Carter was the one who originally appointed Paul Volcker and gave him free reign to send interest rates to the stratosphere. That ended the inflation part of stagflation, at least. Granted, mostly under his successor, but only because Carter lost in 1980.
1980s Democratic Revolution
- Thread starter Nightingale
- Start date
That's a little different than saying Carter found a solution. Its like saying Roosevelt was responsible for a successful D-Day invasion. But I guess its good enough for government...
And for those mentioning foreign policy, Ted did rather put his foot in his mouth in November '79 (granted he was pointing out the obvious) when he discussed how the US had largely brought the problems in the Gulf on ourselves by propping up the Shah. I would, to go back to my guy again, say that (along with his credibility as an early opponent of Vietnam), Carey was enough of a Cold War liberal to pass muster. The more detailed polling done through 1980 IOTL, during the bulk of the hostage crisis, is in fact indicative. Americans were enraged, liked indulging fantasies of revenge, and people who aligned politically with the New Right were all in favor of getting someone who would kick ass and chew gum in office quick. But when you asked follow-on questions, and posed specific dilemmas, the majority of the public wanted someone who would find a way to be strong without being stupid -- like Americans do they crossed their fingers for a magical solution, but the strength they wanted was not a cowboy who might start World War III if he went about things the wrong way. At that point in time, hell, even George McGovern was in favor of flattening Iran's oil patch in Khuzestan with B-52s if the hostages were harmed.
Carey and Askew, of the people I listed, less so Mondale and Muskie, and I think least of all Jerry Brown mostly as a question of personality, could project that appearance. Askew believed in the military and had a sheer earnestness about him that was tangible. Carey was a big bluff Irishman who looked like an ex-heavyweight and had seen combat in World War II. Indeed ironically Carter was probably at his best during the hostage crisis even as a commander in chief (if anything he was failed by his subordinates: by Zbig's obsession with Afghanistan and beating the Soviets, by Cy Vance's failure which was strange for a former Deputy Secretary of Defense to distinguish between military pressure and military force, and by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones' obsession with micromanagement, rash decisions with no logical basis like cutting US forces off from several staging points including one they ended up using by claiming it was politically impossible for no good reason, and wanting to "own" the retaliation/rescue planning process personally resulting in Rube Goldberg structures and ideas rather than properly using all the resources available to him.)
Besides the bread-and-butter reasons for a conventional arms buildup I laid out above, there's also the issue of personnel in a Ford Wins 1980 Democratic administration. Because of all his connections (adviser in succession to Humphrey, Muskie, and Carter's campaigns from 68 to 76, a Trilateral Commission founder, prince of the think tanks, etc.) Zbigniew Brzezinski -- Mr. "funding Bin Laden was OK because we bled the Soviets dry and won the Cold War and freed my beloved native Poland" -- was virtually assured a major job in a Democratic administration, probably National Security Adviser in which role he was as bureaucratically aggressive as Kissinger, and in order to get the "Senator from Boeing"'s support to win Washington's electoral votes and help win Oregon's, a Democratic winner in 1980 probably gives Scoop Jackson his dream job at the Pentagon (also, ironically, to get him out of the way from blocking potential arms-control agreements in Congress...) for as long as Scoop's health holds up.
Also they will be very reserved about the use of force because of Vietnam but they more than the meddling instrumentalists around Reagan (who gave us the Lebanon mission in particular) will Powell Doctrine the **** out of you if you make trouble, go in big and bad in order to not get stuck in another protracted, politics-and-culture-destroying conflict.
Carey and Askew, of the people I listed, less so Mondale and Muskie, and I think least of all Jerry Brown mostly as a question of personality, could project that appearance. Askew believed in the military and had a sheer earnestness about him that was tangible. Carey was a big bluff Irishman who looked like an ex-heavyweight and had seen combat in World War II. Indeed ironically Carter was probably at his best during the hostage crisis even as a commander in chief (if anything he was failed by his subordinates: by Zbig's obsession with Afghanistan and beating the Soviets, by Cy Vance's failure which was strange for a former Deputy Secretary of Defense to distinguish between military pressure and military force, and by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones' obsession with micromanagement, rash decisions with no logical basis like cutting US forces off from several staging points including one they ended up using by claiming it was politically impossible for no good reason, and wanting to "own" the retaliation/rescue planning process personally resulting in Rube Goldberg structures and ideas rather than properly using all the resources available to him.)
Besides the bread-and-butter reasons for a conventional arms buildup I laid out above, there's also the issue of personnel in a Ford Wins 1980 Democratic administration. Because of all his connections (adviser in succession to Humphrey, Muskie, and Carter's campaigns from 68 to 76, a Trilateral Commission founder, prince of the think tanks, etc.) Zbigniew Brzezinski -- Mr. "funding Bin Laden was OK because we bled the Soviets dry and won the Cold War and freed my beloved native Poland" -- was virtually assured a major job in a Democratic administration, probably National Security Adviser in which role he was as bureaucratically aggressive as Kissinger, and in order to get the "Senator from Boeing"'s support to win Washington's electoral votes and help win Oregon's, a Democratic winner in 1980 probably gives Scoop Jackson his dream job at the Pentagon (also, ironically, to get him out of the way from blocking potential arms-control agreements in Congress...) for as long as Scoop's health holds up.
