Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond

Speaking of wahhabi stuff i wonder will this affect indonesia or any muslim majority country in the long term

If Saudi Arabia goes the Iranian route of revolution and isolation that kills the oil funded Wahhabisation of global Islam in it's cradle. Political Islam is going to be a thing but if it's Sufi political Islam it will look very different, not necessarily more western friendly or "liberal", that's a misunderstanding of other currents of Islamic thought, but different.
 
If Saudi Arabia goes the Iranian route of revolution and isolation that kills the oil funded Wahhabisation of global Islam in it's cradle. Political Islam is going to be a thing but if it's Sufi political Islam it will look very different, not necessarily more western friendly or "liberal", that's a misunderstanding of other currents of Islamic thought, but different.
My understanding of Sufism vs Wahhabism is pretty minimal, to be fair; the various strains of thought and internal debates within Islam is a gigantic hole in my political, historical and cultural knowledge. So I’ll take your word for it! Lol

I will say that your comment doesn’t surprise me, though; it seems like very Western thinking to presume that there’s a liberal Islam just waiting to be unlocked if it wasn’t for those meanie Saudis and it seems to be a very bad misunderstanding of the faith and that “conservative” =/= Wahhabi or Iranian Revolution
 
My understanding of Sufism vs Wahhabism is pretty minimal, to be fair; the various strains of thought and internal debates within Islam is a gigantic hole in my political, historical and cultural knowledge. So I’ll take your word for it! Lol

I will say that your comment doesn’t surprise me, though; it seems like very Western thinking to presume that there’s a liberal Islam just waiting to be unlocked if it wasn’t for those meanie Saudis and it seems to be a very bad misunderstanding of the faith and that “conservative” =/= Wahhabi or Iranian Revolution

Liberal Islam is basically code for "Enlighted*" Islam, i.e. with a division between religious matters and secular matters modelled on the one that evolved in the 18th and 19th century in Europe. Projecting that onto a complete different cultural context and religious tradition was/is always pretty crude and doomed to disappointment.

A big difference with a more Sufi orientated political Islam is that to make a crude generalisation Sufism is more authoritarian, with much more of an emphasis on adherence to precedent and religious leaders with less of an emphasis on a personal relationship to Allah. The downstream implications of that are considerable.

*By which is I mean Enlighted with a capital E in the 18th century sense.
 
Liberal Islam is basically code for "Enlighted*" Islam, i.e. with a division between religious matters and secular matters modelled on the one that evolved in the 18th and 19th century in Europe. Projecting that onto a complete different cultural context and religious tradition was/is always pretty crude and doomed to disappointment.

A big difference with a more Sufi orientated political Islam is that to make a crude generalisation Sufism is more authoritarian, with much more of an emphasis on adherence to precedent and religious leaders with less of an emphasis on a personal relationship to Allah. The downstream implications of that are considerable.

*By which is I mean Enlighted with a capital E in the 18th century sense.
Very considerable. Not to make too crude a comparison but that sounds much like the difference between, say, a conservative Christian in a hierarchical denomination like Catholicism or to a lesser extent Eastern Orthodoxy vs more pietistic traditions such as modern Evangelical Protestantism. Would that be a reasonable parallel, to place it roughly in Western terms?
 
Very considerable. Not to make too crude a comparison but that sounds much like the difference between, say, a conservative Christian in a hierarchical denomination like Catholicism or to a lesser extent Eastern Orthodoxy vs more pietistic traditions such as modern Evangelical Protestantism. Would that be a reasonable parallel, to place it roughly in Western terms?

Yes but no. Even under the Ottomans Sufism didn't have the elaborate hierarchy of Vicars, Canons, Bishops etc. that Christianity developed, I'm not an expert but my understanding is it's more like a collegiate university with murshid or leader providing guidance to subordinate students who in turn lead the faithful and act as preists. But that's a very superficial understanding.
 
Surely, the Michigan Wolverines (Ford's alma mater) must win a couple of national championships in college football ITTL

Merry Christmas
 
Healy's Hour
Healy's Hour

"...with the best of my ability, I pledge every last fiber of my being to this country I love so very dearly. It has been the duty and privilege of my life to serve Britain, and God willing, that is what I will be remembered for..."

