Peggy Carter
Peggy Carter | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Mayor of Riáona | |
| In office 1 October 1966 – 1 October 1988 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Margaret Carter 10 April 1920 Ðajyr, Alscia |
| Died | 5 October 2015 (aged 95) Riáona, Ḑarna, Gylias |
| Nationality | |
| Political party | United National Movement (1939–1947) Independent (1966–1968) Party for Popular Action (1968–1988) |
| Occupation |
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| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  Border Guard (1938–1939) Royal Guard (1939–1947) People's Army (1947–1958) |
| Years of service | 1939–1958 |
Margaret Carter (Gylic transcription: Margaret Kartyr; 10 April 1920 – 5 October 2015), better known as Peggy Carter (Gylic transcription: Pegi Kartyr) was a Gylian soldier, detective, and politician. She served as Mayor of Riáona from 1966 to 1988, becoming famous for her distinctive political course, advanced through her Party for Popular Action.
Born in Alscia, Peggy served as a soldier in the Liberation War, first with the Royal Guard and then with the People's Army. After the war, she became a private detective, attaining fame for driving the Mava Organisation out of Riáona, thwarting their attempt to expand operations westward.
Entering politics, she was elected Mayor of Riáona in 1966 as an independent. After experiencing troubles assembling coalitions in the city council, she formed the Party for Popular Action, which became a major player in the city's politics. She was known for her syncretic politics, with signature policies including support for rationing, distributist economics, and a Gylian interpretation of law and order.
Her mayoral term ended when she lost the 1988 municipal election. She retired from politics afterwards, with the PPA collapsing in her absence, and lived in retirement until her death in 2016.
Early life
Margaret Carter was born on 10 April 1920 in Ðajyr. She came from a moderately well-off Allamunnae family, and had an older brother.
From a young age, she was nicknamed "Peggy". She initially disliked the nickname, but later got used to it, commenting that it gave her an advantage in being underestimated.
She completed her primary and secondary education in Alscia, and was conscripted into the Border Guard at the age of 18. Military service appealed to her sense of adventure, and thus she decided to continue it after Alscia was dissolved by joining the Free Territories.
Liberation War
Initially dissatisfied with the Free Territories' lack of a conventional military, Peggy crossed the strait into the nearby Nerveiík Kingdom, and joined the Royal Guard.
Peggy's time in the Nerveiík Kingdom had a great impact on her politics. She was also a member of the United National Movement, being influenced by its corporatism and economic interventionism, and the Women's League.
She remained a lifelong admirer and defender of the Kingdom, and was known for scolding anyone she overheard mocking it and demanding they show proper respect to a defeated adversary. Later during her mayoral term, Riáonans took to joking that Peggy thought "the wrong side won the war" — a joke she would smile at without comment.
After the Tymzar–Nalo regime seized power on 31 December 1947, she fled Nerveiík and returned to Iárus island, where she asked to join the People's Army. Although the PA was somewhat skeptical, her military experience and commitment impressed them, and she was accepted. She joined an intelligence agency and worked as a field agent. She also saw action at the front during the liberation of Herlan, and occasionally worked to train PA personnel.
Peggy had trouble adapting to the militia character of the PA, and gained a reputation among her units for grumbling about the lack of hierarchy, cumbersome mass assemblies, and use of "revolutionary discipline". She didn't mind this, and made jokes about it to bond with colleagues, quipping, "I'm the youngest old fogey in this whole blasted military." She was elected commander several times, although she declined to accept any titles because she felt they were meaningless without an official hierarchy, and ended the war with a distinguished service record.
Post-war career
Peggy traveled across southern Gylias after the war, and ultimately settled in Riáona. She declined some former comrades' invitations to join the Special Public Security Bureau 9 or the new Gylian Self-Defense Forces, saying, "I don't think it's my place in an institution." Instead, she became a private detective, among the first to be officially licensed in post-war Gylias.
As a detective, she mainly worked on cases involving insurance fraud, employment fraud, racketeering, and smuggling. Much of her time was spent combating white-collar crime; she made a principle of rejecting wealthy clients who wanted to hire her.
She earned national fame for her central role in driving the Mava Organisation out of Riáona, foiling their attempt to expand their operations westward. Her exploits inspired several films, series, and pulp fiction books, and numerous detective characters in Gylian pop culture were explicitly modeled after her.
Mayor of Riáona
Peggy decided to enter local politics "out of frustration". She ran for the mayoralty as an independent in 1966, with a campaign that emphasised her war service (earning her an endorsement from Veterans for a Just Peace) and career as a private detective. She finished fifth in first preference votes, but managed to advance through vote transfers and narrowly won the final round with 50,3%.
Her ambitions of being an "activist mayor" were initially frustrated by her difficulties assembling coalitions to support her policies in the city council. In response, she announced the formation of the Party for Popular Action in 1968. At that election, she won a plurality of first preference votes and 51,5% in the final round, while the PPA secured a plurality in the city council, making it easier for her to secure approval from independents for her proposals.
Economic policies
Peggy charted a unique course in Gylian politics. Her campaigning and platform were heavily nostalgic: she sought to preserve the egalitarian spirit of the Liberation War and National Obligation period at all costs, and she condemned "wasteful prosperity" as destructive to solidarity and society, with unabashedly moralising rhetoric. These positions were at odds with the economic boom of the time, and brought her notoriety as such an explicit throwback figure. The Prism famously satirised her as a prematurely old woman grumbling about how "things were better during the war", an image that defined her to the Gylian public.
Perhaps her best-known policy was the official reintroduction of rationing in Riáona, for which she managed to obtain approval by referendum. She established an official rationing department for the municipality, using it to guarantee basic necessities to everyone and to promote a spirit of "public luxury" against individualist consumption. She succeeded in having the municipality take over all housing, thus abolishing rent.