Also they will be very reserved about the use of force because of Vietnam but they more than the meddling instrumentalists around Reagan (who gave us the Lebanon mission in particular) will Powell Doctrine the **** out of you if you make trouble, go in big and bad in order to not get stuck in another protracted, politics-and-culture-destroying conflict.
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If Ford won in 1976, the Republicans would be blamed for all that.
Actually, opposition to Roe v. Wade was mostly just Catholic until Carter's 1979 feud with Bob Jones, the same feud that gave birth to the religious right. If it's Ford (who at the time was anti-abortion in order to appeal to Catholics) who feuds with Bob Jones...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
Some very good points in that Politico piece. Another thing going on was conservative opposition to the ERA, as typified by the Phyllis Schlafly wing of the conservative movement. You also had the gay rights debate which was ongoing circa 1977/78 with the Anita Bryant campaign on the Dade County, Florida referendum and the 1978 Briggs Initiative campaign in California. All of these things coalesced into the modern conservative movement on social issues in 1978-79, as typified by the Falwell-led Moral Majority. All of this is hugely important to understanding the conservative movement and modern politics in general.
true, but misses the point... which is that, in response to all that foreign-based upset, the nation is not going to make a sharp turn to the left and become a semi-socialist workers' paradise... the nation will still lurch to the right, demanding that the nation rearm and stand tall... whatever Democrat is elected is going to be a fairly centrist one, not a far left one...
I think the rigtward shift would still happen under a Republican, it would just happen later than OTL (as early as 1984 if the democrat that succeeds Ford proves to be a disaster, but no later than 96 or 2000).
This. So many good things to unpack on this page of the thread but first let me say: this.
It's also indicative of very different approaches taken within the two parties, and we can take the case of our own history and compare it directly to a posited ATL, in this case a "Democratic Eighties" which with that suffix (not just through '84 but the decade) presupposes a Democrat elected in 1980 does no worse and possibly better than Reagan in handling the economy through to 1984. Let's look at OTL first.
Coming into the Eighties a few key things happened. First, Iran blew up early, many months before the Shah's terminal decline, and brought with it an oil "cost-push" inflationary shock starting early in 1979. Panic speculating on the markets, and panic buying of gas by people who remembered '73 created "artificial" (they were real and tangible, just not mechanically necessary) shortages and egged on inflation. Carter dealt with this extraordinarily poorly -- after making a stirring speech (well-received at the time) about the crisis of the American spirit, he turned around and did flat nothing useful to contain inflation, create jobs, or provide a coherent plan for emergency buffer stocks of transport and heating fuels to meet short-term needs and hedge against inflation. By 1980, unemployment had started to trend up again and growth had tanked -- there was a real recession on. But the monster was inflation, shooting up into the teens which made both the markets and Americans in general panicky. The "foreign troubles," which other than the Soviets proving they could still be bad guys could be summed up in one word -- Iran -- looked intractable. Volcker jacked up rates as an incomes policy-by-default to defeat inflation. Reagan won in a landslide.
What then? The Reaganauts made things much worse for a time by trying to supply-side their way out of the problem, causing much greater distress through about 1982. Between that damage to growth (the opposite of what Laffer posited) and the punitively high interest rates, unemployment spiked at levels not seen since the late Thirties. There were Rust Belt towns with one in four able-bodied adults out of work. This was a bug in the macroeconomic sense but a political feature for the New Right because it broke the backs of many a large labor union. Then during 1983 a white-collar recovery happened: inflation finally plummeted, the stock market took off, and professional jobs started to reappear in force especially in places tied either to the financial-services or electronics and computing industries. In 1984, a presidential election year, the blue-collar recovery finally came as unemployment dropped meaningfully (by about forty percent between spring of '83 and spring of '84, from c. 11% to c. 7%.)
What about the parties? After the great crisis of 1981-83, all this seemed to be victory and vindication for the New Right, and for a coalition of New Right interests -- the free-marketeering cultural conservatives of the Sunbelt, the neo-Confederate Dixiecrats, and the large vested corporate interests -- and a subset of voters incorrectly called "Reagan Democrats" when what they really were was "unionized George Wallace voters looking for a home." That seemed to dominate American politics. And as the New Right, Religious Right, and all the components of the modern American right did whether they were winning or losing, they doubled down.
