American far-left liberal dystopia and other crisis scenarios

There is the Virgil C. Summer site but that was commissioned in '73.

Apparently, I was wrong about coal. Per this site, the breakdown of electricity production in the U.S. in 2016 was roughly:

• 34% natural gas
• 30% coal
• 20% nuclear
• 15% renewables
• 1% petroleum

So cutting coal completely would leave significant gaps in output, which might be able to be filled if, as noted above, nuclear power were to ramp up distribution. That said, if you chop out everything but the renewables instantly, without a rapid expansion, the U.S. would go into energy catastrophe in short order, killing millions outright and reducing living standards of the remainder by an unimaginable amount.

Of course, cutting petroleum would have many other effects, such as on transportation and machinery. We haven't figured out how to make solar-powered passenger aircraft just yet, nor battery-powered trucks or other heavy vehicles.

Ergo, no government would ever attempt such a thing, because it would not be a government for very long afterwards. The premise is that that some loony left-wing group takes over with enough of a mandate to get its most wet-dream policies enacted, but no plausible mechanism whereby that could ever occur has been presented; neither has there been any notion offered of how such a government could remain in power, nor any political group identified that holds the requisite beliefs.

Is the unholy offspring of Greenpeace and the Soviet Communist Party going to somehow win the Presidency, 60% of Congress, 3/4 of the states, and the Supreme Court? Well, I guess things like that have happened in other countries, and if we got Trump in the U.S., it's clear we aren't immune to the lure of the lunatic right, so maybe...

edited 5th Sep '17 8:46:49 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

SERIOUS REMINDER: Any attempt to start political-themed Flame Wars, resorting to bad debate tactics or any form of weird-butt attacks will be thumped. If worse comes to worse, this thread needs to be locked.

It seems the thread is going out of whack. What was once some parody Strawman Political themed dystopia made by me about extreme-left wingers controlling America delves and devolves into real-life US politics and all sorts of badness and depth that is beyond the control and comprehension of it.

These are the threads which inspired this thread.

• American far-right dystopia
• Second American Civil War

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Yeah, in comparison to the aforementioned threads, a lot of reactions to the very idea of creating a left-wing dystopia seem to be strictly to the effect of "don't", but I don't think just arguing about that is any useful. (Funny thing is, with two prolific leftist dictatorships in recent history, one of which is still going strong, there's much more abundant source material than for the default dystopian setting in fiction anyway.)

Best to just stick to the topic, I guess. As mentioned, the main reason the government stays afloat is that its most dangerous potential opponents have either moved out wholesale, or simply can't be bothered with the forming of an organized resistance. The other reason is that even its most disillusioned supporters have bought into their own propaganda regarding the rural regions, making them unlikely to defect and join "those" people.

As a purely visual impression, I'm picturing the once-gleaming and now obviously decaying cityscapes still decorated with idealized propaganda where the shiny happy people on the building facades overlook the decidedly less happy people on the streets. Meanwhile, the countryside actually looks worse, somewhere between Mad Max and borderline schizo tech-level kludge, but everyday life is decidedly more relaxed and better adapted to the lack of effective infrastructure. A bit of a Slobs Versus Snobs situation overall.

edited 6th Sep '17 4:05:24 AM by indiana404

@Fighteer: You know I am quite a sensitive and rather paranoid guy. Due to the very nature of US politics, I have to give three warnings not to derail the thread to an US politics thread.

To eagleoftheninth: Let me answer each questions you gave about the excercise.

• Q1: They will you ship you off to their re-education camps where you will be watching propaganda all day, all night until you break.
• Q2: If they found out you're a Muslim - they will also question you for terrorism links and drag you off to concentration camp.
• Q3: Say hello to the FBI, NSA and CIA.
• Q4: Try harming those animals and see yourself shot by the agents.

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A lot of that has to do with the fact that many of the real world 'leftist' dystopias are that way because they failed to properly implement the socialist politics they purport (sometimes cynically, sometimes genuinely) to support.

Because that's sort of the thing: Dystopias like The Republic of Gilead or Rapture take an ideology ('traditional family values' conservatism and hardcore objectivism, respectively) and just basically give them everything they want. Because of the nature of those ideologies, the end result could never be anything but a dystopia to most modern readers/viewers/players.

