McGoverning
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And these aren't even necessarily the marquee items (though a few of them probably are.) More like a kind-of representative sample. My hope is that, as the lyrics of the old standard have it, the best is yet to come. We've seen bits of a few already: you've pointed correctly to Assad and people should watch the bylines for the midterms when we eventually get there. We've had at least a hint of something on the proliferation front in that the Israelis and South Africans might want to be up to something. We've got Indian material in... well, counting the next chapter cued up as "one," in two chapters we'll get some pretty substantive stuff wrt India. May get some computers in here too, and we've seen the Butterfly-intensive emergence of Cardinal Lorscheider in Brazil as potentially a powerful ally for TTL's liberation theologists. So some things have stirred, some things are still thickening it's all very, very much a work in progress.
You might say that, I couldn't possibly comment But really I don't think it's gonna be Hank, not that this is impossible, and certainly he could have some part to play as McGovern Derangement Syndrome fills the TXGOP with the political equivalent of 'roid rage. You have, though, touched on the significance, indeed the centrality, of the Sun Belt to any effective GOP backlash against "McGoverning." There's still room for the Midwest to play a part and even for the old northeastern establishment to not give up the ghost yet. But the Sun Belt is a mighty twelve-cylinder engine of Goldwaterite and Dixiecratic reaction against George and his works.
Since we're using modern terminology to talk about what seems like an inevitable backlash to a president perceived as disruptive to the established political order, it's probably worth bringing up the character the most recent election took. There were, of course, some very high-profile exemplars of ideological partisanship who were elected in 2018. But as you're certainly aware, and less well covered in the press, there were an even larger number of relative moderates sent to congress as part of a mentality that "rejects extremism on either side," as the song goes.
You're under no obligation to have MDS mirror TDS in this way, and in fact the nature of the parties in 1974 could seriously complicate messaging on a race-by-race basis in a way that OTL 2018 just didn't have to worry about. Just raising the question: will 1974 inevitably speed the Republican conservative consolidation?
John Farson
Banned
In any case, it would be a mistake for the tl to mirror events of the 00s and 10s too much, i.e., an expy of Fox News being formed in the 70s courtesy of Howard Hughes or some other convenient billionaire, 00s and/or 10s politics and events appearing 30 or 40 years early and all that.
This is all great stuff to bring up. And you're quite right that a polarizing influence on the larger political environment doesn't always have just one outcome in that broader political environment, seen most of all in (1) legislative races and (2) midterm cycles. Sure there have been a number of "pure" ideological pendulum swings like the great right-wing backlash votes of 1948, or 1994, or 2010, or even now-forgotten liberal waves in 1958 (that brought George McGovern into the House among its other effects) or 1964, or in 2008 for that matter. You can also have a result just as you described, where stirring the partisan/ideological pot actually activates all its different ingredients, especially in the opposition party, with complicated and often convoluted results.
So when it comes to the '74 midterms, I think it's very much affected by the interplay between big issues - especially, in that very American politics-of-personality way, are you for or against George McGovern or Richard Nixon (The Dick always casts a long shadow) - and localized factors. Also, while TTL is likely to accelerate what I like to call the Great Polarization, at this point the two big parties are still big tents. So you can have the right, left, and middle within both major US parties all advanced, depending on local conditions, in a more agitated and polarizing environment. Much like the global-warming model isn't just a case of "everything gets hotter all the time," it's like turning up the heat on a Bunsen burner - all the chemical elements in the vial you've got clamped above the flame get agitated, so you get more pronounced versions of every kind of weather. Here too. Given that, it means there may be opportunities for minor parties too - the Liberals in New York state, nationally the AIP or on the left Peace & Freedom - to act as weapons of choice or tools of leverage in more pronounced partisan conflicts. The McGoverners could catch just as much grief from Boll Weevils and Scoop Jackson Democrats as from the Goldwaterites, or find issue-based allies among Republican liberals - we've seen some of that very sort of thing in the most recent chapter. Likewise elections could produce both much more strongly ideological, hard-line characters in some places, and people who promise to do away with ideology in favor of "practical solutions," or solid constituency work, in others.
