1973-1974: Richard Nixon / John Connally (Republican)
1972 def. George McGovern / Sargent Shriver (replacing Thomas Eagleton) (Democratic)
1974: John Connally / vacant (Republican)
1974-1977: John Connally / Bob Dole (Republican)
1977-1982: Tom McCall / William Proxmire (Independent—Third Force)
1976 def. Hubert Humphrey / Lloyd Bentsen (Democratic), John Connally / Bob Dole (Republican)
1980 def. Ronald Reagan / James Holshouser (Republican), Lloyd Bentsen / John Gilligan (Democratic)
1982: William Proxmire / vacant (Independent)
1982-1985: William Proxmire / Jay Hammond (Independent)
1985-1993: John Warner / Edwin Meese (Republican)
1984 def. Donald Fraser / Cliff Finch (Democratic), Jerry Brown / various (Reform Alliance)
1988 def. Jesse Jackson / Alice Tripp (Democratic), Dan Quayle / Steve Symms (American Freedom), Dick Lamm / Pat Choate (write-in)
1993-1997: Jim Webb / Jane Byrne (Democratic)
1992 def. Edwin Meese / Al D’Amato (Republican)
1997-2001: Bob Dornan / Dick Lugar (Republican)
1996 def. Jim Webb / Willie Brown (Democratic)
2001-2009: Charlotte Pritt / Jim Jontz (Democratic)
2000 def. Bob Dornan / Dick Lugar (Republican)
2004 def. John Ashcroft / G. Walker Bush (Republican)
2009-2017: Linda Smith / Tom Tancredo (Republican)
2008 def. Jim Jontz / Barbara Mikulski (Democratic)
2012 def. Mike Moore / Mike McGinn (Democratic)
2016: Susan Sadlowski Garza / Rick Nolan (Democratic) v. Dennis Kucinich / Rick Santorum (Republican)
After his resignation, McCall tries to play shadow president, phoning Proxmire every day from his hospital bed to discuss policy minutiae. His continued involvement with the White House becomes public knowledge and the story frustrates his successor, who has already begun his own term deep in another man’s shade and finds himself sinking deeper. Tom McCall dies less than a year after leaving office, his popularity high but his historical role still in doubt. One small legacy is visible in the short term: the shocking illnesses of both McCall and Hubert Humphrey contribute to a social push for men to discuss their health problems more openly.
With inflation largely under control by the end of 1982, Proxmire acquiesces to the lifting of the last wage and price restrictions. They remain available in the Presidential toolbox, but the strong pressure for a return to normalcy means they won’t be called out again for a long while.
The trappings of Third Force governance begin to slip. Republicans and independents begin to leave the Cabinet, replaced with a more specific strain of post-Watergate Democrats, and William Cohen quits the administration caucus in the Senate. Everyone knows the new President is a bit of an asshole; there’s no way he can hold together such a personalist coalition.
Proxmire attempts to retain a sheen of bipartisanship by appointing the Republican governor of Alaska, Jay Hammond, as Vice President. Hammond was a participant in the Crisis Conference and an ally of the McCall White House. He is known for his rugged masculinity and for the innovative Alaska Permanent Fund, a mechanism for redistributing oil industry profits that shares similarities with the basic income ideas floated by some Third Force thinkers. The VP, however, becomes a punchline almost as soon as he steps onto the national stage. With his folksy attitude and bristly beard, the former bush pilot might be popular in the Far West but reminds the rest of the country of a caveman.
Proxmire’s only major achievements are passing a campaign finance reform bill and finally signing the much-delayed Panama Canal Treaty. His budgetary wizardry gets him nowhere with Congress. With the economy recovering, austerity politics are a tougher sell, and the news out of Afghanistan makes defense cuts a non-starter. When Jerry Brown announces his intention to challenge Proxmire for the Third Force Presidential endorsement, the organization, never built for dissent, completely falls apart. McCall’s big names head back to their respective parties. One side of the acrimonious split swipes the mailing list and start talking about a Green Party. Aimless and friendless, Proxmire declines to run in 1984, the twentieth century’s own John Tyler.
First Lady Elizabeth Taylor and her handsome husband enter the White House on the first wave of Boomer nostalgia for Camelot. While the Republican Party is deflated and disorganized – the liberals lost all influence by defecting to the Third Force, but the New Right was battered down in turn by Reagan’s electoral failure – their intrapartisan alliance ticket wins by attacking Proxmire’s defense cuts and promoting a buoyant, vaguely patriotic vision of American grandeur that has been lacking for years. The moral equivalent of war was an inspiration, but now people want the moral equivalent of peace.
It’s content-free Reaganism: most McCallite laws end up staying on the books out of inertia. Ed Meese, Bill Bennett, and the rest are given free rein to bash gays and gin up moral panics, but state-sponsored family values seem a little rich when the first Presidential divorce plays out in lurid detail on every supermarket checkstand. (The Moral Majority backs a third-party bid in 1988, which fails once it becomes clear that Quayle and Symms are being bankrolled by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and a consortium of overseas corporations eager for trade deals). The 3E stands and abortion remains safe, legal, and common. The dovish Warner’s war on the Evil Empire only goes about as far as gladhanding with John Paul II. TTL’s historiography of the Cold War might declare its end in 1975 – everything after Vietnam being a slow simmer down to nonviolent Great Power rivalry.
