History and Politics

[sethgray]

My friend 8rayray8 and I were having this conversation at dinner the other night about how little we know about politics and stuff. The was especially troublesome for me as I tried to write a book once about an elf rebellion (actual Norse elves, not the stupid pointy eared kind. Thank you so much, Mr. Tolkien!). My book was made even trickier because it was about a monarchy trying to overthrow a democracy. Pretty controversial stuff to an American audience, even without the magically powered gay sex.


Of course, I never got further than seven chapters into it because I'm a high school graduate from nowheresville, WY that dropped out of college. I know nothing about the politics it would take to successfully engineer such a situation. I have no idea if any kind of situation in the past would have some parallels I could draw off of. At least I'm not arrogant enough to assume there isn't.

And now that I have dropped out, I'm not likely to ever get a satisfactory grasp on these topics. Oh, sure, I could read up on my own but that's never as effective as having a qualified teacher go over that kind of stuff with you. There are some people I know that I could ask, but I'm not sure how I could ever really explain why I was asking these questions. I would die of embarrassment trying to explain the plot of that book to my Government teacher, cool as she is.

It's almost enough to make me wish I'd never dropped out, but considering how much I hated it I'm pretty sure I made the right decision. If I do ever go back, now I know I need to major in History instead of English. Sure, it's a useless major, but so is English, and I would learn more from History, besides. An English degree would have been superfluous. All I really need to know about writing a book I'll learn by writing one. Guess I should get on that, huh?

Comments

[maryaminx.livejournal.com]

*pokes head in* I don't think I'm technically on your flist as I merely sneak in an out to see if you've written new fic, but I had to comment. (Pretty much an "oh, oh! I know this one!" from a former poli-sci major.)

There are a couple of ways for this to happen, the easiest of which is to have some sort of historical monarchy in place. Maybe this got overthrown in the revolution, or maybe they were just rendered useless a la Britain. Through scheming and loyalist-gathering, they could pretty easily stage a coup. It would be a little harder to gain legitimate power, but engineering a scandal or crisis that shows the opposition's weakness and striding in to save the day neatly ties that up.

In a simple democracy, with no actual royalty hanging around, it's a lot harder. Preferably, you could have "dynasty families" like the Bushes, Kennedys, and Clintons. This family should be generally loved and respected and have a finger in every government pie. Stage crisis or coup and you're golden.

Rewriting the laws to make oneself legit, and keeping the opposition from staging a counter-revolution is a lot harder than actually seizing power. It would really depend on the specifics of the world you're writing to make that work. But the actual coup is pretty easy.

[jupiterrhode.livejournal.com]

In the story, there was actually a historical monarchy. However, the immediate family members were killed off, so the protagonist's claim to the title is dubious, at best.

Thanks for the info, that bit about staging a crisis is something I hadn't really thought of before. *ponders*