered their outrage by refusing to file their taxes. The outbreak of the Persian Gulf Conflict drew the U.S. into a proxy war with Iran that absorbed steadily more and more money. And when the nation's largest chemical plant suffered a catastrophic leak, the most lethal conspiracy theory in human history emerged: "Styrenocide," the idea that America's rising rates of chemical pollution and early-onset cancer were a deliberate attempt at white genocide by globalist elites. Styrenocide believers, united by an extensive online infrastructure, orchestrated attacks on minority neighborhoods in dozens of mid-sized cities, provoking the most intense racial unrest since 2020 and requiring the deployment of the National Guard across the nation. Harkins' reelection in 2044 - again litigated at the Supreme Court - provoked such intense conspiracist unrest that most Americans experienced martial law at some point during 2045. Harkins' repeated attempts to address America's calamitous income inequality all failed to win congressional support, leaving the country more economically stratified than any other developed nation. After eight years, her only major achievements were a successful bill granting statehood to Puerto Rico, and a desalinization initiative that restored California's agricultural sector to viability by providing enough purified seawater to replace the Colorado River.
In 2048, the American nationalist-conservative movement - exiled to the political wilderness since the Crisis of '28 - swept back into power. Like the Democrats, the Republicans had returned to a grassroots primary process, and the grassroots picked Billy Clark: an internet media star and former Trump campaign youth leader. Clark amplified, if never quite endorsed, Styrenocide and other conspiracy theories. He ran and governed on a simple platform: the country was clearly in rapid decline, and it was the fault of subversive elements at home, whose loyalty was to a globalist elite rather than to "true Americans." As desertification continued to drive refugee flows from Mexico and central America, Clark first deployed the military to the southern border - ignoring a Supreme Court order to desist - and then sent a hundred thousand troops into northern Mexico on "push-back" operations with orders to displace any "vagrants" from within 25 miles of the border. As the Border War raged on, Clark reopened dozens of American coal mines - closed since the Bullock-Hogan nuclearization initiative in the '30s - as a political stunt to outrage the environmentalist left. The environmentalists responded, for the first time, with violent terrorism: the reconstituted Earth Liberation Front bombed coal mines and company offices. Clark was reelected in 2052, but international observers declared the election essentially unfree: in swing states, most liberal areas had 80 percent fewer polling places than conservative precincts, and crowds of people waiting to vote were attacked by riot police. Clark's second term witnessed soaring inequality and corruption - Americans began to joke that BMV stood for "bribes for motor vehicles" - and Clark himself famously bought a mansion in Iceland as a backup plan in case the U.S. collapsed. At the same time, though, he set about a determined effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which would allow him to run for a third term. In the end, a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated the repeal effort, though not before six opposition members of Congress were jailed on various alleged drug crimes.
The repeal campaign led directly to the event that is often considered to mark the beginning of the Reckoning: the Year of the Three Presidents. In 2056, Democrat Julian Baxter ran against Republican Clara Grey. Billy Clark broke away from the Republican Party to found the America First Party, or AFP, and ran illegally for president as well. Federal courts barred Clark from the ballot in most states, which provoked AFP-led state legislatures to reject the official vote counts and certify their own results to the Electoral College. The result was that more than a dozen states submitted two, and sometimes three, competing electoral vote counts. All three candidates declared themselves duly elected, while Congress met in joint session for eight months and failed five times to pass a resolution certifying which set of electors was legitimate. Government ground to a halt; the food aid on which many Americans had relied since the Harkins administration evaporated; thousands starved in a man-made famine. Finally, on Congress's sixth attempted resolution, Baxter and Grey reached a compromise that swung enough Republican representatives behind the Democrat to establish an outcome: a Democratic-Republican Congress certified Julian Baxter as the winner of five key states, and the next President. The entire America First Party caucus in both the Senate and the House responded by walking out, renouncing the authority of the federal government.
Baxter was a victim of events. He had already lost almost a year of his term to the Year of the Three Presidents. Now he was obliged to govern with a Congress in which a third of the seats were empty. Dozens of special elections to replace the absent Clarkists were met with active violence: right-wing radicals and conspiracist militias threatened that anyone who voted to fill the empty seats would be shot. Congress would not sit at full strength again until 2088, more than two decades and half a million deaths later. Stymied, Baxter resorted increasingly to brute force. Billy Clark was indicted for corruption and died in prison, leading most nationalists to assume that he had been murdered. The rump Congress passed an act banning armed political militias, which merely provoked a frenzy of arms-stockpiling by both America First and the Earth Liberation Front. In 2060, North America suffered its worst year of drought ever - known to this day as the Red Summer, due to wildfires that turned skies over much of the country crimson - and Baxter imposed the U.S.'s first nationwide rationing scheme for food. Styrenocide believers pointed to the rationing as the globalists' final system for gradual white extermination. Conditions were even worse south of the border, whence millions of refugees poured north in unprecedented numbers. In an act that would later win him the Nobel Peace Prize, Baxter temporarily opened the border. The conspiracists regarded this as confirmation of their worst fears.
