By “deal with the Devil” we mean whatever witchcraft WL Mackenzie King practiced in his downtime, I take it?
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Attempted summoning aside, that many majorities in succession is simply not natural
Running up those kinds of majorities in Quebec while the Union Nationale is dominating the province remains an eluding mystery to me lol
I thought that King had a number of those times as PM with coalition governments (not holding the Majority)
Got a really good book on this - he cut deals with Duplessis, with the federal Liberal and provincial UN patronage networks cooperating and backing each other. Keeping the provincial Liberals weak was a bonus, as it ended a long-running feud between the provincial and federal apparatuses about patronage and fundraising. Duplessis' UN also included a lot of former Liberals from the party's more agrarian-populist branch. This meant that when the Liberals took power in the province in 1960, Lesage and his ilk had no connections to the feds, owed them nothing, had strong incentives to pursue provincial autonomy instead of federal cooperation, and justifiably saw them as reactionaries. The rest is, as they say it, history.
You're right - 1935 and 1940 were majorities, 1945 and 1925 were minorities IIRC. I'd also credit him with 1949, as while St. Laurent wa was party leader it was still kinda a ccoronation of his era.
I’m guessing (and may be wrong here) that the bolded implies something about how Trudeau became such an ardent federalist, after his dislike for Lesage?
A little bit late but I think it is worth considering that the Argentina is this timeline's Chile idea does have considerable merit to it. As someone pointed out earlier the Frente Popular of the late 1940s between Radicals and Socialists does seem likely to present a counterweight to the UC. I suspect Argentine politics won't avoid the polarizing personalism of someone like Ibanez the two term President/Dictator of Chile. However it's likely it will avoid Peron and the military becoming too heavily involved because of the Frente Popular and because there is no opening for the military to insert itself. Plus the estanciero elites aren't as powerful as they were IOTL and therefore in no real position to invite the military in.
But it's also hard to gauge the chaotic effects of Chilean politics on Argentine politics next door. The effect could be to unify the centrist UC with the more progressive elements of the PDP to ward off the threat from Chilean socialism seeing as a divided opposition would be perfect for the FP to steamroll. This might not be hard given that both parties are in their own way liberal (even if the latter is not nearly as reformist). Or alternatively we could see this division persist and the Frente Popular become the dominant "governing party" of Argentine politics. I actually see parallels to what happened in Uruguay with the small Frente Popular eventually coming to dominate the first half of the 21st century after the rule of the Colorados and the Blancos.
But it's also hard to gauge the chaotic effects of Chilean politics on Argentine politics next door. The effect could be to unify the centrist UC with the more progressive elements of the PDP to ward off the threat from Chilean socialism seeing as a divided opposition would be perfect for the FP to steamroll. This might not be hard given that both parties are in their own way liberal (even if the latter is not nearly as reformist). Or alternatively we could see this division persist and the Frente Popular become the dominant "governing party" of Argentine politics. I actually see parallels to what happened in Uruguay with the small Frente Popular eventually coming to dominate the first half of the 21st century after the rule of the Colorados and the Blancos.
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When the Wuebec Liberals took back power, they fully contrilled their own organization, and their whole program was really invested in the provincial state. They had no real lines of communication with Ottawa, and the federal party had no organizational levers to restrain or discipline them. This ran up against the limits of federalism, at which point Liberals either went Federalist like Trudeau, Chretien, and Marchand and left for Ottawa, came out in favour of moderate constitutional modifications, or went Nationalist. A lot of the PQ's best leaders - most notably Levesque - were disaffected provincial Liberals, and even the most moderate provincial Liberals were in favour of constitutional modifications.
Arguably, at least some of the dynamics around Quebec independence could have been avoided if King didn't sever the link between the provincial and federal Liberals in favour of an insane bargain with Duplessis and Quebecois reaction to secure seats he probably could have had anyways.
