Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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How had I never heard of this person?! Very niche choice haha but I think she fits the more chaotic energy of Cinco de Mayo than this TL haha
My prediction for the first black President ITTL would have to be Ron Brown, who IOTL was rising as an influential figure in the Democratic Party before his premature death in 1996. It's possible that Brown could be a future cabinet member down the line and mount a run for Governor or Senator of New York. Then by 1996 or 2000 he could easily have garnered enough establishment support to throw his hat into the Democratic primary and have a shot at winning.
IRL he(Al Gore) won both his senate elections crossing 60% of the vote
Well with the Hartsville Site coming online and the Carey Administration's more robust industrial policy, Gore has an opporitunity to bring home the kind of pork that brings lasting jobs and builds a loyal voter base.
a lot of southern democrats will benefit from good ole pork spending
True. And Kingsport/Phipps Bend, too, though that’s a smaller plant.
Still, Tennessee is getting about 8GW of cheap TVA power it wouldn’t have otherwise in the early 80s compared to OTL and that can only help.
True, though in a ten year itch 1990 it’d probably be a much thinner margin
President Carey wishes all of you a very merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah!
- White House Press Office
- White House Press Office
Note, this gives no information about whether President Carey gets a second Term. Hanukkah only includes December 25 in 1981 and 1984 in his likely term.
Nights of Celebration during the 1980s.
1980 - Tuesday, 2 December 1980 and ended on Wednesday, 10 December 1980.
1981 - Sunday, 20 December 1981 and ended on Monday, 28 December 1981.
1982 - Friday, 10 December 1982 and ended on Saturday, 18 December 1982.
1983 - Wednesday, 30 November 1983 and ended on Thursday, 8 December 1983.
1984 - Tuesday, 18 December 1984 and ended on Wednesday, 26 December 1984.
1985 - Saturday, 7 December 1985 and ended on Sunday, 15 December 1985.
1986 - Friday, 26 December 1986 and ended on Saturday, 3 January 1987.
1987 - Tuesday, 15 December 1987 and ended on Wednesday, 23 December 1987.
1988 - Saturday, 3 December 1988 and ended on Sunday, 11 December 1988.
1989 - Friday, 22 December 1989 and ended on Saturday, 30 December 1989.
iOTL, the first recognition of Kwanzaa by the White House was in 1997 following the first US Stamp about it. So I don't think that iTTL that Carey is likely to do anything with that.
We already know the GOP isn't getting back in the White House until 1993.
I believe it was said somewhere else that the GOP would have a 12 year run afterwords but I couldn't find that post so that might have been a misread or hallucination on my part.
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
Kind of a unimportant question in the big picture, but how is Panama faring post Torrijos? Is the insurgency continuing into the Carey presidency?
I don’t think I’ve explicitly tipped my hand yet on how long the GOP has the Presidency post-1993, but if you read between the lines the result of 2000 should be fairly clear
Good q and in fact not unimportant at all. This is actually going to be the subject of an upcoming update
Well, you've talked about the first African-American President being in the year 2000 and the ideas haven't included Colin Powell....
True! It could definitely be Powell, though sans the context of OTL’s Desert Storm it’s hard to say how exactly he’d earn the same level of public notoriety
After the Storm
After the Storm
Events in South Korea in late 1979 and much of 1980 had been turbulent, to say the least. As street fighting blossomed in Busan, the assassination attempt on Park Chung-hee, while failing, had seen the dictator flee into exile almost immediately thereafter and his government descend into near-chaos, culminating in the ensuing "Hanahoe Revolt" in which a group of political Army officers tried to depose the government of the new President Choi Kyu-hah, new Prime Minister Shin Hyun-hwak and Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-hwa. What was left thereafter was a tense country, looking nervously across the DMZ at the North, unsure of what was to come next - a power vacuum, in other words, both inside the ruling Democratic Republican Party of Park that had designed the Fourth Republic's authoritarian constitution and around it. Events in Korea had been so bizarre and concerning that the Ford administration had dispatched a carrier strike group the region and Japanese diplomats were briefly recalled for consultations out of worry that a Northern invasion may be imminent; in the end, the Peninsula had stayed quiet, but for how long was an open question.
