Bob Schroeck Wrote:This is probably verging too much on dystopian stuff we don't want in the setting, but in the United States at least there's always been a seething undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, most recently tapped into by Conservative Christianity and their paid political lapdogs. I could see that undercurrent being whipped into a dominant cultural force by anti-Fen efforts, possibly leading to a Luddite state not unlike (but probably not as parodically extreme) as the one in Niven and Pournelle's Falling Angels, where the U.S., in an attempt to keep itself "clean" of Handwavium begins to label almost any technology suspect and thus to be banned. While other nations at least maintain a steady state, and some advance dramatically, the U.S. would begin to backslide as both a political and technological power. And, in the grand tradition of American demagogues since time immemorial, blame anything and everything beyond its borders for its decay rather than its own policies and beliefs.So, the 2012 election in Gernsback-2 was won by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Goes_On%E2%80%94]Nehemiah Scudder? While some of the Heinleinians might be happy, I doubt anyone else will be...
Just an idea.
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Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012