alternatehistory.com

I've been thinking about this bit of alternate history a lot for the past few days, as I really think that Reagan was "supposed" to win the presidency in 1968, i.e., that was sort of his moment, just as Obama had his most natural moment to win the presidency in 2008. Had that happened, we might have had a much less turbulent national political climate through most of the '70s and '80s here in the States. I say that not because I am a Democrat (actually I'm probably an atypical Republican) but because I really dislike the debt created in the '80s by supply side economics and I think that America would have been better off without the Religious Right gaining a foothold in the GOP.

The 1968-2008 Parallel


Here's my concept of how this would have worked. Reagan's keynote at the 1964 Republican convention was similar to Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Both set the stage for a charismatic leader to take the reins of a budding new ideological movement within their respective party at the time. Reagan was a much more attractive champion for the new conservative moment than was Goldwater; Obama could win an election while Howard Dean couldn't even win the 2004 nomination, leaving Democrats with John Kerry. Despite both men's rousing speeches, their own party lost in the general election in both of those years to the sitting incumbent Texan president of the other party (LBJ in 1964; GWB in 2004).

Where history split was that Obama defeated Hillary in 2008, and then went onto win the presidency easily against a hapless candidate nominated by a split Republican Party that year, while Reagan lost the 1968 nod to Nixon, who then only narrowly beat Hubert Humphrey, despite the Democrats' own haplessness that year. Nixon lost a ton of votes to George Wallace, votes that Reagan would almost certainly have won, had he been the nominee that year.

A Reagan/Humphrey race in 1968 would probably have been more like Obama/McCain inasmuch as it would have cleared the field of serious third party candidates, because Reagan would have scooped up both the regular Republicans who voted for Nixon and the new conservatives down south who voted for Wallace. It would have been a comfortable blowout, nothing like 1980, but more similar to 2008, where Reagan wins the election by 5-8 points, with an electoral college total in the mid to upper 300s.

In fact, if we want to look at this analogy another way, imagine if Hillary had beaten Obama for the nomination in 2008. Michael Bloomberg might have entered the race and scooped up a lot of the urbane, liberal Obama voters in places like Northern Virginia, and Hillary would have just narrowly beaten McCain despite the worst year for the GOP in the modern era. Like Hillary in 2008, Nixon in 1968 was "the past" and didn't connect with the GOP voters who wanted to give their new conservatism a test run.

President Reagan - 1969-77

I suspect that President Reagan would be similar to President Obama inasmuch as he would have reigned during a time when the country as a whole wasn't quite onboard with his ideology, leading to a much less successful and more tempered presidency. Reagan would have had neither supply-siders (which didn't yet exist) nor the Religious Right to give direction to his presidency. He would have been an optimistic conservative who was just trying to get through the night in a country still going through its liberal cultural revolution of the '60s and '70s. This means that Reagan probably has lots of domestic legislative failed initiatives that result in Republican wipeouts in his two midterm elections - 1970 and 1974. I am assuming that the Democrats mess up and nominate a dud in 1972 again, which leads to Reagan's re-election. I also think that Reagan, like Obama, is so personally liked that his policies won't matter in terms of his re-election, but they will hurt his party down-ballot in a far less conservative country. Domestically almost nothing changes though economically the country is far less turbulent, and we may end up with a much less chaotic version of the 1970s than in OTL.

Internationally, I suspect Reagan would be a hawk on Vietnam and might go hard and "win" the war, or at least get out of Vietnam in a less embarrassing way than Nixon did. This will make hawkishness great again, sort of how Obama made being a foreign policy liberal cool again by getting out of the Middle East in a respectable way. Reagan making hawkishness cool during the Vietnam era by using strength to end the Vietnam War would have pulled the Democrats back towards a more muted version of hawkishness. I.e., Scoop Jackson up, George McGovern down.

One big change for the country through would be that Watergate never happens. The Democrats still have a big 1974 due to Reagan's attempts at forcing conservative policies on a liberal country. But Reagan would run a clean Administration (there would be no Iran Contra this time around) and the issue in 1976 wouldn't be how to find the cleanest candidate possible (no Carter) but how to find the most likely counter to Reagan within the Democratic bench.

The 1976 election

Without Ford and Carter (no Ford because no Nixon, no Watergate, and no Agnew), the 1976 election looks a lot different. Reagan's VP, probably a moderate who Reagan chose to balance the ticket way back in 1968, goes up against the Democratic nominee, whomever that ends up being, in a close election due to Reagan's popularity as a person but fatigue with a Republican White House. The Democrats will be itching for a win, and they'll want a candidate who can be tough on the Soviets while still being able to criticize Reagan's legacy as too bellicose. The Democrats will also want to balance 8 years of conservatism being forced on them with a return to proud New Deal era domestic policy. This all exists of course against the backdrop of the Religious Right forming as a political force.