What about the Dems? Great Society liberalism was put in disrepute, "McGovern" was a dirty word and so was "Mondale," and significantly one of the party's most important economic underpinnings -- mass contributions collected by large industrial unions -- was drying up. So you had first the "Atari Democrats," mostly veterans of the New Left who were socially very liberal but hated what they saw as culturally reactionary union leaders and unwieldy government programs: really they were Progressives, who believed in meritocratic virtues, liberty and equality for all, and technocratic wisdom. So where they would've been liberal Republicans in the Sixties, now they were ex-New Left Dems who backed and were backed by socially liberal entrepreneurs in the electronics industry and parts of the financial world. Then there were the New Democrats, and there was some overlap with the "Ataris" but the New Democrats skewed more Southern and Northeastern, and what they really did was bring a less-statist form of Rockefeller Republicanism in as a dominant ideology for the wounded Democratic Party. Rockefeller Republicans, after all, believed (less than truly-liberal Republicans but still) in civil rights for all and a hand up for the less fortunate, in free trade as a boundless world of opportunity, and investment in education to build the perfect meritocracy. Those forces took charge in the institutional Democratic Party -- the officials and campaign staff and pollsters and bagmen -- and the politicans who championed them took leadership roles. So in some important ways what was "Republican lite" ideology -- the left wing of the old Liberal Party (in the 19th century classical sense of Liberal) that the GOP had been until the Sixties civil war and the Southern Strategy -- now ran the Democratic Party, displacing its social-democratic elements (never Marxist in the sense "social democratic" sometimes meant in Europe, but a very American social democracy, concentrated on economic equity and small-d democracy evening out the economic and political rights of rich and poor around a vast middle class, not so very different -- different but not so much -- from what that red-blooded imperialist nationalist Teddy Roosevelt had preached at the birth of the century) which wanted a more equitable society but sometimes, as the sausage was made, at the great expense of marginalized groups like racial minorities and women.
So what about this world? A Democrat wins in 1980, and from the OP's premise one who does as well or better than Reagan's crew in getting the economy right by 1984. Iran may go south later -- Ford's administration would have backed a Shah-based system for much longer so it would probably take at least until Reza Pahlavi's death, so that economic/foreign policy bow wave hits closer and harder by the 1980 election cycle. It also means the recovery probably starts a little later, so closer in time to the 1984 election cycle. In the meanwhile, any major Democrat is going to put more emphasis on using whatever deficit spending there is to maintain jobs, to prevent the kind of obscene unemployment levels seen in the Rust Belt IOTL. That will help the Dems' electoral record -- it's a pretty simple equation out there in the little about who's willing to fight to get you a job and who doesn't give a damn about the little people.
The sort of Democrats most likely to win in 1980 (the Careys, Mondales, Askews, Muskies) will go with the jobs. So that's a boost in a number of key states that still carry a lot of Electoral Votes in the 1980s census distribution. Also, it means that the unions, while damaged, will remain institutionally and economically a stronger presence in the Eighties than IOTL. Also, because of the likely presence of some New South era liberal on the ticket (most likely Reubin Askew or Dale Bumpers if he could ever be talked into it) on the ticket because the Dems' electoral strength, other than a growing presence in California, was mostly east of the Missouri River, there will be a more economically "liberal" in the postwar sense Southerner tied deeply to the ticket. The administration in place, and its allies in state governments and Congress, are more likely to follow a modified version of traditional liberalism -- more deficit-hawkish wrt inflation, more committed to bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan and containing communism in Latin America (but not, at least not so much, by backing crypto-fascist regimes instead), more committed to the "classical" civil rights of African Americans and women and less so to the newer civil rights of Latinos and the LGBT community. In this world the "Atari Democrats" probably have more leverage as change agents than the New Democrats. The Southern ones are waiting their turn and with more robust figures in the Askew/Bumpers/Jim Hunt/Jim Folsom Jr vein in place, it will take longer for the Clintons of the world to advance and they may be outflanked in the meanwhile by "Atari Dems" like Gary Hart or Bill Bradley, who are more consistently socially liberal and in some cases more economically "liberal" though they are free-traders who love them some tech entrepreneurs. There will be a generational change in Democratic leadership moving from the Eighties to the Nineties, but that change may not be as extreme, nor as totalizing (in terms of who controls the levers of party function, candidate funding, platform fights, etc.) as the change from Mondale to Clinton.
Also, there are secular issues at work: by that I mean cyclical rather than religious-vs-not. After the inflationary disaster of 1980-82 and the levelling out, OTL saw the 1983-88 boom (in which the potentially dangerous stock market crash of '87 became just a market correction) and the long, large boom of 1992-2000. During that period, also, the proportion of Americans employed in manufacturing fluctuated but only within a steady range: after dropping a good bit during the Seventies due to the "steel and coal crisis" things leveled out up to about the millennium. After that, as the effects of NAFTA and China's full entry to the WTO kicked in during the Aughts the fucking bottom dropped out and brought Hell riding with it: the opiate epidemic, the epidemic of middle-aged white female suicide, the countercyclical death rate of middle-aged blue-collar males, the destruction of whole communities into crime-ridden wastelands left behind, the rise of well-cultivated (literally by "outside agitators" just like the Old Right used to say about the left) pan-racist (anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, you name it) lumpen nationalism... well, that's all a different story for a more dystopian TL: ours.
