Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond

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KingSweden24

gaitskellitebevanite said:
Mitterrand dying in 1980 is going to have major repecussions. Likely Rocard becomes the PS candidate in 1981 with the support of Mauroy and Defferre, but thats going to cause a rupture with CERES and other left wing factions. Maybe Rocard appealing to centrists offsets losses of left wing voters, but still probably leaves the PS in a decisively weaker state, perhaps enough to see VGE win a second term
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Oh yeah it’s def hard to imagine VGE not getting seven more in the Elysees. That said that’s not necessarily a bad thing he seemed pretty decent
 
Aisha Clan-Clan

Aisha Clan-Clan

So, I mentioned economic dynamics earlier when I replied a few weeks. I was meaning to bring up cultural shifts in Ford 76 worlds. I'm not going to touch the econ related cultural changes yet.

no Carter and no Reagan means one BIG change right off the bat even before touching any of the effects of economic shifts. What change? No 1977- mid 2015[1] reinflation of the bourgeious respectability bubble. The reason is different, you see the politics/economics realigning in a way that prevents that kind of politics/culture being renormalized. Yes there are "family values" types and yuppies but in this ATL they're dismissed by the mainstream parties and left to fade into irrelevance over time, sort of like segregationists post-1965. This doesn't mean the US becomes more tolerant and accepting than OTL, at least at frst it just means certain specific types of intolerant forces can't cohere into national dominance the way they did OTL.

One big side effect of no bougie respectability bubble is a visibly earleir rise of a "beer and sports" working class subculture in the US over the 1980s and 1990s instead of waiting until the 2010s. Basically, prole culture develops alternatives to either being middle class but with less income or the rural/wannabe rural country music and CSA flag types early. One side effect of this is more practical integration of the races than in OTL with resulting cultural feedback from black community to white community, demographic implications[2].

Religiously motivated social conservatives benefitted from the rise of the bougie respectability bubble thanks to the fact that the Carter-Reagan process bought the christian-patriotic synthesis, to borrow Scott Alexander's term for a certain cultural consensus that held from the 30s to 90s in OTL a decade extra, plus made it's fall take longer. In this world this never happens with the christian-patriotic synthesis quietly falling apart over the course of the 80s and 90s.

Yes, "religiously motivated social conservatives" NOT "religious right". The Religious Right of OTL, with it's organization and capable activism was a creature of a set of quite historically delicate circumstances that produced OTL's convoluted axis of protestant/catholic/mormon social conservatives. The catalyst was "one of their own", Carter deciding to use the DOJ against segregation academies which doesn't happen. Instead, it's a a northern republican doing it. This ATL has and has various types of religiously motivated social conservatives but not as a unified force the way OTL does.

The protestant/catholic/mormon linkage on abortion never happens as a result of the above. Anti-abortion activism remains the province of more hardline catholics, as well as the rare more hysterical fundamentalist who independently reinvents anti-abortion politics from first principles. The whole culture around the "pro-life" movement, plus a certain overall inflexibility on sexual/morality issues OTL has on it's American "right" doesn't happen, instead you see much less of a gender gap, republicans doing better on the coasts[3].

Meanwhile on the left, the lack of a Religious Right to organize against or bougie respectability bubble to alter priorities produces quite strange from the POV of OTL stuff. Firstly, without a percieved need to look for their own source of moralism to turn out supporters to vote you never see either "soccer mom"/nanny state middle class puritanism[4] or either 1990s/2010s to 2020s flavors of what could be called intersectionalism/social justice type politics. Yes, there ARE plenty of social liberals but in this ATL "social liberal" means socially permissive overall as opposed to being vaguely secular but supporting deeply moralistic politics ANYWAYS. Think more pre-80s social democrats rather than Rockefeller republcians for how democrats look on various social issues. In some ways the left is more collective-minded than OTL with it's embrace of union power and a probable attempt to transition the US away from energy dependency under the Carey/whoever admins of the 80s or 90s. OTOH, in other ways it's rather more individual in OTL, with more tolerance of individual behavior or dissent with less focus on identities.