I suspect that the Democrats will end up nominating Scoop Jackson in this scenario. Scoop checks all the boxes as a proud domestic policy liberal while being hawkish-but-not-Reagan-hawkish on foreign policy. Also, Scoop, while not an evangelical like Carter, will likely be able to throw out enough cultural dog whistles to put the minds of the evangelical bloc at ease, i.e., the evangelicals looking to avoid a president who embraces the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll will at least feel comfortable with Scoop as president. I imagine Scoop wins a close election, and unlike in the Carter/Ford race, Scoop doesn't win due to the South flipping as much as he wins due to taking back the West Coast for the Democrats, snagging California, the crown jewel of the Reagan Republican era.

The Aftermath

So much has changed at this point that it kind of becomes impossible to predict what happens next. I suspect that several things happen. First, instead of the South becoming the region that both parties fight over for the next several decades, there will be more focus on the country as a whole, as the fight over the South was largely due to Nixon-Carter-Reagan flipping the South back and forth over the '70s and '80s. Scoop is not going to rely on the South to make him president as Carter did, so the South will be less politically important, and a lot of the policy focuses of the late '70s and early '80s, such as conservative social policy, become less necessary for the parties to focus on.

Similarly, the Religious Right will lack a foothold in either party. Scoop is no Carter and even if they're okay with him, he won't kowtow to them. There will be no natural leader for them to flock to in the Republican Party since Reagan is now gone. Most likely they will dissipate as a political force, sort of like a wave crashing on the seashore with nowhere else to go. This may mitigate some of the culture war fights of the '80s and beyond.

Additionally, the budding supply-side movement also has no natural leader, excepting Jack Kemp, who will probably run for president as a Republican in 1980, and who will probably lose the nomination to a stronger Republican candidate. Ironically, even though the conservative movement will still be ready for a great leader come 1980, it will no longer have a natural candidate to take the mantle, and as a result, it may end up splintering or simply washing out. In a way, this dynamic is sort of similar to the coming 2020 presidential election, where there is a lot of appetite for a progressive leader to take on Trump, but where the Democrats seem to have a lot of politically unappealing progressive candidates with no one like Obama to run as a sunny, optimistic progressive (leading many Democrats to believe that a 2020 candidate who is a genial moderate may be best).

The 1980 election


As such, I suspect Jack Kemp will end up being the running mate to whichever Republican heavyweight wins the nomination to challenge President Scoop Jackson in 1980. All of this probably butterflies away the Iranian Revolution, thanks to back to back hawks in the White House, which will make Scoop harder to beat in 1980 on the part of the GOP. Also, Scoop will be far more competent in office than Carter. Still, Scoop will attempt to take the country back to old-school New Deal policies domestically, which will be like forcing a square peg into the round hole of the conservative 1980 political environment.

Without a natural conservative leader among the GOP heavyweights, I would give George H.W. Bush the most likely chance of winning the GOP nomination in 1980. If Bush were able to give Reagan a run for his money in OTL, despite Reagan basically owning 1980 in OTL, then a Bush run in ATL would probably be successful. A Bush/Kemp ticket would likely defeat Scoop and take the White House, given the hunger for a GOP success that year, and given the poor fit of Scoop's old liberal policies on a newly conservative country.

Interestingly, President Bush in 1980 probably prevents the big tax cuts of the '80s and gives the country a much sounder federal budget and economy, and thus likely wins re-election in 1984, given that the Democrats will be itching for a real liberal to head their ticket after all these years. The Cold War probably ends sooner and Bush gets all the credit. A successful version of President George H.W. Bush, as opposed to the one in OTL who lived in Reagan's shadow and had to pick up the pieces of policies that he never believed in, would have prevented both economic and social movement conservatives from ever enacting their policies and would probably have kept the Republicans much more of a moderate party, sort of a home to upper middle income white collar professionals. The trade-off that led to a Trump-style GOP for blue collar whites, and an Obama-style Democratic Party for white collar whites, never likely takes places. Meanwhile, Perot and Clinton are probably both butterflied away down the line, and the Democrats never truly "moderate" the way they did in the 1990s.

The endgame is sort of that we end up with a modern era in ATL with a moderate Republican Party and a liberal Democratic Party. The conservative era that our country went through in OTL never really happens in ATL because Reagan's presidency doesn't sync up with the strongest moment at the grassroots level of movement conservatism. This means that the present-day U.S. in ATL would have higher tax rates than today, but oddly enough, probably less debt and perhaps lower entitlement spending due to the prudent Bush years in the 1980s (though it's hard to say what subsequent Democratic presidents would have done to entitlements and spending). It just seems like all of this leads to a much sounder economic and cultural situation over the past 50 years instead of the political roller coaster than has characterized our national politics.
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