In this TL of the 1980s Democratic Revolution the trends are these. There's a boom from roughly the end of 1983 (I'm pushing it back a few months because while the economic policy is more sensible -- no supply-side "whoops" in the FY 81-82 budget -- the "cost-push" oil crisis over Iran hits later) through at least 1988 and maybe 1989. And then there's another one, tied to the tech boom and the housing boom and perhaps juiced even more than IOTL by Gary Hart-style "targeted investment initiatives" that really were meant to do things like "invent the Internet" in much the way Eisenhower built the interstate system, rather than more lumpen Bush Sr./Clinton-style stimulus packages, that lasts pretty much through the Nineties. The Soviet Union will still continue to degrade -- a Democratic administration with Zbig Brzezinski and potentially Scoop Jackson in it will very much be arming the mujahedin to the teeth and buying union-made M1 tanks (go Lima, Ohio!) to put all over central West Germany and union-built surface warships (go Massachusetts, Mississippi, Long Beach, and Tacoma) to spend them into the ground. And at some point, whether by agreement or simple secular trend as North Sea production, Soviet production, and a willingness to drill and pump more in the States even though it depletes our supplies faster, oil prices will head down towards secular lows and probably stay there at least for most of the Nineties as IOTL. What this means is, despite all the poli sci literature on "party fatigue" and the vagaries of intra-party factional warfare in primaries, etc., there is a very good chance that whatever party wins in 1980 must do two things -- make it through the Great Recession of 1980-83 and not screw up anything too big in terms of foreign policy -- and they're nearly guaranteed a good sixteen years in the White House, twenty if they're lucky as well as good. It damned near happened IOTL, it took every failing of Poppy Bush and Dan "Potatoe" Quayle to make it not happen and e'en so, just add one more jilted Clinton lover, make Perot stay out when he got out in the summer, speed the recovery up by an economic quarter or two, and he would've done the hard part for whichever party was in power -- survive the likely economic downturn sometime in the 1989-93 window -- still in charge, thereby racking up at least 16 years of White House control and potentially twenty. We can thank Ross Perot as much as the "New Democrat" initiative for the DLC Nineties, especially as weak a candidate as Clinton was despite his human gift at retail politics (either Gore or Bill Bradley would have been much more solid candidates of a similar stripe, despite their more reserved demeanor.) There are very strong medium-term trends that bear fair winds for anyone who sorts out the end-of-Seventies crisis. (Similarly in the UK you had eighteen years of Tory government despite the near breakthrough during economically very bad times c. '92, and a long patch of first right-wing PC then relatively right-leaning Liberal government in Canada. Again, whatever ideology survived the early-Eighties crisis tended to see its way past the bump at the start of the Nineties and well into the next decade.)
What does this do to the Republicans? I think you get a very different answer from what happened to OTL's Democrats-on-the-outs. The modern American Right -- the ideological New Right born of Buckley and Goldwater and all, the Religious Right that came out of segregation until it found its happy blood libel in abortion and ultimately allied, despite old denominational suspicions, with some theologically out the frak there charismatic denominations determined to bring on the End Times, and the culturally revanchist remains of the Old Right -- does not retreat. It does not tack towards an imagined middle ground in search of battleground demographics. It doubles down. This is best seen in the House of Representatives, where after decades in the minority, and despite some relatively moderate small-c conservative leaders like Bob Michel as titular heads of the party, it was the relentless, almost Leninist ideologues (Newt Gingrich loved citing Lenin, he thought he had exactly the right methods just the wrong ends) who took control of messaging, party discipline, finding and grooming candidates for local primaries, creating regional strongholds in conservative states, getting control of state governments to be in charge of redistricting after each census to re-gerrymander the House away from Democrats and towards Republicans -- it was those guys who laid the conditions for 1994.