Choi had been perfunctorily elected to serve out the remaining three-and-a-half years of Park's term until the next statutory elections in July of 1984, but an assassination attempt in March of 1981, also foiled and believed to have been sponsored by ultra-right-wing opponents of the Choi administration such as Chun Doo-hwan overseas, opened the question of how long he could reasonably last in the role. Almost as soon as he had established himself in office the previous year he had begun to clash both with his allies and the opposition. The DRP had never been much of anything other than a vehicle for Park's authoritarian ambitions but it was largely a civilian outfit underpinning military rule, and so with the collapse of the Hanahoe Clique that may have shifted South Korea in an even more junta-like direction it seemed like the civilians were at last in charge, with the modestly pro-democracy Choi at the head. Choi, in a speech in late 1980, promised pro-democracy protestors genuine reforms, including potentially a replacement for the Yushin Constitution designed exclusively for Park's desire to serve perpetually as President despite promises in the early 1970s to retire. Massive demonstrations upon the death of longtime opposition leader and former general Kim Hong-il in August of 1980 had spurred such sentiments along; the question simply became, now, what exactly things would look like next.
The President had, by all accounts, seemed to have something of a change of heart after the mass protests and government chaos of the last two years, but he was a democrat at the head of a fundamentally un-democratic party and beyond concerns about "communist infiltration" rampant in the party echelons as well as the military, there were a great deal of DRP leaders who were concerned about what a New Democratic Party under its dogged leader Kim Young-sam would mean if it were in power. Kim was not a left-wing firebrand by any means but nonetheless a committed liberal and held the Park regime and all its works in contempt, and many DRP members were terrified of mass prosecutions and anti-corruption campaigns that could target them and the powerful chaebols that had lifted Korea into the status of a "tiger economy" after having been poorer than most sub-Saharan countries just thirty years earlier at the end of the war. Kim's stubbornness had, after all, been why Park had tried to maneuver the less disagreeable Yi Cheol-seung into the chairmanship of the NDP in 1978 to stunt the party's momentum only to see it win the popular vote narrowly regardless and nearly surpass the DRP in seats (the President's ability to appoint a third of the National Assembly of course delivered the ruling party a supermajority). Shin, the Prime Minister, was highly reluctant to risk his newfound position, in part because he suspected that Park loyalists like Kim Jong-pil were waiting to seize the reins of power instead and perhaps invite back a vengeful ex-President, despite Park's failing health; with the support of Army Chief of Staff Jeong, who took the view that the NDP was unreliable on the "Northern Question," he opposed the ending of progressive opposition leader Kim Dae-jung's exile in the United States and encouraged the DRP to rename itself to sever ties with the Park era but to look to Kuomintang-held Taiwan, itself an authoritarian, single-party corporatist state, for inspiration rather than Western democracy or even Japan, with its dominant Liberal Democratic Party. [1]
Choi was well aware of these challenges but also the demands of the Korean street, where rapidly rising living standards were no longer enough to buy off the public from demanding democratic rights enjoyed in other industrial economies. Despite some turbulence with the late 1970s oil crises and then the political crisis of the RoK itself, the Korean economy was still growing strong and many foreign investors indeed saw the end of the thuggish Park era with its cult of personality and mercurial leader as a positive. It was also the case that the Ford administration, perhaps more tolerant of Park and KMT-style managed democracy if it kept Korea secure and growing, was now gone in Washington and replaced by President Carey, who while not particularly personally interest in the Asia-Pacific region was aware of Korea being the lynchpin of the American project in the Far East and was less hesitant to demand answers over human rights abuses. As such, Choi announced after recovering from the gunshot wound to his leg in April of 1981 that in 1984 the electoral college would be abolished and a new constitution would allow the vote for a President under popular vote with a runoff, and that the President would cease appointing members of the National Assembly. However, the "Fifth Republic" of Korea would operate a constitution drafted by a constituent assembly chaired by DRP officials and passed by the sitting National Assembly by supermajority vote, thus meaning that genuine constitutional reforms would not be put into place to guard against future authoritarianism. This constituent assembly would work throughout late 1981 and much of 1982 to forge the new constitution, and street protests continued frequently as they worked in secrecy in the background with little popular input.