- Denis Healy, speech at 10 Downing Street upon winning 1980 Labour leadership election


The decision by David Owen in the days before the MPs would elect their next leader to drop out of the race and endorse his once-rival (in Cabinet and for leadership) Healy seemed to cement the final result. For years later, Bennites would curse the moderate Chancellor's decision to drop out, and considered it a corrupt bargain intended to keep the Labour Right's vice-grip on the party in place. Of course, that was a dramatic reaction, even with emotions running high, for the aftermath told a very different story.

Shore and Benn predictably split the left without Owen in the race, and Jenkins' particular brand of Europhilic centrism appealed just as little to Parliamentary Labour and activists alike as had been foreseen by most commentators; indeed, Jenkins was the first major candidate eliminated, on the second ballot. Healy would eventually defeat Shore on the fifth ballot, considerably more rounds than expected, and with that the Callaghan era was over on March 4, 1980 when Queen Elizabeth invited Healy to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands and form a government in her name. Upon his return to Downing Street, Healy engaged in what later became known as "the Ides of March" - the largest turnover of a sitting Cabinet by an incumbent government in decades.

Owen's time at the Exchequer would prove to be quite brief, less than two years, as he returned to the Foreign Office - a job he had, at any rate, preferred. Shore, meanwhile, was named Chancellor, the first sign that Healy understood the energy and direction of the party but where Shore's idiosyncratic foreign policy views would do little damage. It was a move meant to mollify the left of Labour while not alienating the right - and it worked. Foot, for his part, was made Home Secretary, while Benn exited Cabinet entirely. Roy Hattersley received the Defence portfolio, Neil Kinnock the Education Ministry, Bill Rodgers to Health, and Arthur Davidson the role of Chief Whip. The new Cabinet, despite Healy sitting at Downing Street, had definitively shifted to the left, which would soon become clear when Shore would deliver his first budget speech in late April, tossing aside much of the work Owen had done on his own and unveiling a decidedly socially democratic project which the Daily Mail mocked as "the budget speech delivered by Chancellor of the Exchequer Olof Palme." Healy's first test as Prime Minister had arrived, and the turn leftwards of Labour while in government from the Callaghan years and with the shadow of the Winter of Discontent still hanging over the party would come to define his Premiership...
 
It's not necessarily very important, and I wouldn't want you to go out of your way to write a chapter on it, but is there anything going on within the House of Windsor that might raise any eyebrows? Is Charles on the verge of marrying Diana, or will he find a different partner?
 
It's not necessarily very important, and I wouldn't want you to go out of your way to write a chapter on it, but is there anything going on within the House of Windsor that might raise any eyebrows? Is Charles on the verge of marrying Diana, or will he find a different partner?
Tbh I hadn’t given that much thought. My empathetic side would lean toward finding Charles a different more compatible partner so Di gets to avoid all of… that. Maybe her older sister Sarah? Diana was just way way too young for getting tied into all that when she did.

My lazy side would default to just leaving it the same 😂
Interesting, I can't wait to see how Labor's troubles unfold.
Labour has the upside of any potential recovery from the late 1970s crisis but also owns any sluggishness; without Thatcher’s shock therapy you’re unlikely to get as deep of an early 80s recession in the UK but the finance-fueled recovery is unlikely to be as rapid on paper in terms of pure GDP growth.

(Though not to get too far ahead, but much of the Healy/Shore program will be based on the windfall of North Sea Oil coming online starting right around now, which will help Labour a bit)
 
