AHC: No rise of "New Right" in the US

Do they need the presidency? They're stronger than ever right now while pointedly not having it, and aren't likely to get it next year. Sooner or later, they'll be able to break the Democratic hold on Congress, and that could change everything. In the long run, they need a Gingrich more than a Reagan, honestly, especially since they do better as insurgents.
Hm, that's a good point. Perhaps the Reagan Presidency actually hurt the movement since it then became mainstream.
I'm going to go in a different direction. You want the New Right to never take over? Well, then make the Old Right more successful. If Paleoconservatism is more of a success, then it still has legitimacy. You're not going to see Neoconservatives come flocking to them, and even then they would be rebuffed by them.

That in of itself would radically alter the right wing of American politics.

Maybe a President Bob Taft could do it?
 
Do they need the presidency? They're stronger than ever right now while pointedly not having it, and aren't likely to get it next year. Sooner or later, they'll be able to break the Democratic hold on Congress, and that could change everything. In the long run, they need a Gingrich more than a Reagan, honestly, especially since they do better as insurgents.

You do need the Presidency in order to become legitimate and actually move forward with the big policy pushes. Winning the Senate or the House might cause a liberal or moderate President to make some deals, but the big push that changed the entire structure of American politics was Reagan's Presidency.

Since it was seen as 'successful', the Overton windows of American politics changed entirely. Without a Reagan Presidency, there's still a movement conservatism leader, but there's nobody articulating that message in the way Reagan did.

If Carter wins in '80, either because Iran butterflies better, the economy doesn't go quite in as deep a funk or the nation gets it's Volcker medicine sooner, then the entire message of 'if we run a real conservative, we'll win' is destroyed.

Actually, the better idea is somebody not named Jimmy Carter wins in 1976, who can actually work with the Democratic Congress. Let's just say Birch Bayh as a placeholder.

Somebody like Howard Baker or John Heinz or somebody like that is the nominee in '84. Yeah, they still might beat Mondale, but they'll still govern like a slightly more conservative version of Ford, or a slightly more liberal version of OTL's HW Bush.

Now, the knockdown effect's in 2015? Who knows. But, remember, the population didn't buy into the 'regulations are evil, tax cuts are magic, etc.' view of the movement conservatism just one day. They were pounded with that message relentlessly for years. If one of the main suppliers of that message isn't in the Oval Office, that makes Newt and friends job that much harder, because instead of Reagan doing the hard work of carrying the ball down the field, and Newt scoring the touchdown (the '94 wave), the ball is still down at the 30 or 40 yard line.

Yes, the New Deal coalition will crack. The South will crack. Both parties will become more parliamentary. But, there's plenty of seperate worlds where the modern GOP is far closer to even Bush's compassionate conservatism or hell, even a version of John Kasich's version of conservatism being the mainstream of the party, instead of it being the far-left wing of the party.
 

Good points, and I'll agree that no Reagan would be a snag in the far right's ascendancy, but my larger point was that their rise to power went beyond the Presidency or Congress, it also involved education, the media, and business culture. Those developments started early, and liberals didn't take notice of them for decades, by which point it was way too late to reverse them. More to the point, the left was on the ideological defensive for all but a few years of the Cold War, so I don't see how they can beat the right-wing narratives regarding taxes, regulation, and a strong military. So yeah, in a world where Reagan loses, we'll probably be more liberal, perhaps considerably so, but the far right will still have a voice, since the left isn't equipped to fight back in any way other than contesting elections.
 
The organizational, intellectual, and financial underpinnings of the "New Right" emerged in the 50's, if not earlier. National Review and institutions like that, places where conservative ideas could be promoted and promulgated, and given enough financial support to ensure ideologically loyal people could be guaranteed long, lucrative careers. Honestly, for as stupid as their tactics can get (government shutdowns, Monicagate, etc.), Republican strategy since the end of WW2 has basically been spot-on flawless.

Flawless? Since WWII? So how come they kept losing?
Since 1945 to 2016 the Dems will have controlled the House for about 50 years; the Repubs for 21; the Senate, Dems 45 Repubs 24. The Presidency splits Repubs 36-Dems 35.

In the 50s they were a nut fringe.

But yeah, race, feminism, the counterculture, the loss of midddle-class manufacturing jobs, were all contributing factors that would have to be considered.
 
More to the point, the left was on the ideological defensive for all but a few years of the Cold War, so I don't see how they can beat the right-wing narratives regarding taxes, regulation, and a strong military. So yeah, in a world where Reagan loses, we'll probably be more liberal, perhaps considerably so, but the far right will still have a voice, since the left isn't equipped to fight back in any way other than contesting elections.