As many Park-era officials began to see their fortunes wane under Choi's technocratic administration that committed no new outrages or abuses against its populace but also did little to lift Park-era emergency decrees or release political prisoners (it was widely thought that Choi would wait to release any prisoners until the last day of his Presidency in 1984 in a mass amnesty once the DRP, or its successor party, had secured another term), jockeying behind the scenes began in earnest. Both Yi Cheol-seung and Kim Young-sam were eager to serve as President for the 1984-90 term and neither was keen to see Kim Dae-jung come back from abroad and potentially split the opposition vote, but their rivalry about who would be President and who would be Prime Minister needed to wait to see what powers each office would hold; there was speculation that the Fifth Republic could be Parliamentary in nature at the request of Choi to avoid a future Park (and possibly at the behest of Shin as a deal cut between the men). The "constitutional question" also left men like Jeong needing to hold their own court, leading him to cultivate a very fruitful relationship of patronage with the powerful oligarch Paik Sun-yup, a war hero, longtime diplomat and head of Korea Chemicals who while having been appointed to his positions by Park had never been an insider and thus was viewed by some as an establishment figure who was nonetheless "clean"... [2]
[1] Japan's a democracy, of course, but everybody knows who's going to win, and the real contest is internal.
[2] Hat tip to @CELTICEMPIRE and his KMT TL for the idea of finding use of Paik Sun-yup for something
Thank you. I got the idea from a comment early on in the thread by @Kingfish Chris that suggested that he might have a role in South Korea's government.
I'll have to get around to reading this TL after I'm caught up with Cinco de Mayo (which will take a while as I'm still in the part where CSA has just made peace with Spain).
Thank you for reading it! Apologies in advance for its length and over-detail haha
The Elephant at the Crossroads
The Elephant at the Crossroads
In February of 1981, two weeks after the inauguration of Hugh Carey, The Economist released a famous cover issue titled "The Elephant at the Crossroads" with a cartoon elephant pondering what direction to go next, with the article considering what, exactly, the Republican Party of the United States was to do next. This question was indeed very live for the party's grandees and its activists, and the answer would define American politics moving forward, which made its resolution critical. Understandably, this was not a debate that would resolve itself anytime soon, and much of the early 1980s would see intense internecine brawling with most Republican politicians resigned to the fact that it could be as much as a decade before they found their way anywhere close to power again.
The position the party found itself in in the spring of 1981 was dire. While not quite the near-extinction level event that the early New Deal era represented, the GOP in the early 1980s was worse off than it had been after the 1964 LBJ landslide - they were in a superminority in both houses of Congress, had only one-fifth of the Governorships, and were in an even worse position in the state legislatures. While Reagan had kept the results of the 1980 Presidential election somewhat respectable, a few thousand votes going another way in California or the Carolinas would have put him in an embarrassing hole. The road back would be highly difficult, in part because the rift between the increasingly conservative base voters and the needs of the party in a general election were starting to widen.
Comparisons between 1964 and 1980 were inapt. While it was true, as many conservative activists were keen to optimistically point out, that the Goldwater defenestration had been followed by the Nixonian triumph of 1968, that election had come at the back of eight very chaotic years under a Democratic President, and the exhausted and relieved electorate of 1981 seemed unlikely to power such a backlash again by the time 1984 rolled around. It was also very true that the dynamic that Carey had promised - a no-nonsense throwback liberalism and steady hand at the wheel after close to two decades of political chaos and disillusionment - was a world apart from the radical civil rights movement of the 1960s, the anti-war energy of the McGovern insurgency or the moralizing post-politics of Carter, and thus rather than representing the brave new world of New Left impulse it was instead a fundamentally conservative proposition in and of itself.
Understandably, it was William Buckley of the National Review who stepped into the fray as attempting to corral the thinking of conservative intellectualism in response to the failures of Nixon-Fordism and Reaganism in tandem. In one of his first essays on the path forward, he penned a treatise he titled "Beyond the Backlash," in which he positioned the Nixon victories as understandable electoral thermostatic reactions to the implied revolutionary energies of the late 1960s but cautioned the Republican Party that "we must represent more than just the rejection of the new social settlement and the New Deal - we must present a positive, forward-thinking agenda that includes and impresses Americans of all faiths, creeds, races, and classes." Particular energy was devoted to noting that the hoped-for Republican breakthrough in the South had been half-baked; while picking off parts of the coastal South had been a success, efforts to penetrate working-class, unemployment-ravaged states like Mississippi and Alabama had fallen flat with the deep Ford recession of 1978-80. Republican strategists had noted that Midwestern conservatives and Southern rural voters had more in common than different as early as 1928 when Hoover made nudging Black voters aside an implicit strategy; despite the successes of 1964-72, they had succeeded less in building a machine in the South than simply creating occasional swing states.
