What can said about the current state of the former United States in this setting?

"The Second Revolution could have never reconstituted the whole of the United States in one go, especially not in those regions that were still held by [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR] at the time of the Orpheum Theatre Declaration, nor was it intended to. The National Radicals (NRs) for their part did not even expect that the bulk of the country would fall in line behind them as quickly as it did, though with hindsight and an understanding of just how thoroughly Operation Killswitch had damaged the other pretender governments it seems inevitable to us now that they would. By 2058, the current federative diarchy of the states of Sunbelt and Heartland had established itself, and with very few exceptions those local governments that did not immediately fold themselves directly into the new NR government had at least on paper acknowledged it as the legitimate successor of the original United States of America.



The “on paper” part is important though. While the NRs were busy adapting to the impracticality of hard one-party rule, giving way to the current “Majority Party” government now known as the “Grand Coalition of the Republic” with all its various cliques, hangers-on, and questionably integrable elements all debating the finer points of the Easternization Program and the scope of the then soon to come American Cultural Revolution, the working groups of the Northeast, Upcountry, and Far West congealed into what were effectively warlord states who, as is often the case in these instances, became far less eager to be fully subservient to the government in Memphis now that they could stand on their own two feet.



(Such a political limbo also meant that the warlords, or as they are formally called “American Republics”, are not represented as being a part of the United States on foreign maps, though the Americans themselves certainly do so, both the central government and said republics alike. It is left to the reader to decide which is more “accurate”.)



This state of affairs in turn created incentives within segments of the Party to patronize said warlords, establishing networks that crossed the various differences of type and polity, making the central government itself less willing to push the matter of complete integration. That the warlords became themselves a stage for proxy conflicts within the Party is also a not irrelevant matter. The current congressional dispute between the Political Harmony Clique and the Political Engineering Clique (Don’t worry, there’s even more Party cliques with the name template of “Political X” which will certainly not be confusing) having come to quite literal blows between their pet warlords in New England being one rather infamous example of this “consensus building by blood” which has become if not the mainstay, then at least one of the many tools of the trade in the Second Republic for hammering out government policy.



That’s what became of those who played along, not everyone did. It did not take long, namely in the West, for various presidentlings and would-be caudillos to step out of bounds of what was allowed by the NRs. This often took the form of attempts to restart the continental drug trade in violation of both UN and NR strictures, but just as often it involved the use of restricted technologies and social poisons such as Linguistic Heatmaps and other tools that risked a European style Calhoun Cascade.



The response by Memphis was more or less immediate. The General Commissariat to Pacify the Southwest is called many things, most notably a “[censored] debased colonial satrapy of [censored] native compradors” by some members the Plum Caucus of the Communist Party USA, which to be fair if one strips away a few of the more choice words is arguably not an inaccurate description. The Commissariat is a unique political entity even in this day and age. Essentially a military march handed over to a collection of native military families, party militia washouts, and Prohibitionists to run wild the body, founded in 2063, serves mostly as an opportunistic entity in that it uses any pretext to “bring unreliable elements into line and protect the interests and welfare of the American nation” which is jargon for biting chunks out of any neighboring warlord currently on someone’s shitlist.



This has been very effective, though the success of the Commissariat in recent years has also meant a rise in prominence of the Prohibition Party which has hitched itself far more seriously to the stated aim of the body. This may prove to be a miscalculation on the part of the NRs in the long term. The Prohibitionists, being among those segments of the population who have never “made peace with” the memory of Killswitch (-and who can truly blame them? 1.7 million Americans dead in less than a day, all within living memory...) per the NRs’ own admittedly eclectic and poorly integrated understanding of what that could even mean, are not satisfied with the extent of the Revolution. While the current government insists that with the fall of [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR] and the success of the Truth and Justice Commission that the remainder of America’s enemies have long fled the country, the Prohibitionists insist that the enemy is still within. If it were not, then there would have been no need for the Commissariat in the first place. That point is… not easy to argue against.



While operating as a Special Zone the Commissariat does conduct something akin to internal relations with the various states, districts, conventions and communes of the restored union. Its positive relations with the State of Lakotah are to be expected, the current higher-level coordination between it and both the Massachusetts Port Authority and the Church of the South on the other hand is perhaps best understood as a reflection of the personal friendship between the Commissariat’s titular Commissar and the (in)famous union boss of Boston in the former instance and being a Born-Again Southernist in the latter.



The Commissariat likewise does engage in foreign relations of a kind, namely with the United Nations Anti-Terror Command (UNATCO). While the United States proper has yet to rejoin the United Nations, owing in part to questions over how to integrate the North American continent into the modern Conference of Peace and Security Councils, various UN organs are allowed some degree of freedom to operate within the union, with the Commissariat in particular hosting a branch office of UNATCO to assist in training anti-social element response teams and to deal with active UNCoLRC cases in its territory, namely against suspected Satanist terror cells.