I'm curious about the USN. While they had great consequential victories, at this point, they've gone from needing an attack navy to a navy that can keep a blockade going. Different needs, I think, so I expect the grand building effort of dreadnaughts is over. I'm guessing any keel that has been laid down by the Battle of the Florida Straight (August 1915) is completed.
Still, the question is which of the Navies of the world are stronger than the USA. I'm *quite* sure the RN is stronger, and nothing in the Western Hemisphere is close (The USN has sunk most of the larger ships in the CSN, the Mexican Navy and the Chilean Navy, the Brazilians are afraid to come out and fight, Argentina isn't in the USA's class and Canada probably isn't that large. The Candidates in Europe other than the British are the French, Germans and maybe the Italians. The Russians have never seen the point of spending *that* much on a Navy percentage-wise. Outside of Europe, I don't think there is anyone. The Japanese are the most likely candidate and I don't think they are close.
So the USN is somewhere between 2nd and 4th on the Planet right now, I think. And long term, the question is which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host USN vessels looking south and which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host Brazilian Navy vessels looking North. Also, it appears the Author is going to have the Brazilians *not* have a happy time in the 1920s, so it appears we now go to the situation that existed in most of the 20th century iOTL, the USA has a larger navy than the entire rest of the Americas combined...
Your challenge, should you choose to make such a TL is to have the United States *never* have a majority of Naval Power in the Americas between 1900 and 1950.
Still, the question is which of the Navies of the world are stronger than the USA. I'm *quite* sure the RN is stronger, and nothing in the Western Hemisphere is close (The USN has sunk most of the larger ships in the CSN, the Mexican Navy and the Chilean Navy, the Brazilians are afraid to come out and fight, Argentina isn't in the USA's class and Canada probably isn't that large. The Candidates in Europe other than the British are the French, Germans and maybe the Italians. The Russians have never seen the point of spending *that* much on a Navy percentage-wise. Outside of Europe, I don't think there is anyone. The Japanese are the most likely candidate and I don't think they are close.
So the USN is somewhere between 2nd and 4th on the Planet right now, I think. And long term, the question is which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host USN vessels looking south and which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host Brazilian Navy vessels looking North. Also, it appears the Author is going to have the Brazilians *not* have a happy time in the 1920s, so it appears we now go to the situation that existed in most of the 20th century iOTL, the USA has a larger navy than the entire rest of the Americas combined...
Your challenge, should you choose to make such a TL is to have the United States *never* have a majority of Naval Power in the Americas between 1900 and 1950.
Chile’s not the exact comparison I’d make, but your thinking on how the FP could evolve is certainly on very sound footing
Impossible, nobody has a name that cool
Well here we’ll have an insane bargain between Duplessis and the federal Tories to keep each others’ backs scratched which may in fact be worse lol
Haiti seems the obvious choice to continue being, along with Nicaragua, the USN’s main “platform” looking southwardsI'm curious about the USN. While they had great consequential victories, at this point, they've gone from needing an attack navy to a navy that can keep a blockade going. Different needs, I think, so I expect the grand building effort of dreadnaughts is over. I'm guessing any keel that has been laid down by the Battle of the Florida Straight (August 1915) is completed.
Still, the question is which of the Navies of the world are stronger than the USA. I'm *quite* sure the RN is stronger, and nothing in the Western Hemisphere is close (The USN has sunk most of the larger ships in the CSN, the Mexican Navy and the Chilean Navy, the Brazilians are afraid to come out and fight, Argentina isn't in the USA's class and Canada probably isn't that large. The Candidates in Europe other than the British are the French, Germans and maybe the Italians. The Russians have never seen the point of spending *that* much on a Navy percentage-wise. Outside of Europe, I don't think there is anyone. The Japanese are the most likely candidate and I don't think they are close.
So the USN is somewhere between 2nd and 4th on the Planet right now, I think. And long term, the question is which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host USN vessels looking south and which nations in the Caribbean are willing to host Brazilian Navy vessels looking North. Also, it appears the Author is going to have the Brazilians *not* have a happy time in the 1920s, so it appears we now go to the situation that existed in most of the 20th century iOTL, the USA has a larger navy than the entire rest of the Americas combined...