Julian Baxter was driven from power in November 2060, though historians generally don't consider the transition an election. The America First Party - now led by Eric Wexler, a former Clark spokesman, open Styrenocide believer, and self-described "man of the people, not the law" - staged seven coups d'état in swing states where it controlled the governorships, jailing Democratic-Republican state legislators and replacing them with unelected nationalists who certified an America First victory to the electoral college. To this day, the legitimate vote totals of the 2060 election are unknown. Desperate to avoid another Year of the Three Presidents, and the looming likelihood of open civil war, Congress accepted the fraudulent count and Wexler was inaugurated.
Wexler immediately proved his critics' worst fears justified; his inauguration is another popular date for the beginning of the Reckoning. He imposed a loyalty test for key military officers, federal law enforcement officials, and civil servants - firing hundreds and replacing them with regime loyalists. When the dismissed officials appealed to the Supreme Court, Wexler arrested nine out of the fifteen justices on ludicrous charges of child sex trafficking. He then arrested Julian Baxter and sixty-four Democratic and Republican members of Congress on treason charges. Rachel Harkins, now in her seventies, fled to Canada. New sedition laws gave the FBI extensive latitude to punish any kind of "disloyal expression." Forced-labor camps appeared in the southern Nebraska badlands, and began steadily to fill with academics, journalists, activists, and former civil servants. The Earth Liberation Front stepped up its attacks, and in 2064 - after a near-miss bombing of a nuclear power plant that many suspect was a Wexlerite false flag - Wexler declared that the "critical" security situation required the indefinite postponement of the 2064 election. More than a hundred million Americans boiled into the streets in protest, to be met by federal troops firing live ammunition, and eventually by helicopter gunship strafing runs. Protesters armed themselves with whatever weapons they could find, as sympathetic mayors and governors opened National Guard armories to the crowds. Under a plethora of revolutionary symbolism - from the Betsy Ross flag to the hammer-and-sickle - and an equivalent plethora of ideologies, the Resistance emerged. The Reckoning had finally arrived.
By 2067, the breakdown of order was nearly complete. Close to half the National Guard defected to the Resistance. Wexler instituted a draft and replaced the mutineers with conspiracist militias, which began staging pogroms in minority neighborhoods. Most of the professional army remained loyal to the regime, and swiftly drove the Resistance underground in most urban areas, but then found itself mired in an insurgency of bomb and sniper attacks that killed dozens of troops per day. Some Army units responded with a systematic campaign of abduction and torture, trying to terrorize communities into submission. Checkpoints and lockdowns so disrupted interstate commerce that most of the nation soon began to experience critical shortages of food and medicine. The Earth Liberation Front, which never quite assimilated to the mainstream Resistance, continued attacks on energy infrastructure, cutting power to hundreds of millions of Americans. While most Americans steered clear of the war and tried to go on with their day-to-day lives, society was crumbling around them.
In October 2067, a group of senior military officers known as the Cincinnatus Association staged a coup in Washington, D.C., and removed Wexler from power. Most were not constitutionalists or democrats - those officers had long since been purged - but they were pragmatic professionals. They were appalled by Wexler's continued purges of the Army's most talented officers, and they were aware that the regime was suffering mounting casualties without any sign of success in subduing the Resistance. Rather than continue in this futile endeavor, they arrested Wexler and his entire government, including most of the top civilian and military administration. The Cincinnati then established their own provisional government, composed of military officers, technocrats, and former leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties - many of whom first had to be released, grey and emaciated, from Badlands work camps.
In 2070, the Provisional Government held a Second Constitutional Convention in Detroit. The 2070 Convention ratified six amendments, which collectively served to empower technocrats of various kinds as a check on elected populists. Congress could authorize a state of emergency that gave expanded domestic powers to the military, it could merge states and place them under federal administration, and it could impose military government on areas in insurrection. But neither Congress nor the president would any longer be allowed to appoint or remove military officers, civilian administrators, or judges. The elected branches would have power over spending, but not over personnel. The military, administration, and judiciary - the so-called Establishment - would be effectively self-governing and insulated from political control, and so no politician would ever again have enough raw power to do what Wexler had done.
