AHC: Make the GOP the "intellectual" party w/ a POD of after 1980

Have the Republicans pass a requirement that to join the party you have to be able to count to eleven without removing your shoes, and to be a candidate you have to count to twelve. This would at least double the average IQ of the party.

(I'm possibly a Democrat and might be biased :D)
 
As we know, over the last several decades, Democrats have been perceived as more of the intellectual party while the GOP has been the party of blue-collar workers and other various fringe groups (birthers, Teabaggers, etc.). Also, over the last 35 years, Democratic Presidents were perceived as more intellectual than Republican ones. Try making the GOP the intellectual party over the last thirty years. Let's see if anyone succeeds.

Who says the Democratic Party has been more "intellectual" than the GOP over the past several decades. One of the real reasons the Reagan Revolution succeeded was that Democrats stagnated in power from 1940 through 1970 on the populist wisdom of the New Deal era without ever intellectually challenging many of the basic premises that underly their version of the welfare state, while people on the right (not a few of them former liberal democrats) engaged in lively intellectual discussions both attacking these presumnptions and creating an intellectual basis for their own limited government view of things. The result was that, throughout much of the late 1970's and into the 1980s, Democrats responded to intellectually based arguments with emotive ones that sounded (and were empty).

Things have changed now, because after the political success of Reaganomics, it was the Big Government people out looking in, and they had to reinvent themselves and recreate an intellectual basis for their policies since just calling Republicans nasty and mean-spirited no longer worked. For all intents and purposes, small government in various forms is now the dominant ethic and Republicans no longer engage their brains, but go off on emotive and non-rational flights of stupidity like the Tea Party or anti-Immigration movements, while the Left (which still shies away from calling itself "left") has ideas.
 
Let us remember that, into the seventies, the Republican party was considered the party of banks, business interests and industrial management; while Democrats represented the farmers and hard-hat workers. To the extent higher education contributes to intellectualism, the Republicans start with an edge.

Two things need to happen, and 1980 is a perfect starting point. Reagan needs to get out of the race; he has a heart attack, he is deemed too sick to run for president, etc. George Bush remains the leading contender and he never changes his position on the abortion issue. You have two choice-tolerant candidates (Carter and Bush) and both keep abortion out of the campaign, as the parties did in 1976. Bush will win, given Carter's weaknesses, and will win big in 1984, as inflation eases up big-time. Bush takes Nixon's advice not to get too close to the religious right; after all, he doesn't need their help. Falwell's Moral Majority goes bankrupt as in OTL, Swaggart "falls to sin" as in OTL, and Baker is busted for fraud. The religious-right movement does not penetrate politics. Rather, you have a minority of politicians in both parties who profess to be "pro-life" but the issue stays out of the mainstream.

The second thing that needs to happen is the Soviet Union needs to stay together. It may see China-like reform, but the presence of a powerful "communist" nation remains. The benefit? The Red-Scare enthusiasts have an enemy to rant against. They are the hold-outs of the McCarthy era, professing communist conspiracies. They vote for Republicans, but the GOP moguls just let them rant on the sidelines while presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford go about their jobs, concerned about the integrity of the United States.

When the USSR broke up, the communist "threat" disappeared and the Red Scare enthusiasts had their bubbles popped. The OTL Republicans had already taken in the religious right and the Red Scare zeal was turned away from a nonexistent communist conspiracy to a very real candidate and President Clinton. Isn't this about when the right-wing radio commentators started their followings?

The Tea Party conservatives treat their doctrine as inerrant as Holy Scripture, not subject to negotiation or compromise. Gingrich (1995) and Boehner (today) take their obstructionist stands as righteous Americans against errant presidents. To prevent this from happening, the Republicans needed to keep the social extremists from writing their platform decades ago.
 
Who says the Democratic Party has been more "intellectual" than the GOP over the past several decades. One of the real reasons the Reagan Revolution succeeded was that Democrats stagnated in power from 1940 through 1970 on the populist wisdom of the New Deal era without ever intellectually challenging many of the basic premises that underly their version of the welfare state, while people on the right (not a few of them former liberal democrats) engaged in lively intellectual discussions both attacking these presumnptions and creating an intellectual basis for their own limited government view of things. The result was that, throughout much of the late 1970's and into the 1980s, Democrats responded to intellectually based arguments with emotive ones that sounded (and were empty).

