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roseandheather
Admiral
Posts: 2056
Joined: Sun Dec 08, 2013 10:39 pm
Location: Republic of Haven
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runsforcelery wrote:
Had it not been for the collapse of Péricard's constitution, the Republic of Haven never would have become expansionist even in the Andermani sense of the word.
The Legislaturalists built a corrupt political edifice to guarantee their own and their families' continued domination of their society. The Havenite social safety net — or, rather, a Havenite safety net — was in place long before the hereditary power of the Legislaturalist class was institutionalized. The process by which that was converted into a mechanism of control was the point one of my characters was getting at when he said the Republic had died in its sleep, murdered by people with the best of intentions in the name of enforced equality of outcomes. In essence, the Legislaturalists were in the position of the candidate who actually did run in an election in the US by promising that everyone would enjoy "an above average income." They secured their control by promising continually bigger and better social programs to the increasingly larger percentage of the population which had been excluded from the opportunities which produced superior outcomes for them and their families. And at the same time that they promised those bigger and better programs, they insisted that in a just society — which, of course, their society was — there was no inequality in education, intelligence, starting economic or social position, or even just plain the luck of the draw. More than that, they insisted that anyone who argued that there was such a thing as natural inequality even between individuals, shorn of any group context, was an evil "enemy of the people."
At the same time they were taking that position in public, in private, they were busy monopolizing control of the Havenite economy. A stupendous portion of the total economy was controlled directly by Legislaturalists or their allies, and the corrupt nature of the bargain at the top of the power pyramid permeated all of its other levels, as well. The fish rotted from its head, creating a situation in which the system promised equal access to health services, education, law enforcement, and politics, but in fact delivered nothing but inequality and demanded graft and kickbacks at every level before it made those things available to non-Legislaturalists. Rob Pierre's fury at the system sprang not simply from the death of his son, but because he remembered a time when it had come far closer to making good on those promises. It was the inevitable tendency for those who style themselves "the vanguard" of any movement to monopolize power, control, opportunity, and wealth for the benefit of the members of their own group which pushed the "Athens of the stars" into the exact opposite of what it had been created to be and had, for centuries, actually been.
The Legislaturalists didn't find themselves in a position to enact their bargain overnight. There were trendlines in the Republic which did, in fact, originate from the best of intentions in a society which truly did have the technological and economic resources to ensure that none of its citizens lived in want. Efforts to act upon those intentions had negative as well as positive consequences, because the one law no one can repeal is that of unintended consequences. The negative consequences, however, were fully repairable and fully recoverable before the Legislaturalists got behind them and pushed in the name of personal power. Without that action on the Legislaturalists' part, the Republic of Haven would have had no more cause to expand forcibly than 21st century Sweden would have to invade the United States of America.
Absent the Legislaturalists' manipulation of the situation, the Republic of Haven would almost certainly have going on doing precisely what it had been doing for centuries — and precisely what the Alignment feared it would continue to do — which was to grow as a political entity through the establishment of daughter colonies and the voluntary association of neighboring star systems and to grow in terms of a military threat (to the Alignment's long-term ambitions, not to the SKM or its neighbors) through exactly the sorts of contacts and relationships you can see in the Manticore Ascendant novels. That was the threat the inner onion needed to eliminate, and it did it by encouraging the Legislaturalists' ambitions and putting its covert weight behind policies designed to further cripple and destroy the domestic strength of the People's Republic, on the one hand, and to totally discredit Haven as a counterweight to the Renaissance Factor when the time came for the Solarian League to implode. It was less the direct military threat of the PRN that caused the inner onion worries than it was the ideological threat of Péricard's Republic. It was the risk that star nations seeking security in a galaxy gone mad would turn to an essentially (and demonstrably) benevolent interstellar power which had already created the largest extra-Solarian League political union and mutual defense network in existence. Haven had to be delegitimized just as thoroughly as the League was busy delegitimizing itself through Frontier Security and the Protectorate System.
The Legislaturalists were a homegrown phenomenon; the virulence and destructiveness of their policies, however, received several hefty kicks from the Alignment. They were a tool ready to the Alignment's hand when the time came to gut Haven, and the Alignment used it well. There are no guarantees that the Legislaturalists wouldn't have done precisely what they did do even without Alignment encouragement and manipulation. What we do know is that the Alignment did encourage and manipulate them and that they became conquistadors and eventually found themselves in direct confrontation with the Star Kingdom of Manticore. I will guarantee you, however, that no one in Nouveau Paris (outside the ranks of any Mesan operatives, at least) had any idea where the People's Republic was headed when the Legislaturalists first set out to "game the system" in the name of political power.
::soaks up this information like a flower soaking up the sun:: ~*~
I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.
Javier & Eloise
"You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley..."
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