The coup, and then the 2070 Convention, achieved their initial goals: Wexler's fall largely pacified the Resistance. Most of the ordinary men and women who had taken up arms against Wexler were prepared to give the Provisional Government a chance; whatever its other flaws, it cracked down hard on right-wing militias and protected minority communities, and it was effective in restoring power and food stability - albeit through draconian rationing of both. The new Constitution confirmed the public's optimism: it promised a return to civilian rule, at least of a kind, with elections in 2074. But not all of the Resistance was so easily pacified: many liberal and libertarian activists remained in rebellion, declaring themselves the Army of the Constitution. The Constitutionalist movement - calling for an return to the pre-2070 constitution - was stronger politically than militarily; in addition to attacks on government and Wexlerite forces, it mounted a public campaign in defense of popular sovereignty and civil liberties through marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and online activism.
Between 2070 and 2074, the Reckoning developed into a bitter three-way insurgency, with America First, Earth Liberation Front, and Constitutionalist groups fighting each other and the Provisional Government. Atrocities were common on all sides: the ELF successfully destroyed a nuclear power plant in Colorado, creating the Pueblo Dead Zone. The Provisional army, for its part, gunned down two hundred unarmed Constitutionalist demonstrators in Philadelphia. America First militias systematically assassinated members of the Cincinnatus Association, whom they considered race traitors, and massacred ethnic minorities; a particularly horrific pogrom in Memphis even caused a temporary and unofficial alliance of government troops and Constitutionalist militia, who cooperated in hunting down the Wexlerites to a man.
By 2074, while violence remained widespread and brutal, it was clear that the Union was no longer at risk of dissolution by force: the Provisional Government was in control more or less everywhere, and was beginning to restore services like education and administration that had frequently collapsed in the chaos of the early fighting. Insurgent activity was often intense, but the various rebels could not seize or hold territory; they had to operate underground. As a result, the promised elections went forward - not without violence, but without catastrophe. The America First Party boycotted the process, continuing to advance its cause by force; the Greens participated, and won twelve seats in Congress, but refused to disband the Earth Liberation Front. But most of the power went to two brand-new parties: the Constitutional Party - which did disband the Army of the Constitution and commit to a political settlement - and the National Union Party, or NUP. Both were mostly composed of pre-Reckoning, middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans. The Constitutionalists still broadly supported the repeal or rollback of the 2070 Convention, while the NUP backed the new, more technocratic Constitution as necessary to political stability. But they fundamentally agreed on settling that question by political compromise, not by military force.
When the votes were counted - the 2070 Constitution had abolished the Electoral College and replaced it with a runoff system - no presidential candidate had a majority. The NUP and Constitutionalists agreed a compromise to avoid a runoff: the NUP's Elizabeth Perez would be President, with the Constitutionalists' Rev. William Booker as her Vice President, and with the Constitutionalists promised a key role in the budget - the main lever of power left in elected rather than technocratic hands. The first woman of color to occupy the White House, Perez would serve two terms, and is revered today as the "Savior of Her Country." She took full advantage of the expanded federal powers granted her under the 2070 Constitution. When the 2077 East Coast Megatsunami destroyed much of New York City, Perez removed the Boston-to-Washington urban corridor from state authority and placed it under the Acela Emergency Management Administration, with orders to stormproof the urban East Coast. That enormous undertaking turned into a national jobs guarantee: anyone who needed work could report to an AEMA office, take the next bus to the East, and labor alongside tens of millions of others to build the gigantic seawalls that would hold back the next tsunami. Likewise, most of the former Great Plains were reorganized under the Heartland Recovery Administration, which funded (and mandated) drip irrigation and water reuse systems that let the desert grow dates, melons, sorghum, and other drought-resistant crops.
Even as Perez began America's rebuilding, she was guiding the Reckoning to its bloody close. While the Constitutionalists had traded the bullet for the ballot, America First and Earth Liberation Front forces remained extremely active in 2075. Perez prioritized the Wexlerites, an act that would have long repercussions. State governments in the South and Mountain West, where America First attacks continued to kill dozens per day, were dissolved, and Perez placed the regions under five military districts. The rag-tag federal forces - Constitutionalist militias who had rallied in '74, Resistance militias and National Guard who had rallied in '67, and regular troops who had served the government both before and after the '67 coup - began finally to cohere into integrated, battle-hardened divisions. Invoking the 2070 Constitution's state of emergency, Perez created the Federal Internal Security Taskforce, or FIST: a new agency composed of military intelligence officers, agents of the federal intelligence agencies and FBI, and former Resistance and Constitutionalist militia leaders. The agency's unaccountable and ruthless operations cost Perez the support of the Constitutionalist Party, and her majority in Congress. But in a sign that the Reckoning was waning, the Constitutionalists went into political opposition and not back into armed resistance, and they accepted Perez's reelection in 2078 - a landslide secured by the success of the recovery administrations in the Midwest and the Acela Corridor.