In terms of polarization, I think one key factor here, that very much comes out of the Wars of the Sixties, has to do with cultural/emotional worldview and cognitive/group traits. In particular I'm thinking of Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler's thesis in Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. I say that for a few reasons. One is that Hetherington and Weiler are clasically-trained poli sci Sadistics Nerds of a very, very high order, the kind of guys who would've made my mother - who taught Poli Sci Statistical Research Methods every semester for twenty-odd years, plus supervising a couple dozen MA research theses - smile. Also because theirs is a sophisticated approach. They appreciate that what behavioral psychologists have classed as the "authoritarian personality type" is a real thing. But they also have a nuanced, really sociological, view. It's not a fixed point, except for a very few people. "Authoritarian personality type" is a spectrum, and even people on the opposite end can show occasional signs and markers of its logic and behavior patterns in particular contexts. So the key, over time, is to see how since the Sixties/Seventies the divide between more- and less-authoritarian worldviews has been the most consistent salient marker - "highly positively correlated" as the Sadistics Nerds put it - of how the Great Polarization has pulled the United States into two large, warring political camps, but also that the nuances and fluctuations, also the punctuations, in that process have a lot to do with how weak or strong that "pull" for or against authoritarian traits and perspectives has been at a given time, or among given sub-groups in the voting public. It's the Big Gravitational Factor, but it has very different kinds of influence and salience depending on the contexts of specific historical moments.
I think that's likely to be even more true in the McGoverningverse than IOTL. You have, with the McGoverners, perhaps the most consciously - really, almost performatively, to use a godawful clunky academese word - anti-authoritarian presidential administration of the 20th century. That's not to say they don't have some of those qualities, not at all - there are absolutely times where the McGoverners would say "this particular political situation is damaging to the nation and morally wrong ... so let's use the full weight and power of the Imperial Presidency and the Vast Mid-Century Federal Superstate to bash it into shape." There's a little touch of authoritarianism in the night there, because every human does it in some ways. But, more broadly, the ideals-as-policy, radical inclusion of Out-groups, sweeping inclusivity, emphasis on equity and acceptance and common purpose for all as fundamental societal goods, suspicion of authoritarian policy models (law-and-order politics, the Cold War national security state, bomb-first foreign policy), on and on, these folks have staked out a big damn Gramscian "position" (as in War Of) on the anti-authoritarian end of the spectrum.
By unequal and opposite reaction, that's going to get a lot of people with stronger, more "positively correlative" authoritarian tendencies worked up. That may be Goldwaterite Cold Warriors and Dixiecratic enemies of racial and class integration who don't like the McGovern administration's social-democratic ends and left-liberal methods. That may be Cold War liberals and top-down AFL-CIO commissars who don't trust McGoverners' insistence on detente or small-d democratization of the American Left. It may even include people further to the left, who think the McGovern approach is namby-pamby sellout liberalism that fails to Crush Our Enemies or Create Our Utopia given a perceived chance so to do. Many different sorts of folks who correlate more in that direction may react against "McGoverning" in fractal ways, that sometimes create what you could call "interference in the signal" as they're at cross purposes with one another, or in other ways create generalized pressure on the McGoverning model from multiple different angles. Also it may strengthen each of them in different ways, so that there are in fact competing more-authoritarian possibilities for where anti-McGoverning interest groups might go.
Also it can create divides among the anti/less-authoritarian political interests as well. A big one would be between full on Free To Be You and Me exuberance, pursuing long-cherished totemic goals or radical (in the sense of equal measures sweeping and sudden) social change, versus more pragmatic types who see the goal as a world of much less ideology, and more sensibly shared foundational rules of thumb. There's that kind of conflict within George Stanley McGovern himself, between his High Plains Progressive philosophical and emotional anchor in the second category, and his desire occasionally to change the political landscape with sweeping single-issue transformations of the "rules of the game." Indeed that dialectic is fundamental to how the McGoverners operate in practice. We'll see it even more over time.
