AHC: bracket "the 1970s" in the U.S.A. in four to eight years politically.

Just what it says on the tin. Give me a relatively short "the '70s" as far as American politics.
Camelot.

Jack until 1969, Bobby through to 1973 before losing in an upset to Generic McRepublican, who then loses re-election to an economically radical Democrat in 1976 who governs into the 1980s and whose VP continues their legacy. The 1960s thus last until 1973, and 'the Eighties' begin in 1977. Poor Generic McRepublican (R–PA) is synonymous with an awkward and tumultuous '1970s', thankfully a brief period in the American story.
 
@ GeoDude...

Assuming I understand what you mean here...

For me, the 1960s can be viewed as ending with either the Paris Peace Accords(Jan. 73) OR the resignation of Nixon(August '74), which represented hiatuses in, respectively, the Cold War conflicts and anti-establishment politics that had dominated the decade or so since Kennedy's death. After that, the political scene was dominated by a bunch of issues not really connected with Cold War/counterculture, eg. oil crisis, swine flu, inflation, Iranian Revolution(which I recall people being somewhat confused about, since it was seen as a major threat to the west, but not a Communist one), Middle East generally, etc.

End of the 70s? If you want it under a decade, the 1980 election. This brings back to the fore anti-Communism(Afghanistan, admittedly pre-Reagan in origins, El Salvador etc), end of alleged Vietnam Syndrome(Rambo etc) culture vs. counterculture(Reagan's War On Drugs, the Meese Commission etc).

EDIT: Sorry, I hadn't realized this was a challenge, I just thought you meant where do we think the 70s begin and end.
 
I assume the OP see the "70th" starting with Nixon´s victory in 1968 and ending 1980 with Carters defeat.
So the easiest way would be that Johson get reelected in 1968 and after a humilating defeat a sharp turn to the right with a Reagan precidency and a GOP-congress till 1980.
 
I made a mistake, but it's a lucky mistake. :)

So, let's roll with it and talk about both was and what could have been. I kind of like timelines which interweave a couple of potential threads.
 
Camelot.

Jack until 1969, Bobby through to 1973 before losing in an upset to Generic McRepublican, . . .
And from '73 to '77, this Generic McRepublican tries to balance the budget during an economic downturn (!) (!) (!)

I'm assuming OPEC tries to assert themselves at some point even without the specific cause of a '73 Yom Kippur War.
 
@overoceans

" . . . hiatuses in, respectively, the Cold War conflicts and anti-establishment politics . . . "
I think of the anti-establishment politics as going mainstream during the '70s. I mean, you certainly had plenty of guys who might have been very conventional and maybe a successful sales pro at an auto dealership wearing his hair long, smoking weed, and listening to the latest rock music.

And I think of the archetypical '70s movie as some thriller with the underlying theme that you can't trust either the government or the big corporations.
 
Interweaving threads... I'm on board :)

The "Strung-Out Camelot" suggestion upthread is not far off one possible explanation and if you got really tight you could bracket it between "McRepublican" getting elected into an atmosphere of inflation and white backlash in '73 ousting the now-damaged Bobby and then pick up with some different elements: either Iran or Saudi implodes faster by '78 or so introducing fundamentalist strains in to replace the earlier vulgar-Marxist Arab nationalism in the Middle East (plus an oil shock and possible US entanglement which would define the start of an "Eighties" different from ours but a different era, just a "Long Weekend" from getting out of Southeast Asia to getting ensnared in the Persian Gulf), quicker metastatization of Silicon Valley around the Homebrew Club and slightly faster work at Intel (up the road from me these days...) that gets them working chips by '78, plus the potential deaths or irrevocable ill health of both Brezhnev and Hua leading to usurpation of power much faster by reformers in both Moscow and Beijing ready not just to introduce Chinese sweatshop power to the global economy but perhaps muzhiks with MBAs as well, and only a short window of "classical" détente as we're familiar with it between solid Cold War under the Kennedys (if Jack lives for two terms there's probably more of Ruthless Robert left and he's more suspicious of Kosygin's overtures in the late Sixties) and a different kind of "Cold Peace" where the US and Soviets deemphasize confrontation in Central Europe and on the nuclear front as each opens up northern and southern fronts respectively fighting Islamic extremists (Afghanistan, the southern SSRs, and possibly Iranian-held parts of Azerbaijan for Moscow, Saudi and Bahrain and southern Iran -- and God forbid, Pakistan -- for the US) where the new calculus is how to do that without panicking the other side into thinking you're turning on them next rather than the troublesome Islamic radicals. All of that latter part would lead to a long-term regime of higher oil prices distinct from the shorter-term price shock we know from '73 and possibly more Club of Rome-style economic regimes in both West and East turning towards alternate (nuclear and natural gas?) power resources and much more public awareness of political contests between monetarists and full-employment types in shaping political coalitions. That whole deal could give you a really short "Seventies" of about six years or so, just a weird little interval between more clearly defined eras.

