- Ukraine should be Tibet, with the region having broken away from China during the collapse of the PRC. Here it's Japan and the Soviets which serve as Tibet's most ardent defenders, fearful of Chinese invasion, while Europe plays America's role, with the government sending massive aid but the public dissatisfied. Steve Jobs and much of the American left are very anti-Tibet, as their atheist views cause them to oppose the theocratic rule of the Dalai Lama.
- Israel is more difficult, but I think it could be South Africa. Europe is one of the main "neoliberal" powers of this timeline and given how they treated the Françafrique in our timeline I think the CMEE would strengthen its neocolonial stranglehold on Africa. South Africa would be propped up as "the only democracy in Africa" despite not-so-covertly continuing Apartheid. Nelson Mandela would have signed a much-lauded peace deal with the Apartheid government, promising eventual full independence for the Bantustans, but this does little to calm the tensions. Violence continues, mostly on the Afrikaner side, throughout the 21st century. On October 7th 2023, black militants would emerge from the Bantustan of KwaZulu in a surprise attack, killing thousands of Afrikaners. In response the South African government enacts a brutal campaign of repression on the Bantustans, and repeatedly invades Zimbabwe under the pretext of rooting out terrorist cells.
- In general, with the decreased importance of oil, I think Africa would be the equivalent of our timeline's "middle east". It would be a site of major tensions between the CMEE and the Soviet Union, and I think that the 9/11 equivalent really should have been African Islamists attacking the European stock exchange in Rotterdam. The Texas subplot is where things jumped the shark for me.
- I can't imagine Jeffrey Epstein would ever gain prominence in this non-financialized, non-neoliberal America. Instead I think the equivalent should be a new-age cult which insinuated itself into powerful institutions across America during the 90s and 2000s, probably a weirder alternate version of NXIVM. It would have to have some kind of known connection with John McKernan during his post-presidential career. The left would be up in arms about this, both due to their hatred of religion and their hatred of the McKernans. "Release the NXIVM files" and "Raniere didn't kill himself" would become common refrains among Jobs supporters. However, it would be revealed that Jobs himself was closely connected with the cult during his own more woo-woo days, causing a good deal of consternation among the Democrats.
- Likewise, I think the leftist QAnon would be all about the evil pedophilic Vatican being in control of every right-wing politician, with NXIVM being a Vatican front to spread religious ideas.
- Hasan Piker would definitely be the Charlie Kirk of this timeline. Like Kirk, he's somebody that serves as a bridge between the more moderate and radical wings of his movement, though not without some friction. His killer would be clearly identified as a right-winger, but large segments of the right would refuse to accept this, claiming that the killer must have been a radical leftist who didn't think Hasan was extreme enough (Despite there being no evidence for this). His death causes the left to fracture, with some of the more radical leftists believing he was killed by the Jobs administration for threatening to speak against the free trade reforms.
- The online far-right of this world would be a lot more purist, constantly arguing over the fine points of fascism and refusing to participate in politics outside of protests. "Hitler did nothing wrong" is quickly becoming orthodoxy in right-wing spaces and anyone who disagrees is kicked out. Since antifa is inspired by paramilitaries that fought the brownshirts in Weimar Germany, their right-wing equivalent would literally call themselves the brownshirts.
I got confused towards the end...
Was Blago the analog of DeSantis?
I dunno what exactly would've happened after that. Any ideas would be welcome.
Where would the Lancasterverse versions of you be?
As for me, I would likely not be American in this timeline, assuming I am born at all. My family immigrated to the United States using the Diversity (DIVA) Lottery, which was enshrined with the Immigration Act of 1990. That likely doesn’t get enacted in the Lancasterverse due to how anti immigration the US is. I would actually be Singaporean, since my family was about to immigrate to Singapore until they got selected by the DIVA Lottery.
I thought the most recent two-parter was wonderful, and I was speculating whether the Chernobyl disaster would have happened in the Lancasterverse. This led me down an autistic rabbithole trying to craft lore for a scenario where there was a major disaster in the mid 1980s, but where the roles of nuclear power and genetic engineering are swapped in the verse. I also wanted to address the massive land use that would be required for the US ethanol industry. I've tried to make a bit of a narrative, but I'm definitely approaching this more from a scientific angle rather than historical.