When one is thinking of the Second Republic and the National Radicals in general one is often thinking of the Sunbelt in particular. One of the twin states composing the National Diarchy, Sunbelt along with its sister Heartland can be thought of as the paired hemispheres of a national brain centered around Memphis: The Heart of the Revolution. In this respect, however Sunbelt is the senior of the pair, both figuratively and literally. While almost all of the regions of the union date to the founding of the republic around two decades ago, Sunbelt is a carryover of a revolutionary era “base area” of the NRs prior to their ascendancy. Predating even the Orpheum Theater Declaration, the Grand Army of the Republic, and the “Majority Party” system itself. In many ways the NRs themselves can be said to be a sublation of the Sunbelt revolutionaries towards a more national (pun intended) form.

 

Of course, once the United States was reconstituted fully things changed. Firstly, the newly established capital was divorced from any state administration. Secondly, the base areas were done away with, giving rise to more or less contiguous sub-administrations with varying forms of rule within them (more on that later). The new mega-state formed in the south however kept the name Sunbelt giving it a perhaps not unearned sense of distinctiveness, being able to claim that it is the “oldest state in the union” [1].

 

This seniority and centrality to the early revolutionary era and building up of the NRs means that the basics of the ideology of “Americanism” come, at least in their original forms, from the Sunbelt itself. One of the more successful attempts at Easternization by the various warlord states of the former Global North, the NRs are considered the furthest along in political and social modernization among the rest of the “West” [2] if one does not count the Federal People’s Republic of Eurasia. Personally speaking, as part of the FPRE’s official ideology is a denunciation of any pretensions of “Atlanticness” (as opposed to the USA’s complete agnosticism or disinterest towards such classifications) I opt to not count the Eurasians as an “Easternizing Society” but as a wholly modern and civilized one. Where the reader falls on this point is their own concern.

 

The ideology of the NRs in the briefest is that of a Consultative and Democratic Dictatorship, the norm in much of the civilized world. Democratic functions in theory operate along a twin tracked model of an internally democratic Majoritarian Party employing a form of Mass Line. In practice this takes the form of cliques within the Party that represent various interests, both public and intra-party.

 

Within the NR party proper there are eight cliques, and within the “Majority Party” system more broadly there are 13-16 [3]. These cliques are based primarily upon the degree of incorporation with the Party Core, and then from there distinctions in policy.

 

The Core or Central Clique of the Party are those affiliated with the NR vision of governance without qualifiers and without addons. This vision is one of directing the National Radical “governance revolution” into establishing a party of natural governance, a vanguard of the American people where all democracy occurs within the single party and ultimately fuses with the state and civil society.

 

The further away from the core the more qualifiers are attached. “Inner Party” cliques such as the Movement for National Reconstruction and the Political Synergy Clique broadly align with the vision of the Total Party-State but with particular carveouts for their own pet institutions such as the military and republic gendarmerie or of maintaining a multiplicity of internal forms of governance between the states. Such forms of unitary patron states or poly-federalism come just short of the Core’s vision.

 

“Middle Party” Cliques such as the Political Harmony Clique and the New Era Scientific Development Movement advocate for an effective multi-party system within the NRs themselves, with the non-elected functions of the state existing as a kind of commissarial office to ensure that all parties reflect the “diversity of revolutionary orthodoxy” not that any kind of political vision outside the NRs should be allowed to exist. They also, as an aside, are the strata of the Party that most vigorously advocates for annexing the shattered remnants of Canada into the United States.

 

“Outer Party” Cliques such as the Dynamist Conference of America, Political Engineering Clique, and Movement for American Socialism advocate for the division of the legislative and consultative offices, handing the second over to non-NR parties, effectively establishing the Grand Coalition as a permanent fixture of American politics rather than as a stop-gap measure towards the establishment of the Party-State itself. Inspired by China’s consultative conference in particular, the Outer Party believes that while orthodoxy should be strict within the Party (making them closer to the Core than the Middle Party on this point) that the idea of absorbing all civil society into the Party itself is premature at best. To this end they often adopt a form of constitutionalism, advocating not the return of the old US Constitution (which is still in writing and spirit the supreme document of the land) but of a revised constitution. On this point there is overlap here with the Inner Party who desire constitutionalism to codify their own special interests into law permanently.

 

Beyond this are what are called the “Unintegrated Interests”, which is to say those groups whose existence and platforms in some way conflict with the Core’s program of a Total Party-State. These would be the twin caucuses of the Communist Party, We Are Sorry for the Inconvenience, and the Prohibition Party.

 

Closest to the Party Proper would be the Apricot Caucus of the Communist Party. The larger of the two groups, the Apricots desire the reestablishment of the old American two-party system with them playing the second part of course. The Apricots argue that the national revolution represented the final culmination of the more general “bourgeois revolution” that the first United States failed to fully bring into being on the continent [4] and thus is broadly speaking at the very least a “legitimate government” to operate under. Under a new two-party system the Apricots wager, perhaps correctly, that they could contest in the public sphere the claims of the NRs that they are the natural vanguard of the American people. In the present moment such an electoral coup would be impossible, but in 20-30 years who knows? To this end they are, despite not being NRs themselves, very supportive of the current state and constitute a part of the “Majority Party” at least on paper. They also agree with the Middle Party on annexing Canada.

