Okay, this is really two questions:
1) How would pop culture in the 1980s be different if Reagan got the Republican nomination in 1980 but lost to Jimmy Carter?; and
2) How would it be different if a non-Reagan Republican beat Carter in '80 (or, as John Frederick Parker suggests, if Reagan wins but is assassinated early in his term)?
The easy answer to the first question is:
monumentally. A quick detour on non-pop-culture issues: Republicans are going to blame Reagan for losing to an obviously-vulnerable incumbent; Reaganite conservatism is going to be depicted as non-viable on the national scale in favor of Nixonian centrism as articulated by George Bush and Bob Dole. On the Democratic side of the ledger, a re-elected President Carter doesn't slash corporate tax rates in 1982, nor does he authorize massive increases in the defense budget. My belief -- YMMV -- is that the cyclical nature of the economy augurs a recovery from the "malaise" of the late 70s even without Reagan's tax cuts. So by 1984, Carter's approval ratings are going to be in the high 60s, and Walter Mondale is going to breeze to victory (if not
quite as easily as Reagan IOTL).
That means the 1980s will be defined politically by classic, old-school, big-government liberalism. It also means that (a)
Republican internal critiques over supply-side economics -- remember when George H.W. Bush called it 'voodoo economics?' -- are likely to win the day, meaning that Republicans become the party of deficit reduction, not tax cuts; and (b) neo-Keynesian economics, rather than being discredited, is likely to become the dominant view both among academics and in the general electorate as
the way out of economic downturns. President Carter obviously doesn't fire the striking air traffic controllers, and the early-'80s move to crush labor is blunted. (In the long run, I think the decline in union power is relatively inevitable given the reconfiguration of the U.S. to a post-industrial economy, but in the short term, as the major Democratic power base in the late 70s, they're going to get propped up rather than smacked down.) Oh, and there's no co-opting of the Christian Right by the Republican party, either.
That's a long-winded way of saying: re-electing President Carter in 1980 is likely to validate and prolong old-school big-government liberalism as not only viable, but probably the mainstream political view of the largest plurality of the electorate, with a public-private partnership view of government constrained by fiscal responsibility (the Nixonian view, also held by George H.W. Bush in the 1970s) becoming the primary opposition. That, in turn, means that pretty much
everything we think of today as being core Republicanism -- supply-side economics, tax cuts as fiscal policy, huge defense budgets, Christian social conservatism, and federalism as devolution to the states -- will be reduced to the fringes of the most conservative (and most discredited) wing of the Republican Party.
Now, I want you to just think about how pretty much
everything in the 1980s came to be defined either by, or in opposition to, the cultural shift that occurred whereby those conservative principles came to be held by a large plurality of Americans.
Here's what's in and what's out:
TV: Obviously, there's no
Family Ties, but I think we also lose shows that reveled in ostentatious greed, like the prime-time soaps (
Dallas,
Dynasty,
Falcon Crest, etc.). We lose over-the-top Cold War paranoia shows like
The Day After. Crime and legal procedurals are probably still popular, but I would expect them to be more socially conscious and message-driven, like
L.A. Law and later,
Law & Order, rather than the anything-justifies-getting-the-bad-guy mindset of shows like
Hunter. Violence on TV is probably more regulated, so you probably miss out on TV wrestling and later shows like
American Gladiators. On the other hand, sitcoms are probably largely unaffected, which means you still have
Cosby; I think you also still have sitcoms like
Diff'rent Strokes and
Silver Spoons that play to liberal tropes. Children's TV continues to be regulated, so the next wave of cartoons would look more like
Challenge of the Superfriends than OTL's toy-driven shows; you'd still have the
Smurfs, but say goodbye to
Transformers,
G.I. Joe,
He-Man and the like. That probably means that
Robotech breaks out even more so than OTL.
Movies: Like TV, only more so. Say goodbye to the do-what-it-takes cop movie (
Lethal Weapon and the like); bid a fond farewell to flag-waving Cold War films like
Red Dawn,
Rambo: First Blood, and
Rocky IV. I actually think you'd probably lose the
entire Schwarzenegger-Stallone mindless action hero genre -- no
Rambo, no
Predator, no
Cobra, etc. (Sadly, you'd also lose
The Running Man, an outstanding satire on the deregulation of television.)
Rocky and the
Terminator would still be hits, but producers would draw very different lessons from their success.
Back to the Future would be very different (if it exists at all); I doubt that neo-50s-nostalgia would catch on in the Carter-Mondale '80s. Nor would 80s excess films like
The Secret of My Success or
Wall Street. Of
the 50 most popular films of the 80s, I can only imagine a handful surviving in any fashion. What fills the void? It's hard to say; this is going to be a time of peace and prosperity without ostentatiousness and over-the-top-patriotism, more like
OTL's 1990s.
Porn: There's no Meese Commission, so there's no crusade to get
Playboy out of the local 7-11. The last word from the Justice Department on pornography will be the Johnson Commission, which essentially found that pornography was harmless and that access thereto may even serve as an "outlet" for otherwise would-be sexual predators. I suspect that attitudes towards porn would move more quickly towards where they are now, IOTL.
Cigarettes:
Huge. Without Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, cigarettes are never derided in pop culture as being 'low-class'; instead, the classic notion of the 'smoke-filled room' being integral to power continues, and cigarettes continue to occupy a parallel space alongside the martini.
Music: Totally different. Madonna isn't the "Material Girl" without Reagan, nor do we see the socially conscious rock of the 1980s of Genesis, U2, Sting, and (of course) Don Henley. We lose out on the bluegrass-inspired, patriotic-sounding (if not necessarily
patriotic, per se) "Born in the USA" album. Even though many Democrats are plenty horrified by heavy metal in the 80s, Tipper Gore never meets up with a powerful clique of mostly Republican wives and forms the PMRC, nor is there a Meese Commission on pornography. So I think you'd start off with a continuation of the trends of the 1970s with guitar-rock and apolitical post-punk acts like Blondie. The guitar-rock scene evolves similarly to
Dirty Laundry; rock goes harder, heavy metal is bigger, and so on. The post-punk scene transitions into the poppier New Wave/Britpop stuff while skipping over social-commentary-oriented New Wave acts.
That's for starters.
