For All Time (FaT) is an extensively dystopian timeline created on another website by “Chester A. Arthur.” It has become notorious on AH.com as an example of what happens when everything in an ATL that can go wrong goes wrong.
The POD for the timeline is Franklin Roosevelt dying suddenly on December 20, 1941, leading to the ascension of Vice President Henry Wallace to the Oval Office. From that point on, one disaster after another strikes the world. The timeline concludes in 2002, with the world stage having calmed a tad (though virtually unsavable).
The timeline is usually considered to have plausible events throughout the 40s and 50s, before going utterly insane in the 60s...much like OTL.
Those terrible, terrible, Presidents; from Henry Wallace (who completely botches America’s efforts in World War II) onwards, America suffers under a stream of Commander-in-Cheifs who are, to put it politely, not up to the job. Even midly competent ones such as Thomas Dewey and Joe Kennedy Jr. are the victims of severe bad luck.
Extreme in the Mainstream; the more marginalized and extreme a figure is in OTL, the more likely he or she is likely to be a prominent world player in FaT. Examples include Charles Manson becoming the Governor of California (and later being cheeted out of the White House in the elections of 1980; he dies when trying to take his state out of the Union a few years later), Lyndon LaRouche becoming the Governor of New Hampshire (and Manson’s running mate), Jim Jones becoming governor of Pennsylvania, and later President (and being disposed of in a quiet military coup when he goes completely bonkers), and perhaps most notoriously, the sociopathic Andrei Chikatilo becoming the final General Secretary of the USSR.
Nukes; with no international organization created after World War II to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons, dozens of countries gain the atomic bomb in FaT, including Canada, Australia, Greater (apartheid) South Africa, Idi Amin’s East African Federation, ect. Another key part of this rule is that whenever nuclear weapons can be used, they’re used (for example, the largest single series of conflicts in FaT is a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and the pan-Middle Eastern Jerusalem League, and concluded thereafter by a nuclear civil war that destroys the USSR).
Conflict, conflict, conflict; besides the wars (nuclear or otherwise) in FaT, many countries wind up splintering. Examples include France balkanizing after being dominated by a series of fascist dictators, England secceeding from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada breaking apart, and race relations in America taking a long dive off of the cliff.
Name dropping; FaT includes many summaries relating to the fate of celebrities and politicians from our world in the long nightmare of the ATL. Examples include Elvis Presley becoming a businessman (fleeing to Australia during America’s economic collapse under the Jones Administration), Richard Nixon becoming the head of America’s largest fast food chain, and John Lennon becoming one of the world’s most famed promoters of Indian music (though he devolves into a washed up music star with serious marital problems).