To Three
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Karl the Mad
- Posts: 1260
- Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2013 4:27 am
- Location: Oregon
To Three
Am I correct in assuming that Donald Trump 2016 failed in your version of reality? Hope's America doesn't seem like a right-wing proto-fascist dictatorship just yet, from what we've seen of it so far.
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
As Three
"Trump failed, but the alt-right wasn't defeated, far from it. Steve Bannon from Breitbart News ran for election four years later, pulling a Roosevelt and starting a third, short-lived party propped up by old money and a few regressive immortals' ideals. The Reformist Party fostered some pretty hateful acts between 2016 and 2020, but deathless rednecks squarely met their match on every platform. The Vienna Accords allowed the more progressive immortals and undead to burst out of the woodwork and to fiercely defend their moral values - and to support politicians that had similar ones.
These made for some tough four years, with the Reformists trying to tug the party's fringe closer to Centrist discourse, but they couldn't deny the fact that they were the voice of the average angry White, heterosexual mortal human. For every Rust Belt retiree who wanted manufacturing jobs to return to America and gender-neutral bathrooms to be wiped off the map, for instance, you had thirty educated, reasonable and wise individuals who realized Society had nowhere else to go but forward. Globalization can't just be reversed, not when Apple's taken half of its production campus to Luna as of 2024 and shuttle tech makes it possible to live in Australia and work in France in the same week.
Clinton didn't last more than one term, however. One of Caliban Smith's Libertarian allies, a Green dragon named Dafyd Jones, nabbed a surprise victory in 2020. The current US President was effectively born in Scotland in the Low Middle Ages and became a US citizen in 1975, just like the rest of the local Accords signatories.
Overall, being led by an immortal isn't the catastrophe the conservative human contingent assumed it would be. First off, Jones will only ever get eight years in office at the most and he's made it clear he doesn't want to futz with procedure. He wants to keep strengthening America's ties to the international community and was elected on a strong pro-environment platform. Mostly though, he was elected by his fellow immortals, people who felt they had a moral obligation to shelter the rest of us from abuses in political discourse, technology or economics. The Battle of Hope might be old history to me, it's fresh for a lot of centuries-old folks in town - and that prompted them to put together a platform that would make sure demagogues like Rendell - or class clowns like Trump - are never given another inch.
Jones' last campaign was, erm, interesting... His ads involved ghostly transitions between European Medieval architecture and various American landmarks. He compared nurses, cops, doctors, teachers, researchers and others to the more noble figures in Arthurian mythology - all of that over Gregorian chants.
No attacks, no slander, no name-calling or mud-slinging - just pure positivity for the entire running year. Guy was an absolute rock star by the end, and he managed to suck in equal parts of the usual Democrat and Republican electoral colleges.
It's nice, honestly. He strikes the good old chord of American Exceptionalism, but he's tuned it on a global scale; asking us what we can contribute to the world around us, to the colonies beyond and our friends in Paradise.
America is for Americans, sure - but the Americans I know are anywhere between five to three hundred years old. They're White or Black or furred or pointy-earned, and they might or might not be proficient with magic. They have a foot in India or China or Europe, and they're not all Catholic or Christian. They might have gears and cogs instead of flesh. They speak two or three languages and sometimes have to come to grips with powers or abilities they didn't ask for. Increasingly, some of the Americans I know have a foot in Heaven or Hell - and those in the know are well aware the time's coming where Gabriel and Ahriman will have to add their names to the Vienna Council's big book.
So, well, we're trying. There's always someone around to whine about how things were better before Elysium and no, not everything's perfect. Immortals still kill innocents out of contempt, some immortals have trouble getting a job because a lot of misinformed employers think they'll have to keep garnishing a retirement package that'll go nowhere. Society doesn't consistently accept people who don't age, who aren't required by Nature to leave their post for someone else to take. A lot of folks don't realize that people like Liddane change jobs or cities every ten to twenty years - immortality makes it hard to keep the same levels of interest up. Eventually, you became a taxpayer and job-seeker someplace else.