So what that means is lots of moving parts. Moving parts very likely to show up in those midterm elections lurking just an eyelash over the narrative horizon. In the early going, all of the parts are likely to be in agitated motion, so that's likely to ruin the day of every political pundit and political-scientific psephologist who thinks they have a fixed and effective model for How American Election Cycles Work. They've already, ITTL, been treated to two straight downright screwy presidential cycles - 1968 and 1972 - that were very much three-way races and each time settled by fine distinctions by late deciders that narrowly avoided the whole mess being thrown into the House of Representatives. The flux is very, very strong. So there will probably be a lot of uncommon results, and a lot of results that correlate to "in this very local and specific constituency, what's people's gut feeling about (1) President McGovern and (2) former President Nixon?" with those two as avatars, basically, for these broad political tendencies. At the same time, because of all the flux, you're quite right that there will be some centripetal force too, people trying to "move to the middle" in order to recreate a stable core for the political system.
One thing I think this juxtaposition does, though, is point right out to us that even where there might be elements that "look like the recent past but in the Seventies," they are likely to grow up in and respond to a very different political context from our own. Example: Roger Ailes drafted a memo for Dick Nixon in, IIRC, 1971 or 1972 that reads like the first, shortened business model for Fox News. At the time, however, for one thing they'd have to find consistent, legally defensible workarounds for the Fairness Doctrine. That means (1) a lot of it would probably need to be done in an even-more-sophisticated-than-OTL network of "New Right counterculture" made up of political newsletters, mass mailings, histrionic and melodramatic "Civilization Is Failing Because [INSERT PET ISSUE]" paperback best-sellers, and so on. Where they took it on air, it would need to be heavily editorialized, "talking about the news" rather than reporting it: think "No Spin Zone" not six o'clock headlines. And even then you'd need, if you'll follow a basketball metaphor, a Washington Generals set of paper-tiger liberals who get paid to be trounced consistently by your New Right pundits in order to follow the rules. Also, you may have a situation where opposing political forces try to work up their own models, either middle-of-the-road politicians decrying this kind of thing and organizing town halls or other fora where people can "talk sensibly about issues," or even folk on the left organizing alternatives to your 'Howard Hughes Seventies Fox News," up to and including the Sixties favorite of just getting the rank and file out in the streets to influence legislative outcomes directly. Different times automatically mean different contexts. Elements may match, or at least rhyme, but with different cultural mediums and moderators, and a demographically different pool of voters, things will always come out different-from-now.
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I get the sense that situations like Yom Kippur are going to really heighten the contradictions there. In my opinion, you can't really have a moral empire, but if the McGovern administration tries to hammer one out, all of the quandaries inherent will be readily apparent.
Whatever memoirs Rudd and Ayers wind up writing are going to have some very interesting perspectives, I'm sure.
Thievery is the highest form of flattery
Really, go for it. I think there are some operators in the Andersonverse who will be on that like white on rice.John Fredrick Parker
Donor
So of our representative sample, Assad aside, we’ve gotten succulent hints on southern party politics, nuclear proliferation, and liberation theology, and we’re about to get some good stuff on India and microcomputers. And since we’re into 1974 now, I’m guessing Punk is not to far way either, while Disney will have to wait.
As a good admixture of social-democratic Democrats and Last Progressives, the McGoverners will shy very deliberately from what they see as overtly imperial acts, arrangements, institutions, and policy logic. But as the very case you cite points out, along the way the administration will discover that there are deeds, views, and consequences that have imperial dimensions they failed fully to understand, or to foresee. And that doesn't even get in to foreign policy fights within the American system of government that they actually lose.
