Why I Wrote... The Tenacity of Hope
- May 1
- 12 min read
By Tom Anderson.
While I am a veteran writer of both published and unpublished alternate history (AH) fiction, The Tenacity of Hope is my first published foray into the dicey world of American politics. In this article I’m going to discuss both why this field is a potentially rich one for AH fiction, and why I chose the specific scenario I did: of a world in which Barack Obama does not become President in 2008 so soon after becoming Senator, but instead at an advanced age in the 2030s after a long political career.
Nowadays, the primary impression an outside observer gets of American politics is that it is, to borrow a phrase Americans themselves might use, ‘a dumpster fire’. Amid toxic hyperpartisanship and a President and cronies manifestly unfit to be elected to the office of county dogcatcher of Padiddlyboing, Ada County, Idaho, the general sense of horror is exacerbated by the intricate complexities of the USA’s constitutional foundation which is impenetrable to many outside observers. Many American voters, of course, may themselves not be aware of many of the details, but I am talking of matters as fundamental as the federal structure of the US. Even outside observers who themselves come from federally constituted nations like Canada, Australia or Germany struggle to comprehend the bottom-up federal structure of the United States and the contradictory way its political parties are organised. For someone from a unitary nation like the United Kingdom (like myself) the difference is even starker, and obscured by the fact (as the BBC’s Matt Frei observed) that, as an English-speaking nation with a common origin, it is easy for us to miss just how alien many of the ideas the US is built on are.
And, of course, this confusion is mutual. A couple of stories involving past Prime Ministers spring to mind. Harold Wilson was in the United States when he heard of the death of then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. He phoned home to announce he would stand in the leadership contest to succeed Gaitskell (which he eventually won). On hearing this, an American friend offered to write Wilson a cheque for a thousand dollars to donate to his campaign; this conversation devolved into confusion when Wilson tried to explain that the entire cost of his ‘campaign’ was the two shillings and sixpence it had cost him for the international phone call.
Years later, Wilson’s fellow Labour PM Gordon Brown – a poor Prime Minister in my opinion but certainly an intelligent and well-informed man with knowledge of history – met with similar transatlantic confusion when President Obama discussed the idea of a financial transaction tax with him. Brown suggested Obama simply ‘put it in his next manifesto’ (Americans would probably say ‘platform’) and when he won re-election in 2012, to introduce it then. In the UK, this is indeed how it works; as the aforementioned Wilson once commentated, “elections have consequences”. If a party pledges a policy, no matter how controversial, and then is elected with a majority, no-one can block it (by convention the House of Lords will not use its already weakened delaying action against a manifesto commitment). The concept of parliamentary sovereignty overrules any kind of attempt to block change: no parliament can bind a future parliament, and the constitution changes with the law.
In the United States, on the other hand, its federal structure and foundation on a written constitution produces a radically different political landscape. From an outsider’s point of view US states seem like nothing more than arbitrary divisions that could be redrawn in an afternoon without upsetting anyone (their cultural distinctions are often missed) rather than something much closer to the nation states that come together in the European Union or similar bodies. To take one personal example, on the way back from Chicago via Michigan my family once filled up our hire car with petrol on the Illinois side of the border, then passed through Indiana into Michigan and were flummoxed to discover that petrol in Michigan (thanks to the influence of the car industry) was a full dollar per gallon cheaper than in Illinois! The idea that you can cross a border without customs and have a completely different tax regime there is incredibly alien to the British mind.
Furthermore, the drivers in Michigan may be able to sit a totally different driving test at a totally different age to those in Illinois, and moving from one state to another necessitates almost as much paperwork as does moving from one country to another; for example, the dreaded health insurance is not necessarily compatible. Each state has its own government and the elections to its legislature, though little discussed even by Americans, are in some ways actually the most important elections as they can set the rules internally that govern the other elections.
This is a roundabout way of noting that US politics, though often horrifying, is also a fascinating topic. Even if the US wasn’t the cultural and military superpower that the rest of the world has to cope with the existence of, I wouldn’t be surprised if US politics was an object of fascination by outsiders in a sporting-fan way. I first became interested in it in the early 2010s mostly to facilitate arguments with random people on the internet.
In particular, a prevalent notion both inside and especially outside America is the idea that the presidency is the only office that matters. Sometimes a president is even treated as a dictator with absolute power and no constraints, which one might call a self-fulfilling prophecy considering that is now pretty much true. But according to how the US should function constitutionally, the president is only one small part of the system of government. The US explicitly separately the executive, legislative and judicial branches of its government. Whereas in Britain one must be a Member of Parliament (or occasionally a peer in the House of Lords) to be a member of the executive Cabinet, in the US a President can nominate members of the Senate or House of Representatives as Cabinet secretaries but they have to resign their seats in the process; and those secretaries are then scrutinised and approved by Congress before taking office.
