Just wait and see
America will be left of OTL in some places and right of OTL in others
Best way to describe any TL
New Deal Coalition Retained: A Sixth Party System Wikibox Timeline
Best way to describe any TL
No, that's more a descent into the abyss. It makes Peak Gonzo look like the meadow scene from Sound of Music
Teaser for the next update:
Caption: the campaign manager speaks in a heated post-debate conference with the press.
Caption: the campaign manager speaks in a heated post-debate conference with the press.
I don't think that such a description is quite accurate. Many social liberals, like George McGovern, were quite populist and there were more than a few Dixiecrats, like John Connally, who were not populist. So, maybe call the latter wing the "Dixiecrat wing"? Though the descriptions of each wing are spot-on.
Populism and...elitism (patricianism?) I think are on a different political axis from liberalism and conservatism. It's more of a style of politics then necessarily a whole wing. You have many patrician liberals around this time in the Northeast, and many liberal populists in the South; as well as many elitist conservatives and populist conservatives all over (especially the South I'd say).
Fair enough. Moynihan, for instance, believed that single mothers of all things, were to blame for many issues facing blacks, yet he was undeniably a member of the elite and came from the Northeast.
I just finished reading this whole thing, and I love it! It is so interesting and I couldn't stop reading. I love your take on everything I can't wait to see how JFK handles the Vietnam War and the space race.
I can't wait to see how JFK handles the Vietnam War and the space race.I just finished reading this whole thing, and I love it! It is so interesting and I couldn't stop reading. I love your take on everything
Seconded. Great job, very interesting, keep it up!
I just finished reading this whole thing, and I love it! It is so interesting and I couldn't stop reading. I love your take on everything
Thanks! Don't worry. A bumpy ride ahead for all
Excerpt from The Formation of the Sixth Party System
By Newt Gingrich, 1999
Chairman of the Political Science Department, Princeton University
Chapter Five: How John F. Kennedy Lost the Democratic Party
The nature of the modern Republican Party can be condensed into the contributions of four individuals. In my now famous quote, the current GOP “Owes its existence to three Californians and William F. Buckley.” To understand the events that led to the problems President John F. Kennedy faced starting in 1966, we must take a closer look at the latter.By Newt Gingrich, 1999
Chairman of the Political Science Department, Princeton University
Chapter Five: How John F. Kennedy Lost the Democratic Party
From his last minute bid for the Republican nomination in 1964, Bill Buckley came to the realization that the Republican Party at the time was reaching a point where its electoral coalition would be untenable. The GOP at the time was attempting to both support civil rights and retain the support of African-American voters while also drifting to a more conservative direction in regards to economic and size of government matters. Though it was believed by Buckley and his fellow conservatives that the two were not mutually exclusive, in his battles against Evan Mecham and the John Birch Society (which represented to him as a Republican Party that had abandoned civil rights and went too far to the right on social and economic policy) he realized that there had to be a shift or the statist inclinations of the Democrats would take black voters gradually under their electoral coalition. In the months after the 1964 convention, he spent most of his time laboring to find a solution that would avoid this and not allow the GOP to copy Democratic big government solutions to the problem of racial injustice.
It was this mindset that precluded his famous speech at the Tuskegee Institute in March 1965. On the podium in front of the entire student body of the prestigious center for African-American learning, Buckley revealed to the world what he called Liberty Conservatism. In brief, he stated that the root cause of the continuance of racial injustice was its propagation by the government. His examples abounded. Slavery was the policy not of the general populace but of the landed gentry that controlled southern politics, leading to the dehumanization of blacks. This same ruling class developed black codes, Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws, and other facets of racism in the nation. In order to vanquish the evil from the shores of the United States, according to Buckley, the Government would be forced to police itself rather than private individuals. To act proactively in eliminating all shreds of racial bigotry or discrimination from the law books and promote equality and liberty of all men. Once this was done, combined with private efforts, the culture would change.
The speech was well received, making the intellectual Buckley an odd celebrity among the civil rights movement. Many Republican politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Medgar Evers among others – including some Democrats such as Eugene McCarthy – quickly took up liberty conservatism as their banner when it came to civil rights. Its first test against the established order of the New Deal Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans would be Buckley himself in the 1965 New York Mayoral race.
Having defeated the reformist-minded Mayor Robert Wagner in the 1957 Democratic Primary, Tammany Hall boss and incumbent Mayor Carmine DeSapio was retiring after two terms, and the race to replace him was heated. Republicans nominated Rockefeller ally and noted liberal John Lindsay, hoping his views and personal charm and good looks would carry them to a win. DeSapio’s allies in the Democratic party forced through Abraham Beame, which made disgruntled liberals seek to nominate author and defeated primary candidate Norman Mailer for the Liberal Party line.
In this race jumped Buckley for the nomination of the Conservative Party (headed by the dogged and ruthless campaign manager Roy M. Cohn, of McCarthy hearings fame). His entry upset much of the Lindsay campaign’s well prepared election strategy of competence and anti-corruption rhetoric, mostly given the intelligent Buckley hit those marks as well. Mailer an afterthought, the two major party nominees hit Buckley and each other hard to maintain their dominance, Beame doubling down on the class division and white ethnic-centered outreach that so characterized DeSapio’s tenure. Lindsay on the other hand utilized surrogates to attack Buckley as an “out of touch, right-wing intellectual” and Beame as a “tool for the corrupt Tammany Hall” while he stayed above the fray using his charm and good looks to great avail. Mailer, ever the stirrer of controversy, focused most of his campaign on bizarre publicity stunts such as an impromptu book reading/campaign rally in Central Park where he would debate any man or woman that came forward.
