AHC: A paleoconservative dominated GOP.

[calvim]

With a POD no later than 2008, what could be changed to create a GOP that by today would be dominated by a paleoconservative ideaology or similar.

For clarifications sake, paleoconservative means:

• A non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing a need to protect national sovereignty.
• A staunchly conservative, tea-partyesque fiscal policy (bonus points for gold standard support)
• A generally conservative stance on social issues emphasizing traditional (often judeo christian) values.

 

[Deleted member 109224]

With a POD no later than 2008, what could be changed to create a GOP that by today would be dominated by a paleoconservative ideaology or similar.

For clarifications sake, paleoconservative means:

• A non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing a need to protect national sovereignty.
• A staunchly conservative, tea-partyesque fiscal policy (bonus points for gold standard support)
• A generally conservative stance on social issues emphasizing traditional (often judeo christian) values.

You're forgetting anti-immigration and economic nationalism.


Trump more or less checks off most of the boxes tbh. Otherwise, I'd say Rand Paul is your guy.

 

[calvim]

Thsnks for the addendums! I knew i was forgetting somethings.

Trump and the pauls are solid picks, but a trick to fit in at or before 2008 no?

 

[Jiraiyathegallant]

Maybe if Trump and Rand Paul don’t clash hard in the early primaries, and Paul decides to position himself as a Trump ally early on he could become VP. Trump consequently runs a similar campaign and presidency, but is influenced towards non interventionism by Paul and some of advisors he brings in.

Given Trump’s personal life though, it is hard for me to see him as a Paleoconservative regardless.

 

[calvim]

A solid idea, but a little too late unless trump runs early. But when?

 

[President Benedict Arnold]

I think your best bet for something resembling paleoconservatism is either the future (say, if GOP donors fall into irrelevance and the base pushes them in a different direction economically) or you make a shift in the 1990s.

I think the '90s is where you need to find a PoD for paleoconservatism as an idea to rise up and take over the Republican Party.

 

[Anarcho-Occultist]

Gore wins in 2000 but dies on 9/11. Lieberman consequently wages a more hawkish war on terror, invading Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The financial crisis is blamed on Dem fiscal policies and antiwar energy fuels the right. In 2008, Ron Paul (coming off a second-place finish in the 2004 primaries) gets the Republican nomination and wins the presidency over Democrat John Edwards. The 2010’s see the GOP become a libertarian-paleocon coalition with the 2016 primaries pitting John J. Duncan (here a Senator), Gary Johnson (ditto), Dana Rohrabacher and Mark Sanford (who may or may not have been Paul’s VP) against each other (though Jon Huntsman, Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, Mitt Romney and John Kasich all mount quixotic bids).

I’ve considered doing a timeline based off this scenario.

 

[dw93]

Dukakis wins in 1988, has a rocky term, and Buchanan wins in 1992 perhaps.

 

[RousseauX]

With a POD no later than 2008, what could be changed to create a GOP that by today would be dominated by a paleoconservative ideaology or similar.

For clarifications sake, paleoconservative means:

• A non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing a need to protect national sovereignty.
• A staunchly conservative, tea-partyesque fiscal policy (bonus points for gold standard support)
• A generally conservative stance on social issues emphasizing traditional (often judeo christian) values.

so basically trump except with more conviction

 

[Expat]

Mentioning Trump, or any candidate, is just muddying the waters here. We’re dealing with a modern marketing machine that churns out a lot of vague ideas open to interpretation and a very few extremely specific ideas that on their own don’t really represent the adoption of any ideology wholesale.

In this way, candidates can be many things to many people, and the party can court from various strains of ideology and claim to represent a unified movement that doesn’t really exist. This is something any modern two-party state is probably going to have to deal with in the age of marketing and data science.

So really there are a few ways to approach the challenge:
Have the governance of the GOP be more strictly paleo.
Create a scenario where enough of the electorate is paleo that roughly 50% of our political infrastructure (in the form of a political party) is organized around them.
I guess guess a third option would be for the class of scenarios that get us a multi-party system with various parties more keyed to specific ideologies.

How to get a frequent plurality of voters to routinely vote the same slate is tough. Parties evolve and the paleo agenda...basically resists that. You’d at least need to butterfly the interventionism of WW2, or maybe better, have the situation in the immediate post-war world be read by most as a tremendous, earth-shattering mistake.

To get the pro- open markets, pro- cheap immigrant labor faction out of the GOP is also a tall order. The “reasonable men of business” had been their chief, even self-described stereotype since the 1860s.

I think it could possibly have been done in a 1950s conservative takeover. No one is more paleo than Taft. If he can get in power and fiddle with party bylaws in a sophisticated way and put the right people in charge, he could possibly morph the party in his image. I think several scenarios where disaster then happens for the GOP are the more likely outcomes than success, but it’s a system with no real margins. As much as I think change is possible, it’s certainly true that people can resist it with all their might, so perhaps the party system remains in place and the electorate’s just forced to adapt. Luckily marketing is on its way to make them think they’re being better represented.

 

[jerseyguy]

This is basically OTL since the 2016 election, but to see the party taken over by paleo-cons you'd have to stop the growth of in its tracks or keep it from taking over the republican party. Neocons were mostly ex-communists who became Cold War Hawks because they saw a revolutionary mission for the US of spreading democracy around the world.