Considering the importance of Congress to the US political system, it is striking that it is often ignored in foreign views of the country, leading to confusion like Gordon Brown’s about why Obama couldn’t just win an election and then introduce his tax. Obama’s plans still had to make it through an often-hostile Congress which may be controlled by the other party. In fact, American voters seem to delight in deliberately putting one party into power in the White House and another in the House and Senate; the way the US is structured often seems to suggest an attitude that ‘government doing nothing is always safer than government doing something’. It is a measure of just how historically fortunate the US has been in terms of resources, avoiding existential wars, etc., that such a naïve attitude has stuck around to this day.
One of the things that makes US politics so interesting from an AH perspective is the rigid schedule of US elections. The United States has never cancelled or delayed a nationwide federal election, even in the middle of its civil war! In some ways, this is an admirable achievement, although the lack of snap elections also makes it possible (even likely) that the federal government can be stuck in wasteful deadlock for years. But the interesting AH factor is that because (for example) the six-year Senate electoral cycles are predetermined and have followed their planned schedule for over 200 years, one knows which states will be up for election 20, 50 or 100 years from now. So, for instance, one could introduce a significant historical Point of Divergence in the year 1990 and the world could change radically, yet you know exactly which Senators in which states will be up for election in 1994. This is very different to most countries and in some ways makes it easier to sketch out in detail the consequences of a POD.
Indeed, a greater uncertainty in US politics stems from the Supreme Court, which has de facto grown increasingly important and powerful from what the writers of the constitution originally envisaged. Starting from the landmark case Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, the Supreme Court has, arbitrarily and for partisan reasons, declared itself the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution. In practice, justices have frequently come to serve for life, and their deaths and replacements introduce drastic unexpected shifts into US politics no less arbitrary than the death of a monarch plunging eighteenth-century Europe into war. One sometimes reaches the risible conclusion that in a country in which there is such a bewildering array of elected offices, none of them actually matter as one Supreme Court can declare a law constitutional and then, after a few justices die and are replaced, the next Supreme Court declares the same law isn’t constitutional anymore. Indeed, one often hears in US elections that while a voter might not particularly like a party’s presidential nominee, they will nonetheless vote for them ‘for supreme court picks’ to ensure that justices who will support the ‘right’ side of a divisive social issue (e.g. abortion) will be put in power by that president. I must admit that I still find the Supreme Court so obscure that I probably did not feature it in “The Tenacity of Hope” as much as I should.
So that is why US politics, though not a political system I would ever want to live under, is certainly a powerful setting in which to explore alternate history. I am very far from the first person to make that observation, nor even the first SLP author, with older books such as Martin Concagh’s Presidential or Austin Ross’ Out of the Blue. I also delved a little into US politics in my 1886-set The Twilight’s Last Gleaming, when things were very different but also hauntingly familiar, but US politics was only part of the background. In The Tenacity of Hope, I decided to make it the main focus.
The idea of analogous lists of political leaders is one which sometimes does the rounds in online AH, more as a ‘bit of fun’ than a serious exercise. For example, one could attempt to make a list of UK Prime Ministers in which each one is an analogue in terms of views and background to the real-life list of US Presidents. Or one can shift events to a different era and come up with analogous political controversies. Vague thoughts on this exercise is essentially how Tenacity got started. I was musing on how American politics has become so gerontocratic of late. Unbelievably, Obama is the only President to have been born in any year later than 1946 (Clinton, Bush II and Trump were all born in that year). The 2024 presidential election (which had not happened at the time I wrote the book) initially looked as though it would be a face-off between two late-septuagenarian or octogenarian candidates who were both visibly suffering cognitive decline. In practice, of course, Joe Biden dropped out, only for Americans to collectively decide they preferred the other gerontocrat.
This shift towards older candidates made me reflect on how Obama had the impressive achievement of short-circuiting an otherwise rather predictable conveyor belt of candidates and breaking into the corridors of power after only a couple of years as a Senator. Having served two presidential terms and then hit the limit – and because in the US it has become customary for former presidents to retire from seeking any other political office – this effectively meant that Obama’s career had ended much sooner than most would have predicted when he was first elected to the Senate in 2004. This got me thinking: what if Obama had had a political career more like that of his vice-president Joe Biden? Biden was originally elected to the Senate back in 1972 as the candidate of the youth (unseating an elderly rival), tried several times for the presidency (primarily in 1988 and also later in 2008, by which point he was already being described as old) only to improbably and belatedly enter the White House at the age of 78. What if something similar happened to Obama, and he missed his early chances for power but later returned after a long Senate career and being written off as yesterday’s man?
