The really interesting universe, where we amended the constitution to remove the natural born citizen clause in 2005, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term saw him leaving office with 80% approval.

in 2025

Trump wins 2020 because he’d have spent 4 years saying the same stuff he did in 2020-2024 and Clinton’s snuffing out of Covid leads to backlash over “heavy handed lockdown martial law jade helm” shit

Yeah. A Cruz-type wins after SCOTUS abolishes the death penalty (worth it), then gets crushed in ‘24 because the US suffers from all the COVID inflation with little of the Biden-era growth.

Also the Republicans would absolutely have tried to pack the Court in response to a liberal majority.

The bigger question is why Clinton wins and the subsidiary butterflies

Let's say no Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting, the EMAILZ thing gets squashed to a significantly greater extent, and the Access Hollywood tape totally dominates the closing stretch.

Ok so my thoughts: Trumpism as a local form of Peronism dies, we don’t get four years of wires being ripped out, but the general trajectory of the tea party curdling into an explicit fascist movement, tech oligarchs trying to consolidate political power, and left disenchantment continues

Trumpism doesn’t die, he’d already taken over the Repub party. If he declines to run in 2020 whoever he picks gets all of the R votes but not necessarily people who’d been tricked into thinking Trump was competent at any of this

Yeah the thing is that some version of this awful rupture was coming because the one-sided arson of norms and the fecklessness of Democrats on the rare occasions they got power was all structurally baked in.

I think the good version of this is that the awful rupture stays a GOP civil war that destroys the party while the Dems split into like a Justice Dems party that’s left-libs plus the current DSA center

*party system of new JD party v legacy centrist Dems

The emailz thing matters but i think it implies a different campaign because the media doesn’t think it can just keep running the Clinton scandal playbook

Yeah I do think it's an interesting counterfactual to imagine how far back we have to go before disrupting the trajectory that eventually lands us at fascism sometime around now

Handling the disintegration of the USSR differently. People often say we're seeing a boomerang from the GWOT, but imo we're much more seeing a post-sovietization of American life.

What does that mean?

By that do you mean this was an inevitable result of unipolarity, when we no longer had an ideological counterweight demanding we project something resembling "freedom" and "democracy"?

Yeeep

Along with media consolidation making the press more vulnerable to right wing political pressure.