Your challenge, should you choose to make such a TL is to have the United States *never* have a majority of Naval Power in the Americas between 1900 and 1950.
I mean, Argentina seems to be being set up to become a wealthy and prosperous South American nation with high QOL, like OTL's Chile is
That's a tough one, because the second someone else in the hemisphere starts to make a navy the USA will be like "wait a second...this is our turf" and then build a bunch of battleships.Your challenge, should you choose to make such a TL is to have the United States *never* have a majority of Naval Power in the Americas between 1900 and 1950.
You'd almost have to go super ASB and have a completely fragmented USA in order to have a chance.
And even with a USA denied access to the Mesabi Iron Range, Pennsylvania itself has the resources needed, I think. (Sort of if the entire Ruhr was controlled by one nation
)If Nicaragua is playing the part of OTL Panama, then Haiti is sort of playing the part of OTL Philippines. The fact that the DR (not sure what it is called at this point) is still part of Spain and the Haitians have the Americans playing big brother will, to some degree, cut down on the border issues in Hispan~ola. At worst, I think you'll deal with guns, etc being smuggled across the border for a DR independence movement. (Note, this *will* exist, I don't see the Caribbean as happily being the Alaska/Hawaii of Spain)
Assuming you're talking about DR being part of Spain, officially, it's the "Captaincy-General of Santo Domingo."
Ah, in that case, yes.
At this point, though, Santo Domingo is a province rather than a Captaincy-General
A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
"...opposed. The actual efficacy of the Stolypin Land Reform is of course still debated in modern Russia, and both now and in the 1910s the program had its detractors from both the Right and, naturally, the Left. Rightist opposition to the land reform was of course fairly straightforward - it countered the traditions of the peasantry, disturbed the mir, and in some cases created an avenue to deny landholding nobility or the Church their due and their influence. Left-wing opposition to the Reforms was somewhat more sophisticated and, in some ways, esoteric, depending on what brand of leftism one adhered to.
By the year 1916, with four years since the Constitution, the functioning of the Duma had clearly left much to be desired by the budding Russian intelligentsia and the more radical workers organizations forming in industrial cities, particularly Moscow. Russian liberalism and leftism had, for many years, oscillated between traveling hand-in-hand and being bitter opponents; men such as Milyukov were both champions of the commoner and traitors to the Russian people, depending on which Marxist newsletter one read. But Milyukov was of course a classical progressive democratic liberal, very much a creature of the Russian literati, and thus too cautious and too alien a figure for the average Russian counter-Tsarist; moderate and conservative democrats such as Vasily Maklakov and Alexander Guchkov were even worse, despite their very real progress in acting as a calming and reformist influence upon the Council of Ministers.
The biggest split on the Russian Left starting in early 1916 was largely internal within the two main parties of Marxism, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (the SRs, known as the Esery in Russian) and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, or RSDLP, which contrary to its name was the more radical body of the two. Traditionally, the Esery had been the leading edge of Russian radicalism, born out of the zeal of the Narodnik movement of the 1860s and 1870s. It was an SR man who had grievously wounded Tsar Alexander II and others like him who had assassinated Konstantin Pobedonostsev. By 1916, and looming Duma elections that year, the SRs had begun to advocate working within the system to transform it, and thus decided not to boycott the upcoming elections, a position taken by their chief theoretician and leader, Viktor Chernov. There was a great advantage to this - the SRs, like the RSDLP, thought Milyukov a toothless idiot who spoke beautifully but accomplished little. Liberalism, to them, seemed unable to bring about the very real change Russia needed and only revolutionary democratic socialism would. Accordingly, weak as the Duma may have been, it needed their presence to function, and so rather than independents affiliated with the Esery running, the party itself would run a maximalist campaign, focused in rural constituencies home to their key base - the rural peasantry, especially those who were opposed to the dismantling of communal ownership of farm land and its consolidation into small but ample private landholdings.