That was helped along by a bunch of self-inflicted wounds of Bubba's, and especially by blue-collar voters deserting or staying home because of NAFTA, one of those generational changes in the party where, in the "1980s Democratic Revolution" TL there would probably be more powerful party gatekeepers committed to the union vote who would be skeptical of free-trade panacaeas. But the fact that the GOP were ready, that they had "talking points memos" handed out with language to brand Democrats as enemies of the American way, because they had been taught what buttons to push to get their partisans out to vote, because they were committed, they seized their chance and made something of it. The GOP ITTL is likely to behave the same way. If they are lucky, when their breakthrough moment comes for the White House they'll have a candidate in place who can sell a right-wing agenda as "compassionate conservatism" with a smile like the Bush brothers -- Carroll Campbell of South Carolina would've been a good one, as would Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, if Bush family fortunes have faded after Ford's second term. But in 1980 when I suspect Reagan beats Dole from the right ITTL but has to live with his right-wing primary language costing him the general, and again in 1984 and '88, I think you will see committed New Right candidates for the Republicans in the presidential cycles. In '92 there may be a tack back to "moderation" in the form of a pre-New Right style conservative in the Gerry Ford mold, but again if that little experiment fails and the Dems get their at-least-sixteen years, it's right back to the New Right laboratories to build the perfect salesman. Because the New Right has always been genius at sales -- their very roots lay in professions that involved a large sales component, from "direct marketing" to real estate to auto sales to franchising, and so on. Reagan became famous because of his stock sales-pitch "The Speech" about how liberal values destroyed capitalist liberty. They will hone their game, they will eat away at the Democrats, complacent and too often corrupt (esp. in the House) in their long incumbency, they will always keep at being who they are, and by sometime in the Nineties they will be ready to strike. And there's a good chance, whether it's '96 or 2000, that they have at least two of the three branches of government simultaneously and start working like hell at replacing Supreme Court justices. They learned from Roosevelt, from both Roosevelts: never waste a window of opportunity. So the chance when it comes will be sharper, more partisan, more rapid, and more far-reaching (voucherized Social Security anyone? How about we defund the Medicare-for-all created during the Eighties boom by the old school liberal president then? And let's get some DeVos-ification of American education fired up right now. Glass-Steagal? What Glass-Steagal?) than what we have experienced in the Reagan, Gingrich, and Dubya revolutions. Compress much of that into eight frantic years (if they can gin up a timely economic bubble at reelection) and that's what's coming ITTL. And they will have had more advance time, especially during the Nineties, to wear away at the blue-collar white folks who did so well out of the 1980s Democratic Revolution because it still took an interest in industrial labor and small farms. So if they have better control of the Rust Belt states, you could be looking at another "long majority" like the Democratic one now passing in the OP's TL....
A bit sobering for me to see the rise of the New Right here (I'm socially conservative, but I hate their reactionarism). This TL's Democrats must really stop the New Right urgently, if they don't want their gains to fade. They should at least keep a 47-seat minority to prevent the New Right's agenda and hold Southerners in line. And they may be better off if they lose 1992 in the alt-alt scenario since Republicans will honor Ford conservatives.
So what would be the parties' ideologies here, @Yes?
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Right here, dear fellow, right here
I could say the same.@EcoBOOM,
There will be a bit more cultural conservatism for longer in the 1980s Democratic Revolution in any case, I think. Civil rights for African Americans and women will play a big part in the Democratic Party's actions, but there will be more fighting (because of competition for lower-wage jobs) over support for Latinos and (because of cultural cooties among Catholics, Southerners, and Midwestern union members/small farmers) LGBT rights (although I think there will be a more responsive public-health and disease-control approach to HIV, especially as it spreads past being "the gay plague.") In my own posit upthread, in 1988 the Vice President who figures maybe it's his turn at the top is Reubin Askew. Askew was (and I know people who knew him personally) as fundamentally decent and good-hearted a man as Jimmy Carter played at being (Carter improved with age -- the presidency changed him for the better but at a high cost for all involved.) He was a hugely successful anti-corruption crusader, fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, wanted sharply more progressive taxation, backed core social-services programs like Social Security and national health care to the hilt, was one of the first pro-Civil Rights state legislators in Florida, and was both a wickedly talented debater (he'd been a very good prosecuting attorney before politics) and a loving family man. But he was also anti-abortion, deeply hesitant about big changes in gay rights (especially family-related changes like civil unions and adoption), and strangely enough anti-no fault divorce (he'd been raised by a single mother who escaped an abusive alcoholic and in his own conscience thought you needed that kind of reason to break up a marriage.) He was a teetotaler as well, a church-going Presbyterian who didn't get preachy in public ever but had an old-fashioned code of morality that happened to include social and economic justice as far as his cultural background would take them. So someone like him is still getting in the mix with, say, Gary Hart, who besides his New Left roots was from the Western "if it ain't hurtin' nobody" school of personal liberties, suspicious that folks like Askew who were flaming traditional liberals in many ways were now wedge figures for cultural-conservative backlash, and differed fundamentally on the role and importance of the unions and small farmers in the Democratic coalition (Hart's core was socially liberal suburbanites and technocratic entrepreneurs, and idealistic college educated youth.) This is a debate that will not go away whether there's a transitional figure prior to an "Atari Democrat" or whether the change is more abrupt. And unlike a Clintonverse, there will probably be less "triangulation" and more simple division between the more collectivist and socially traditional (not always conservative in the American sense) Democrats and the more individualist and socially accepting ones. By the 2000s that may swap -- you could have socially traditional individualists vs collectivist social-acceptors which is a possible current trend IOTL and if so very much a Clintonian legacy. But this is "1980s Democratic Revolution"-verse, so the divide looks more like, well, something like Reubin Askew vs. Gary Hart.