The group who suffered the most from Reagan defeat were politically minded evangelicals, with Jerry Falwell having particularly bet big on organizing Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches as a united political force. Between the personally evangelical Jimmy Carter having fallen short in 1976, the various anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-abortion wedge campaigns of 1977-78 failing to make much headway with the electorate [1], and now the evangelical-friendly Reagan falling short brought into open question to what extent a "Christian Right" could actually have potency. A movement that in the mid-1970s looked to be the leading edge of social conservative organizing had proven in many ways toothless, and Nixon's dismissiveness of them a decade earlier suddenly looked to have been the right bet. By the late 1980s, men like Falwell or his fellow Virginian pastor Pat Robertson had declined remarkably in influence, and though the GOP was in all ways a socially and culturally conservative party then and now, the evangelical politics that had looked nascent in the late 1970s never emerged as much more than a historical curiosity.
That being said, if the reactionary anger of Goldwater and Reagan had proven toxic with the broader electorate even with the creakiness of the New Deal coalition as it entered its sixth decade, one thing the 1960s had proven was that there was even less appetite for Rockefeller Republicanism, whether with base GOP voters or for that matter anyone else. Even moderate creatures of Washington like Howard Baker were staunchly to the right of where the liberal wing of the party had been a decade earlier, and even as early as 1960 the Eastern Establishment had clearly been on borrowed time. What exactly a conservatism for the 1980s should and would look like, then, was an open question.
It was in this nadir of influence and vacuum of powerful, unifying figures that former President Nixon began to rehabilitate himself, at least behind the scenes. Men like Donald Rumsfeld, from retirement as a party grandee in Illinois albeit with an eye towards the future even after the spectacular failure of his 1980 primary campaign, pointed out that Nixon had won a 49-state landslide and his heir, Ford, had scraped out a narrow win in enormously difficult circumstances four years later. "Nixonism without Nixon" was something that perhaps could work, then. This idea found particular credence within the Senate GOP, amongst young, reform-minded Western Senators such as Alan Simpson of Wyoming, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Orrin Hatch of Utah, who all ranged from the center to right wings of the party but got along well with one another and looked upwardly mobile in the Senate leadership hierarchy. They enjoyed close relationships with Midwestern conservatives like Richard Lugar of Indiana or Bob Taft of Ohio, as well as Reagan's close friend Paul Laxalt, who though more libertarian-colored nonetheless kept a close eye on what soon came to be known as the Republican Renewal Project, spearheaded by Simpson. The RRP's program was fairly straightforward - checking the excesses of Democratic patronage politics and clientelism in urban strongholds and appealing to working-class white ethnic voters through shared cultural conservatism (particularly on issues of law and order), budget orthodoxy a la Ford without the obsessive monetarism of his Federal Reserve, and muscular but pragmatic realpolitik foreign policy abroad that would shift away from the more moralistic regimens of both academic left-wing revisionism in vogue post-1968 and the view of the Cold War as a struggle between God and Satan increasingly popular amongst religious conservatives.
Many conservatives were quick to reject this as simply warming over the failures of the Ford years, but there were important differences. The RRP specifically looked not to traditional conservatism as Ford had but rather sought to build on Nixon's Southern Strategy while marrying working-class union voters whom Democrats depended on in a big tent party and looking to the booming suburbs as the backbone of their coalition. Whether it was workable, of course, was an open question, and so the "Renewalists" who got the quiet acquiescence of the movers-and-shakers in the party and insurgents seeking a full throated "choice, not an echo" of Goldwater's promise of the New Right looked ahead to the 1982 midterms as the ultimate contest of who would ascend in the party and who best knew how to speak to the electorate...
[1] Not helped by it being Ford that cracks down on Bob Jones University rather than Carter, and before the 1978 midterms IOTL most (though certainly not all) evangelicals regarded abortion as more of a Catholic issue anyways