On the whole, we've chosen someone who's pretty much in the post-superhuman registration camp and that dares a lot of us to take action - to contribute to Society. The doomsayers tend to forget that Green dragons only ever protected mortal settlements and rarely infringed on personal rights and privileges. It's pretty much the perfect setting for something like my workplace to take shape, seeing as we're past the fifties' glorified anonymity and moving beyond the nineties' misanthropic approach to vigilante service.
I know I haven't canonically met Lucian Rothchild yet, but his fairly Socratic outlook on things makes me think his allied Weavers are gonna fit in just fine."
These made for some tough four years, with the Reformists trying to tug the party's fringe closer to Centrist discourse, but they couldn't deny the fact that they were the voice of the average angry White, heterosexual mortal human. For every Rust Belt retiree who wanted manufacturing jobs to return to America and gender-neutral bathrooms to be wiped off the map, for instance, you had thirty educated, reasonable and wise individuals who realized Society had nowhere else to go but forward. Globalization can't just be reversed, not when Apple's taken half of its production campus to Luna as of 2024 and shuttle tech makes it possible to live in Australia and work in France in the same week.
Clinton didn't last more than one term, however. One of Caliban Smith's Libertarian allies, a Green dragon named Dafyd Jones, nabbed a surprise victory in 2020. The current US President was effectively born in Scotland in the Low Middle Ages and became a US citizen in 1975, just like the rest of the local Accords signatories.
Overall, being led by an immortal isn't the catastrophe the conservative human contingent assumed it would be. First off, Jones will only ever get eight years in office at the most and he's made it clear he doesn't want to futz with procedure. He wants to keep strengthening America's ties to the international community and was elected on a strong pro-environment platform. Mostly though, he was elected by his fellow immortals, people who felt they had a moral obligation to shelter the rest of us from abuses in political discourse, technology or economics. The Battle of Hope might be old history to me, it's fresh for a lot of centuries-old folks in town - and that prompted them to put together a platform that would make sure demagogues like Rendell - or class clowns like Trump - are never given another inch.
Jones' last campaign was, erm, interesting... His ads involved ghostly transitions between European Medieval architecture and various American landmarks. He compared nurses, cops, doctors, teachers, researchers and others to the more noble figures in Arthurian mythology - all of that over Gregorian chants.
No attacks, no slander, no name-calling or mud-slinging - just pure positivity for the entire running year. Guy was an absolute rock star by the end, and he managed to suck in equal parts of the usual Democrat and Republican electoral colleges.
It's nice, honestly. He strikes the good old chord of American Exceptionalism, but he's tuned it on a global scale; asking us what we can contribute to the world around us, to the colonies beyond and our friends in Paradise.
America is for Americans, sure - but the Americans I know are anywhere between five to three hundred years old. They're White or Black or furred or pointy-earned, and they might or might not be proficient with magic. They have a foot in India or China or Europe, and they're not all Catholic or Christian. They might have gears and cogs instead of flesh. They speak two or three languages and sometimes have to come to grips with powers or abilities they didn't ask for. Increasingly, some of the Americans I know have a foot in Heaven or Hell - and those in the know are well aware the time's coming where Gabriel and Ahriman will have to add their names to the Vienna Council's big book.
So, well, we're trying. There's always someone around to whine about how things were better before Elysium and no, not everything's perfect. Immortals still kill innocents out of contempt, some immortals have trouble getting a job because a lot of misinformed employers think they'll have to keep garnishing a retirement package that'll go nowhere. Society doesn't consistently accept people who don't age, who aren't required by Nature to leave their post for someone else to take. A lot of folks don't realize that people like Liddane change jobs or cities every ten to twenty years - immortality makes it hard to keep the same levels of interest up. Eventually, you became a taxpayer and job-seeker someplace else.
On the whole, we've chosen someone who's pretty much in the post-superhuman registration camp and that dares a lot of us to take action - to contribute to Society. The doomsayers tend to forget that Green dragons only ever protected mortal settlements and rarely infringed on personal rights and privileges. It's pretty much the perfect setting for something like my workplace to take shape, seeing as we're past the fifties' glorified anonymity and moving beyond the nineties' misanthropic approach to vigilante service.
I know I haven't canonically met Lucian Rothchild yet, but his fairly Socratic outlook on things makes me think his allied Weavers are gonna fit in just fine."