Removing Carter from the picture in Ford '76 worlds imo secularizes the US 10-20 years ahead of OTL without his encouragement and normalization of various evangelical types in culture/politics, along with the stuff I mentioned above. This means you get the 2010s and onwards US where more and more people are cultural christians or vaguely monotheistic but apathetic on the subject with people starting to come out as atheist in the 90s. This is actually bigger than you might think, since you'd have the boomers following a more natural course of evolution on secularism instead of acting as a significant lagging force the way they did OTL. Boomers not delaying things twenty years means you see things like the "right" having to evolve to factor in the sexual revolution's not going away short of a collapse of the current civilization to name one big shift earlier than OTL[5].

Basically you get a radically different left on social issues, much less yuppified politics/cultural norms and a "right" that has to find a different way to get elected. Even if you have some of the same names as OTL in the politics come the 2010s or 2020s, their agendas and gimmicks they used to win elections will be quite different. This isn't even getting into the economics-related shifts due to the victorious 1980 democrats yet.

The only spoiler I'll give you of my next post is this: There's no bourgeoisie bohemian/bobo types as a result of certain ATL economic politics. This is BIG. Just think about the implications for the "left" here alone, nevermind broader culture/politics. This might be worth a shorter post on it's own, depending on how inspired I get. Maybe.

[1] When you had Trump who BLATANTLY didn't play the "respectability" game announce his candidacy and be serious.
[2] Visibly more racial mixing than in our world. It's probably about 18% multiracial newborns as of 2022, so in the ATL more like 27% assuming similar demographic changes to OTL. This isn't likely for various reasons, but whatever the final numbers there'll be visibly more white/black mixes than OTL.
[3] Not so much the rustbelt since in this world, you have more protectionist democrats putting effort into propping up unions/the rustbelt which counteracts republicans being more culturally acceptable.
[4] See various liberal anti-drug arguments, anti-smoking, sex negative feminists, the upper class liberal wing of "protect the cgildren" types
[5] The GOP is going to run into big trouble starting this decade because of it in OTL....
 

Leonidas

Glad I stumbled on this thread! I’m interested to see what Carey’s presidency will be like, as well as other developments like the better-organized LGBT rights movement and the rising star of Harvey Milk. His survival ITTL was one of the things that got me hooked early on.
 
Money Bomb
  • Index

    • KingSweden24

    Money Bomb​

    Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of growing economies - primarily in Latin America - had borrowed heavily from the World Bank and then increasingly from private sources to finance their industrializing, expanding economies. Mexico in particular leveraged future oil revenues, taking advantage of the spike in oil prices beginning in 1973 and carrying through to the end of the decade, which created a massive debt cycle where the country's earnings eventually were outstripped by its total foreign debt. Other resource dependent countries in the region - Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, etc - pursued similar courses of action and by mid-1980 the economies of Latin America were among some of the most indebted in the world. Dependency on commodity prices remaining high and interest rates and inflation in creditor countries remaining low was now the backbone of the economy of a region already struggling in the wake of the Panama Shock and an outbreak of extremist paramilitary violence in the previous two years; now, in the summer of 1980, the bomb went off.

    The impetus was a sudden, dramatic decline in oil prices between early May and the middle of July - from peak to through, the 1980 petroleum bear market was close to a 40% drawdown, and by May of 1981 the global spot price on oil would have moved down close to 70% [1]. Part of this was a healthy recovery of Iranian and Venezuelan production along with new North Sea (both British and Norwegian), Canadian and Alaskan supply coming online, but the bigger picture was a broader macroeconomic change. The spiking unemployment and substantive pullback in industrial and economic activity in late 1979 and early 1980 - the worst recession in the Western world since the Great Depression of the 1930s - reduced demand for energy and other raw materials (ironically, the price of such materials was a big driver in the recessionary conditions), which in tandem with intentionally-elevated interest rates begun by both American and European policymakers at various points in 1979 to finally break stagflation drove prices for such materials even lower in the short term. The still-elevated inflation, rapidly climbing interest rates and sharp collapse in real prices of resources in 1980 made the debt situation for resource-rich countries already suffering from advanced Dutch disease untenable.