Things have changed now, because after the political success of Reaganomics, it was the Big Government people out looking in, and they had to reinvent themselves and recreate an intellectual basis for their policies since just calling Republicans nasty and mean-spirited no longer worked. For all intents and purposes, small government in various forms is now the dominant ethic and Republicans no longer engage their brains, but go off on emotive and non-rational flights of stupidity like the Tea Party or anti-Immigration movements, while the Left (which still shies away from calling itself "left") has ideas.

A lot of people would dispute that it's 'dominant,' for example Rachel Maddow and others have made a pretty good case that most americans are actually fairly politically liberal if you look at public attitudes on things like entitlements (although admittedly that's probably because of aging demographics, hence all the Tea Partiers wanting more medicare benefits), progressive taxation, etc. The main area that public policy and attitudes have really changed are basically gun control and 'law and order' type issues (three strikes, death penalty's resurgent popularity, etc.)... And quite a bit of that had to do with academics like Robert Martinson and Charles Murray (himself more obviously reactionary) significantly influencing the debate over public policy in the 1970s after the crime waves and perceived failure of the war on poverty. I think for the POD you need to shift the '70s shift in criminology and disputes over the efficiency of welfare a decade or two earlier and have it be more visible than OTL, although that's tough...
 
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I would say it would have to be the Democrats listening to blue collar workers in 1982 and subsequent years instead of stereotyping them as dumb rednecks and delivering too many of them to the Republicans in a neat package. That was a major strategic error in the long-term and upset the balance between big business/corporations and labor in this country.

The Democratic party then went along with or at least didn't stop policies like globalization that shrunk the private sector blue collar union movement to a pale shadow of its old power. Manufacturing was going to shrink to some extent anyway, but US policies made that faster and deeper than it would have ordinarily have been. Most union member in the US are currently state and local employees or other non-manufacturing workers without the direct incentives to oppose corporate interests that the old blue-collar unions had.

The transformation of its views of industrial labor from "the workers" who we were all supposed to cheer for and work to help to "dumb rednecks" who it's okay to ignore and exploit was a very bad deal for the Democratic party and for the country as a whole.

So, in 1982 the Democrats work hard to support industrial labor. They listen. They adjust their policies. The "Reagan Democrats" come home. The Democrats gain quite a few more seats in the midterms in 1982, and win the presidency in 1984. They get the 'dumb redneck' vote and the reputation as the non-intellectual party, but they control the House and Senate continuously for the next two decades, just as they had since the mid-1950s. Neither Bush gets elected. We get a couple of terms of probably Mondale, and then maybe Cuomo. Probably no Clinton, and no Democratic attempts to compete with the Republicans for big corporate donors. Probably no NAFTA or WTO. No Gulf War I or II. No war on terror. The Soviets might stick around for another five or ten years, but they were inevitably going to fade anyway.
 
You can not capture the Reagan Democrats in 1982 or 1984. Whoever is elected in 1980 will become the "hero" who stopped double-digit inflation, as a result of changing supply-demand in petroleum and real estate development.

The Republicans today appear narrow-minded because they will not compromise. They will not compromise because the attitudes of religious/social conservatives will not accept it. It is their way or no way, whatever the issue. To keep down that attitude, you need to keep religious conservatives out of control of the GOP. To keep them out of control, you can not take a "pro-life" stance in the eighties. To not need such a stance, you need a pro-choice Republican in 1980, and that was GHW Bush. Let Falwell, Swaggart and Baker go down without religious issues standing out in either party, and they should stay out. If they stay out, you have seventies-style compromise leading the issues again, into today.
 
Another possibility: Earlier emergence of neo-liberalism and neo-classical economics. In OTL that was obviously marginalized into the 1970s although it's not like there weren't people arguing for it in the 1940s. Maybe the anti-New Dealers start citing people like Hazlitt or Mises in the late 1930s/1940s more so than OTL in response to Keynes (or the latter has more of a role in the post-war reconstruction)? It's not like there weren't plenty of rich billionaires interested in bankrolling think tanks and PR/propaganda campaigns in general to promote that sort of thing although I can't really think of any Koch analogues off the top of my head.
 
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