Coming to the party a bit late...
I still don't get how the hippies in California and Washington side with the Evil Oppressors (tm).
What on Earth makes you think that the hippies and liberals were the ones who were holding power in the California and Washington Statehouses? To say nothing of the possibility that the Allied States was using force to get them to join. After all, it's not like the citizens of Jericho, Kansas, ever agreed to become citizens of the Allied States; it just
happened. Who knows
what kinds of tricks the Allied States used to seize power in the western states?
I would imagine that the most conservative people would resent MORE government control...
You would think so, wouldn't you? Yet even in real life, conservatives continue to support a US President who thinks that he ought to have the right to detain without trial or jury anyone he declares to be an enemy combatant without any judicial oversight. Hardly the stance of someone who genuinely supports limited government.
especially taking away the 2nd Amendment?
Well, the thing to remember about the Allied States is that it's not even a truly Conservative government; rather, it's a Corporatocracy. It's a Fascist state in the original sense of the term: The merging of the state and the corporation. So the Allied States government represents an extreme vision of what might happen if, in essence, Wall Street became the capital of the United States. The Big Business branch of the Republican Party, so to speak, as opposed to its Libertarian or Conservative or Neo-Conservative or Fundamentalist Christian branches.
As for the Western states "falling in" with Cheyenne. It was easy to dupe us. Misinformation and control of information. The Western States only heard what they were allowed to to hear. Blind loyalty is happening now, even without the nukes.
Certainly true. Then there's the fact that with an entire country full of people without power, without food, folks are more likely to follow a government that promises to put food back on the table and the hot water running again. Like FDR said, a hungry people is a receipe for dictatorship.
Another interesting thing to consider....
What if Tomarchino is the legitimate Constitutional successor to the US President, and that's how he initially got his support? After the bombings, most of the government would have been gone, and most Member of Congress dead. Now, in real life, there's always a designated survivor, a member of the Cabinet who's taken away -- but what if he died, too?
Let's say that there were 35 members of the House of Representatives outside of D.C. when the bombings went off who survived, and maybe 7 Senators. With the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate dead, and with the entire Cabinet and VP gone, then who would become the next President would be dependent upon which chamber's surviving members elect their presiding officer first. If the surviving House members elected a new Speaker first, then that new Speaker would automatically then be elevated to the presidency; if the surviving Senators elected their new Senate President Pro Tempore first, he would automatically be elevated to the presidency. It would, quite simply, be a race.
What if Tomarchino was elected to the position of Senate President Pro Tempore first, and thus legally became the US President? He could then have moved his administration to Cheyenne, won over the loyalty of most of the US Armed Forces in the West, but, then, in the course of events, let's say that the newly-elected Speaker argued that because the Speaker comes first in the line of succession, he should be president and not Tomarchino, and
he wins over a sizeable percentage of the armed forces in the East. You could have a situation where two people could both have claims to the presidency that would seem very strong to most people.
Anyway, that's my pet theory: That Tomarchino was the legitimate US President after the bombings -- or at least
a legitimate US president -- and used that to consolidate his power. Then, after he'd built up a strong enough power base, he decided to play the idea of a "reborn" America by changing the name and the flag.
[My only question about the eastern bloc is, why Columbus? New York didn't get bombed. Wouldn't that make more sense as the new capital?
There could be any number of possible reasons. For one, I imagine that maintaining security in New York City would be a nightmare; 12 million people and you're wanting to relocate a national government that was just brought down, or damn near so, by what amounts to a backseat nuke into a population center that large? Further, the other states in the Union might object to New York holding such a position of dominance over national politics (which, indeed, is part of the original reason New York wasn't made our permanent capital). Another thing to consider is that with most of the major population centers gone, the survivors would mostly be rural. Rural folk may object to such a decidedly
urban center holding power; Columbus is a decent compromise. It's a city, but it's not incredibly huge or all that disconnected from rural areas, either. Drive a bit in any direction from Columbus and you're in farmland. Columbus is more geographically centralized than New York, too, and the surviving US government may have wanted to appear somewhat geographically central.
Further, Columbus is actually fairly well-equiped for that kind of thing. The Ohio Statehouse is almost as large as the United States Capitol, for instance, and it's surrounded by state-owned skyscrapers that house most of the remainder of the state government that are all connected underground via tunnels. I don't know if any other state capitals have a setup like that. Columbus would also be more militarily defensible than the whole of New York because it's smaller (though it wouldn't be more defensible than Manhattan, what with that being an island and all, to be fair). Ohio may have also just demanded that it be located in Columbus as a condition of not joining the Allied States. Another possibility is that the Governor of Ohio may have an illegitimate claim to the US Presidency but that the remaining Eastern states have just decided he's a better option than Tomarchio.
A country's largest city isn't always its capital...
Nor a state's. That's why the capital city of the State of New York is the City of Albany, not the City of New York, and the capital of the State of California is the City of Sacramento, not the City of Los Angeles. To say nothing of the fact that Washington, D.C., is our federal capital rather than New York or Los Angeles or Chicago.
Man, I got goosebumps when the soldiers started stripping off the ASA flag patches at the end.... Chilling.
I found it inspiring, not chilling. American soldiers rejecting the badge of fascism.
I liked that Mayor Grey, a major asshole last season, has had such a nice character arc. I liked seeing him fly Johnston's
Gadsden Flag -- though, I have to say, I really wanted to see them pull down the Allied States Flag, burn it, and fly up the Flag of the United States again. Oh well.
Anyone else find it interesting that the new Allied States Capitol that J&R were building in Cheyenne looked like it was basically a copy of the US Capitol?