Discussion Main / TheGreatPoliticsMessup

Per TRS, this was merged with Faild Future Forecast and turned into a disambiguation page:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1633065928095904900&page=3#comment-56

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass. Hide / Show Replies

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by randomtroper89 on Jan 17th 2021 at 8:20:40 AM

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

I'm cutting all this stuff in the description, it is not necessary to list a wall of events to explain the trope and the concept, which is basically. "A" happened in real life in year "X", but the work was made before year "X", yet it is set after year X, so event A is nowhere to be seen"

We don't need to list the whole Abecedary, do we?

But as noted, that is not the only change to which this applies. Others include:

• No one expected the discovery of the New World, since basic mathematics told everyone who could do it properly (Columbus couldn't) that Asia was too far away for anyone to go there and come back alive (they were right, but luckily for Columbus' expedition The Americas got in the way).
  • By contrast, prior to the European discovery of Australia and Antarctica European geographers and sailors theorized a massive southern continent of equivalent size to all the northern continents combined ("Terra Australis", from which Australia would take its name). World maps from the 15th to 18th centuries often featured this entirely imaginary continent.
• No one expected thirteen of the Colonies of British America to actually attempt, let alone achieve, independence.
• No one expected Napoleon to fail or to have met with any success in the first place.
• No one expected that the Empire of Japan would become a Great Power when The Empire of the Qing didn't. Many in the 19th century thought if any Asian country could modernize and become a great power it would be The Empire Of The Qing, especially during the Self-Strengthening Period of the late 19th century - assuming the theorizers in question even thought "Asians" could pull off modernization at all because of, their lack of European ethnicity.^note Look, we didn't say these were smart predictions, just predictions based on what people believed at the time. What wasn't expected was that Japan, with just a tenth of the Qing Empire's population and a similar fraction of its wealth, would become the first modern power to emerge from Asia. On that note...
• No one expected The Empire Of The Qing to end in a revolution (1911) and be replaced by a Republic, largely because Europeans had this funny idea that China was 'timeless' and 'eternal' and didn't quite understand that the Qing's claims to be just the latest 'dynasty' of one two-thousand-year-old pan-Chinese supra-national state were just a teensy bit bogus. Circa 1900 some Europeans imagined that it would eventually fall to European imperialism, but an internal revolution was not anticipated by anyone because only ethnic Europeans were capable of such a political and social movement.^note  Again, pretty obviously dumb-as-nails, but that is legitimately what many thought
• No one expected additional World Wars after the horrors of the Great War to End all Wars.
• No one expected the original Great War to End all Wars to be so horrible in the first place, or its messy aftermath.
• No one expected The Great Depression. If enough people had, it probably wouldn't have happened.
• No one expected the great European colonial empires to fall to anything bar one another. ^note Some, including Jean Jaurès, understood they were about to have a little spat of some sort or other and that the loser(s) could have all sorts of harsh conditions imposed on them, but the idea that any of these countries wouldn't survive the war was just not out there.
• No one expected the communists to win the Russian Civil War in the first place.
• Unaware of the power of the atom bomb and its potential as a strategic weapon, rather than the mere tactical weapon it was going to be used as, no one expected Japan to surrender just three months after the Germans did so. While known to be beaten, most (even in Japan) expected them to fight to the very last man and the war to end only when the USA totally occupied their country and declared the war over (rather than in a negotiated surrender).^note As of 2003 about 120,000 out of the 500,000 medals that the USA made to give to the soldiers whom she expected to be wounded in Operation Downfall (the 'Purple Heart' medal) were still left over despite the USA's involvement in Korea, Indochina, Lebanon, Columbia, Somalia, Kuwait, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
• No one expected that the Republic of China and the Guomindang would lose the Chinese Civil War.
• No one in The Roaring '20s expected the young women to take steps forward after taking the vote and rebel against the norms of the time by cutting their hair short, working outside the house, smoking in public, engaging in sports, wearing makeup, making out with total strangers, and driving.
  • No one in the fashion world of the time expected women to wear shorter skirts^note which would rise and fall for the next forty years and pants as everyday wear.
• No one in The '50s expected the upheaval of The '60s ^note Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the '60s could've existed. So there's always hope.-Tuli Kupferberg and nobody in either of said decades expected the malaise of The '70s.
• No one expected that Japan wouldn't go on to become an economic powerhouse rivalling or even superseding the EEC (European Economic Community) or USA. Science fiction back in the 80s and (very) early 90s showed a very Japanese future. Then their economy imploded and they've never made up that ground.
• No one really expected apartheid to end peacefully.
• No one expected Fermats Last Theorem to be solved.
• No one barring some very clever early Science Fiction writers like E. M. Forster and Jules Verne and the very clever Nikola Tesla expected The Internet. Even when it came, few thought it would become so ubiquitous.^note Technology Marches On can turn any futuristic Science Fiction story written in the 1950s or earlier into Zeerust with the mention of punch cards, vacuum tubes or manned satellites. The opposite effect can be incurred by having manned colonies outside Earth.