Despite the attacks Buckley slowly gained support as the campaign wore on. His tireless outreach to African-American communities and brandishing of the Liberty Conservative message won many plaudits, focusing on quality of life issues such as traffic congestion, tax burdens, and above all law enforcement – criticism of Tammany Hall shielding of the NYPD from reform and citing of the disproportionate impact of crime on the poor (especially black) underclass as a point against Lindsay’s proposed Civilian Review Board won him much plaudits from both the middle class and the civil rights community. Once he was seen as a legitimate contender, the coming attacks of the main candidates were countered with vicious mudslinging engineered by Cohn.
Even in defeat, through his doctrine of Liberty Conservatism William F. Buckley had changed the playing field for the two parties, the effect of which would become known quite soon on the national level.
While the passage of Medicare – health care policy being a cornerstone of the Democratic wish list since the Truman Administration – had made John Fitzgerald Kennedy a hero in many liberal and populist circuits, the events of early 1966 would prove the beginning of his downfall.
A new wave liberal from the Northeast (as opposed to the more populist, New Deal kind of Democrat that formed the majority of the party), Kennedy often found himself at odds with the working class-centric scope of much of the congressional leadership, a mix between long-serving southerners such as Speaker L. Mendel Rivers and more-economically centered populists like Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey. His New Horizons policy contained as many social platforms as they did economic, and the perceived softness of the Kennedy Administration to the growing counterculture movement in actuality hurt them far worse than the more infamous infighting over civil rights did with the southern block.
The first sign of the growing chasm between Kennedy and the majority of the Democratic Party was seen in the retirement of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Tom Clark. At the time, the court held a narrow majority of liberals (Earl Warren, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Clark, and William Brennan) against the conservatives (John Marshall Harlan, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and Thomas Dewey). Holding this seat by an ideological ally was key, and Mike Mansfield had conversations with Kennedy to the tune of making sure the confirmation was a formality.
However, Kennedy’s decision to appoint NAACP lawyer and civil rights advocate Thurgood Marshall to the seat was met with immediate firestorm, not just from the usual culprits of the southern block. Mindful of the spread of Liberty Conservatism among the black community within the United States, many on the populist wing of the Democratic Party had made the conclusion that trying to break the Republican heritage of blacks (reaffirmed by Nixon’s passage of the CRA in 1963) was certain suicide for the party. A doubling down on the cultural conservatism and economic populism embodied in Harry Truman’s come from behind re-election in 1948 seemed to be the key to these Democrats – with the added boost of keeping the Dixiecrats in.
During the confirmation hearings, Democrats such as Sam Ervin and George Smathers went heavily after Marshall for his liberal views on social policy, the debate eventually carrying out to the Senate floor. Mansfield, keeping his promise to the President, scheduled an up and down vote.
The results were shocking to the White House. The Democratic Caucus had rejected the nomination 25-36 (the only southern Senators voting Yea being Ralph Yarbrough of Texas and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee), while Marshall was only confirmed by a 30-9 vote of the Republican Caucus, concerns about liberalism tampered by the historic nature of the pick. Even noted administration allies such as J. William Fulbright, John Pastore, and Majority Leader Mansfield voted nay, a stinging rebuke to Kennedy barely over a year into office.
Along with the solid phalanx of southern Senators and Representatives blocking all his major initiatives except for the higher education initiative known currently as the Kefauver Grants – after Senator Estes Kefauver, close to his deathbed at the time – the most prominent Democratic group souring on the President were the labor unions, most notably George Meany’s AFL-CIO and Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters. Noticing the great stress eating away at the President, a group of Kennedy loyalists led by Chief of Staff Edward “Teddy” Kennedy (motivated most likely out of love for his older brother) arranged for a series of investigations into labor union practices and primary challenges to southern politicians in order to break the legislative deadlock.
The number one target was considered to be Governor George Wallace of Alabama, running for re-election after two terms. Wallace had angered many in the Kennedy Administration after Kennedy ally Miles E. Goodwin (later elected senator as a Republican) was defeated by Republican A. Linwood Holton after he backed the candidacy of former leader of the American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell’s fifteen percent of the vote was blamed for Holton’s one percent margin of victory. With the Alabama Governor being touted by some as a potential Presidential candidate, Teddy Kennedy and the others felt it was necessary to defeat him.
The divisions of the Democratic Party were widening, but the events of 1966 and 1967 would end with a gaping chasm to be formed.
Attachments
Eww.
Uh oh.
Better than OTL conservatism, at least.
I can see some sort of divide grow in this movement in regards to affirmative action. That's one issue that is both socially and fiscally liberal. Liberty Conservatives are going to have to put their social or fiscal liberalism ahead of them.
Wait one second. Doesn't FDR's support of affirmative action and how Truman won in 1948 (with the support of black, in the latter case without Dixiecrats) provide arguments for social liberals to appeal to minorities?
Even LBJ said no? That's a surprise.
Anyways, nice work.
FDR's affirmative action programs... weren't really affirmative action programs. He supported limited anti-discrimination legislation, but it was not racial quotas.
Of course
No, they absolutely were. The various New Deal programs required 10% of all people (equal to the nationwide percentage of blacks in the 30s) employed to be black.
As such, it still doesn't nullify the impact of Truman winning an election no one expected he'd win by appealing to blacks, and despite both the left and right of the party splitting off of the party. This gives social liberals a good case to make.
Fine, but affirmative action did not "take on" until the Nixon administration
Well, until the Johnson administration. Nixon's role in expanding it shouldn't be ignored, but LBJ was the guy who started it in regards to private businesses.