Environmentalism
By the mid-1980s, the sheer amount of arable land that needs to be dedicated to the growth of corn for ethanol begins to become a problem, displacing human food crops and natural habitat. Internal reports circulate within the ethanol industry.
In 2006, former vice-president John Sununu releases the documentary film ‘A Convenient Lie’, which criticises the green fuel industry’s anti-environmentalist agenda and brings the Corn Carpet Crisis, often later referred to as the Soil Crisis, to the forefront on the American political imagination for the first time. Over half a century of reliance on artificial nitrogen fertilizers has led to land totally depleted of natural nutrients and the concentration of toxic nitrite compounds in the soil. The environmentalist movement has a new enemy, and its name is NO2.
Images of the whole US interior covered with endless homogenous fields of cornstalk in a desperate attempt to feed an every thirstier energy sector are powerful, but the manufactured doubt from the ethanol industry as to the ability of the continental US to sustain enough agriculture to support both people and industry is fierce. Every year, the industry spends millions promoting vegetarianism so that the 40% of land in the contiguous United States formerly used for livestock can be used as fodder for the ever-expanding carpet of corn that blankets the mid-west. Popeye the Sailor becomes a common icon for good old-fashioned American fruit and vege. In the 2010s, the ultra-processed chicken nugget becomes associated with the images of limp-wristed weakness and effeminacy and ‘nuggie boy’ becomes a popular online insult for men seen as such.
After the democrats gain control of the senate in the 2014 midterm elections, the influence of ethanol money on US politics sees a proposal for the disestablishment of the Mammoth Cave national park to make room for more corn fields. This is opposed by president Jindal, who invokes the image of Republican Teddy Roosevelt to promote the preservation of America’s national parks as an obviously right-wing ideal.
By the early 2020s, the effects of the Soil Crisis are starting to become evident. The monocultural cornfields are much more vulnerable to blight pathogens than natural grassland and crop failures that wipe out hundreds of acres are becoming increasingly common. Reliance on chemical fertilizers leave the soil left behind bereft of life. A single season can turn a thriving rural community into a ghost town, Carpet refugees having to migrate to other still-fertile regions of the US.
Activists point to the 1984 Monterrey Protocol's banning of PFAS as an example of how large-scale cooperation on environmental issues IS possible, but the Jindal and later Grassley administrations are frustratingly slow to act. By the time of Nikki Hayley's campaign, the soil crisis, once a fixture of right-wing activism is hardly mentioned at all.
Genetic Engineering
Beginning construction in 1974 in the Novosibirk Oblast, USSR, the science town of Kolsovo is the Soviet union's main centre for the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology.
In the 1980s, genetic engineering technology using retroviruses such as Moloney Murine Leukemia Virus as a vector to incorporate new genetic material into organisms is developed about 15 years earlier than the same technology was in our timeline owing to greater science funding within the USSR to remain competitive with Japan.
One of the main projects at Koltsovo is the genetic engineering of cold-tolerant crops to boost the agricultural output of rural Siberia. Ordinarily, the genome of a retrovirus vector is divided up so the viral particles can only infect the target tissue once, and can't divide. However, during a biosafety test on the 26th of April 1986, a rare recombination event allowed a strain of the viral vector to become replication-competent.
Poor design of biosafety compliant sealing allowed the virus to infect the lab workers, inserting fragments of non-human DNA into the genome of white blood cells within their bodies. Over a matter of days, the infection spread to the nearby village of Novobrosk, and Soviet geneticists informed the central committee that if left unaddressed, a viral pandemic could sweep across Europe, causing millions of deaths.
Historians debate the cultural impact of the Koltsovo disaster in the years to come. Genetic engineering was never viewed the same after the disaster, forever tainted by association with the threat of unpredictable and unseen poisoning of the very essence of life. Some view this as a valuable lesson about the dangers of a technology better not pursued, while others see this as a source of unwarranted hesitancy toward adopting techniques that could save us from the crises of the age, namely the Soil Crisis.
