WI: A Second Return to Normalcy after WW2

What I'm trying to get at here, though, is to use this changing period of time and molding it to lead to something different. A world where the Conservative backlash to the New Deal gets its way. Where America takes a back seat to world affairs, and allows for a more hands off government. Where Europe is given minimal if any support, and expected to go it alone. Where if the New Deal is not repealed, many, many things are cut, and it is not expanded.

You'd want a POD in the 1930s. President Ritchie? The New Deal is too successful to be undone.
 
You'd want a POD in the 1930s. President Ritchie? The New Deal is too successful to be undone.

Which Ritchie are you referring to?

And ideally, I don't want a POD like that where there isn't FDR and the New Deal. Maybe some variations on the OTL, maybe with FDR getting killed, or things going wrong that didn't or things going worse than the OTL, but I'd ideally like for FDR and the New Deal to exist. Otherwise, there isn't anything to return from.

Something I was thinking of is maybe the recession goes worse and gets more out of hand, with rampant labor protests and violence. And maybe Korea goes exceptionally bad. And maybe the Conservatives manage to hamstring Truman in areas they didn't in the OTL. Just throw things at the fan to create backlash and disillusion, and have the other side take advantage just by being the other side.
 
There's another thing I didn't factor: The Ayn Rand Apocalypse situation in the 50s (and not just having things go much more badly up until the 1952 election). That is, the New Dealers never let up. In the OTL, the Eisenhower administration was an era of sitting around and thinking and not doing things transformative the way they had been under FDR. The Rand apocalypse would be that the New Dealers keep going full steam ahead and transforming things and making government bigger in a fashion that wasn't done in the OTL. And that leading, in the Conservative mindset, to very bad things down the line if not at the time.

This would make for a Return to Normalcy say around the later 50s or 60s. It'd also be interesting if they avoided all the Beatnik and Hippie stuff and stuff remained a more natural, average evolution of that 20s, 30s, 40s culture, which may fit well with this scenario.
 
Secondly, it is important to note that Dewey was a GOP Liberal. The GOP Conservatives would say cut away the new deal. A GOP Liberal and Moderate would say keep it, or at least the basic ideas, but we can do it better and with far less waste.

For all the sound and fury of the Taftites, Dewey was head of a surprisingly united Republican party; he wasn't subject to the sceptism later not-quite-conservative nominees had directed at them.

That dynamic really comes about in the sixties. (Also, Gov Dewey was Nixon's great booster for the VP nomination in 1952. Think about it.)

Another thing to remember: the factional divide in the GOP of 1948 is still more between isolationists and non-interventionists than it is between divergent economic ideas.

the loss of 1948 seemed to embolden the GOP hardliners; it was what lead to them unleashing McCarthy on the Truman administration and America.

To a certain extent.

The Alger Hiss hearings took place under the Republican House elected in 1946. It was all primed to go even before Truman's shock victory.

Though of course the simple existence of a Dewey administration would have provided a great release valve for most of that pent-up witchhunt fervour.

However: slapping down McCarthyite nihilism with inhouse presidential party leadership is one thing; stopping the redscare from being ramped up during the Korean War is another.

I'll be charitable and suggest that a sitting GOP prez is decent enough to stop the Tailgunner from getting his start at Lansing, WV, but I'm not charitable enough to think that this hypothetical admin will automatically call on cooler heads to prevail during the onslaught of Korean War/fall of China/Soviet nuke hysteria.

What I'm trying to get at here, though, is to use this changing period of time and molding it to lead to something different. A world where the Conservative backlash to the New Deal gets its way. Where America takes a back seat to world affairs, and allows for a more hands off government. Where Europe is given minimal if any support, and expected to go it alone. Where if the New Deal is not repealed, many, many things are cut, and it is not expanded.

If the whole package is meant to be a repeat of 1920s 'return to normalcy' of economic restraint combined with isolationism, then I think you're asking for something which is near ASB; many historians backdate the Republican internationalists victory over the isolationists to Wendell Wilkie giving FDR tacit support for his destroyers-to-the-UK programme during the election of 1940.

A postwar Republican POTUS might try to be non-interventionist (obviously Taft), but I think he'd fail in that attempt. He would face too much entrenched internationalist policy weight.

And with the budget: there was a large amount of postwar retrenchment under Truman in OTL, and certainly a Taft elected in 1948 would want to continue it, but the influence of the world crises just won't allow a new Washington Naval Treaty style retrenchment, military spending wise. And Korea, the Soviet bomb, these will demand a ramp up in US defence spending come 1950.

This will look more like some strange version of Reaganism, not at all like Harding- or Coolidge-ism. That's not a return to normality.

There's another thing I didn't factor: The Ayn Rand Apocalypse situation... the New Dealers never let up... The Rand apocalypse would be that the New Dealers keep going full steam ahead and transforming things and making government bigger in a fashion that wasn't done in the OTL.

Personally I would have gone with something like the "WFB Standing Athwart History Warning" to categorise Rightwing fears of a continuing New Deal like activist government.

But you already told us in your last post what the main obstacle is to an activist Amerigovt postwar: "Politically, the Conservative coalition was a force in Congress, and it stymied any Liberal agenda."

This here is why Truman didn't get to enact the great domestic legislative record he wanted, even as the reliably moderate Sam Rayburn was passing this agenda through the House (most of it tended to fall in the senate.) This pemanently liberal-sceptic Upper Chamber is why Lyndon Johnson was practically a lapsed New Dealer throughout his entire time as US senator.
 