The left, yes, but the liberal/Democrats? Kennedy attacked Nixon for not being aggressive enough against Communism; if the quagmire of Vietnam had been avoided, the liberal marriage of progress at home and anti-communism abroad could have easily been sustained.
 
re: counterculture vs. Christian conservatives...

Somehow(and it would take some work), get a different line-up on the Supreme Court, which leads to more conservative rulings on pornography, and NO ROE VS. WADE. This takes a considerable amount of wind from the sails of the culture warriors.

And yes, I realize that, even in the twentieth century, you're likely going to have liberalization at the state level in a lot of places, but I don't think it really "hits home" without major federal intervention in the form of SCOTUS rulings.

Roe v.Wade wasn't originally a big enough deal to bring Christian Fundamentalists into politics; they weren't particularly anti-abortion; that was a Catholic position. What got the Religious Right going was tax deductions for segregation academies; abortion was later deliberately seized on by their leaders as a more respectable rallying issue. If it hadn't been that it would have been something else.
 
Flawless? Since WWII? So how come they kept losing?
Since 1945 to 2016 the Dems will have controlled the House for about 50 years; the Repubs for 21; the Senate, Dems 45 Repubs 24. The Presidency splits Repubs 36-Dems 35.

In the 50s they were a nut fringe.

But yeah, race, feminism, the counterculture, the loss of midddle-class manufacturing jobs, were all contributing factors that would have to be considered.

You're conflating the success of the Republican party in general with that of the "new right", but the two don't coincide perfectly. The fact that the latter were a nut fringe in the 50's is part of the point here; back then, it was a requirement among Republicans that they accept the New Deal and its provisions - but only a decade later, Goldwater proved that was no longer the case, and by the 90's Republicans not willing to tear down the welfare state were the exception to the rule. Some New Deal consensus, that.

At any rate, their losing elections is partially explained by the tactical incompetence I mentioned - plus, you know, sometimes the Democrats did a few things right. But in the long run, their success has been in shifting the conversation to their own advantage, and they had so much success in attacking Democrats as soft on Communism that Vietnam was practically a forced error on Johnson's part. That's what I mean by good strategy - you so thoroughly define the terms of conversation that the other side shoots themselves in the foot trying to match you - and then you blame them both for screwing it up and for still being weak, something Nixon did masterfully. The fact that Vietnam went from being horrendously unpopular to being the death knell of anyone who opposed it less than five years after it ended is a testament to the power of this kind of reframing.
 
To meet the challenge . . .

Vietnam becomes a successful coalition government and this starts sometime before JFK gives the go ahead to the overthrow of Diem. And this is perhaps fueled by an all-night drinking and negotiation session between Khrushchev and Ho Chi Minh.

Civil Rights was already highly successful, perhaps in the top 10% of unexpected success. You had Malcolm X playing bad cop in a sense. And if Martin Luther King, Jr., was too much of a Sunday School figure and rubbed some people the wrong way as a holier-than-thou, well, you had plenty of people who were moderates. Many large Southern towns had bi-racial committees in order to implement desegregation. Hard to see how it could be any more successful, except . . . starting in the early 70s many of the actual transitions were done during contracting economic times.
 

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How to avoid the rise of the New Right?

Let's look at what the New Right stood for(in a nut shell):

Interventionism abroad.

Economic Conservatism.

Religious Moralism.

What caused these factors to make the New Right so popular?

Interventionism Abroad. Vietnam first a foremost, oddly enough. That war really put a damper on fighting communists abroad, thus led to members of the New Right to jump on this issue hardcore, particularly after the Foreign Policy SNAFUs of the Carter Administration. Avoid Vietnam and this becomes less of an issue.

Economic Conservatism. No need to change this. This was a staple of the Old Right anyway.

Religious Moralism. This is the big one. Kill this and the New Right shrivels back into the Old Right. Before WWII neither party was particularly more religious than the other and before the Counter Culture religion didn't really factor much into politics. I'd say avoid the rise of the Counter Culture and this issue will also shrivel and die. To do it, maybe get rid of McCarthyism, but certainly without Vietnam it wouldn't reach the fever pitch of OTL.

Thus the New Right is dead on arrival.

The affects of this? Well I'd assume that with no Vietnam, this would put a damper on any anti-interventionists in both parties. However, in the 90s, with the fall of the Wall, I could see a reemergence of the Old Right that could very well see the shrinking of the Military.
 
Alright, Catholics were the first to become interested in the issue of abortion, and then Protestants. But per Randall Balmer's Redeemer about the Carter Presidency, the issue among Protestants did play a role in some 1978 Senate races. Now, there is the whole backstory about evangelical leaders first taking up the mean-spirited issue of the IRS vs. tax exemption for schools which still discriminate on racial grounds. But be that as it may, among rank-and-file evangelicals abortion was an actual issue.