Your best shot at the last gasp of sweet reason from the GOP really is probably '92. They'll have had several cycles of true believers (though in a footnoted list I did on this subject in the Alternate Presidents/PMs thread I had Paul Laxalt -- St. Ronnie's Congressional bestie -- run in '84 and choose Charles Percy as his running mate as a gesture towards party unity while his Reagan-veteran minions pushed the Overton Window waaaaaay right.) It will not have gotten them anywhere because the Big Damn Democrat of the '80s had his two terms (I still just plain like Hugh Carey for the part, he had the physique and temperament for it, right out of central casting for "hugely successful Irish Democrat") and the economy is still humming enough that, especially against hard-liners, his successor should do fine in '88. But by '92 there is a reasonable chance that there's been a lot of crosstalk in Spectator and National Review and papers from the American Enterprise Institute and other parts of the GOP chattering classes about "electability" and convincing voters that the Democratic trend towards what is, ideologically, a liberal-Republican stance on many issues is just playing at what really needs to be done and laden with Sixties-liberal baggage. (This was the era when authors on the New Right were convinced by the quality of their ideas. By the time you hit OTL's Aughts you mostly have people covering for whatever the party does even if it's self-contradictory, like the good shills they are, or the terrible power of true belief like the Freedom Caucus and the various organs of neo-Confederacy.)
So there's a real shot by '92 at getting a small-c conservative, still conservative enough to count but sober and thoughtful and not reflexively anti-science or anti-education, an "honorable pessimist" in the great small-c conservative tradition, pragmatic enough to work with either a still-Democratic Congress (using salami tactics to win over reps from conservative-leaning districts) or to prevent Senate Dems from digging in their heels. Bush Sr had some of those qualities -- I've been known to joke about his administration as "Gerald Ford's second term" right down to the personnel (except Rumsfeld because everyone sane fucking hates Donny) -- he just had a tin ear for domestic policy and that did him in in the end. ITTL of 1980s Democratic Revolution, I could see a number of possibilities. David Durenberger may not be there because ITTL, with 1978 an anti-Ford midterm, the "Minnesota Massacre" probably doesn't happen and Mondale (still in the Senate ITTL) and Rudy Perpich and so on get reelected, but maybe Durenberger rather than Carlson becomes governor in an anti-Democratic '82 midterms so he might still be in the mix (Arne Carlson had more upstate support, but I could see Durenberger beating him in a tight primary.) Definitely John Warner of Virginia and Kit Bond of Missouri, both men likely to have political careers similar to OTL's because of their talents and favorable local voting conditions, would be viable choices for a '92 "moderate moment." Possibly even, in one of the great political comebacks, Bob Dole if he pulled a Hubert Humphrey and returned to the Senate because he just couldn't stand being away from politics. Those four -- Durenberger, Warner, Bond, and Dole -- would be the top of my list for conservative "moderates" (translated as "not card-carrying acolytes of the New Right") who could make the push in '92.
The difficulty there is twofold. First, an enthusiasm gap particularly in the South and West, although they might outperform the more ideological Eighties nominees in the Midwest. Second, the state of the economy, which if it's already turning around in '92 is going to favor the Democratic incumbent who can get after the Republican "moderate" for not being a true believer (get the other side's partisans to stay home) and say "my plan is working, vote your wallet and everything will be fine." So the timing, for any pushback against the broad and often fractious coalition of the Hard Right (free-marketeers, religious fundamentalists, corporate neo-feudalists, and right-wing libertarians are not always natural allies), is entirely contingent on how quickly the likely downturn somewhere in the 89-93 time window got turned around. The best Democratic candidate for that in this window is probably Gary Hart, who devoted the most of his considerable policy-wonkery time other than to arms control, to coming up with targeted and deliberate plans to produce the kind of economic phenomena that dominated the Nineties boom -- high-tech expansion, revamping of traditional industries, venture capital expansion for entrepreneurs, housing opportunities for middle-class Americans and a construction boom to go with it, etc. So either Hart himself, or the Big Damn Eighties Democrat's successor taking on Hart as Vice President and listening to him, could take more positive steps faster than the Bush administration (bound by "Read My Lips" and Bush's old-school budget orthodoxy.) Also it depends on Hart keeping it in his pants in the mid-Eighties but here he has not challenged a popular incumbent Democrat in '84 so he's more relentlessly focused on making his bid in '88 which could keep his nose to the grindstone instead of ... other places.
And any failure at this point simply drives the institutional engines of the GOP further into partisanship, into "heightening the contrasts" to use an old leftist phrase, and wait for something -- a Democratic civil war, a mega-scandal, an economic hiccup just in time for an election cycle -- as their chance to make a move. IOTL they got number one (just quietly) in '94 because of NAFTA, they got number two during Bubba's second term, and they had a bit of three (the dot-com bust) in time to make the 2000 cycle winnable although, like a proud Bush, Dubya did everything he possibly could to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The real choice spots for the GOP are '96 (if there's another transition of personnel after two successive two-term Democrats) and 2000 (by which time even with good structural dynamics and record-low oil prices keeping inflation out of the picture for suburban swing voters, there should be some kind of economic "correction".) But there is an outside shot with '92 I think and it is the twilight of the reasonable Republicans. They will not be wiped out just because of this -- we can look at Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and, every second Thursday between his third and fourth mint juleps, Lindsay Graham to see vestigial survivors even in our hyper-partisan TL -- but this is their remaining chance to lead. The coming generation of talent after them is made up of 1) bomb-throwing revolutionary masterminds like Gingrich and DeLay or their functional equivalents ITTL, and 2) right-wingers who have learned how to sound moderate while right-wing ideas come out of their mouths, men like Carrol Campbell and Kempthorne and the Bush Boys (maybe Neil gets in on the politics game ITTL too, or instead of Dubya. Would be interesting to see how Fredo Bush did.)