    Extraction-heavy developed economies such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway saw their ongoing recessions worsen through 1980 and deep into 1981 (Norway's explosive production growth positioned them better than most to weather price declines), but for places like Mexico, the nightmare had only just begun. Governments across Latin America, staring down the barrel of an acute debt crisis that had roared out of nowhere, pursued aggressive debt reduction and austerity measures but it was to no avail; in late July, Mexico announced a partial default on its sovereign debt [2], cratering its economy and the value of its peso as investors fled and unemployment ballooned. Chile, previously riding high off its victory over Argentina in the Beagle War the year before, followed suit in August. Along with North Korea in March, this marked now three countries that had staged partial or total sovereign debt defaults in the space of six months, and as fall and winter beckoned, the risk of additional contagion in Latin American - and perhaps global - debt markets loomed large over world policymakers, particularly the maligned World Bank and IMF that now had to navigate how to extricate hemorrhaging Latin economies from a debt crisis, especially as private banks began to call in loans from the region in panic or refuse to refinance existing debt, exacerbating the spiral.

    The reaction from Washington and European capitals was relatively muted, however; while it would take months for high consumer prices (gas in particular) to draw down to the extent of the underlying raw materials, the sharp collapse of input prices in the summer of 1980 was taken as a sign that the hawkish, contractionary interest rate policy was working to break inflation. "The view of the Federal Reserve," Chairman Burns said to the Senate Banking Committee in early September testimony after the end of the August recess and the start of the meat of the 1980 campaign season, "is that the current policy course is delivering as intended, and that the short term recessionary and unemployment effects will alleviate with stronger economic growth after inflation has been properly tamed." Though Burns tight money policy has, in later years, been identified as belatedly helping end the stagflationary cycle (though more targeted stimulatory measures and the development of the United States' first industrial policy in the 1980s have been argued to have helped as much or more) of the 1970s, the fact that his twelve-year tenure at the Fed overlapped with some of the worst economic shocks in US history and that his stance under Nixon was to succumb to Presidential pressure and keep a loose posture ahead of election cycles, has contributed to his reputation as one of the worst, out-of-his-depth Fed Chairs in history, and as early as 1980 his testimony was met with considerable skepticism from Senators of both parties. As Latin America's economies collapsed south of the border and capital flight accelerated, his dismissive and hawkish stance contributed to an even worse reputation there, along with the IMF.

    [1] Fictional figures of my making but roughly on par with the OTL early 1980s oil glut
    [2] IOTL, this default occurred in August of 1982; with the economic contraction of the late 1970s having been worsened and moved forward due to Panama, it now occurs two years early
     
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    • ZeroFrame

    ZeroFrame

    KingSweden24 said:
    Money Bomb​

    Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of growing economies - primarily in Latin America - had borrowed heavily from the World Bank and then increasingly from private sources to finance their industrializing, expanding economies. Mexico in particular leveraged future oil revenues, taking advantage of the spike in oil prices beginning in 1973 and carrying through to the end of the decade, which created a massive debt cycle where the country's earnings eventually were outstripped by its total foreign debt. Other resource dependent countries in the region - Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, etc - pursued similar courses of action and by mid-1980 the economies of Latin America were among some of the most indebted in the world. Dependency on commodity prices remaining high and interest rates and inflation in creditor countries remaining low was now the backbone of the economy of a region already struggling in the wake of the Panama Shock and an outbreak of extremist paramilitary violence in the previous two years; now, in the summer of 1980, the bomb went off.

    The impetus was a sudden, dramatic decline in oil prices between early May and the middle of July - from peak to through, the 1980 petroleum bear market was close to a 40% drawdown, and by May of 1981 the global spot price on oil would have moved down close to 70% [1]. Part of this was a healthy recovery of Iranian and Venezuelan production along with new North Sea (both British and Norwegian), Canadian and Alaskan supply coming online, but the bigger picture was a broader macroeconomic change. The spiking unemployment and substantive pullback in industrial and economic activity in late 1979 and early 1980 - the worst recession in the Western world since the Great Depression of the 1930s - reduced demand for energy and other raw materials (ironically, the price of such materials was a big driver in the recessionary conditions), which in tandem with intentionally-elevated interest rates begun by both American and European policymakers at various points in 1979 to finally break stagflation drove prices for such materials even lower in the short term. The still-elevated inflation, rapidly climbing interest rates and sharp collapse in real prices of resources in 1980 made the debt situation for resource-rich countries already suffering from advanced Dutch disease untenable.