Maybe if just more of the rank-and-file had figured it out for themselves, look, to pass a Constitutional Amendment most probably is going to take a number of years. In the meantime, we need to do what we can to reduce the incidence of abortion. For starters, not every young women who is pregnant has a supportive family. Nor every woman who's solidly in middle age for that matter.

And thinking about these kind of issues might push many evangelicals to at least more seriously consider progressive economics.
 
Humphrey wins in '68. The New Right rises earlier, but without Nixon to muzzle them, they go off the rails like the New Left did IOTL. Reagan gets stomped in '72 by an electorate willing to embrace China and one that doesn't equate the end of the war to Munich.
 
I think Nixon winning in 1960 could be the best POD.
It could lead to

1. A less succesfull Civil Right movement.
Even if Nixon support the Civil Right movement, I think there are certain limits, what a northern, republican president can achieve at this time.

2. No Vietnam War
At least not at the scale like IOTL. Maybe some more limited conflicts In Cuba and Laos, which have less impact on american society which leads to

§.A less radical conterculture movement.
 
A good POD to stunt movement Conservatism and the rise of the new right would be to have Reagan win the 1976 primary again Ford. It was a close run thing and Reagan had the late momentum, and just barely lost against Ford. After his excellent speech at the 1976 RNC, people thought that they had nominated the wrong guy.

So if Reagan had won the nomination in 1976 and won against Carter in the 1976 general election he gets to deal with stagflation, the Iranian revolution and a general sense of malaise. Anybody in office in the late 70's is basically screwed. Reagan becomes the Jimmy Carter of the era. He is seen as economically inept and tone deaf to the times.

With the movement Conservative's savior basically seen as failure, Reagan loses in 1980 to a Democrat. The economic recovery happens in the early 80's and the Democrat is re elected in 1984. Historically the Reagan presidency will be seen as a disaster like Carter was. Movement Conservatism and the rise of the new right would be extremely discreted.
 
Nick, I think you make an excellent point. Winning the 1976 presidency is generally a booby prize.

Maybe, maybe if someone listened to the best economists in the world and took an early interest. And maybe if they had hit upon the method, look, we're not going to take a baby step where we don't get good feedback and can't tell if it's working, nor are we going to take a giant step. What we're going to do is take a solid medium step and honestly look at feedback. We're going to have a whole series of medium step, feedback, medium step, feedback.

So, I don't think the problems of the late '70s are inevitable, just highly likely and tricky to deal with. To put some numbers on it, I think a president and Congress has maybe a 1 out of 5 chance of successfully addressing economic stagnation/inflation relatively early, and a 4 out of 5 chance that he or she will face the same headwinds Carter and the Democratic Congress faced.
 
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Off the top of my head, strangling the Vietnam War in the cradle (so JFK not being assassinated, no Tonkin Incident, take your pick) would produce so many butterflies that you'd probably avoid the "New Right".

After that, you'd need to avoid the "Southern Strategy" by hook or by crook, so either have Lee Atwater get hit by a bus in 1966, pr find some way to prevent the country from "boiling over" in the late 60's/early 70's.
 
After that, you'd need to avoid the "Southern Strategy" by hook or by crook, so either have Lee Atwater get hit by a bus in 1966, pr find some way to prevent the country from "boiling over" in the late 60's/early 70's.

I'm really not sure that's possible, though. Literally the entire history of the South in American politics has been fighting like hell to preserve their right to lord it over their black population, so having Civil Rights imposed on them by the federal government would be guaranteed to provoke a backlash. All you could do would be to keep the Democrats as the party of states' rights and all that jazz, but that would require a POD in the 40's, if not earlier, since Harry Truman came out strongly in favor of civil rights, split the party, and won re-election anyways. At a minimum, you'd need him to lose in '48 to prevent that switch.
 
Roe v.Wade wasn't originally a big enough deal to bring Christian Fundamentalists into politics; they weren't particularly anti-abortion; that was a Catholic position. What got the Religious Right going was tax deductions for segregation academies; abortion was later deliberately seized on by their leaders as a more respectable rallying issue. If it hadn't been that it would have been something else.

Point taken. However, even if the RR did go looking for other issues besides abortion, I'd be willing to bet that they'd still involve alleged federal interference in local/state jurisdictions, as abortion did post-Roe.

I think you get a lot more mileage out of "The federal courts are protecting dirty magazines at the newsstand on the corner!" than you do out of "There are dirty magazines at the newsstand on the corner!"
 
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