The "small-c"s next chance, if they were to get one, would actually be after eight years of the first hyper-active Republican president in a while, who has swept through all these major changes and tried to claw back a 5-4 conservative majority on the Court. He (so very certain to be a he at that point) might decide that a particular "small-c" type with loads of experience, probably in the Senate, would be a safe pair of hands to drop things into third gear, make some technical adjustments and cruise ahead keeping the changes in place. But there are likely to be challenges in the primaries from even more extreme factions -- especially the Religious Right or the Dixiecrats -- who fought loyally for the party in the wilderness years and think it's time to claim their reward by putting "one of ours" in the White House. There are two dangers to a New Republican Majority ITTL. One is that, an extremist president -- I should refine that, a culturally extremist president rather than an economically and judicially extremist president -- who provokes a backlash. The other is that modern GOP economic philosophy is based on creating exactly the kind of infinitely ginormous culture of bubble-speculation and moral hazard in an economy skewed wildly towards the financial sector that, well, we experienced ourselves in roughly the 1998-2008 window. That one lasted ten years. It might have held on for longer with a bit better care and feeding under Bush -- you could've gotten twelve out of it before the wrong margin call came and the whole house of cards came down. But that's only three presidential terms rather than four, and would bite home at exactly the wrong time just like IOTL, during a presidential election where the incumbent's party gets blamed and the opposition needs to just look cool and caring and speak passionately about the plight of average Americans and not make unforced errors.
So sixteen years is probably the absolute maximum the new GOP majority could manage, and there are good potential reasons to think it would only be twelve. So, say, 1980s Democratic Revolution Majority 1980-96 or 1980-2000, Following GOP Majority 1996-2012 or 2000-2012. Either way something changes about then and it will depend very greatly on what wing of the Democratic Party is able to seize the moment with ideas and candidates as to whether they can build another successive majority, or simply start an unstable era of regular party-swapping, or bring on conditions where the main institutional thrust of both parties comes up short and a third force emerges (probably, sad to say, that third force would be a right-wing populism not unlike what's two months into occupying our White House now. Only the team might be competent all the way to the top rather than run by an overweight, under-interested, emotionally arrested mandarin orange in a toupee who ran George Wallace's dream campaign but only wants to golf in Florida now and is being slowly neutered in his institution-smashing white nationalism by the able and relentless Republican establishment who these days are the sons and heirs of the Nineties bomb-throwers. His tin ear for the Obamacare repeal process -- because it is *yawn* a legislative process -- is already defeating his own political instincts to protect the herrenvolk welfare state on behalf of his hard core of supporters.)
By the 2000s the GOP looks very much like the GOP we know from that time period: a layer of smiling salesmen in key roles especially POTUS, a Big Tent Right made in broadly equal parts of Ayn-Randist "vulgar New RIght" political offspring of the original New Right, of fiscally and culturally reactionary representatives of the Religious Right, of people (some Venn Diagram overlap here with the Religious Right category) best defined as Dixiecrats and not only that but getting more brazenly neo-Confederate again after a generation and a half of keeping that on the DL, a rump of mostly Midwestern and Northeast/New England "small-c" conservatives, and one or two outliers doing their own thing like libertarian gold-fetishist Ron Paul or vestigial liberal Lincoln Chaffee. The weight of effort will lie with changing political economy -- campaign finance rules, corporate breaks, mass deregulation of everything where you can make a quick killing, Reaganesque New Federalism, slow bleeding of funds to major federal programs, high-tech-only defense increases because the jobs are concentrated in GOP areas like Orange County and Dallas-Ft. Worth, and so on -- as much or more than changing moral economy, which will aggravate the culture warriors but encourage them that (1) they are buying up favors from the free-marketeers to cash in later and (2) they need to get behind a particular candidate when the incumbent's eight years are up and win the White House for themselves. There are still a lot of small-c conservatives and "Reagan Democrats" out in the population, but again as IOTL an entire media culture has been or is being built up to persuade them that backing the ideologies of the Republicans in power is the best way, not just to get what they want but more importantly, to prevent what they fear.