This was the critical concept of The Tenacity of Hope, the title of course being a pun on the title of Obama’s real-life book The Audacity of Hope. Initially I stuck quite close to the analogous history idea, with events in alternate Obama’s life paralleling those of Biden. However, I eventually abandoned this idea as too constraining and predictable, though the reader may still spot traces of it in the final book.
I initially considered a different POD to what I eventually settled on thanks to feedback suggestions from colleagues on the forum. I instead chose to explore the POD I had already published an article about, that the circumstances behind Obama winning his Senate seat were, improbably, tied to casting choices made in Star Trek: Voyager. Obama’s planned Republican rival for the open Senate seat had been Jack Ryan, former husband of actress Jeri Ryan; it was when the divorce papers were opened and his behaviour towards her was revealed that Ryan had dropped out of the race, to be replaced by the extremely weak candidate of Alan Keyes. If Jeri Ryan had not been cast as Seven of Nine in Voyager (her travelling to California had been cited as a cause of the breakdown of the marriage) circumstances might well have been quite different.
This POD has been discussed by others elsewhere, and for the sake of drama it is sometimes suggested that this change would actually have resulted in Obama losing to Ryan. However, cooler heads have pointed out that this was always unlikely given trends in Illinois and the broader nation at the time. Also, given Jack Ryan’s behaviour I think it was inevitable that his marriage would have broken up whether Jeri was travelling or not. For this reason, in the book I instead say that the marriage broke up later and under different circumstances, and that Obama does triumph over Ryan, but it’s much closer than his blowout against Keyes. This is enough to tilt Obama away from his early shot at the presidency in our timeline (OTL) which I suspect he never expected to be as successful as it was. The view at the time was that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable choice, yet in both 2008 and 2016 it became clear that she was highly vulnerable to a challenger. For this reason and others, rather than the seemingly obvious outcome of Clinton being the nominee in 2008 rather than Obama, I have her lose to John Edwards (though I did have to change the details of the latter’s infidelities to make this possible).
The rest of the book alternates between exploring what Obama is doing in his elongated Senate career and looking at broader events both in the US and the rest of the world. In my AH writing I tend to try to stick to a strict definition of the ‘butterfly effect’ which in this context means that a political change in the US will inevitably have consequences in seemingly unrelated matters and around the world. We get to see different leaders and events in other countries as well. This is perhaps obvious when one is talking about democracies like the UK or Germany, but it can also be the case due to different power struggles in non-democratic states like China. However, there are also calcified, declining regimes run by incompetent but irremovable dictators like Russia, and many of those go on to make very similar mistakes in Tenacity to the ones they did in the history we know.
In the book I also explore changes to pop culture and the media. While there has always been influence running back and forth between politics and culture in general, in recent years we’ve seen dramatic shifts (especially in the little-regulated US) of prominent commentators rising to influence via novel means involving the internet and social media. Streaming services have also radically shifted how we consume film and television. As we’ve recently seen with the case of Paramount vs Netflix in the buy-out of Warner Bros, which company ends up with what kind of streaming service can be the result of the arbitrary whims of chance. I explore this in Tenacity with a scenario in which the Star Wars licence becomes owned by Sony (who have a popular streaming service) while Disney buys out Paramount and produces new Star Trek series. Ultimately these changes loop around to affect politics; look at the impact of astroturfed fan outrage towards ‘woke’ on US politics.
One interesting element of talking not only about presidential races, but the great diversity of elected offices in the US, is that gets greater insight into just where future presidential candidates come from. In the US, the low turnout ‘midterm’ elections held halfway through a presidential term are usually (though not inevitably) dominated by a backlash against the president’s party. Because future presidential candidates are usually drawn from Governors or Senators, and whether someone wins a gubernatorial or senatorial election in a swing state is often determined by the other party being in the White House, this means if there’s a different list of presidents then there’s also a different set of Governors and Senators who could run for President in future. So, someone who in our history sank into obscurity could potentially rise to the highest office in the land, as I go on to explore in Tenacity. Another factor which may come into play is that an incumbent president may seem to be riding high in the polls and victory against him is impossible, meaning strong opposition candidates choose to wait a few years and only weak ones run to raise their profiles…but then the economic winds change and unexpectedly one of those weak candidates ends up as President.
Hopefully, then, I have made clear why exploring a very different (yet also familiar) twenty-first century through the lens of American politics, and the career of Barack Obama specifically, made for an interesting scenario to explore.
The Tenacity of Hope is on sale from Amazon now.
Comments