In an alternative history: Theodore Roosevelt's "...triumphant return to power." (SM Stirling, Black Chamber, THREE, p. 66. See here.
Today: President Trump in London. See here.
OK. Totally dislocated. But my brain connected those three items before passing out for the night.
I hope to be more coherent tomorrow.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Not quite so incoherent as you might thing! More and more the problem we are having the US is how one party, the Democrats, seem to be increasingly unwilling to accept electoral defeat and do ANYTHING they can to oust a Republican president. A very bad sign for the future of the US.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
I consider it a problem that you-know-who took over the Republican Party, and that most Republicans have been sucking up to him, rather than holding fast to what we’re supposedly their party’s principles. I Lso think that there are good reasons to oust this Republican President by impeachment, and I’m not even a Democrat.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
I fear I have to at least partially disagree. First, I agree in finding Donald Trump unsatisfactory in many ways. I would have preferred Jeb Bush! But, when it comes to the actual practicalities of governing the US, he has been better than I expected. Esp. as regards taxes and filling vacancies in the US judiciary with sound, original text, strict constructionist judges. Including the recent nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
As for whether or not Pres. Trump completes his term in office, we shall see. But, I had more than just Trump in mind. I was also thinking of how the Democrats has been showing a pattern of behavior, since the election of 2000, of being increasingly unwilling to accept narrow electoral defeats--and trying to reverse them by hook or crook. Going down that road can only lead to disaster for the US.
Last another point to keep in mind is that Pres. Trump's dominance of the Republican party is merely partial and transitory, and will not outlast his time in office. So, I'm hoping better GOP leaders will arise who can both learn from him and DO better.
Best regards! Sean
Teddy Roosevelt would most certainly have won the 1912 election if he'd been the GOP candidate -- he got 34% of the vote and beat the Republican incumbent, Taft (who got about 24%) even running on a 3rd-party ticket, a historically quite unique performance. It's as sure as anything hypothetical can be.
If the vote hadn't been split, I think Roosevelt would have taken about 65% of the popular vote or more, with something like 370 Electoral College votes -- a performance unprecedented since the inception of the modern party system in the early 19th century. And this time he had, unlike 1904, conspicuously made no promise not to run again.
Wilson was a very bad person, and a terrible President, of course. He had all of Teddy's personal and political faults, but none of his virtues: I agree with Roosevelt's appraisal of him, which was not flattering. The only virtue he had was weakness, which kept him from doing more harm.
The 1912 Republican nomination campaign was a carnival of corruption, fraud and outright violence, astonishing even by the standards of the time -- several states were outright stolen from Roosevelt by naked ballot-stuffing. Teddy had the Old Guard in a total panic; they deliberately did things that threw the election to Wilson, because they were so frightened of Roosevelt.
They were afraid he'd totally change things if he won; and he probably would have. If you read the 1912 Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") platform it still sounds fairly radical.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And I have only contempt for the kind corruption so endemic in the US of 1912. But Theodore Roosevelt's radical "New Nationalism" was not the right road to follow. Better a weak President, like Wilson, who shared some of TR's bad ideas but lacked the DETERMINATION to make them effective.
Sean
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