The core ideals of socialism ('far left' to people in the US, regular left to pretty much the rest of the world) however, if taken to their logical extreme, don't really produce an automatic dystopia.
Social justice and equal rights for all and having the means and results of production controlled and shared by everyone equally and democratically does not really make for much of a dystopia (it may not be everyone's ideal society, but it is certainly not one where the majority of people would be completely miserable). In order to have a leftist dystopia, you need to introduce some element that is antithetical to actual leftist ideology. Like say, as happened in the real life Soviet Union and Communist China, having an authoritarian dictator taking the democracy out of the system and having the production of the nation determined not by what the people democratically agree they need, but by the dictator deciding what they think the people need autonomously.

This setting is a politically focussed alteration of the US. There is literally no goddamn way to discuss this topic without discussing (real-life) politics in the US. When Fighteer says we shouldn't turn this into another US politics thread, he means we should restrict out discussion of politics to only those elements relevant to this topic, not US politics in general.

So far I have seen very few elements of this 'Militant Atheist, Left wing dystopia' that are actually left wing, rather than just unrealistic strawman claims about what American 'rightists' claim 'leftists' want, but that no left wingers actually do.

edited 6th Sep '17 5:20:13 AM by Robrecht

Angry gets shit done.

Coming from an off-shoot of Soviet-style socialism, I'd say a lot more harm was done not from actions contrary to its ideals, but rather ones with unintended consequences from being followed to the letter. Here's a few examples that can be featured in Liberamerica:

While the regime is quite efficient in eradicating the influence of religion in public life, it fails to account for the fact that the majority of people actually like a good deal of its traditions, the holidays in particular, which results in either secularized carbon copies - such as the Soviet-style celebrating of New Year instead of Christmas, complete with a Santa analogue - or garish to the point of grotesque exaggerated celebrations of secular events, such as weddings and school graduations. And that's not going into the veneration of political figures. Religious or not, fanaticism persists, because the best of intentions couldn't erase the purely social frameworks it arose from.

Speaking of which, the government is quite effective in putting women in the workforce, virtually on par with men... with the resulting social attitude being that any woman not willing to both work full-time and keep house and tend to her children is a lazy bourgeois housewife, a veritable Peggy Bundy. Essentially, right becomes expectation and then obligation, analogous to the attitude that real women don't wear dresses.

All in all, the door swings both ways with regard to ideals turned verbatim into policy. And that's not going into the aforementioned economic and logistics problems of a government that has scared off most of its skilled workforce and virtually all of its private sector. Like I said, the problem of socialism is that it does eventually but inevitably run out of other people's money.

edited 6th Sep '17 6:03:08 AM by indiana404

A defining aspect of the extreme form of socialism is the destruction of market forces that govern competition in private industry, which combines with corruption and favoritism to create inefficiencies that accumulate until they make the economy uncompetitive and unable to sustain standards of living.

This is a gradual process, since no government can get away with yanking the economic foundation out from under its people instantly. Rather, the "revolution" begins with an existing state of extreme inequality, such that privation among the common people is so great already that they're willing to take extreme risks to get a better life. This applies equally to right- and left-wing revolutions. "We're getting shafted anyway, so we have nothing to lose," is the defining mentality.

Since we're veering left here, the new government suspends freedoms in the name of righting the wrongs of inequality: it targets its corporations, its wealthy, its business leaders, its religious leaders, and so on, for mass forfeitures of property and ownership, save the ones that kowtow sufficiently to the new masters. It then nationalizes the seized assets and operates them itself, fixing prices and wages in ways that make little sense but satisfy popular demands.

What follows in this command economy is gross excesses of mismanagement and corruption, resulting in supply failures and mass shortages of general goods. The government must resort to imports to satisfy domestic needs, and as the quality and production failures of its own industry cause its exports to tank, it starts to mount trade deficits that it sustains with monetary manipulation. This of course creates inflation of its domestic currency along with thriving black market trade in a stable external currency that no amount of law enforcement action can stamp out (partly because the cops are also using the black market).

There, you have a plausible scenario.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So plausible, in fact, that it's exactly what happened in most attempts to create a fully socialist state in real life.

But then I'd argue that's not really a socialist dystopia, i.e. a dystopia created by the inherent flaws in socialist ideology, so much as a dystopia created by the people creating it claiming to be, but not actually being socialist.

And no, that's not a No True Scotsman.

Command economies are not the workers collectively controlling the means and distribution of production and that's pretty much the only requirement for actual socialism (and the only thing all socialist streams agree on, all other details of how this should be achieved and how the society around it should be structured being negotiable).