By halfway through her second term, Perez had brought the Reckoning to a close at last. FIST made tens of thousands of arrests, disrupting America First's underground network so badly that the nationalists resorted to pitched battle in an effort to secure safe havens in Texas and Arkansas. They failed; federal forces inflicted thousands of casualties in 2079, killing most of the key America First leaders and seizing crucial supply and arms depots. By the end of 2080, nationalist attacks had declined to one or two per month, with casualties for the year under 100. Perez declared a general amnesty, which an overwhelming majority of America First fighters accepted. Only the Earth Liberation Front remained in active insurgency, and its operations dwindled away under pressure from the Green Party not to discredit the environmentalist cause with violence. As a shaky peace returned, Perez leveraged her close and cooperative relationships with the autonomous military, administration, and judiciary: she convinced the Establishment to establish meritocratic recruitment policies that aligned with Perez's new guarantee of tuition-free higher education. America's new technocratic elite would be far more open to talent than its old socioeconomic elite.
In 2082, Elizabeth Perez, like George Washington before her, relinquished power at the height of her popularity and retired to her North Carolina hometown. William Booker, her former Vice President and the leading Constitutionalist, was elected in a process carefully monitored by the new Establishment civil service. As the NUP willingly handed over power to the Constitutionalists, the Republic celebrated its first genuinely successful election in almost a century: free, peaceful, and accepted as legitimate by all parties.
Booker, if less revered than Perez, would go on to become even better loved. The central theme of his two terms was national reconciliation and rebuilding. He continued the recovery administrations in the Midwest and East Coast, with their massive agricultural and stormproofing public works. He directed billions in federal funds to public universities. Income inequality began to shrink, albeit only slightly, for the first time since the 1990s - though Booker failed to regulate genetic therapies and modification, with the result that health inequality continued to expand.
Most importantly - and with key support from the Establishment - Booker founded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission solicited testimony and documented wrongdoing not just from the Reckoning, but from the centuries that had preceded it: through this process, the U.S. finally came to a collective consensus about its history of slavery, Jim Crow, and native genocide. After a century of online conspiracy theories, the Truth and Reconciliation process restored a shared reality, a common belief in certain vital truths and historical facts, that was essential for democratic government. On the Commission's recommendation, Congress finally approved reparations for slavery; for the first time in U.S. history, the racial wealth gap began to shrink substantially. The Commission approved reparations, too, for the tens of millions who had died of causes related to chemical pollution: an olive branch to Styrenocide conspiracists. In the 2082 midterms, for the first time, the America First Party ran a slate of candidates, and won a modest number of House seats in Appalachian districts. The nationalists' decision to lay down their arms and reenter the political process marked the final end of the Reckoning.
In a myriad of crucial ways, Booker also rebuilt American prestige abroad. China, having been the world's sole true superpower during the twenty years of the Reckoning, was suddenly confronted by an America that seemed young again: ambitious, idealistic, energetic, creative. Booker admitted two hundred thousand refugees per year, from all over the world, each year of his presidency. He deployed the U.S. Navy to piracy hotspots around the world, restoring its role as a guarantor of world trade. He even completed the Guam Arcology: a state-of-the-art fortress in the West Pacific that Eric Wexler had founded as a vanity project and stronghold against China. Booker noted how appropriate it was that the Arcology would finally be finished by a black pastor whom Wexler once had tortured.
William Booker died in office in 2088. All of America mourned; even the nationalists who had bitterly protested his Truth and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged, in retrospect, that the Reverend Booker had made it possible for Americans to trust each other again - for the first time in generations. Booker was succeeded by his Vice President, Priya Varna: a former Constitutionalist militia commander who maintained deep ties to the Establishment even as she sought to roll back its independence. Varna's two-year term was consumed by a single, ultimately successful defense project: the redirection of resources from the massive army that had been required during the Reckoning, toward air, naval, space, and cyber innovation. As more than half a million veterans of the Reckoning finally demobilized, they found jobs waiting for them in factories producing cutting-edge aircraft, warships, avionics, radars, and munitions. Varna rebuilt American high-tech military power while simultaneously demilitarizing American society. Abroad, she put that smaller, high-tech military to work: she reestablished U.S. bases in East Africa in exchange for food aid supplied by the Heartland Recovery Administration, and successfully faced down the Chinese Navy in the 2089 Zanzibar Crisis, confirming the return of the United States as a global superpower. A few months later, she was among the first signatories to the Seoul Agreement prohibiting the use of coal worldwide.
