HOME | DD

Description
The vast distances involved in space travel, even with the advent of faster-than-light travel, remain so enormous that democracy is generally thought to be infeasible on an interstellar level. Though sub-planetary republics exist, these are considered oddities and sideshows. In their stead, imperial monarchies dominate the spacelanes. Though these range from enlightened and semi-constitutional, such as the United Kingdom, to despotic, such as the Bolivarian People’s Empire, they are all similar in that most power rests with a hereditary aristocracy or some sort of dictatorship.

There is, of course, one notable exception.
The United States of America’s glory days of unquestioned dominion over known space are long gone. Politically isolated, the United States can be considered friendly to only a few major polities, notably ancient allies such as the UK, along with allies of opportunity such as the Chinese Autarchy, which shares a mutual enemy in the rogue Chinese Mandarin State, which claims portions of both neighboring American and Autarchy worlds. To all others, the United States remains disdainful at best, and the galactic community remains dismissive in turn, deriding Americans as hopeless idealists. Their reputation is not helped by the US’s steadfast abolitionism. While refusing to re-legalize the white-collar slavery practiced in some galactic empires is not uncommon by any means, the US is especially fiery in their abolitionism, freeing all slaves that pass through their territory and have even confiscated the slaves of an ambassador visiting from the Nation of Centauri, an incident that nearly sparked a war. Only the United Kingdom’s offer of financial re-compensation, rejected out of hand by the US government, avoided blows.

The United States is also unique among interstellar powers descended from old Earth in that it retains most of its Terran homeland. The CONUS, or Continental United States, is now far from the political or cultural center of America, as even the nation’s capital relocated to New Washington 72 years ago, in 2312. As the Terran Nationalist Revolutions swept a planet mostly ignored by empires that had long since grown beyond it, the USA was one of only a few nations to successfully defend its ancient homeland from the forces of the Terran Federation, mainly due to its still-debated decision to use nuclear weapons in its own territory. Only a few of its overseas possessions were lost to the Terrans.

The greatest irony of the modern United States is that, while all but the edgiest of its citizens would describe their country as democratic, America can hardly be said to be interplanetary in its democratic system. The US is in fact more like a close-nit coalition like the European Union of old rather than the original federal system. The President, chosen each eight years by an Electoral College now totally divorced from the popular vote (though electing unpopular candidates would be social suicide), is responsible more for setting extremely general policies for America’s vast militaries, while the vestigial federal government concerns itself with collecting meager taxes and fielding diplomats. Instead, each planet composes a Commonwealth of a few hundred to a thousand states, which run themselves like an extraterrestrial carbon copy of the United States’ old system. All the Commonwealths orbiting a star compose a System-State, which sends representatives to New Washington.

On a federal level, Congress remains divided between the ancient Democratic and Republican parties. However, due to the loose nature of the modern States, these are more vague confederal ideas than coherent parties. The Democrats include Social Collectivists of a sort that America once considered its fiercest opponents. However SoCols lack a drive to dismantle capitalism as ferocious as their Communist forebears, and are as such more readily tolerated by the rest of the establishment. The Collectivists mostly busy themselves with nationalization proposals, though a few of their leftier Commonwealths have abolished the market completely, with varying degrees of success. They are, essentially, a codification of the old label of “left-wing populist.”
The sub-parties of the Republicans, meanwhile, subscribe to Liberal Conservatism, whose modern platform, such as one exists, is basically “well, kings are bad, but so are command economies.” Their factions run from standard conservatives to Palaeo-Social Liberals.
Congress is, however, perhaps at its most serene in the history of the republic, perhaps due to its total inability to wield any real amount of power.

The up-and-coming countercultural ideology is, against perhaps all odds and sensibility, Neo-Anarcho-Primitivism, whose marginalized adherents mainly hail from their one major political concession, the State of Eden on old Earth formed from the area of the former National Radio Quiet Zone. Their guiding ideology seems to all outside observers to be an excuse to live on beautiful country estates and hold themselves above outsiders, while using throwback versions of the holonet that technically don’t count for reasons unclear.

The Christian Revival of the 2200s that swept the western metaculture mostly passed America by, and the christian portion of the population bottommed out hovering around 40%. While the slim majority of Americans continue to conduct their lives without reference to religion, a new God on the block, a literal American civil religion, is the fastest-growing religious group in America. These people claim the Founding Fathers to be divinely inspired, and draw most new converts from freed slave/immigrants who wish to distance themselves from their old owners’ customs and find the legend of Lincoln the Liberator appealing. The largest of these, the Church of the Constitution, has been constructing an anti-grav assisted mile-high statue of Abraham Lincoln outside of Capital City on New Washington, but setbacks have kept the incomplete monument an expensive embarrassment for decades.

In terms of sexual morality, America is simultaneously extremely permissive and somewhat conservative. Generally speaking, her commonwealths have enshrined Ad Hoc gender identity, allowing nationals to identify as whatever they choose, and marriage is between any number of consenting adults, both positions considerably ahead of many interstellar polities. However, graphic sexuality in public is not culturally acceptable, and even mere nudity is considered obscene and immoral even where it is not illegal, except for isolated nudist retreats. In this way, the US is again like the United Kingdom, with minor nomenclatural differences. (the fifth-largest gender identity is spelled xr, not xir).

The United States remains generally unconcerned with the affairs of the rest of the galaxy. However, radicals elsewhere in inhabited space hold up its model as worthy of emulation, especially where monarchies and dictatorships stagnate. It seems possible, with time, that America will once again inspire democratic revolts to rise up.