Overall, she promoted distributist economic policies, favouring cooperatives and workers' self-management, and severely restricting concentration of wealth. She helped bring in recurring capital levies and similar measures to tax Riáona's wealthiest, taking advantage of municipalities' right take on any competence they wish as long as it didn't disrupt Gylias' constitutional foundation.
Regulations and growth
She also championed a series of public health regulations that led to occasional derision as a nanny stater, such as prohibitions on drugs in public spaces, early closing hours for bars, and a carless days scheme that heavily discouraged private cars to the benefit of cycling and public transport.
One effect of her policies was that Riáona's population and economy were largely maintained at the same level. She rejected the concept of economic growth and abolished the city's conventional economic measurements in favour of measuring well-being and sustainability. This won her the support of the Green Party, and characterisation by some historians as a predecessor to the concept of a steady-state economy. It also served as significant common ground with Governor Margaret Roberts, who was a pioneer of green conservatism.
Law and order
Similarly unusual for Gylias, Peggy emphasised her detective career and advocated a left-wing version of law and order. Her use of rhetoric associated with the concept was controversial, to which she retorted, "I believe in law and order: the Law of Jante and spontaneous order!".
She advocated fighting crime by abolishing poverty and inequality, and urged public security volunteers and law enforcement to prioritise cracking down on white-collar crime, which she saw as the greatest threat to society.
Popularity
Between 1972 and 1980, she consistently won over 50% of the first preference votes, thus winning mayoral elections in the first round. Her highest vote was 53,5% in 1974. This came in spite of her advocacy of sometimes unpopular policies, and led her to memorably observe, "People gripe day and night about what I stand for, and then come Election Day they go into that booth and give me another mandate. This must be my punishment."
While her policies had formed a quirky parallel course during the Golden Revolution, the wretched decade brought a more onerous backdrop. Peggy despised the Aén Ďanez government, perhaps more so given the superficial parallels between their governing styles. However, she enjoyed a warm relationship with Governor Margaret Roberts, who praised Peggy's courage in advocating her policies despite the risk of unpopularity. She also had a close friendship with Róisín Ní Bradáin, and was the officeholder whose ideas most closely matched Róisín's.
By the 1980s, Peggy's popularity started to decline. Her first preference vote once again fell below 50%. Her biographer opined that she had been in office too long, and had lost the "ceaseless impulse to explain and campaign" that had propelled her to reelection. Although she managed a personal triumph in outlasting the Aén Ďanez government and lasting two decades in office, she finally lost reelection in 1988 to a Urban Movement candidate.
Public image
Peggy's political career was defined by her stubborn, no-nonsense personality. Her resilience came from long experience in the military and as a detective, and she was known for her intense professionalism and sarcastic streak.
She treated the Party for Popular Action solely as a vehicle to advance her proposals in the city council. It was seen as a personal party, with no real ideology or any other notable personalities, and earned derogatory nicknames like "Party of Peggy's Automatons", "Pretext for Peggy's Actions", or "Party of Unpopular Action".
She earned the enmity of The Federal Informer, based in Riáona and previously supportive of her detective work. The newspaper consistently attacked her "reckless flirtation with extremist rhetoric" — particularly regarding law and order — and "authoritarian trappings", namely the PPA's volunteer wing, the Popular Volunteers.
Writing in Radix, Virginia Inman acknowledged that while Peggy's stubbornness at times grated on voters, they also on some level admired her "blunt, frankly-my-dear-I-don't-give-a-shit attitude", demonstrated by her repeated election wins. The PPA never won a majority in the city council — evidence that voters were unwilling to allow her carte blanche in office.
Above all, Peggy consistently espoused a coherent worldview in office — one that was heavily nostalgic, but appealing to the egalitarian spirit of the Liberation War and National Obligation period. Her battle was always against "wasteful prosperity", which she saw as a force that would tear apart society and ultimately lead to inequality.
As anachronistic as her appeal to the "can-do" communal spirit fostered by the war and rationing was, her concerns were ultimately about the destruction of the Gylian consensus and the Golden Revolution's achievements. In this way, she forged a unique course that managed a two-decade balancing act between socialism and conservatism.
Peggy dominated public life in Riáona during her mayoralty. She was known to many Riáonans as "The Mayor" (no further detail necessary) and "The Woman on Five" (her office being on the fifth floor of the City Hall).
Later life and death
Peggy announced her retirement from politics after losing the 1988 election, leaving her party to collapse in her absence.
In retirement, she almost completely disappeared from the media, declining interview requests and refusing to write an autobiography. She lived long enough to witness the defeat of the neoliberal conspiracy and Aishwarya Devi's policy of reducing consumption for sustainability purposes, which vindicated her lifelong stances and gave her significant personal satisfaction. Aishwarya would privately ask Peggy for advice and consult with her regarding policy, but Peggy declined to claim any publicity or take public roles like the Public Advisory Council.
In her last years, she suffered from Alzheimer's disease. She died in her sleep on 5 October 2015, aged 95. The Federal Informer carried an obituary that metaphorically described her as "Riáona's fussy, sometimes overbearing, but ultimately well-intentioned maiden aunt".
Private life
Peggy never married nor had children. She lived for most of her life with her two best friends, Ana Martinelli and Colleen O'Brien. The three had been roommates when Peggy first moved to the Nerveiík Kingdom; Peggy helped bring them to safety in the Free Territories and they resumed living together in Riáona after the war. Ana and Colleen had no involvement in politics, and continued their comparatively ordinary careers without reference to their friendship with Riáona's mayor.