Memoirs across the Hard Left spectrum are going to be very interesting ITTL. Unlike the situation IOTL, the USian firmly-left folk in McGoverning face a long series of debates and dilemmas much more like their rest-of-the-world brethren whenever social-democratically-inclined governments were elected or otherwise established. Whether the left-adjacent government of the day should be accommodated in order to achieve some goals or as much political movement of the goalposts as possible, whether entryism is a viable or acceptable tactic to push the government farther than it might go otherwise, whether the government should be opposed actively as accommodationist or otherwise hopelessly compromised, whether this is all a line-item, issue by issue situation or whether choices should be made on broad strokes of principle. Also, whether one sees the McGovern Moment as proof that hope and change are possible within the constructs of the system, or whether only violent revolution will do. Other folks on the no-really-the-serious-left spectrum will have long chapters about similar hopes, disappointments, and crises of conscience or political tactics. Yer Tom Haydens, yer Jesse Jacksons, yer Jerry Rubins, yer Ron Dellumses, yer Dolores Huertas, yer Howard Zinns, all these sorts of folks and more will have high highs and low lows to discuss. Also there will be consequences on the broader political spectrum: union leaders and Democratic pols who fear McGovern has let the reds in the service entry, folk of the Left who may actually fear McGovern has swamped and diluted them in a soup of mushy-social-democratic union straightjacketing and visceral hardhat reaction. It's really very, very messy.
I like the "succulent hints" bit. Also the YOU WILL TAKE YOUR PLOT POINTS AND LIKE THEM DAMMIT approach to Disney.
Good usage of "House of Cards" terminology. But there will be a candidate like him, or influenced by him.
"Like" more than "influenced by," I suspect, but indeed there will likely be several candidates who've sprouted from the Sun Belt Right just in the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, much less later cycles within the larger McGoverning TLverse. For the Bicentennial year I can think of at least four off the top of my head and I'm probably missing some. Of course at this stage every GOP varietal looks set to bloom in the '76 primaries, even the liberals, there's nothing like opposition to create the energy and illusion of unity, and nothing like trying to win back power to highlight the actual divisions.
I do know the ones you mean. Thanks also for reminding me about election night. The McGoverners have gotten some things done since then, at least, but it's always good to remember the good times. I had lost track of that particular moment in my view of the narrative horizon, feels good to be reminded of it. Always did like her, and as for George I think Shirley reminded him of his own daughters. Tempted to give Shirley something useful to do, too, at least until she starts remembering that she was once a stable boy on the isle of Atlantis...
John Farson
Banned
It occurs to me that two things that will likely keep away a Fox News type network from being formed in the 70s are a) the existence of the Fairness Doctrine (which was eliminated by the FCC in 1987), and b) the fact that at this point in time the 24-hour news media as we know it doesn't yet exist. This is still the age of Walter Cronkite rather than Hannity, O' Reilly, etc. The first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage was CNN in 1980, and it was also the first all-news TV channel in the US. Even then, by all accounts CNN didn't really break through to the public until the 1990-91 Gulf War, when tens of millions if not hundreds of millions tuned in to follow the war developments in real-time. Fox News really is the result of about two decades or so of development, but the media environment of the 70s is quite different from what it would become OTL in the 80s, let alone the 90s.
That's not to say that Fox or something like it might not come about sooner than OTL, especially as the result of McGovern Derangement Syndrome - and I think a hypothetical McGovern re-election will only throw it into overdrive - and when the next Republican president comes to power, before which the GOP will have lurched ever further to the right.
That's not to say that Fox or something like it might not come about sooner than OTL, especially as the result of McGovern Derangement Syndrome - and I think a hypothetical McGovern re-election will only throw it into overdrive - and when the next Republican president comes to power, before which the GOP will have lurched ever further to the right.
It's certainly true that the antecedents of Fox are there. Not sure McGoverning is the right place to tackle this, but one way to get under the soil of right-wing media would be to stop the decline of AM radio as a music platform. I think you'd need at least an early 1960s POD to handle this. But without the rise of AM talk radio, you don't have a programming model to build from or a demonstrated audience.