This choice by Chernov was controversial within the party and divided it into the Right SR and Left SR factions, the latter of which was skeptical of this new commitment to participation in what they considered a sham democracy and the former eager to reunite with the social democratic Trudoviks led by Aleksey Aladyin and Alexander Kerensky, who had broken away from the Esery to participate in the Duma as the voice of the Left. Still, agrarian socialism held a certain strong appeal in a rural, agrarian country like Russia where the changes brought forth by the Stolypin reforms were having very real impacts and early on. The RSDLP, meanwhile, continued its line of total boycott of the "sham Duma" and instead began to advocate for more violent street demonstrations of workers to showcase their ability to threaten "bourgeoise industries and interests," led by the syndicalist-sympathetic Julius Martov in St. Petersburg. The RSDLP was not necessarily opposed to the concept of democracy - although a faction of exiles in Switzerland around Marxist intellectual Vladimir Lenin, whose brother had been executed by the government in 1887 as an Esery terrorist, were fairly explicit in their view that democracy itself was a bourgeoise invention [1] - but saw its role as being that of a vehicle for the burgeoning urban working class in Russian factories, railroads and shipyards who needed protection and that socialism was the sole vehicle which could provide that. While labor protection laws had proliferated under both Michael and his father, they were still viewed as highly insufficient, and the RSDLP was, unlike the Esery, less skeptical of the Stolypin Reforms (the SRs opposed them as they viewed it as a bourgeoise plot to end communal land ownership) and indeed thought they were insufficient in pursuing land reform. The RSDLP's issue, however, was that they scoffed at the idea of agrarian socialism and had indeed been founded as much to oppose the Esery as they had to overthrow Tsarism; they were explicitly Marxist to the point of ultra-orthodoxy, viewing the industrial urban working class and them alone as the knife's edge of the revolutionary proletariat. At a time when less than ten percent of the Russian population was engaged in such work (though the ratio was quickly growing year-by-year as the Russian economy expanded quickly), this stubbornness left them a narrow base and allowed men like Chernov and his allies Andrei Argunov, Alexander Antonov, and Maria Spiridonova to persuade themselves that their rivals on the hard left of Russian politics could be safely ignored as they rallied the peasants.
This indeed turned out to be true - the elections of 1916 saw the SRs and Trudoviks together win just short of a quarter of the seats in the Duma (with the Trudoviks the considerably larger of the two, but the SRs did impressively nonetheless), and when combined with Milyukov's Kadets and various unaffiliated but peasant-aligned deputies nearly half of the body, meaning that the People's Party and right-wing parties had now just a narrow majority, though the State Council was of course still inflexibily conservative and Tsarist. This watershed moment in Russian history proved that organizing and political advocacy could reach the Russian people and that demands for reforms could be heard, even if the body to which these men were elected had little ability to actually act on such reforms..."
- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
[1] As we do a who's who of Russian left-wing figures here, you'll notice our friend Vladimir Ilyich is nowhere near Russia
By the year 1916, with four years since the Constitution, the functioning of the Duma had clearly left much to be desired by the budding Russian intelligentsia and the more radical workers organizations forming in industrial cities, particularly Moscow. Russian liberalism and leftism had, for many years, oscillated between traveling hand-in-hand and being bitter opponents; men such as Milyukov were both champions of the commoner and traitors to the Russian people, depending on which Marxist newsletter one read. But Milyukov was of course a classical progressive democratic liberal, very much a creature of the Russian literati, and thus too cautious and too alien a figure for the average Russian counter-Tsarist; moderate and conservative democrats such as Vasily Maklakov and Alexander Guchkov were even worse, despite their very real progress in acting as a calming and reformist influence upon the Council of Ministers.