Varna did make one major misstep: in the face of low-level but persistent terrorism by the Earth Liberation Front, she demanded that the Green Party disband its armed wing. The Greens refused, and for a few months before Election Day in 2090, the nation held its breath to see whether large-scale fighting would return. In the end, Varna suffered a heavy defeat at the polls by the National Union Party's Miriam Spinoza. Varna immediately accepted the result, and the nation celebrated its second peaceful transfer of power since the Reckoning. Spinoza - a former political prisoner who had served in the Provisional Government and the Perez cabinet - reached a compromise with the Greens: the Earth Liberation Front would be incorporated into the state police forces of states - Washington, Oregon, and Vermont - where the Green Party controlled the governorship. A hardline wing of the ELF rejected the Seattle Compromise, but environmentalist terrorism fell to an even lower level than before.
Spinoza enjoyed the most successful first term of any president since the Pax Americana. The 2092 Megatsunami struck the Acela Emergency Management Administration with full force, and for the first time the seawall prevented any catastrophic flooding or mass loss of life. Power was restored and life returned to normal within a few weeks: the national job guarantee, and its labor of fifteen years and seventy million workers, had finally borne fruit. When renewed crop failures in Central America threatened a major refugee influx - post-Reckoning America once again being an appealing place to which to flee - Spinoza deployed U.S. Marines to stabilize local conditions and distribute food, dealing with the refugee crisis at its source. At home, amid stabilizing crop yields and the growth of Priya Varna's military-industrial complex, Spinoza launched a major new initiative: the Federal Health Service, America's first true national healthcare system. Millions maimed or poisoned during the Reckoning flocked to the new clinics.
Spinoza survived a nationalist assassination attempt in 2093; the shooter's only justification was that she was a Jew. In a historic first, the America First Party leadership in Congress disavowed the attack. Sporadic attacks by hardline ELF supporters were met by FIST retaliation, in which - for the first time - Green Party state governors and formerly-ELF state police assisted. In a third sign that the scars of the Reckoning were beginning to fade, Spinoza abolished the First, Second, and Fourth Military Districts - restoring six states to the Union and leaving only Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Idaho under martial law. She decisively won reelection in 2094, and will be inaugurated in a few weeks. Like her country, she has stared into the abyss of totalitarianism and civil war, suffered torture and starvation - and returned stronger, clear-eyed and fire-hardened, to the world stage.
Economy"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937
The United States remains in economic recovery, with all that this entails. Economic growth is steady, and much higher than the rest of the developed world - though it is now beginning to slow. American business has adapted to the new global economy: less multinational and less stable, more oriented toward the immediate needs of domestic agriculture and industrial production. But recovery comes only after collapse, and the scars of that collapse are very real. Between 2040 and 2080, the U.S. suffered decades of depression, devastating natural disasters, prolonged double-digit unemployment, the consequences of a national-debt default, and finally civil war. If the American economy is rising swiftly, it is only because it had fallen far.
In many ways, the U.S. fundamentally remains a war economy, organized for maximum efficiency by a permanent civil service largely insulated from political pressure. That centralized economic planning was originally necessary to achieve food stability, a credible response to natural disasters, and victory in the Reckoning. It has continued, in large part, because the growing American economy is predicated upon the structure and support provided by the federal bureaucracy. The National Production Board (NPB) offers contracts for the megaprojects on the East Coast and Midwest that continue to employ millions, as well as for the military-industrial complex that generates almost thirty percent of U.S. GDP. This means that Board contract requirements for efficiency, reliability, and cost are de facto industry standards. The NPB also oversees a sophisticated rationing system for resources ranging from water to uranium, ensuring that diminishing stocks of raw materials are distributed in the public interest across the economy; no major company can exceed its acquisition ceiling for a particular resource. Likewise, the Office of Price Control regulates maximum and minimum prices of household goods to control inflation and protect living standards; the Emergency Manpower Commission regulates labor availability by expanding or contracting available jobs in public works projects; and the Financial Stabilization Bureau sets ceilings on stock dividends in order to incentivize investment in certain areas of the economy. Perhaps most crucially, the Emergency Labor Board regulates labor relations: the ELB allows (and, indeed, promotes) unionization of a workplace by a card-check without notifying the employer, and thereafter uses "maintenance-of-membership" rules to enroll any new workers into the union. As a result, the U.S. private sector is more than forty percent unionized.
It is much easier for big companies to afford the high labor costs of a unionized workforce and the administrative costs of complying with so much bureaucracy, and so the U.S. economy is dominated by a relatively small number of large corporations. But the careful regulatory framework of the Establishment offers those companies an exceptionally stable and predictable business environment. American capitalism may not be as creative or dynamic as once it was, but it is more socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable: the country's largest companies still make modestly more money each year than they did the last.