Or you could have a "long Seventies" instead that was defined around a "mini-party system" defined either by a strong hand of Nixonian Republicanism, or by the steady rise of the New Right facilitated by but ultimately overwhelming the more purely Nixonian "carrier" of the phenomenon. In version one of that, you're basically in a "no Watergate" scenario (except it's not that simple; as the great Jimmy Breslin pointed out in How the Good Guys Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer there were so many things Nixon did that were shady in '71-'72 that Tip O'Neill warned his then-boss Carl Albert in early '73 that impeachment was coming, he just didn't know which set of charges would be the cause.) Nixon does his eight years, maintains his control and for that time at least corrals the New Right into being a substantial faction of the party but essentially short-circuits the powerful and defining connection between the Sun Belt New Right and the Southern New Right by pursuit of the Southern Strategy. Then Nixon's VP post-Agnew, whoever it is, beats Reagan in '76 and you have continued Nixonian policy on through the decade, probably with more and more of its downside leaking out as you get into the successor's administration, and then a collapse at the end where the pendulum swings towards the Dems and the New Right manage to get "their man" nominated in 1980, just in time to be another Goldwater swamped by an antithetical consensus. Or, you could have the New Right rising the whole time as Nixon does his thing like OTL and falls to Watergate/the Chennault Affair/the planned Brookings break-in/whatevs like IOTL, followed by the Nixon-lite of Ford but with the New Right pressing ever more in constituency candidacies, displacing liberal-to-moderate Rs in Congress, winning platform fights at the national convention, and maybe Ford does ask Reagan to run with him and pulls it out in '76, then deals with the troubles of the rest of the decade as his administration leans further and further to the right (ex. tries to appoint Bork to replace Potter Stewart, uses force to prop up Somocismo without Somoza in Nicaragua, leans away from détente after getting SALT II sorted out, etc.) Then 1980 brings in party fatigue, economic and foreign policy woes, and Reagan can't quite get over the finish line but the GOP has been in large part transformed at the institutional level into a party of the Right, run by New Rightists and Dixiecrats with a rump of pragmatic Bob Dole-style conservatives and the Chaffees and Weickers and Hatfields forced into a kind of John Andersonesque Progressive third way or simply out of office. That would be a "Long Seventies" of, like 1969-80/81. And with assorted related cultural movements, more sense of national decay even than in OTL's Seventies, more active protest and identity-justice movements against a persistent Republican government, and a steadier drift to right-wing economic policies that make unemployment and deindustrialization larger and broader fixtures of the decade on beyond the coal and steel industries.

Then there's my own interpretation of OTL's historical periodicity. In terms of American history I believe in a "short Fifties" that starts around late 1951 or 1952 once it's clear there will be no unconditional victory in Korea, as Truman's approval rating tanks and as Eisenhower gains steam against the last sally of the Old Right under Bob Taft, as the Russians work on the H-Bomb and coherent all-day scheduling of TV begins to take shape, and some of the first key civil-rights cases begin to work their way up the appeals process. I would put the end of that "short Fifties" by late 1958: the troops have been in Little Rock making it clear that the federal government and massive-resistance states are going to square off; Sputnik has been launched and the Space Race is on; Castro is taking over Cuba and changing the calculus of the Cold War while also driving the domino-theorists; styles are changing too especially with Modernist furniture and the narrow-lined men's ties and suits of the Sixties already "in"; black-and-white psychological dramas like Anatomy of a Murder and Tea and Sympathy are challenging the Hays Code and opening up the possibilities of the Sixties along with anti-hero Westerns like The Searchers; proper rock and roll is here to stay as Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and such dominate the kids' charts and start even with the twentysomethings to displace the brief golden age of Nelson Riddle-backed Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole; Jack Kennedy begins looking seriously at a 1960 presidential run and so does Hubert Humphrey; and so on. Actually the Sixties are so "long" I would say that like the movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows "the Sixties" comes in two parts. One runs from 1958 to 1965 and is concentrated on the sleek, go-go, jet set fashions and celebrity of over-30 icons from the Kennedys to James Bond to Richard Burton and Liz Taylor and so on, on the hottest parts of the Cold War, on the most dramatic and consequential period of change in the Civil Rights movement, and the definitive period of decision on a massive American commitment to Vietnam. Then 1966 through 1972 is both the era of the Counterculture and of its victorious opponent white backlash, of "Nixonland" and national breakdown, of the cancer of Vietnam, of the disjointed combination of "Volume 1 Sixties" events like the moon landing happening within months of "Volume 2 Sixties" events like Kent State. The whole 1971-72 period is the rotting fruit of "Volume 2 Sixties" at its 'finest.'

Then "the Seventies" really honestly arrive in January 1973. Nixon's inaugurated for his second term seemingly at the height of his powers but really about to collapse. The New York and London stock markets start a two year collapse that costs forty-some percent of NYSE's real value and 73 goddamn percent of FTSE's in London. The overheated easy money of Arthur Burns' "let's reelect Nixon" policies at the Fed, plus some disruptions on the commodities markets, doubles inflation in the first three quarters of '73 before the OPEC embargo and middle-class families can't find enough steak on the shelves for Sunday dinner. Watergate, which had been there for six months of '72 buried under pundits' encomiums about how wise and bipartisan Nixon was plus whispering campaigns about McGovern (and McG's own incompetence re Eagleton) now goes off like an atom bomb. The OPEC sheiks pull off the largest transfer of wealth from a single economic cause up to that point in history. A series of other corruption scandals from Serpico's testimony in NYC to the Sharpstown banking scandal in Texas and many points inbetween rocks state and local politics. The "steel crisis" caused by cheap and better-made Japanese and Korean steel on global markets starts. People start buying Toyotas. Fashion, already into garish colors thanks to mainstreaming hippie chic, now goes to absolute hell in a handbasket. The Seventies are on.

And they carry on in two phases too, I think. The first is the "Sixties Hangover" phases, which is basically Watergate a nd the Ford Administration. The bleakest, most dystopian pop culture and the worst fashions of the decade come from that period, when it all seemed to be coming unglued -- and at the same time there was an undercurrent of "revenge movies" like Dirty Harry and Death Wish and a profusion of hard-line cop shows, thankfully forgotten behind more thoughtful and enduring fare like Columbo and the Rockford Files, but there were plenty of incipient Reagan voters watching Police Story and the like. Then comes the "Making of the Contemporary World" Seventies as certain key trends loosed in the first period 1973-76 really take shape and come together. These are diverse. They include the emergence both of politicized Islam and its shockingly sudden relevance as an alternate worldview alien to Cold War calculus, both Sunni (Grand Mosque takeover, the near-massacre of the US embassy in Islamabad, mujahedin v the Red Army, the impetus towards Sadat's assassination) and Shia (Iran, Iran, Iran, but also flickerings of Hezbollah in Lebanon.) There's the coming together of the brain trusts of the microcomputing industry and Intel's "microchip." There are significant refinements in packet switching and architecture in both ARPANET and the British equivalent that laid the foundations from which Berners-Lee and company "built the Internet" at the end of the Eighties and brought it public in the Nineties. There's the birth of the modern blockbuster and its transformation of Hollywood corporate culture, presaged by Jaws but really a child of the later Seventies. There's the first renaissance of geek culture from Trekkies to Star Wars to sci-fi on tv to the epic-fantasy explosion to the popularization of Tolkien to D&D to the first proper video games. There are the first stirrings of what will later be the "New Democrats" movement in the candidacy of a nuclear engineer turned peanut farmer with a preternaturally big smile. And in his political destruction there's the first coherence of modern multimedia right-wing propaganda, designed to destroy the legitimacy of any Democrat in the White House and drown them in negative coverage. There's the emergence of the Religious Right, who along with the Birchers are the first "ultra" movement on the American right, dedicated to either owning the system or burning it down and birthing many ideological children and stepchildren down to the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and the alt-right. There's the definitive victory of the New Right in gaining control over the GOP in the '78 and '80 election cycles. There's the flourishing of both hard-core monetarism and "neoliberalism" (which is simply Liberalism, in its 19th century guise, under a clunky name and with all the same flaws and appeal to the meritocratic classes.) There's the creation of the end-of-decade economic conditions that will break the union movements in just about every Western nation that's not West Germany or Australia (well, Japan had their own deal going.) There's the Pacific Rim emerging as an economic force. So much of our world is birthed in that 1977-early 1981 period.

That gets at my end for "the Seventies." So it goes from January 1973 to January 1977 for the first, half then January '77 to March of 1981 with the second. Why then? A number of defining transitions for the creation of "the Eighties" happened in mid to late 1980, though not quite all yet. (You could also do a "long Eighties" from the anti-Carter midterms, the beginnings of revolution in Iran, and the birth of hip-hop after the looting during the '78 New York blackout, but I just roll a different way :)). But what cements "the Eighties" as underway is March 1981. The codas of many late-Seventies elements from Apple getting done with the essential work for the Apple II to the cancellation of Battlestar '80 to the end of the PIttsburgh Steelers' dynasty to the Tehran hostages coming home, had already happened. But the Age of Reagan, so crucial to "the Eighties" was cemented in March when he survived Hinckley's assassination attempt and in a fit of fellow-feeling Congress passed his disastrous FY 81-82 budget. At that point "the Seventies" are truly dead (and disco too :cool:). Some of their influences linger like the first wave of Atari games and Raiders of the Lost Ark and such, but it's the Eighties for sure by spring of '81.
 
I think of the anti-establishment politics as going mainstream during the '70s. I mean, you certainly had plenty of guys who might have been very conventional and maybe a successful sales pro at an auto dealership wearing his hair long, smoking weed, and listening to the latest rock music.

And I think of the archetypical '70s movie as some thriller with the underlying theme that you can't trust either the government or the big corporations.

Interesting point about the 70s thrillers. Though I actually tend to view them as a hangover from Watergate, which I think of as, politically speaking, "sixties". They WERE a pretty sturdy fixture throughout the seventies, though.

Another, somewhat less lighthearted 60s hangover that continued long into the 1970s was violence by self-styled left-wing revolutionary groups. In fact, those didn't really get into full swing, as far as the calendar goes, until the early 1970s, but they continued on until the mid and even to some extent late 70s. Oddly, though, they're not usually talked about when people remember that decade.
 
101183_large.jpg

Capricorn One, U.S. release date: June 2, 1978

The contractors don't want to lose money they've "already" made, NASA itself doesn't want to be embarrassed, a major Congressman speaks of national prestige.

The whole thing just becomes too big, so they decide to fake a Mars landing, including being prepared to kill the astronauts if necessary.

The film has its moments. Stephen Hawkins said the whole thing was a piece of crap. And yes, if your expectations are too high, you'll likely be disappointed. But with expectations more modest, maybe not so much.
 
Interesting point about the 70s thrillers. Though I actually tend to view them as a hangover from Watergate, which I think of as, politically speaking, "sixties". They WERE a pretty sturdy fixture throughout the seventies, though.

Another, somewhat less lighthearted 60s hangover that continued long into the 1970s was violence by self-styled left-wing revolutionary groups. In fact, those didn't really get into full swing, as far as the calendar goes, until the early 1970s, but they continued on until the mid and even to some extent late 70s. Oddly, though, they're not usually talked about when people remember that decade.
Its definitly talked about in Western Europe, were it played a bigger role. Still I think its a sign, that speaks more for the long 70s theory. The leftists terrorism is no sixties leftover, its something new, showing the beginning of the seventies. The large protest-movements of the 60s fall apart; in Europe are they 1969 already gone, in the US they have 1970 with Cambodcha and Ken State their last hurrah. The extreme ideologes are left alone and go the way of terror, but the larger mass start their "march through the institutions". So I say political and social the 70s begin 1969.
 
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220px-Rose_Township_Ohio_from_Clay_Road.JPG

This is a cheerier, more optimistic type of '70s movie. In the made-for-TV movie Ohms (Weds. Jan. 2, 1980) the community joins together to protest a large corporation which wants to run a high-voltage power line through their property. The activists even win over a skeptic toward the end, and they win.
 
@Yes

' . . . But the Age of Reagan, so crucial to "the Eighties" was cemented in March when he survived Hinckley's assassination attempt and in a fit of fellow-feeling Congress passed his disastrous FY 81-82 budget. . . '
I disagree. I think firstly, Reagan's tax cut Keynesianism and secondly, his military build-up Keynesianism is what brought the U.S. economy out of the doldrums.

I just wish the military build-up had been in the direction of raising conventional force NATO levels to more nearly match those of the Warsaw Pact, which is something which would have made nuclear war less likely.
 
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Interesting point about the 70s thrillers. Though I actually tend to view them as a hangover from Watergate, which I think of as, politically speaking, "sixties". . .
Do you of "the 70s" as an awkward, nebulous time when we started to face the limits of growth? ? in some ways factually accurate, and in other ways not
 
. . . The leftists terrorism is no sixties leftover, its something new, showing the beginning of the seventies. The large protest-movements of the 60s fall apart; in Europe are they 1969 already gone, in the US they have 1970 with Cambodcha and Ken State their last hurrah. The extreme ideologes are left alone and go the way of terror, but the larger mass start their "march through the institutions". So I say political and social the 70s begin 1969.
And we can add Latin America and the secession movement in Quebec.

I guess the theory of "radicalization" sometimes happens, although we can come up with a ton of examples of people becoming political and in fact highly passionate about politics and not becoming violent.

And shit, violence just gives the right a perfect excuse to do what they want to do anyway. I like Gene Sharp who makes the point, tactical considerations alone, nonviolence is clearly the way to go. He's a somewhat longwinded writer and activist who wrote a semi-famous book in 1971. He also found a number of speaking engagements in the late 80s and early 90s as eastern European nations were becoming independent. Don't know how much of a following and influence he really had.
 
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Do you of "the 70s" as an awkward, nebulous time when we started to face the limits of growth? ? in some ways factually accurate, and in other ways not

I don't know enough about economics to know whether we started seeing the limits of growth in the 1970s. Suffice to say, that is a claim that is made, and seems to have fairly wide credence. Certainly, the decade saw the origins of austerity as a political force, culminating in the respective rises of Thatcher and Reagan.

Apart from economics in isolation, I'd agree with the idea of the 70s being nebulous, and a time of general disillusionment.
 
You could have Humphrey winning in '68. Unable to extract himself from Vietnam, his administration continues along the same lines as Johnson's, with the same vibe. Finally, with a peace deal looking possible in '72, he wins reelection, only to be plunged back into the same chaos and drift.

Reagan wins in '76. He's a one-term president, but we have a conservative-backlash 70s, instead of what we have now.
 
Just what it says on the tin. Give me a relatively short "the '70s" as far as American politics.

The Seventies *were* a relatively short decade politically. 1970-1972 were really an extension of the 1960's. I would date the 70's from the 1973-74 energy crisis/Nixon impeachment.
 
GeoDude wrote:

And we can add Latin America and the succession movement in Quebec.

Actually, seccessionist violence in Quebec would be the textbook case for my earlier theory that the 1970s violence was really just a hangover from the 60s.

The FLQ got started in the early 60s, with 1963 marking the first of their bombing attacks(for some reason, I thought seccessionist violence started in 1960, but maybe those were some other groups or lone wolves). Here is a partial list of their early attacks, all of them occuring before Nov. 22 1963.

And the Cross/Laporte kidnappings and the imposition of the War Measures Act all took place before the end of 1970, after which point separatist violence in Quebec vanished from the scene.
 
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I disagree. I think firstly, Reagan's tax cut Keynesianism and secondly, his military build-up Keynesianism is what brought the U.S. economy out of the doldrums.

I just wish the military build-up had been in the direction of raising conventional force NATO levels to more nearly match those of the Warsaw Pact, which is something which would have made nuclear war less likely.

I think we're mostly on the same page here, actually, I'd just clarify things (and there will be some differences of emphasis just because I tend to be a Post-Keynesian behavioralist rather than a "straight" Keynesian-synthesis guy, but we're on many of the same pages esp. the one where St. Ron of Tinseltown saying grass is blue and the sky is purple and right-wing economics rescued us in the early Eighties is bullshit.) I'll do it by bullet points instead of my usual ramble. But before I do -- major cool points for "OHMS". Major. Have you thought about seeing if there's an interesting POD with Seventies cinema where the "auteur-driven" stuff gets dished faster (except maybe Scorcese because (a) he's good at what he does and (b) there are always outliers) like Apocalypse Now does collapse under its own budget and Cimino (oy vey, Cimino) pisses off the wrong person trying to get backing for The Deer Hunter and things head downhill from there and there's more stuff like OHMS and The Black Hole and a faster move to slasher flicks and better-quality Star Wars knockoffs and an accelerated production timetable for Raiders, etc., etc., so all that stuff makes a more lasting impression? Maybe we could even get a full series of films out of DUN DUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUN.... FLASH!!! AAAH-AH! KING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE!! (A world where Timothy Dalton is Bond sooner and Brian Blessed's doing voice-overs for American commercials in the Eighties, both of which could be butterflies from that, is a better world to live in :).)

Right. Back to my point.