I will note, points understood, and frankly it's been too long for me to recall the dynamic of the conversation to reply directly to each point.

I've been thinking for quite some time on how the heck to get this to work, because I find it interesting, but I can't get it to work, and I full well understand the problems with getting it to work which have been the subject of much of the discussion. The problem being something to the effect of the post-war years of the OTL being one where the New Deal era of government thinking has been entrenched, but where the Conservative coalition and Cold War Liberalism limit the expansion of New Dealism to any great degree, thus staving off any going too far which could drive a major backlash.

I have been thinking on this for a while, and I think the way to get this has to begin in the war years and pre-war years. My basic thought is a world where FDR is possibly killed in '33, with Garner rising to the presidency, and failing to do anything meaningful given he refuses to betray his conservatism. Things subsequently get worse as Depression deepens, and people begin to become more active in expressing their dissatisfaction with protests (which are sometimes violent) and the population becomes more open to radical schools of thought and radical leaders (this sets up more carte blanche for big, activist government). An initial inkling I had was that this could lead to Huey Long rising to the White House in 1936, creating something far more liberal and constricting than the New Deal, which dominates politics leading to backlash later on, but I don't know if Long could ever gain enough support to seriously take the White House. So maybe one of FDR's possible OTL successors could instead be the nominee and winner for 1936, such as Burton Wheeler or Paul McNutt. And they are the ones to put into place a New Deal sort of program which begins to bring the country out of Depression. Ideally for this narrative, that program would go further in action and expansion of government than the New Deal, which sets up backlash later, but I don't know enough about either men or the other possible men to succeed FDR. In this scenario, the Democrats manage to control the White House, and New Dealism controls the politics, for decades up until a point of about 1960.
In the meantime, Europe has it's war and Japan ravages the Pacific. If it's a person like Burton Wheeler in the White House, then the US could stay in isolationism if his personal isolationist beliefs hold and the foreign powers attempt no major attacks on the United States. So Europe could go into the fray with Britain possibly being forced to have peace, with the Soviets left to fight the Nazis with whatever result that may yield. Foreign affairs would affect this scenario, so the vagueness of them at this point in my thinking is a problem. Foreign affairs could also be a fun area for all sorts of nifty stuff and AH brain droppings. For example, maybe the Jewish Alaska proposal could be accepted, maybe the Soviets could beat the Nazis and storm Europe, maybe the United States and Japan could go to war later in the 40s (I've had the idea in my head for a while of a major, bloody war set in a period when both powers have jets and have managed to create a arsenal of a handful to a dozen atomic bombs of era yield).
In the United States, as I said, the Democrats in the White House and the *New Deal go on. Let's say the problems of '37, such as the attempt to cut back on spending and focus on balancing the budget which lead to the recession, as well as something akin to the court packing scandal don't occur, preventing the conservative bump. Government expands, spending goes forward, business gets looked after with a magnifying glass, etc, etc.
I don't know if anyone but FDR would have tried more than 2 terms, especially since FDR running seemed to have been more or less because of fears in the world at large and the US in it. Let's say for the sake of this discussion that the Democratic Presidents have only 2 terms each, handing things off to a successor thereafter. That also creates an interesting situation of that being more difficult to regulate than FDR and term limits, given what can you do to hamstring a leader passing things off to an heir apparent administration after administration? Let's say maybe Burton Wheeler has '36 and '40, and hands it off to Paul McNutt in 1944 and he wins '48, and then someone else comes in, and so on.

Now we get into the issue of a new Conservatism. The idea of everything I've set up so far has been an effort to set up a possible reaction. It may be more narrative than history, and I fully accept any blame to be had there. The things so far have been Democrats running the White House since 1933, which was itself an OTL Conservative and Republican fear, as well as a sweeping *New Deal that has been going on. That *New Deal has pulled America out of the Depression, and has set up a new era of big government, and government regulatory in a way that is a New Dealers wet dream, but may have become too much of a nanny state and constrictivly so with business and economics regulated to within an inch of their life. This is not, however, bad for the common layman because it's pulled them out of the muck of the Depression and has given them security. However, let's say things start to crack: it's gone too far, business leaders and the wealthy can't stand it, anyone who tries to do something exciting and new get's hit with a wall of red tape, the government begins to look into nationalizing things or already has done so. I heard a speech recently by Truman while playing "LA Noire" where he said that business needs to respect workers, but that Unions must also be respectful in not unreasonably asking for wage increases and benefit increases which would increase prices for the consumer, which gave me the idea that maybe Unions could go too far in asking for those things, whether through their own initiative or through the government dictating they get those things, and maybe they could start to act up when they don't get those things, striking and protesting in ways that slow things to a halt. And perhaps the economy begins to sour in the face of all that.
Culturally, this narrative is very deco-era. Men wear suits and ties and fedoras, and there is no New Left, which is instead replaced with a Conservative youth which reacts to their times (which I made a thread about, which put me in the mood to write this). Conservatism begins to become the in-vogue ideology and nearing 30 years of Democratic control and big government begins to give way to that, leading a Conservative to win the White House. Maybe JPK Jr wins as a Conservative Democrat at some point. And that's where the scenario ends.

Now, feel free to tear that down and criticize it or add on. I fully accept it may be, given my lacking knowledge of the WW2 era and my attempt to create a story more than history, naive or even wrongheaded (certainly unpolished), but it needed to start somewhere.
 
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