  • No one expected mobile Internet to take off, either.
• No one expected Pluto to be demoted from full planetary status in 2006, rendering countless science fiction stories outdated. (However, many astronomers and Pluto-supporters believe that, especially following the New Horizons flyby of 2015 and with recognized flaws in the official definition of planet that actually disqualify Earth, the demotion will eventually be overturned, so stories set decades or centuries in the future may be safe.) Similarly, many SF stories reference the fact the solar system has a tenth planet; one was discovered in 2005 - Eris - but its NASA-sanctioned title as the tenth planet was short-lived when it, along with Pluto - was demoted in 2006. As a result, until the ruling is changed any fiction written/published prior to 2006 referring to the solar system having nine or ten planets is, for now at least, outdated.
• No one expected the upheavals in the Greater Middle East.^note Well, except for Emmanuel Todd, based on demographical and educative evolution.
• No one expected Al-Qaeda, an until-then obscure terrorist group, to have the money or will to pull off something as big as 9/11. Except Charles Stross. He had to change the name of the bad guys in his novel The Atrocity Archives halfway through writing it.
• No one expected Osama bin Laden to be found and killed by American forces, and if they did, nobody expected him to be hiding in an urban compound less than one km from Pakistan's homegrown version of Sandhurst or West Point (i.e. the country's chief army officer training academy)^note  Except for the Janitor from Scrubs.
• No one expected the Pope to resign for the first time in over four hundred years.
• No one expected China to become an economic power, even though they really should've.^note Except Eric Idle and Tom Lehrer.
• No one expected North Korea to outlast the rest of the Soviet bloc by so long. During the 1990s, many assumed that North Korea was on the verge of an East Germany-style collapse. Instead, in the face of no more Soviet backing, Kim Il-sung's death, and an infamous famine, the North Korean state proved surprisingly stable. Same for Cuba, although it's much, much less isolated or extreme.
  • Conversely, after the Fall of Saigon, some thought that South Korea's days were numbered.
• No one, or almost no one, expected the economic crash of 2008.^note In the United States, nobody anticipated the sudden shift in politics that occurred as a result of the crash. Roughly from the late 1960s to the 2008 crash, American politics had been dominated by socio-cultural divisions, with economics and finance far in the background, and the neoliberal policies of the 1980s-2000s virtually unchallenged. Many commentators in late 2008/early 2009 fully expected this to continue, with the Democrats capitalizing on changing demographics and Republicans being relegated to a regional permanent second-party. The emergence of the Tea Party on the right (and growing awareness of inequality and unionization on the left) made people realize that not only would this not be the case, but economic issues would be a driving force in US politics for years to come.
  • Not to mention that most expected in later08-early 09 that we would see a return of openly progressive government a la FDR. That was the platform Obama ran on. Then he got in and turned hard Right in terms of governance even before the Tea Party got going. He refused in his first two years to bring the Big Banks back under strict regulation when he had the political capital to do so, instead focusing on the Affordable Care Act, which also quickly turned into a hot mess compromise with the Republicans that fell far short of giving us what the campaign promised (true Universal Health Care).
  • Congruent to that, no one really expected the Tea Party movement to become so overwhelmingly dominant that it has virtually seized total control of over half the US at the State level and paralyzed the Federal Government even while Democrats still held majorities in the Senate.
• No one expected the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and the legalization of same-sex marriages all over the West for the next five years, eventually reaching all of the US in 2015.
• No one expected the United States and Cuba to reestablish diplomatic relations so quickly and peacefully in 2015.
  • For that matter, when their diplomatic ties were severed in 1961, nobody in either country actually expected it'd take more than fifty years for them to be reestablished.

And to conclude, this is general stuff that real life people didn't expect, nothing to do with portrayals in fiction, unless it's alluded to / invoked in-universe and such.

Edited by TrollBrutal Hide / Show Replies

The Simpsons example:

Somebody mentioned a Simpsons episode where the Soviet Union only pretended to have disbanded but I don't think it should count as an example of the trope since, instead of being the case of the people involving in making that episode being outdated or making a prediction, they joked that a major event in history was a ruse.

Scrapped reference to missile defense being a "pipe dream" since the system is at least partly operational.

Many American television shows set thousands of years in the future seem to assume that America will still exist then (Status Quo Is Good). While we don't even know if our species will propogate that long, it is hard to imagine that America will necessarily thrive for many millenia, and if it does, it most likely will be a very different America than the one we recognize today.

Shows (especially comical ones like Futurama and Family Guy) make loads of predictions, which may even prove to be funnier in hindsight, when those predictions prove themselves wrong or right.

I know that we can't act as a crystal ball in explaining this trope (we'd have to march on every future political example in media and entertainment), but I feel that it definitely deserves a blanket mention that any show that predicts the outcome of certain events COULD become examples of this trope.

Edited by Dominick