Seriously, you guys need to break your reliance on bipartisan elections and start paying more attention to the third-party candidates.
We would... except everybody sane joins the two big parties. Only the people crazy enough to think they can beat the two-party system make a separate party.
thanks, i can no longer in good conscious vote for ANYONE now 
.
Allow me to crush your idealism even further - they did it to fund Vietnam.
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Anyways, QC clearly takes place in a world where the South won the Civil War. Sherman is halted outside of Atlanta for a moment too long, and the failure to capture that city results in Lincoln losing the 1864 election to McClellan. Despite the loss, Lincoln still has four months before he's out of office and attempts to leave McClellan no-one to negotiate with. Sherman's March to the Sea and Grant's campaigns in Northern Virginia result.
But, as in our time, the South holds out, here heartened by the deadline for the war, and on March 4, 1865, newly sworn-in President McClellan declares a cease-fire with the Confederacy. The negotiations are quick, the CS dropping all claims to states that did not secede, as well as on the western territories and West Virginia. The US gives up Indian Territory and pledges a non-aggression pact in return.
Without the unchallenged rule of North America, the USA remained an isolationist nation that rarely, if ever, went on foreign adventures, turning a blind eye to the CSA's purchase of Sonora and Chihuahua in the 1880s, and taking advantage of the Confederate-Spanish War of 1898 to grab the Phillippines.
The Great War kicks off in 1914, with Britain, France and Russia versus Germany and Austria. The US and CS, nuzzled in their warm isolationist blankets, see no need to get involved in such a silly affair. Without their aid, Germany knocks Russia out of the war in 1917 and breaks through to Paris in 1918. Britain, safe from German arms by virtue of its powerful navy, yet unable to fight Germany on land alone, signs a white peace.
Russia falls to Communism, but with German satellite states sitting on the rich farmlands of the Ukraine, Communist Russia remains a backwards marginalized nation. France continues its cycle of collapsing Republics, and the Austrian and Ottoman Empires remain, propped up by their powerful German ally. A German-dominated economic and political sphere forms, called
Mitteleuropa.
A Depression hits, but not as bad or as hard, since the boom of the '20s was checked from US neutrality in the Great War, the lack of the Southern economy contributing, and a war with an upstart Japan.
France and Italy fall to some form of Fascism, forming the Rome-Paris Axis, possibly courting the Russian Soviet Federated Socalist Republic (RSFSR). Appeasement has taken hold in Britain, but Germany, despite economic troubles, remains confident in its power. The final collapse of the Hapsburg Monarchy in the 1940s is the cue for the Franco-Italian declaration of war on Germany, the Axis hoping to take advantage of disorganization in Germany as it prepares to integrate the German-speaking lands of former Austro-Hungary.
Britain and the Americas stay out, Britain unwilling to aid either side and the Americas again not seeing the gain from messing around in Europe. The Second Great War continues (with or without the RSFSR entering) until Amiens and Venice are vaporized by nuclear bombs. With no Nazi Party in the Kaiserreich, Albert Einstein and his contemporaries never fled Germany, and the Kaiser now has a gridlock on the most powerful weapon on Earth.
If Fascism survives the failure of the Second Great War, it does so in a radically changed form, France and/or Italy becoming a noisy opposition to Germany rather than a true constant threat.
As the German monarchy stumbles in the '50s and 60s, a new democratic wave emerges, eventually restructuring Germany on the British model, retaining the Kaisers as nominal heads of the country, but with a powerful Reichstag. This creates a ripple effect in
Mitteleuropa, changing it from a means of German-dominance to a "European Union". The small German-created states of central and eastern Europe quickly join, as does the Ottoman Empire.
Pure science, rather than war-focused research, explodes in the Americas and Britain after Wernher von Braun puts the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit.The "Space Race", as it is called, ends in the early 1970s as German, British, and joint US/CS missions land on the Moon. Small lunar colonies are eventually planted, followed in the 80s by an International Space Station (named such despite nearly all work being done by Germany, the British Empire, and the Americas).
There is no Vietnam war, as no major nation, least of all the US, has interest in helping the French hold on to Indochina. Segregation comes to an end in the Confederacy in 1986, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.
The flood of space technologies and requirements kicks computer development in the ass, especially as the Space Race sets its new goal at Mars, though the Mars program is put on hold after the
Germania and
Invincible disasters in the 90s.
Home-use sentient robotics are unveiled on January 1, 2000, and the first private space station follows a few months later, though its widely regarded as a "mad scientist's wet dream" rather than a true scientific outpost.
The USA and CSA maintain warm relations, not least due to sharing a space agency, the North American Space Agency, NASA. Travel between the two is easy and fairly unrestricted. Talk of reunion has always been dismissed, however. Most believe the North and South make better friends and neighbors than spouses.
The British Empire remains the world's largest nation, moreso if all her dominions are counted. Economically strong, though outclassed by the pure industrial giants of the USA and Germany, she holds her own economic union with her dominions and is not art of teh so-called "European Union".
The German Reich is the most powerful nation on Earth, both economically and militarily. Though its solitary reign over the Bomb has ended, the Reich remains, quite clearly, number one.
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Topic: How did the QC universe get so different from ours? (Read 46797 times)