Description
The vast distances involved in space travel, even with the advent of faster-than-light travel, remain so enormous that democracy is generally thought to be infeasible on an interstellar level. Though sub-planetary republics exist, these are considered oddities and sideshows. In their stead, imperial monarchies dominate the spacelanes. Though these range from enlightened and semi-constitutional, such as the United Kingdom, to despotic, such as the Bolivarian People’s Empire, they are all similar in that most power rests with a hereditary aristocracy or some sort of dictatorship.

There is, of course, one notable exception.
The United States of America’s glory days of unquestioned dominion over known space are long gone. Politically isolated, the United States can be considered friendly to only a few major polities, notably ancient allies such as the UK, along with allies of opportunity such as the Chinese Autarchy, which shares a mutual enemy in the rogue Chinese Mandarin State, which claims portions of both neighboring American and Autarchy worlds. To all others, the United States remains disdainful at best, and the galactic community remains dismissive in turn, deriding Americans as hopeless idealists. Their reputation is not helped by the US’s steadfast abolitionism. While refusing to re-legalize the white-collar slavery practiced in some galactic empires is not uncommon by any means, the US is especially fiery in their abolitionism, freeing all slaves that pass through their territory and have even confiscated the slaves of an ambassador visiting from the Nation of Centauri, an incident that nearly sparked a war. Only the United Kingdom’s offer of financial re-compensation, rejected out of hand by the US government, avoided blows.

The United States is also unique among interstellar powers descended from old Earth in that it retains most of its Terran homeland. The CONUS, or Continental United States, is now far from the political or cultural center of America, as even the nation’s capital relocated to New Washington 72 years ago, in 2312. As the Terran Nationalist Revolutions swept a planet mostly ignored by empires that had long since grown beyond it, the USA was one of only a few nations to successfully defend its ancient homeland from the forces of the Terran Federation, mainly due to its still-debated decision to use nuclear weapons in its own territory. Only a few of its overseas possessions were lost to the Terrans.

The greatest irony of the modern United States is that, while all but the edgiest of its citizens would describe their country as democratic, America can hardly be said to be interplanetary in its democratic system. The US is in fact more like a close-nit coalition like the European Union of old rather than the original federal system. The President, chosen each eight years by an Electoral College now totally divorced from the popular vote (though electing unpopular candidates would be social suicide), is responsible more for setting extremely general policies for America’s vast militaries, while the vestigial federal government concerns itself with collecting meager taxes and fielding diplomats. Instead, each planet composes a Commonwealth of a few hundred to a thousand states, which run themselves like an extraterrestrial carbon copy of the United States’ old system. All the Commonwealths orbiting a star compose a System-State, which sends representatives to New Washington.

On a federal level, Congress remains divided between the ancient Democratic and Republican parties. However, due to the loose nature of the modern States, these are more vague confederal ideas than coherent parties. The Democrats include Social Collectivists of a sort that America once considered its fiercest opponents. However SoCols lack a drive to dismantle capitalism as ferocious as their Communist forebears, and are as such more readily tolerated by the rest of the establishment. The Collectivists mostly busy themselves with nationalization proposals, though a few of their leftier Commonwealths have abolished the market completely, with varying degrees of success. They are, essentially, a codification of the old label of “left-wing populist.”
The sub-parties of the Republicans, meanwhile, subscribe to Liberal Conservatism, whose modern platform, such as one exists, is basically “well, kings are bad, but so are command economies.” Their factions run from standard conservatives to Palaeo-Social Liberals.
Congress is, however, perhaps at its most serene in the history of the republic, perhaps due to its total inability to wield any real amount of power.

The up-and-coming countercultural ideology is, against perhaps all odds and sensibility, Neo-Anarcho-Primitivism, whose marginalized adherents mainly hail from their one major political concession, the State of Eden on old Earth formed from the area of the former National Radio Quiet Zone. Their guiding ideology seems to all outside observers to be an excuse to live on beautiful country estates and hold themselves above outsiders, while using throwback versions of the holonet that technically don’t count for reasons unclear.

The Christian Revival of the 2200s that swept the western metaculture mostly passed America by, and the christian portion of the population bottommed out hovering around 40%. While the slim majority of Americans continue to conduct their lives without reference to religion, a new God on the block, a literal American civil religion, is the fastest-growing religious group in America. These people claim the Founding Fathers to be divinely inspired, and draw most new converts from freed slave/immigrants who wish to distance themselves from their old owners’ customs and find the legend of Lincoln the Liberator appealing. The largest of these, the Church of the Constitution, has been constructing an anti-grav assisted mile-high statue of Abraham Lincoln outside of Capital City on New Washington, but setbacks have kept the incomplete monument an expensive embarrassment for decades.

In terms of sexual morality, America is simultaneously extremely permissive and somewhat conservative. Generally speaking, her commonwealths have enshrined Ad Hoc gender identity, allowing nationals to identify as whatever they choose, and marriage is between any number of consenting adults, both positions considerably ahead of many interstellar polities. However, graphic sexuality in public is not culturally acceptable, and even mere nudity is considered obscene and immoral even where it is not illegal, except for isolated nudist retreats. In this way, the US is again like the United Kingdom, with minor nomenclatural differences. (the fifth-largest gender identity is spelled xr, not xir).

The United States remains generally unconcerned with the affairs of the rest of the galaxy. However, radicals elsewhere in inhabited space hold up its model as worthy of emulation, especially where monarchies and dictatorships stagnate. It seems possible, with time, that America will once again inspire democratic revolts to rise up.