The public sector also plays a key role in the U.S. economy. The most obvious examples of this are America's two economic megaprojects, the Heartland Recovery Administration (HRA) and the Acela Emergency Management Administration (AEMA). The HRA directly owns all the water between the Mississippi River and the Continental Divide. It has used this power to set up public drip-irrigation and water reuse systems across the deserts and badlands that were once the Great Plains. It also provides seeds, loans, training, and equipment to any homesteader seeking to start a farm in the desert. In return for the HRA's water, all crops produced using that water must be sold at market value to the National Food Bureau. While some farmers grumble about 21st-century feudalism, the HRA has been extremely effective both at providing agricultural jobs and at stabilizing the food supply.
Likewise, the Acela Emergency Management Administration was founded at the end of the Reckoning to construct a gigantic floodwall around the Acela Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., with the goal of protecting 190 million Americans from megatsunamis. The floodwall became a national jobs guarantee: anyone looking for work could join AEMA and make minimum wage, plus free room and board, building the wall. Over fifteen years, AEMA employed seventy million workers and constructed a reinforced-concrete wall 70 feet high, 25 feet thick, and almost 700 miles long. Today, AEMA still employs about seven to ten million Americans at any moment in maintaining, expanding, repairing, and administering the Perez Wall, and it continues to offer a guarantee of work to any American who needs it, up to a cap set by the Emergency Manpower Commission.
The U.S. government also involves itself in the economy through the direct provision of public goods. The National Food Bureau provides a weekly food supply to every American, sourced out of the crops of the HRA. This Universal Basic Nutrition is (barely) sufficient to live on, but it's mostly sorghum grits and imitation beef, and most Americans heavily supplement it by shopping at grocery stores. But the system has reduced food insecurity in the U.S. below even the level of the Pax Americana. Likewise, the Emergency Housing Administration provides a "sweat equity" guarantee of housing: the government will build a house for anyone willing to contribute twenty hours of labor per week to its construction. When the house is finished, the recipient owns it (though not the land beneath it, which remains public property). Both programs, founded in order to address the mass starvation and displacement of the Reckoning, have since become essential to America's political and economic stability. They have made the U.S. substantially less economically unequal than most other nations: although the gap between rich and poor is vast, even the poorest Americans can own their own homes and put food on the table every night. And since 2083, reparations for slavery have provided every Black American with a small but important monthly basic income, with the result that the racial wealth gap has meaningfully shrunk for the first time in U.S. history.
The engine of the U.S. private sector is the military-industrial complex. As President Priya Varna gradually demobilized the vast numbers of troops who had fought in the Reckoning, she reinvested the defense budget into a sweeping campaign of military modernization - a campaign that also served to generate millions of jobs in the arms industry. Most major U.S. manufacturers now produce military as well as civilian goods, because the National Production Board's defense contracts are a reliable source of income whatever the state of consumer demand. Thus appliance companies produce microwaves and rifles, automakers produce electric sedans and armored fighting vehicles, aircraft companies produce airliners and fighter jets, and tech companies offer smartphones and cyberweapons. Since the National Production Board expects cutting-edge products, most major companies have invested heavily in research and development, which makes the U.S. economy more technologically innovative than its heavily regulated structure would suggest. Fed by first-rate universities, coordinated by the Office of Scientific Progress, and fueled by defense contracts, the U.S. technological sector is once again a powerhouse.
The high levels of public spending on which the U.S. economy relies are funded substantially by highly progressive income taxation. Among high earners, tax evasion is socially taboo after the Reckoning; many American elites spent time as refugees or political prisoners, and they understand the importance of contributing to a functioning society. Rates of individual and corporate tax compliance are thus quite high. But taxation covers only a portion of the nation's myriad recovery programs; the remainder is funded by debt. And since the U.S. default in 2065 destroyed the nation's international credit, the overwhelming majority of U.S. creditors are ordinary Americans, who have spent thirty-one years buying war bonds and then recovery bonds in order to fund their nation's future and their own retirement. This model of public debt has become essential to American culture and politics: to be an American citizen is to be a part-owner of the nation in a quite literal way, with one's own savings invested in its fortunes. As Elizabeth Perez put it, "Now we all sink or swim with the Republic."
Military"Our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other."