Which is why Huthman's strawmanning of 'liberals' is a problem: Dystopias are meant to examine the flaws of the ideology that underpins them and making up some shit about 'left wing' ideology that (practically) no one on the left actually supports doesn't expose any flaws, except in the writer's ability to do actual research.
The great big flaw of 'far left' ideology (i.e. socialism) is that it's so idealistic and ideologically 'perfect' that it can't actually be implemented by real life, flawed human beings. You can't write a dystopia that's socialism taken to it's extreme, because socialism, as an ideology, is designed to result in a utopia of taken to it's extreme. You can only write dystopias that result from failed attempts at implementing socialist ideology. But then again that's easy to do because there are so, so many ways in which those attempts can easily fail.

Angry gets shit done.

Yes, exactly. You don't need to invent failure conditions for revolutionary socialist states, because we already have plenty of historical examples.

On the other hand, I don't think we've ever had a true socialist state on a large scale, because getting from the revolution to the collectivist worker's paradise is really hard and has only been done in tiny communities that aren't functional as independent nations.

What you're left with are strawman parodies of "liberal ideology" and it's very hard to get from any existing political structure to one in which those strawmen become real. By what mechanism would a hyper-environmentalist government abruptly stop all use of fossil fuels? By what mechanism would a hyper-gun control government strip all guns from private hands? I could see them trying, but not succeeding. In other words, how does one get from the current political environment to the putative dystopia?

edited 6th Sep '17 7:41:00 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The mechanism and its effects were already explained - a slew of scandals concerning conservative policies results in a landslide election victory and rushed legislative measures, the initial push is funded by the wealth of left-leaning plutocrats and further reinforced by the now acquired control over the government budget. It was also noted that measures such as gun control would have little effect outside the big cities (where weapons are already not too popular), other than the manufacture of homemade guns and ammo when the factories are closed or nationalized as well.

On a tangent, as much as I have some fond memories of the commie days, I find the notion that socialism is perfect if not for the people, to be like saying that an art-house chair is perfect if not for how it sprains the back of anyone actually trying to sit in it. It's one thing to say that socialism requires a certain technology level in order to be effective, but blaming its failures on people being people does not really present it as something to ever be implemented at all.

Consequently, it's only logical that if socialist practices were somehow initiated and enforced to the letter, that human nature itself would turn the resulting government into a dystopia where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

If we're perfectly honest though, true socialism isn't THAT hard to implement, it just needs to start from the ground up rather than being enforced from the top down (which has so far always been the issue).

The first steps towards building a working socialist nation would be something along the lines of a whole bunch of workers who've just been laid off because the company that employed them finished its project and doesn't want to pay them in the time until the next project banding together and starting a collective/cooperative business that ends up being able to successfully outbid all its top-down Capitalist competitors because the workers have all agreed they only want enough money to earn a living wage, rather than wanting a whole load of profit on top of that. And then that initiative spreading and leading to the rise of many other such cooperatives until eventually all the means of production are in the hands of the workers.

There's a good way to create a dystopia where state is still actually socialist, too: A Cyberpunk future where all the MegaCorp 'nations' are democratic collectives, who are all dedicated to equality and the principles of 'from each according to their means to each according to their needs', but who still end up dystopic because their available resources are finite and they all disagree on what the others' means and needs are (and not necessarily in a selfish 'they have all the means, we have all the needs, so they should give stuff to us, but we shouldn't give stuff to them'. But in a more realistic 'we have enough land to either grow all the food people need to be comfortably fed or to grow the cotton, flax and wool to keep them comfortably clothed, but not both at the same time.')

Angry gets shit done.

Troll Post.

edited 8th Sep '17 7:42:50 PM by Huthman

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How? What? When?

See, Huthman, this is why no one actually believes you started this thread for any reason other than just to shit on 'liberals' and 'atheists'.

And also why we can't actually have this thread without discussing politics. You've now reached the point where your reason for why this made up president is supposedly evil is 'because atheism/socialism/communism/liberalism' and that those are things you don't support, politically, (Even though you don't know jack shit about them, beyond presumably having been told they were bad by whoever screwed your head up badly enough that you feel you need to keep doing this over and over and never actually seem to realize what it is about what you're doing that people take issue with) and therefore consider evil.

Presidents don't make amendments. Presidents don't have the power to unilaterally change the constitution. In order to introduce an amendment that 'basically says State Atheism, Socialism, Communism and Liberalism' (whatever the fuck that means) it needs to be voted for by at least two-thirds of Congress and then needs to be ratified by at least 38 separate states.

That means this stuff must have ridiculous amounts of popular support.

Especially given this bit from the original post:

edited 8th Sep '17 5:51:21 PM by Robrecht

Angry gets shit done.

I say we nuke this thread from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

We're going to need to lock this thread instead.

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Request(s) for thread locking granted.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman