AHC: Different US Political Realignment

With the latest PoD, make it so of the two parties in the US, one is both the more economically interventionist and socially conservative/communitarian, while the other is the more neoliberal and socially liberal/libertarian.

To put it another way -- OTL, the US political spectrum, on this chart, tends to flow right-up to left-down; I'm looking for TTL's spectrum to flow perpendicular to it.
 
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perhaps a christian left, favoring social safety nets and being sworn enemies against "godless corporations," while being socially conservative
 
Is there some way you could stop the pro-abortion/pro-choice (pick the term you prefer) take-over of the Democratic party in the 70s? Until that point abortion, which is and was the biggest 'social conservative' issue, was more or less evenly split between the parties. You had a quite active Catholic social justice element in the Democratic party and folks like Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were anti-abortion/pro-life.

Maybe the easiest way to do this would be to give FDR a moralizing religious streak that he lacked OTL, which would help to set a religious stamp on the party.
 
No Roe v Wade would probably be a big start. That case has created a lot of profoundly unnatural alliances and alignments.
 
Maybe a surviving and more powerful Populist Party? IIRC, they were fairly interventionist, and since they were a rural-based party I could see them being more socially conservative.
 
How about a Christian Democratic party emerging first from Irish and Italian American quarters then bolstered by supporting civil rights from a religiously informed position and sewing up the African American constituency.

Maybe as well radical religious types in this world were responsible for mobilising the industrial working class in the first half of the twentieth century - providing soup kitchens, defensive associations/unions etc in conjunction with some wealthy philanthropist types.

Maybe no New Deal/FDR paves the way for the church(es) to fill the need gap during the depression?

ETA: European Christian Democrats were generally far to the left economically of both US parties until well into the early nineties imo.
 
Lots of good PoDs here -- also wondering, given any of them, where the new "perpendicular" national debate shifts, does it become on the whole more communitarian, interventionist, what?
 

JoeMulk

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You could go fairly recently actually. Just have Carter be more outspokenly pro-life in 1976. Perhaps Reagen gets the nomination but doesn't court the religious right since he's running against a southern evangelical. Perhaps Carter attacks him for being a twice divorced actor while he was in the navy. Regardless of if Reagen comes back or not the Republicans move in a more libertarian direction by appealing to socially liberal yuppies while the Democrats unite around somebody like Scoop Jackson in 84.

EDIT: Crap, I should have read that Jackson died in 83. Other then that detail you get the idea.
 
I'd argue that none of the post-1960s PODs here would work. They might moderate the polarization between the parties, but the polarization would still be the same. None of those PODs are enough to re-shape the polarization.

From the Republican side, as far back as the 1950s, the conservative movement was preaching traditional moral values and economic liberty and anticommunism. Fusionism was an attempt to give philosophical coherence to tendencies that were already finding themselves on the same side of politics. Now you could argue that this was the result of communism: its godlessness and (initially) social radicalism combined with its obvious centralizing and socializing tendencies meant that in a world where communism was a big deal, you were very likely to get a party that combined free market-ism with traditional values-ism with aggressive foreign policy, and consequently the opposite tendencies would also tend to align. That being the case, the earliest realistic PODs are during WWII and its immediate aftermath, to remove the pinkos as a realistic threat.

However, I would argue that the USSR *wasn't* the main reason for this alignment of forces. I would argue that it was the result of the technocratic, regulatory, expert-driven, centralizing rationalist model of the New Deal. The New Deal itself was perfectly acceptable to religious and culturally customary elements, but this model was inevitably going to conflict with using religion and custom as a source of law and practice, which happened during the 1950s. Maybe another way of saying the same thing is that because of the Depression, the United States was moving towards economic regulation and centralism, which inspired a reaction by free market types, at the same time that for other reasons it was also developing looser divorce laws and other trends that inspired a reaction by family values types. In the nature of things, the defenders of one trend were more likely to defend the other and the opponents of one trend were more likely to combine with opponents of the other. So to actually reshuffle the party polarizations, you probably need to go all the way back to the 1930s. You either modify how the New Deal happened and what it was all about, or else you get rid of the Depression altogether and somehow have the US move in a direction of even more economic freedom while loosening mores. As in the 1890s, the result will probably be a a morally conservative economically populist movement.
 
mmrandis, I certainly get your point re fusionism -- though I've generally thought that China not falling to Communists (say having Mao, ZE, and co killed in 1934), would work. Consider -- it would complicate the Cold War, significantly diminish the freakout of 49, and thus largely head off the rise of that coalition.
 
Here's another interesting realignment: The Republican Party follows the British Conservatives, while the Democrats follow the Liberals. This could have very well happened if a Free Silver Dem, like WJB, hadn't won the nomination in 1896. So let's say Cleveland wins renomination and squares off against McKinley. This would likely lead to the continuation of the Populist Party, so at least for a shortwhile you would have a three party US. In the long run, this would have interesting implications.
 
I'm skeptical any such alignment could actually occur. Yes, it is always raised in theory, but in practice, this kind of socially/culturally-conservative, economically progressive alignment is never a major party in any country. Even in many European countries where the right supports a more expansive welfare state, they're still to the right of the that country's left on those issues while also being more culturally conservative. I could see such a party being a small third party, were the U.S. electoral system friendlier to minor parties. But as a major party? I doubt it.

The best I think you could get were that the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic and social justice questions even sharper - as if, were the Democrats a European style Social-Democratic Party, with a stronger labor component - then you might have a larger faction within the Democratic Party that is culturally conservative. But as the mainstream within the party? I don't think it's possible in the present day.
 
I could easily see a revolt against the rich southern whites during the Great Depression, causing a fiscally liberal, socially far-right party to take over in the South.

Well, that kind of happened for awhile - lots of Southern Democrats were some of the most ardent New Dealers. They were still part of the Democratic coalition though.

The problem is that in a winner-take-all and presidential electoral system, there is no long-term basis for a third-party, unless they accept a permanent junior role, forgoing presidential elections except as part of a coalition.
 
Well, that kind of happened for awhile - lots of Southern Democrats were some of the most ardent New Dealers. They were still part of the Democratic coalition though.

The problem is that in a winner-take-all and presidential electoral system, there is no long-term basis for a third-party, unless they accept a permanent junior role, forgoing presidential elections except as part of a coalition.

I'm talking about far left fiscal liberalism.

True, the winner take all does blow everything about proportion.
 
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