  • The FY 81-82 budget was the big supply-side disaster, and rather than having a Keynesian effect it may among other things have exacerbated inflationary pressures for longer, leading to Volcker's real death-spiral on rates (as you've pointed out, things were actually getting better at the "gross" statistical level during most of '81, and inflation had at least leveled off.) It certainly did damage to any plans for responses to the spiraling unemployment. What the mess they caused resulted in was 1) losing a year in getting a fiscal grip on the situation and 2) egging Volcker on even further with rate hikes. The end result was the Rust Belt holocaust from fourth quarter '81 through about the second quarter of '83, when unemployment hit Depression-era levels (in Youngstown OH and Rockland IL it was around 25% and the national average was pushing towards 12%, only ever seen again in the direct wake of the Crash of '08 which was an even bigger economic calamity.) There was infrastructural damage (the high rates also meant the shuttering of subsidiaries of the big industries or the closing of whole branch factories, never to open again) that ran so deep -- Roger and Me deep -- that significant second-tier industrial towns have never truly recovered. And, crucially, taken together with other regulatory and legislative decisions coming out of the Reagan White House, this is the period when they really broke the back of the unions same as in Britain (and a lesser degree, France, where Mitterand's U-turn to dirigisme hit the old CGT stalwarts, which mostly backed Mitterand's coalition frenemies the Parti Communiste Francais hard) and a few other places. Despite one last ride backing Mondale in '84, there was no turning back from the decline of union power, both lobbying leverage and financial leverage, in the Democratic Party and we saw the rough beast of the Democratic Leadership Council start slouching towards Clintonism. You also have cultural effects at this point -- this is the meat of John Mellencamp's career writing about the dying industrial Midwest, and of Springsteen's "Born in the USA," which of course is really about a blue-collar Vietnam vet who can't get a job now and turns to crime.
  • Volcker pushed too damn hard. But what he did -- too much of, but did -- was a piece of the Keynesian recovery of the early Eighties. I would at a dogmatic level call it a post-Keynesian recovery because of the following elements. First, there was a significant incomes-policy-by-default: Volcker's punitive rates, which ended up hitting employment and productive industry the hardest (hard even for GM to get loans hence the death of Flint, Michigan) because with a New Right Republican in office there were no compensatory measures: no income policy on executive salaries because there can be wage inflation from the top too, and crucially no concentration of new tax revenues from wealth, ie the incomes of the richest and capital gains of all kinds. I would say Reagan's U-turn on the biggest peacetime tax increase made a post-Keynesian difference in that it minimized the inflationary impact of the other Keynesian measures by "wringing out excess money" from the system in a non-monetarist way. But again it was missing the crucial ingredient of an even bigger tax increase focused on wealth holdings. That greater tax level could then have been used for the one crucial Keynesian element that was missing in the early Eighties: to fund jobs programs to ameliorate unemployment caused by the anti-inflationary measures. But there was just as you say the major "military Keynesianism" of Reagan, and attached to that measures taken by the Democratic Congress to help specifically Chrysler and Silicon Valley, which all helped. And in the short term Reagan's policies egging on Wall Street made a crudely achieved difference in kick-starting investment again. Just too much of it was concentrated on using financial instruments to make more financial instruments to weave funny money out of the air (rather than compensating for decreases in investment in the productive sector (which helped drive unemployment), and created the bullish bubble that popped in 1987. Fortunately the overall economy was recovered enough by then to absorb the correction.
  • So what worked in the early Eighties was either naked Keynesianism or Keynes-derived. The trouble was there was not a broader incomes policy involving a "Tobin tax" of some kind on wealth holdings, and use of that fiscal balancing element (there had to be some fiscal balancing, Mondale got that part right even though he was a little too hawkish about deficits, to prevent another bump in inflation) to create jobs programs that would (1) deliver on infrastructure improvements and (2) soften the blows of Volcker's inflation-killing rates (he could have lowered them a little faster too especially if there was a Tobin tax in place to rein in Wall St.'s exuberance.)
  • There was eventually a respectable conventional buildup but you're right about how long it took to really get going. It was the mid-Eighties before the Apache and the fully-developed M1A1 (with the good engine and the 120mm Rheinmetall gun) had production lines running at capacity, and before the real steel-cutting for a "600 ship navy" got underway. That "military Keynesianism" helped carry a gingerly recovering economy along past the '88 elections, but in political terms it was already behind the times within a year or two of the launch point as the Ron-and-Gorby romance got going. Should've gone harder earlier. But in the Army especially there was the "light division" fixation in the early to mid Eighties that got in the way. That had three roots. One was Reagan administration policy: rollback was now the watchword rather than containment, so they wanted more Army units that could "fight a land war in Asia" or more likely Latin America or Africa, and that meant "leg" infantry rather than heavy formations. Another was a change in the Chief of Staff of the Army -- John Wickham took over, who'd made his name with the "Air Cav" in Vietnam and wanted to revive a pure infantry element in the Army even though he already had five divisions that fit the bill (the more specialist 82nd and 101st, but also the 7th, 9th, and 25th.) The third was pure bureaucratic pissing and jobs for the boys. "Light" units, the new ones of which were grotesquely undermanned (the 6th Light Infantry "Division" in Alaska had four Regular-army infantry battalions at full strength, in two understrength brigades, and that was typical) which let the Army say it had expanded on paper to eighteen divisions (I've looked at the TOEs -- on a good day if recruiting and discipline levels were good, they had just about fifteen properly-manned divisions at best) and added lots of jobs for colonels and one- and to-star generals. Problem was none of that was too much good for reinforcing Europe (even though there were jobs for light infantry in urban environments, as I said there were already five divisions to choose from not to mention properly training the National Guard in that role under the "Total Army" concept) or a war for oil in the Middle East. It was ultimately the Democratic Congress that pushed for (union-built) tanks and ships and such while Reagan played with Star Wars and tried to build an Army more suited to fighting the Sandanistas than the Sixth Guards Tank Army or Iraq/Iran.
  • Back to the economics, the other thing of course is that the people around Reagan (especially the likes of Don Regan, that prince of Wall Street) were fine with a ruthlessly deflationary policy that drove up unemployment without any mitigating programs. It was a great way to kill the unions. The same obtained with fundamentalist monetarism under Thatcher (which like Reaganomics was a bit of a sham underwritten by North Sea oil revenues from the years of peak production), where that was allied to legal and police actions to clamp down on strikes. And higher rates encouraged British industries to go to "lean manning": this was actually good in practice for some of them, but there was of course absolutely no effort to develop other new industries to take up the workers who'd been made redundant.

OK but in all seriousness, you should come up with a short TL where Capricorn One becomes a hit and launches an "anti-hero" strain to sci fi ahead of Alien and between that and Star Wars and maybe William Proxmire deciding to retire earlier there's a more robust NASA by the Eighties from all the publicity. That or Star Trek: The Movie has a better script...
 
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