The biggest split on the Russian Left starting in early 1916 was largely internal within the two main parties of Marxism, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (the SRs, known as the Esery in Russian) and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, or RSDLP, which contrary to its name was the more radical body of the two. Traditionally, the Esery had been the leading edge of Russian radicalism, born out of the zeal of the Narodnik movement of the 1860s and 1870s. It was an SR man who had grievously wounded Tsar Alexander II and others like him who had assassinated Konstantin Pobedonostsev. By 1916, and looming Duma elections that year, the SRs had begun to advocate working within the system to transform it, and thus decided not to boycott the upcoming elections, a position taken by their chief theoretician and leader, Viktor Chernov. There was a great advantage to this - the SRs, like the RSDLP, thought Milyukov a toothless idiot who spoke beautifully but accomplished little. Liberalism, to them, seemed unable to bring about the very real change Russia needed and only revolutionary democratic socialism would. Accordingly, weak as the Duma may have been, it needed their presence to function, and so rather than independents affiliated with the Esery running, the party itself would run a maximalist campaign, focused in rural constituencies home to their key base - the rural peasantry, especially those who were opposed to the dismantling of communal ownership of farm land and its consolidation into small but ample private landholdings.
This choice by Chernov was controversial within the party and divided it into the Right SR and Left SR factions, the latter of which was skeptical of this new commitment to participation in what they considered a sham democracy and the former eager to reunite with the social democratic Trudoviks led by Aleksey Aladyin and Alexander Kerensky, who had broken away from the Esery to participate in the Duma as the voice of the Left. Still, agrarian socialism held a certain strong appeal in a rural, agrarian country like Russia where the changes brought forth by the Stolypin reforms were having very real impacts and early on. The RSDLP, meanwhile, continued its line of total boycott of the "sham Duma" and instead began to advocate for more violent street demonstrations of workers to showcase their ability to threaten "bourgeoise industries and interests," led by the syndicalist-sympathetic Julius Martov in St. Petersburg. The RSDLP was not necessarily opposed to the concept of democracy - although a faction of exiles in Switzerland around Marxist intellectual Vladimir Lenin, whose brother had been executed by the government in 1887 as an Esery terrorist, were fairly explicit in their view that democracy itself was a bourgeoise invention [1] - but saw its role as being that of a vehicle for the burgeoning urban working class in Russian factories, railroads and shipyards who needed protection and that socialism was the sole vehicle which could provide that. While labor protection laws had proliferated under both Michael and his father, they were still viewed as highly insufficient, and the RSDLP was, unlike the Esery, less skeptical of the Stolypin Reforms (the SRs opposed them as they viewed it as a bourgeoise plot to end communal land ownership) and indeed thought they were insufficient in pursuing land reform. The RSDLP's issue, however, was that they scoffed at the idea of agrarian socialism and had indeed been founded as much to oppose the Esery as they had to overthrow Tsarism; they were explicitly Marxist to the point of ultra-orthodoxy, viewing the industrial urban working class and them alone as the knife's edge of the revolutionary proletariat. At a time when less than ten percent of the Russian population was engaged in such work (though the ratio was quickly growing year-by-year as the Russian economy expanded quickly), this stubbornness left them a narrow base and allowed men like Chernov and his allies Andrei Argunov, Alexander Antonov, and Maria Spiridonova to persuade themselves that their rivals on the hard left of Russian politics could be safely ignored as they rallied the peasants.
This indeed turned out to be true - the elections of 1916 saw the SRs and Trudoviks together win just short of a quarter of the seats in the Duma (with the Trudoviks the considerably larger of the two, but the SRs did impressively nonetheless), and when combined with Milyukov's Kadets and various unaffiliated but peasant-aligned deputies nearly half of the body, meaning that the People's Party and right-wing parties had now just a narrow majority, though the State Council was of course still inflexibily conservative and Tsarist. This watershed moment in Russian history proved that organizing and political advocacy could reach the Russian people and that demands for reforms could be heard, even if the body to which these men were elected had little ability to actually act on such reforms..."
- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
[1] As we do a who's who of Russian left-wing figures here, you'll notice our friend Vladimir Ilyich is nowhere near Russia