 

The Plum Caucus does not agree. They broke off from the rest of the party (though kept their seats) when the current line of the Apricots was established. The Plums could not agree to what they saw as an “unqualified legitimization” of the second republic. They conceive of their situation as merely representing the interests of American Communists such that no “white terror” might be brought against them until such a time that the “real” party of the masses can fully constitute itself. In practice though this just means that they vote present most of the time and hang around the congressional snack bar a lot.

 

In an interesting wrinkle to this, the Movement for American Socialism was also once part of the core Communist Party, though they broke off for the opposite reason. When the Apricot Line was established they switched to the NRs, believing instead that it could be turned towards an explicitly socialistic program. As one can guess this has led to lots of grumbling about “left and right deviationists” by Communist Party cadres.

 

Beyond this are We Are Sorry for the Inconvenience and the Prohibition Party, neither of which are particularly popular within the Sunbelt, instead being found in the Heartland and the former regions of the Northeast once controlled by [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR]. They and the non-party groups represented by the “municipal seats” in Congress will be covered in more detail when we reach the Heartland.

 

A big reason why neither group is pronounced in the Sunbelt is once again due to the particularities of its history. We Are Sorry for the Inconvenience is found in those regions which were the locus of [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR] control during the revolution, being descended from independent resistance cells that were affiliated with none of the pre-unification pretender governments. Meanwhile the Prohibition Party is concentrated in those areas that felt the brunt of Operation Killswitch, such as the Far West and Great Lakes.

 

When the [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR] launched Killswitch the purpose was to completely demoralize the American population. Within less than a day 1.7 million people died. Almost all of them were those from vulnerable populations: children, babies, pregnant women, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped, persons struggling with mental disorders, those in hospitals, wards, nursing homes, churches, concerts. A sudden hysterical and public culling all across the then shattered United States at once, meant to utterly break the will of the still resisting masses and show them that none of the pretender governments and none of the revolutionaries could save them.

 

Killswitch was a Hail Mary that needed to be 100% successful to conclude the war in favor of [ECUMENICAL AGGRESSOR], but unfortunately for them it was only about 95% successful. Essentially every pretender government, including the at the time ascendant administration in Chicago would break under the strain, but the NRs would not. The Orpheum Theater Declaration by the NR leadership followed, and from there the Grand Army of the Republic was established. Everywhere they went their former enemies joined them and so what should have been a triumph for one side of the war ended in its almost immediate conclusion in someone else’s favor. The revolution triumphed more or less by default.

 

The Sunbelt was disproportionately unaffected for reasons still unknown. It may have been that cells of the old regime had been compromised by that point or that the Killswitch order somehow did not reach them. Regardless, because the core territory of the revolutionaries was not affected this at once was a boon but also led to a gulf between the Party during its early era of rule and the American citizenry in general. While quick to adapt to both this and the many other difficult realities of reconstituting the republic this meant that the initial vision of the revolutionaries could not be realized, giving way to both the clique system and the unintegrated elements which thrive on those subtle and queer distinctions that still exists between what the Party imagines America has the potential to become and what it is (for now?).

 

While these distinctions are a result of things that the rest of the country has that Sunbelt “lacks” the opposite is also true. Sunbelt is home to the Church of the South, the reconciliationist protestant church established during the dissolution and reconstitution of the Southern Baptists, National Baptists, and African Methodists based around the catechetical and administrative organs of the old National Baptists in particular. The largest church in the United States [5], its core is found in the Sunbelt, stretching across the breadth of the mega-state. The Southron Church is often seen as synonymous with the Sunbelt itself, and while this is not strictly true (the governor of Sunbelt is notably a Catholic) the former does exert some influence on the latter. The influence of the Southron Church can be felt most strongly in aspects of the American Cultural Revolution promulgated by the Party and its popular militias, namely the American Conference for Faith and Patriotism and the Jubilee system which has become a cornerstone of the NR program of land reform.

 

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[1] Despite everything the old state governments of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan still exist. They obviously argue that they are older as they literally date back to the First Republic.

 

[2] The worst of the Western Barbarians who have made no progress towards Easternization being the EuroState of course.

 

[3] The variation here is whether one counts the interests of the municipal groups as a singular mass or distinct from one another. As there are four total this necessarily changes the number if you count all of them.

 

[4] Communist Party Orthodoxy states that the culmination of the progressive bourgeois revolution almost came in the United States during the early republic, the end of the civil war, and the end of WW2 respectively. However, the potentially historically progressive character of the American national bourgeoise was undermined first in the defense of slaveocracy, then in the name of compromise and an institutional coup within the republic after the Civil War, and then in the complete takeover and attempted dissolution of the US entirely by rentier interests during the solidification of the late Anglo-American Banking Empire.

 

[5] And in parts of Eastern India and Myanmar technically. The Southron Church maintains membership (for now?) in the various global church associations of its precursors including the Baptist World Alliance. This had a somewhat funny effect where a number of local Baptist councils in the breakaway states of Eastern India and SEA chose to affiliate with them making those churches, at least on paper, “Southron”. Sometimes they’re called “Southron Asian” (get it?). Not important but a neat tidbit to bring up at parties."