George C. Marshall, 1942
Once the most powerful armed force in human history, by 2070 the U.S. military had fallen far indeed. Technological stagnation, budget cuts, and foreign wars of attrition afflicted it from the 2040s on, leaving it less battle-ready than its Chinese competitor. Then Eric Wexler's political purges of the officer corps dealt a heavy blow to institutional memory, and the bloodshed of the Reckoning left little of the old military behind: too many old comrades took up arms against each other. What emerged from the Reckoning was something new: an enormous army of popular mobilization, composed of pro-democracy militias as much as of soldiers. That new American military had learned to fight without qualitative advantages of technology and training, and it had earned through heavy losses a level of combat experience unsurpassed in the 21st century. It never assumed its own superiority, or pretended that technology could substitute for fighting spirit and a willingness to accept casualties; it was an army not of career professionals, but of citizens fighting for their homes. For the U.S. military, the fifteen years since the Reckoning have witnessed a delicate and still unfinished transformation: the transition back to a smaller, more technologically advanced, more professional force - without losing the battlefield lessons and spirit of the citizen-army that saved the Republic.
That transformation has been most fraught for the U.S. ground forces - the Army and Marine Corps. Though greatly assisted by the revival of the cutting-edge American military-industrial complex, the transition remains only partially complete. Most senior officers remain veterans of the Reckoning, and the two services are divided by political animosity: while much of the modern Army is descended from Resistance militias or rebellious National Guard units, the Marines remained loyal to the Wexler regime until the 2067 military coup, when most of them transferred their loyalty to the Cincinnati and the Provisional Government. Army officers therefore regard the Marines' loyalty to the Constitution as suspect. These divisions are mirrored among career NCOs, many of whom are also battle-hardened veterans of the Reckoning who chose to stay in uniform after the transition to an all-volunteer force. But more junior officers and enlisted personnel mostly entered the service since that transition, and so hold fewer grudges. The upside of having so many senior leaders and NCOs who survived the Reckoning is that, while they may be mutually suspicious, the Army and Marines both retain an extraordinary depth of institutional knowledge about actual combat. They are veteran fighting forces who know their business.
That business has changed, though, as the mass army of the Reckoning has been replaced by a smaller and more advanced force. U.S. troops have grown more specialized and more highly-trained. Gone are the huge infantry divisions mounted in old JLTVs; they have been replaced by smaller, integrated combat teams that emphasize combined-arms tactics. At the battalion and even company level, new technology has been integrated: armed drones, self-driving and self-targeting infantry fighting vehicles, railgun-armed battle tanks. Training and equipment both emphasize instantaneous wireless communications between every battlefield asset, constructing a three-dimensional battlespace map that "clears the fog of war" - allowing every unit to see everything that every other unit can see. While this basic approach is common to all U.S. ground forces, the Army and Marines each retain some peculiarities. The Army has invested substantial resources in the study of irregular warfare; many of its generals, after all, got their start as insurgent militia leaders. Army Special Forces remain expert both in organizing and in combating insurgency. And the Marines have returned to their amphibious roots, reorganizing entirely into small, combined-arms, self-contained expeditionary forces that can be rapidly deployed to crises anywhere in the world.
The revival of the U.S. Navy and Air Force has been another major project of the last 25 years, and in some ways a more daunting one; those services were largely spared the crucible of the Reckoning, and so do not have the same vast reservoir of recent combat experience from which to learn. Their reconstruction after years of neglect has been the single greatest objective of the reborn U.S. military-industrial complex. The results have been uneven. Because they have been rebuilt almost from scratch with cutting-edge ships, aircraft, avionics, computers, and munitions, the U.S. Navy and Air Force are substantially more technologically advanced than their Chinese counterparts. But because this rebuilding is a gradual and expensive process that has yet to reach completion, the Air Force and Navy are also much smaller than their Chinese equivalents; the Navy is at two-thirds of its planned final size, and the Air Force is at closer to half. The U.S. also has not fought a true naval or air battle since the 2040s; while naval and air thinkers have innovated new doctrines, those ideas remain untested by combat. Much of the Air Force and Navy officer corps is deeply inexperienced, and not all personnel fully understand the capabilities of the new technology with which they have been entrusted. Despite all of this, the reach of the U.S. Navy remains global, with bases scattered across all five oceans and dozens of active antipiracy operations. And the qualitative edge of U.S. naval and air technology, even hampered by untested doctrine and inexperienced personnel, was enough to convince a Chinese fleet to back down at the Zanzibar Crisis of 2089.