The Democrats will be torn. With tech and the Internet still going strong the aging "Atari Democrats" and their heirs will still have a lot of power and leeway in the institutional party and feel like "well, if Factor X hadn't been effed up in 2000 we wouldn't be in this fix, let's just stick to our game plan." There will be some room for the Rockefeller New Democrats to flex a bit especially in places with connections to the financial-services and pharmaceutical industries, both big givers to them because said givers really want socially liberal economic Republicans and that's what these NDs promise to be in practice. But there is a stronger vestigial union presence, and as some of the big manufacturing unions have taken a hit over time, some of the more politically radical skilled (ex. electrical workers) and unskilled (ex. much of SEIU) unions take a larger role, more willing to make political alliances with minorities, women's groups, LGBTQ activism, and so on. There may be something of a repeat of an experiment that failed IOTL -- democratizing and diversifying unions (then in the early Seventies) allying with the identity-rights movements while the old manufacturing unions sank in the economic quicksand. So you have a Democratic right who are free traders and corporate-friendly with specifications (tech, finance, pharmaceuticals, Internet-service) but still quite socially liberal because they owe more to the "Ataris" than the"New Dems", and a Democratic left that's returning to a social-democratic approach through that awful clunky but descriptive term "intersectionalism," as various rights movements and specialist unions converge around common goals as a measure of self-defense. With the right leadership such a coalition could evolve into a 21st century version of what the AFL-CIO was at its height, but there are still plenty of internal squabbles and concerns that somebody else's oppression experience is getting favored over theirs, so it's tricky. That is most likely to coalesce in the face of a second Republican POTUS who wants sweeping cultural change like the legal and economic changes of his predecessor. And at the same time the "Atari" approach will persist until the major party officials, campaign operatives, etc., who made their name in its heyday start aging out of their roles. That may take long enough that they start bleeding "change now" collectivists to third-party efforts, buying the GOP more time in power until the financial house of cards comes down. When it does, depending on how severely that (1) spikes unemployment or (2) destroys the housing market, that would give the collectivists a boost because they're willing to promise more radical fixes in clearer, simpler language, which is what people like to hear when they're in real distress. Real friction between 21st century Dem right and 21st century Dem left is likely to intensify most by the late Aughts to early Teens, in the face of responding to the big changes the GOP have rammed through. And paradoxically that could do the most to keep the Republicans in power even as they face their own internal fights between the merely venal and the true believers.
It's a good article, but I think there are actually two stories, with only loose linkage between them.
Yes, Bob Jones III (the one born in 1939) insisted on his "right" to bar African-American students and/or forbid interracial dating. Maybe in some final analysis, he does have such a "right," but then he doesn't get tax-exempt status!
In addition, he was rather a mean-spirited man who did such things as publicly criticize President Ford's wife. Yes, really.
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Story (1) Why did other evangelical leaders apparently put weight on their own right to discriminate if they so choose? And/or why did these other leaders fail to call out Bob Jones?
Story (2) And why were individual evangelicals slow to pay attention to the issue of abortion, for it certainly seems to be in their wheelhouse?
As much as some evangelical leaders may have tried to link them, I tend to think they were probably only somewhat successful and the individual members probably largely made up their own minds.
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The Democrats really have to stay united or they'll end up like 1968.
I'm guessing the electoral map is still the same IOTL, but because the Midwest and Northeast do not decline that much, those areas will have more electoral votes than IOTL, and less so for the West Coast and South.
I'm guessing the electoral map is still the same IOTL, but because the Midwest and Northeast do not decline that much, those areas will have more electoral votes than IOTL, and less so for the West Coast and South.
The big three in the Sunbelt -- California, Texas, Florida -- probably continue to gain becauase of specific trends of economic development in the first two (esp. the electronics and telecommunications industries) and retirement migration in the third. But there's probably not as much Electoral College drift from the Rust Belt to other places ITTL. On the other hand, the farther we get from the 1980s Democratic Revolution itself the more the GOP may manage to gain some culture-war leverage in those states and it will take an economic shock to bring them back around towards the Dems. In borderlands areas I could see the trending of Missouri towards more conservative politics (with growth in the Ozarks and blue-collar urbanites voting culture war over pocketbook more often), and Virginia and North Carolina towards more liberal ones (because of the growth of NoVA and medicine-driven Richmond in VA, the Triangle and Charlotte in NC) much as IOTL. The Democrats are torn between two definite wings by the 2000s, between the left-Liberals (liberty and justice for all, but free trade and entrepreneurship) and the renascent social democrats (equity for all and banding together against the Money Power and the "Budweiser Ayatollahs"), only ITTL that right wing is less nakedly corporate and small-c conservative in its economic policy playbook, so that by itself is some improvement. Really getting the Clinton machine outflanked by other reformist types (a Nineties power-change that is more Gary Hart and Bill Bradley and less Bill and Hillary) does a power of good. So do the achievements of the Eighties Dem Revolution, from keeping unions stronger for longer to rationalizing the health care system earlier (there will have been fights about cost containment several times I'm sure) to investing in infrastructure back when it could still benefit US manufacturers. All that is stuff the Dems can fall back on. But they're still likely to get in factional fights every election cycle at least for a while after the fall from power. Being in opposition helps unify you but only until you have to choose the guy/gal running for a particular office and then things can get snippy. Like Will Rogers said they're not part of an organized political party, they're Democrats...