1980 New Hampshire Primary
1980 New Hampshire Primary

New Hampshire's snowy, granite hills and bucolic small New England townships would, a month after the inconclusive Iowa caucuses did little to clear up the picture for either party, reveal themselves a major proving ground in what was already becoming an acrimonious and acidic primary on the Republican side. For the incumbent GOP, all guns turned on Dole, who had surprised with his strong Iowa finish, claimed that he had "the Big Mo" and declared, in a turn of phrase he would later admit to regret, "we shall continue the good work of the Ford administration into the Eighties!" BLS numbers just a few days before voters went to the polls in New Hampshire announced that unemployment had finally, two years after the Panama Crisis, breached the psychologically and politically significant mark of 10% [1] and the administration's policy response was thrown into question from both left and right. The unemployment and inflation prints may not have directly impacted Dole's dire performance on the ground in a much less demographically and geographically friendly state, but they certainly did not help. Reagan's campaign was particularly aggressive, blanketing the Granite State with ads decrying "a bipartisan, big-government legacy of failure," suggesting that Reagan would break a two-party establishment that had thrust the country into this crisis; Connally, sensing weakness on Reagan's part with such a hard heel turn away from his sunny, "above the fray" strategy from before, chose a different line of attack, running on his record as a Texas Governor and promising "a New Start from a son of the New South." The "New Start" message was a number of things - it sounded hopeful, it cleanly broke with the Nixon-Ford legacy (of which Connally was a small part), and it could be credibly marketed as a conservative idea, since it was amicably vague. The surprise hit of Iowa, Crane, had no such luck in New Hampshire; despite his right-wing bona fides in New England's most famously rock-ribbed Republican state, his social conservative warrior persona was a poor fit for the old-line Yankee attitudes of the state's GOP base and an ad he cut with Phyllis Schlafly endorsing him wound up damaging him more with soft-libertarian voters than it would boost him with conservatives who regarded the big three candidates as more credible Presidential candidates. Nor was New Hampshire friendly to the race's moderates; Anderson's result in Iowa had been so puny that his niche had effectively collapsed by the time New Hampshire rolled around, even if he couldn't see it yet, and Baker seemed to be "running for '84" with his rhetoric, which served him well in picking up a slew of delegates in the relatively uncontested Vermont and Massachusetts contests the following week but failed to make many headlines with the remarkable turnaround in the Granite State.

In the end, New Hampshire would prove to be what rescued Reagan's campaign from humiliating also-ran status and what would surely have been a death blow to his gravitas as Connally zeroed in on South Carolina on March 8 and three other big, delegate-rich Southern states three days later. Reagan placed first in New Hampshire with 34% of the vote, hardly a dominating result but well ahead of Connally, who placed second at 25% with Dole lagging well behind at 19% and the rest of the big candidates taking smaller figures in the single to low-double digits. "From Fourth to First!" declared the Nashua Telegraph [2], and Reagan campaign headquarters popped plenty of champagne that night as their candidate barreled towards a showpiece showdown in South Carolina with Connally and would place an honorable second in Massachusetts and Vermont in the interim, earning nearly half the delegates in each behind Baker. New Hampshire defined the race as a three-way affair, with Dole the weakest despite his substantial establishment support (Baker, Anderson and Crane would be afterthoughts from here on out).

For the Democrats, New Hampshire was notable for other reasons - the complete and utter humiliation of Governor Dukakis of next door Massachusetts, who had bet the house on the Granite State but placed fourth behind the big three of Hugh Carey, who came narrowly in first with 25%, then Reuben Askew at 22%, then Mo Udall at 19%, whose campaign now seemed to be on life support after he was unable to leverage his squeaker win in Iowa into any semblance of momentum, thanks in large part to an uncoordinated, activist-driven campaign that seemed undisciplined and aloof, frustrating even the famously amiable Udall. Dukakis, barely breaching 10%, dropped out after winning the subsequent Massachusetts primary by a disappointingly narrow margin but declined to endorse any of his opponents quite yet, suggesting he would withhold his endorsement to leverage his influence (and the respectable haul of delegates he had out of populous Massachusetts). The race seemed to have a clear character just like after Iowa, though; Askew as the candidate of the South (both Udall and Carey largely eschewed campaigning south of the Mason-Dixon and focused instead on a substantial prize of delegates in Washington, Oklahoma, Illinois and the big kahuna at the end of March, New York) and the other two seeking to seize the rest of the country as best they could to arrest his likely domination of the former Confederacy ahead of what could in fact, mathematically, be a contested convention for the first time in decades...

[1] Remember, the late 1970s crisis has been worse with Panama creating a supply shock in effectively all industries and the Miller Fed is already pursuing what we know IOTL as "Volckerism" with aggressive rate hikes; so unemployment numbers we would not see until late 1981/early 1982 IOTL are here starting to appear eighteen months early.
[2] The sponsor of OTL's "I'm paying for this microphone!" debate moment, which I've never understood quite why it made such an impact to be quite honest
 
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