    Extraction-heavy developed economies such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway saw their ongoing recessions worsen through 1980 and deep into 1981 (Norway's explosive production growth positioned them better than most to weather price declines), but for places like Mexico, the nightmare had only just begun. Governments across Latin America, staring down the barrel of an acute debt crisis that had roared out of nowhere, pursued aggressive debt reduction and austerity measures but it was to no avail; in late July, Mexico announced a partial default on its sovereign debt [2], cratering its economy and the value of its peso as investors fled and unemployment ballooned. Chile, previously riding high off its victory over Argentina in the Beagle War the year before, followed suit in August. Along with North Korea in March, this marked now three countries that had staged partial or total sovereign debt defaults in the space of six months, and as fall and winter beckoned, the risk of additional contagion in Latin American - and perhaps global - debt markets loomed large over world policymakers, particularly the maligned World Bank and IMF that now had to navigate how to extricate hemorrhaging Latin economies from a debt crisis, especially as private banks began to call in loans from the region in panic or refuse to refinance existing debt, exacerbating the spiral.

    The reaction from Washington and European capitals was relatively muted, however; while it would take months for high consumer prices (gas in particular) to draw down to the extent of the underlying raw materials, the sharp collapse of input prices in the summer of 1980 was taken as a sign that the hawkish, contractionary interest rate policy was working to break inflation. "The view of the Federal Reserve," Chairman Burns said to the Senate Banking Committee in early September testimony after the end of the August recess and the start of the meat of the 1980 campaign season, "is that the current policy course is delivering as intended, and that the short term recessionary and unemployment effects will alleviate with stronger economic growth after inflation has been properly tamed." Though Burns tight money policy has, in later years, been identified as belatedly helping end the stagflationary cycle (though more targeted stimulatory measures and the development of the United States' first industrial policy in the 1980s have been argued to have helped as much or more) of the 1970s, the fact that his twelve-year tenure at the Fed overlapped with some of the worst economic shocks in US history and that his stance under Nixon was to succumb to Presidential pressure and keep a loose posture ahead of election cycles, has contributed to his reputation as one of the worst, out-of-his-depth Fed Chairs in history, and as early as 1980 his testimony was met with considerable skepticism from Senators of both parties. As Latin America's economies collapsed south of the border and capital flight accelerated, his dismissive and hawkish stance contributed to an even worse reputation there, along with the IMF.

    [1] Fictional figures of my making but roughly on par with the OTL early 1980s oil glut
    [2] IOTL, this default occurred in August of 1982; with the economic contraction of the late 1970s having been worsened and moved forward due to Panama, it now occurs two years early
    Click to expand...
    An amazing chapter. The fact I didn't known about the Latin American debt crisis is surprising as it changed an entire decade for hundreds of millions of people. Thank you for introducing me and many other people to the Latin American debt crisis.
     

    KingSweden24

    ZeroFrame said:
    An amazing chapter. The fact I didn't known about the Latin American debt crisis is surprising as it changed an entire decade for hundreds of millions of people. Thank you for introducing me and many other people to the Latin American debt crisis.
    Click to expand...
    Sure thing! LatAm gets short shrift in a lot of TLs and the early 80s crisis there has had big big impacts on the US in particular (not coincidentally the big migration wave from Mexico began around that time)
     

    CountDVB

    KingSweden24 said:
    Sure thing! LatAm gets short shrift in a lot of TLs and the early 80s crisis there has had big big impacts on the US in particular (not coincidentally the big migration wave from Mexico began around that time)
    Click to expand...
    Yeah, pretty the Debt Crisis caused alot of the modern fustercluck for them in modern times. It was something I found pretty intriguing.
     
    Aisha Clan-Clan

    Aisha Clan-Clan

    CountDVB said:
    This is extensively fascinating and a wonderful explanation. Definitely wish I can articulate stuff like this ^^;
    Click to expand...
    Thanks. It takes a ton of reading over the years in wide areas plus a willingness to think outside the box to come out with these takes. I use this site to do short discussions/maybe contribute something more substantive if the thread is interesting enough, mostly. I post my stuff elsewhere for various reasons..

    Yes, some dynamics of OTL(antipopulist shift in politics, boomers being pouty and entitled, steel/other "rustbelt" industries in decline) were all baked in back to the 70s or earlier, but the dynamics of how things would play out specifically? MUCH more flexible. OTL's Carter-Reagan/Bush-Clinton setup was one possible historical result from the 70s. Ford in '76 represents a nexus point that could have led in VERY different directions even with the hardcoded stuff.
     
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