It's hard to avoid the rise of neoconservatism or dis-entangle it from the end of detente and heightened superpower tensions in the 1980s.

God forbid anyone tries to resurrect the gold standard. Paleocons' fetish for tariffs might be counterproductive, but they won't absolutely destroy the economy with a deflationary spiral the way a gold standard would. One of the major causes of the Great Depression was a scarcity of gold (aka money supply) relative to the amount of growth in the economy during the 1920s, and gold couldn't adjust to the imbalances in world trade.

Gold standard proponents usually point out that hyperinflation is almost impossible under the gold standard and the government can't borrow that much, but no hyperinflation comes with massive deflation. In theory if the value of money went down by 10%, the price of goods people by would decrease by 10%, but so would wages (and not necessarily at the same rate). Deflation wrecks the economy by destroying debtors' finances, because the dollar amount of debt they owe hasn't changed but now they have less ability to pay it off than before.

Economist disagree about things like whether inflation or unemployment is worse, or whether fiscal or monetary policy are the best way to smooth out the business cycle, but there is a pretty universal consensus that the gold standard is a bad idea. Low to moderate, but steady levels of inflation are less bad than the deflation that a gold standard entails.

 

[Alcsentre Calanice]

Neocons were mostly ex-communists who became Cold War Hawks because they saw a revolutionary mission for the US of spreading democracy around the world.

What? I mean, sure, they were liberals, and some of them even social-democrats, but they explicitly disapproved of the New Left. I don't think that many of them qualified as communists.

 

[jerseyguy]

What? I mean, sure, they were liberals, and some of them even social-democrats, but they explicitly disapproved of the New Left. I don't think that many of them qualified as communists.

Most of the prominent neoconservatives went through a Trotskyist phase earlier in life, generally in the 1930s when they were still university students. Many of them broke with Marxism and the broader left in the 1960s, mainly in opposition to the New Left. Irving Kristol wrote a memoir about that political cohort in the New York Times. Among working-class, radical students at the City University of New York in the 1930s, there was one lunch counter for Stalinists, and one lunch counter for Trotskyists. The latter lunch counter produced many prominent social scientists and neoconservative thinkers.

The late Christopher Hitchens is another example of someone who called themselves a Trotskyist earlier in life but abandoned Marxism and became a fervent Iraq War supporter.

 

[Hodor]

Anyone derailing discussion by trying to say the Trumps election is proof of paleoconservatism as the power ideology in the modern GOP should really take another look.

One of the only realistic ways to allow for paleocons to gain control the GOP establishment in the last century in my opinion is to find a POD that either drastically reduces or makes outright unpopular right wing Zionism or support for Israel in the USA. That's doesnt guarantee what you are looking for but I believe it to be a necessary condition for the GOP to be non interventionist in governing.

 

[overoceans]

Most of the prominent neoconservatives went through a Trotskyist phase earlier in life, generally in the 1930s when they were still university students. Many of them broke with Marxism and the broader left in the 1960s, mainly in opposition to the New Left. Irving Kristol wrote a memoir about that political cohort in the New York Times. Among working-class, radical students at the City University of New York in the 1930s, there was one lunch counter for Stalinists, and one lunch counter for Trotskyists. The latter lunch counter produced many prominent social scientists and neoconservative thinkers.

The late Christopher Hitchens is another example of someone who called themselves a Trotskyist earlier in life but abandoned Marxism and became a fervent Iraq War supporter.

Hitchens actually saw a continuity between his erstwhile Marxism and his latter-day neo-con fellow-traveling. He gave interviews in the early 2000s, saying stuff like "capitalism is now the truly revolutionary ideology", and that being involved with people like Paul Wolfowitz(a particular idol of his) made him feel like he was back in his days as a youthful firebrand. And he explicitly cited the neo-cons' troskyist roots as one reason for this affinity.

(My running joke during the futile search for WMDs was "Have they found the ice-pick yet?")

 

[jerseyguy]

Hitchens actually saw a continuity between his erstwhile Marxism and his latter-day neo-con fellow-traveling. He gave interviews in the early 2000s, saying stuff like "capitalism is now the truly revolutionary ideology", and that being involved with people like Paul Wolfowitz(a particular idol of his) made him feel like he was back in his days as a youthful firebrand. And he explicitly cited the neo-cons' troskyist roots as one reason for this affinity.

(My running joke during the futile search for WMDs was "Have they found the ice-pick yet?")

Yeah, they can be summed up pretty well as communists for capitalism. They've abandoned class struggle and marxist socialism for Fukuyamist liberal democracy, but they held on to Marxism's Jacobinistic and universalistic tendencies for spreading the revolution and delight at seeing reactionary fundamentalists destroyed by progress(TM).

Hitchens has a point about capitalism being a revolutionary ideology. Unfettered capitalism has done more to break down nation states and traditional social mores than soviet socialism ever did. Massive migration flows for economic reasons are a bigger threat to nation states than propaganda about "international socialist brotherhood". The breaking down of traditional social mores like opposition to homosexuality in public life has gone the farthest in the advanced capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America, while areas behind the iron curtain more or less maintained traditional social norms around gay rights.