Finally, the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Cyber Force have emerged from the post-Reckoning military reforms as unqualified success stories. Cyber operations were an important part of the Reckoning, with forces on all sides relying on propaganda operations and direct cyberattacks. The modern Cyber Force thus has its own vast body of real-world experience on which to draw, and it is a success story of political integration: senior officers once fought for the Wexler regime, the Resistance, the Provisional Government, Constitutionalist militias, and even America First and the Earth Liberation Front. Today, it recruits directly from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the National Technological University, and it is widely acknowledged as a world-class cyberoperations outfit. Likewise, the Space Force has benefitted from lavish congressional funding and close ties to key universities. It has been entrusted with all U.S. space operations, including exploration and resource extraction; as National Production Board industrial rationing becomes gradually stricter year by year, the U.S. has wagered much on the Space Force's race to innovate new cost-effective asteroid mining operations. Because ICBMs travel through space, the Space Force is also responsible for most of the U.S. nuclear deterrent: a far smaller arsenal than that of China, but mounted on brand-new hypersonic, AI-guided missiles that may be superior to Chinese missile-defense AI. In 2094, the Space Force demonstrated the ability to destroy an asteroid with such a missile from 3 million miles away: a rare bit of good news for humanity, meaning that for the first time the planet need not fear a catastrophic impact event.
REQUIEM 2095; an application
by Plzen » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:01 pm
by Reverend Norv » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:07 pm
Plzen wrote:I like it. A country forced to reinvent herself under pressure. The scars still run deep and recovery will still be a long road, but a couple of lucky decades to catch its breath and the United States will emerge, if not necessary stronger, then at least freer and more just than ever before.
Whether the imploding world will provide the necessary time and space is quite another matter, of course.
I’ll hold your reservation for as long as you need to finish your application.
by Plzen » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:32 pm
by Reverend Norv » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:39 pm
Plzen wrote:I'll wait for, oh, another week for someone to put up an application for China, and if nobody does I'll put one up myself. 5 players is a far more modest participation than I had initially hoped for, but I think that would be enough to launch the IC.
In foreign affairs China may be the dominant global hegemon, its superiority recognised by all, but within the shadows of its closed society it faces an endless litany of social, political, and economic problems...
by New yugoslavaia » Sun Sep 27, 2020 11:39 pm
by G-Tech Corporation » Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:58 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Plzen wrote:I'll wait for, oh, another week for someone to put up an application for China, and if nobody does I'll put one up myself. 5 players is a far more modest participation than I had initially hoped for, but I think that would be enough to launch the IC.
In foreign affairs China may be the dominant global hegemon, its superiority recognised by all, but within the shadows of its closed society it faces an endless litany of social, political, and economic problems...
That was part of the dynamic I was hoping for: essentially, the US and China have reversed roles. Now China is the dominant global hegemon, riven by internal problems and festering discontent. And the US, having gone through the crucible of near-collapse and emerged with a lot of its demons exorcised, is once again the up-and-coming rival: still not as large or wealthy or powerful, but dynamic and creative and optimistic.
by Plzen » Mon Sep 28, 2020 9:13 am
G-Tech Corporation wrote:I am curious how China will hold together in the face of her current sociological trends, yknow.
by New yugoslavaia » Mon Sep 28, 2020 9:52 am
by Sao Nova Europa » Mon Sep 28, 2020 11:28 am
by Plzen » Mon Sep 28, 2020 11:34 am
Sao Nova Europa wrote:Considering Russia's population, landmass, nukes and economy and relatively lite effect of climate change, is it correct to state that Russia is kinda an emerging power? Like India or Brazil in rl?
by New yugoslavaia » Mon Sep 28, 2020 11:59 am
Plzen wrote:Sao Nova Europa wrote:Considering Russia's population, landmass, nukes and economy and relatively lite effect of climate change, is it correct to state that Russia is kinda an emerging power? Like India or Brazil in rl?
It would be a country of modest means and modest influence, but one which prospers anyways because it is also faced with only modest difficulties.
by Plzen » Mon Sep 28, 2020 12:02 pm
New yugoslavaia wrote:I have two ideas for nations/groups.
1. A radical transhumanist organisation/nation that wishes to use gene splicing to create a new subspecies of humanity which can survive much better in the growing desert climates. Viewed negatively by quite a few people due to their "interesting" views/methods.
2. A federation of southern African states which started many decades ago when a group took over south Africa after a massive civil war and rebuilt it. Attracted other members after it brought great prosperity to the country with a series of hybrid wave/desalination plants.
by Reverend Norv » Mon Sep 28, 2020 12:09 pm
Plzen wrote:G-Tech Corporation wrote:I am curious how China will hold together in the face of her current sociological trends, yknow.
In a word, poorly. Because of the nature of the Chinese bureaucratic system and its diplomatic position, there is a strong need to present facades both internally and externally, which means there is a strong incentive at every level of government to distort statistics and suppress or propagandise this or that event. Consequently, the information the CCP receives is increasingly divorced from the reality that information is supposed to represent, and as a result the country's ability to react to that reality is falling apart.
Like the proverbial bull in the china shop, China has unparalleled military, economic, and espionage powers but little understanding of how to use it properly.
At least, that will be the concept I run with if it falls upon me to make a China application. I'm hoping someone else does, first.
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