In 2025, President Jobs authorises strikes on Iranian agricultural research facilities, insisting they are on the verge of developing biological weapons under the guise of the New-Mesopotamia Agricultural project.
Nuclear Power
In 2020, nuclear physicist Jennifer Doudna wins the nobel prize in physics for her work in developing small modular actinide-recycling thorium reactors, a technology science journalists hail as the holy grail of reactor technology. SMARTR promises to revolutionise nuclear power, enabling anyone to have a small reactor at home with relatively accessible technology.
There is a growing movement on the Minitel in science-communication communities that SMARTR could be part of the answer toward solving the Soil Crisis by reducing the world’s energy-dependence on ethanol crops, and allowing the land to be reclaimed and reforested.
- The broader geopolitical alliances of this world would be unrecognizable in various fascinating ways. I believe that the US and the USSR would be allies more often than not, the great collectivist powers of the 20th century having put aside their differences and arrayed themselves against the neoliberal rising stars of Europe and Japan. I think that this timeline's belt and road initiative would be a joint project between Jobs' US and the Soviet Union, billed as a way to get America back onto the broader world stage and save various developing countries from European imperialism (and hey, if we liberate all these countries maybe we can get our hands on their rare earth minerals...)
- I was surprised that there was no mention of South America at all, so here's my idea for what's going on down there. The US quickly pulled support from right-wing regimes at the beginning of Lancaster's presidency, leading to a period of chaos in the early 80s. As the decade came to an end, a wave of left-wing governments swept into power, sometimes democratically, sometimes violently, all of them scarred by war and underdevelopment. In 1990, a conference of left-wing leaders met in Asuncion and agreed to aid each other in recovery and development. In 1992, this informal alliance was formalized as the Bolivarian League, a supranational union with a common currency, which encouraged internal freedom of trade and movement but adopted Lancastrian protectionist policies toward the rest of the world.
The League was very popular initially, and over the '90s and early 2000s it led to massive improvements in education and infrastructure, lifting millions out of poverty. It expanded, incorporating Cuba and Nicaragua as member states, and there have been frequent on-and-off discussions of Mexico joining. However, they began to run into many of the same protectionist stumbling blocks as the US, remaining technologically backward and isolated from global markets. Corruption, while more under control than it had previously been, was still an everpresent issue. Some countries were clearly contributing more to the League's common projects than others. And while the League had copied many of Lancaster's trade policies, they were far more lenient on immigration, leading to an influx of African refugees during the 2000s. All of this led to significant resentment in several member states, most notably Argentina, where the "Salirgentina" movement (anyone who speaks Spanish please tell me if there's a better Spanish equivalent of Brexit) began advocating for withdrawal from the league. Right-wing Peronist Carlos Reutemann leads an aggressive anti-immigrant, anti-League campaign that ultimately leads to a referendum. To the shock of almost everyone, Salirgentina barely passes in a low-turnout vote.
- The presidency of Jobs leads to a rise in violent left-wing groups collectively termed the "alt-left", which proliferate in online spaces, taking previously innocuous memes and turning them into symbols of revolution. One of these groups, the Society of the Godless, organizes a "Unite the Left" rally against the building of a monument of the ten commandments. When a Christian counterprotester is killed, Jobs controversially claims that there were "very fine people on both sides".
- The American Libertarian movement is now pretty firmly identified with the left, although it still includes many figures we might consider right-libertarian in our timeline. Within the Libertarian party you're as likely to meet an anarcho-communist as an anarcho-capitalist, and while the two have their disagreements they're likely to consider each other allies in the fight against statism. Libertarians are broadly pro-gun, pro-LGBT, anti-government, anti-racist, and antitheist, and are also firmly opposed to big corporations and monopolies.
- The far left is a lot more amorphous and less purist than in our timeline, often to their detriment. Weird syncretic movements that the left doesn't want anything to do with in our timeline, like Nazbols, "MAGA Communists", and as previously stated AnCaps, were instead kicked out of the right for being too left-wing and became somewhat accepted in left-wing spaces.