The conservatives are more successful on the economic front. The Republicans and neoliberal Democrats unite to abolish the ESB completely and “deactivate” the most painful article of the Jackson Act by removing the mechanism for oil price enforcement. (Full repeal of the Act fails, however, so the government retains the right to set prices in another emergency.) There is a credit card boom and Wall Street goes wild: after a Long 70s, it’s finally the 80s of cocaine and padded shoulders. Even the President is now a swinging bachelor. The McCall era is dead and buried, for about a minute.
Jesse Jackson does better than one might expect in 1988, and manages to keep above McGovern levels in the EC. (The farm crisis happens on schedule, seeing as ag policy was not one of McCall’s priorities.) Nevertheless, after failing again with populist liberalism, it’s time for an alt-DLC to take charge, embracing the language of “limits” to attack Republican sleaze and excess.
Meanwhile, an attempt to revitalize the Third Force goes nowhere, since the rich liberals are happy with Warner and the radicals are excited about Jackson. Only a few oddball Westerners get behind Dick Lamm’s write-in bid. Focusing on the two themes of environmentalism and immigration, Lamm invokes McCall’s name at every opportunity as he tries to keep the old dream alive.
The boom of the eighties gives way to a hangover of more stagflation, and the Democrats return for the first time in over two decades with their very own Virginian veteran. Webb’s term is dominated by conflict in the Middle East, Kurdistan having requested aid against Iranian incursions. The American deployment makes history as the first action approved by Congress under the War Powers Act. With the Iranians withdrawing almost as soon as the first US border patrols land, the short, apparently virtuous war and the mood of economic recovery gives Webb the cover to slash regulation and stack the NLUO with building trades leaders and property developers. (Even the international far-left cuts Webb some slack, excited by Abdullah Öcalan’s participation in the Kurdish coalition government – a bright light for socialism as the Soviet Union quietly sheds republics and welcomes American capital.)
The smooth sailing is soon upended by the embarrassing spectacle of Jim Webb publicly feuding with the first woman Vice President. The party had originally selected Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne both as a sop to the liberals and as a counter to their Presidential candidate’s reputation for misogyny. However, the two took an immediate dislike to each other on the campaign trail. A year into their term in office, Webb is making jokes about Byrne’s appearance and Byrne is supporting dissident Democrats in Congress who refuse to vote for Webb’s initiatives.
The always febrile Democrats are beginning to split again, with liberals waking up to Webb’s sexism, his environmentally reckless regulatory bonfire, and his obvious desire for military buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy. Conservatives, meanwhile, are breathing fire over the cracking of NATO, and over a rash of rioting and crime allegedly sparked by gentrification in urban centers. It becomes clear that while Webb’s policies might be broadly popular, nobody really likes him.
1996 is a testosterone fest for the ages, and America waits with bated breath during the debates to see which candidate will throw the first punch. Bob Dornan, the GOP’s id, tosses off homophobic slurs and implies that he chose his vice-presidential candidate for the size of his penis. Jim Webb brags about killing Vietnamese people. The op-ed writers demand a new Third Force. Nobody is satisfied, turnout is low, and when Webb loses, he angrily blames “politically correct liberals” for “forcing” him to run with Governor Brown after several women declined to share the ticket with him.
Dornan and his thin Republican majorities in Congress withdraw from Kurdistan, pass draconian crime legislation, cut social spending and end the 3E’s free contraceptive program and abortion counseling. He even cracks down on the McCall-era cannabis loophole, under which one only need to claim Rastafari identity to buy and sell the scheduled drug. However, the hardest-line Sagebrush Rebels in the west are disappointed. Despite his hatred of “dickless leave-no-tracers,” Dornan is an animal lover, and he lends his support to a bipartisan bill that fully protects America’s remaining old-growth forests.
Indeed, amidst the nasty culture warring clogging up the airwaves throughout the 1990s, environmentalism has stayed a relatively nonpartisan issue. Conservative Republicans might hate the condescending antinatalists at the 3E, and Democrats might blame the NIMBYs at the NLUO for rapidly escalating gentrification, but everyone acknowledges on some level that the excess of the pre-Watergate, pre-McCall order could never stand. Whether they couch it in the language of fiscal prudence, capitalist decadence, or Christian apocalypse, there is no way to turn back the clock. Even Jim Webb, as big on bigness as anybody, happily signed the United States up to the great Jakarta Convention in 1992.
Enter Charlotte Pritt, the Governor of West Virginia, who has managed to refashion McCallism for the proletarian Democratic Party. She asks why so many Americans are miserable, atomized, overworked, and underpaid. Her New Millennium Plan proposes worker self-management, nationally guaranteed family leave, an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, massive investment in clean energy to meet the Jakarta emissions standards, and protectionist barriers against outsourcing and the rapacity of the global market. Limits to growth do not have to mean austerity. There is already enough wealth for everyone in America; it’s time for American workers to enjoy what they’ve built.
While the plan is dismissed as communism by the Webb wing of the Democrats, it has something for everyone else. Labor loves it, of course, apart from the last conservative holdouts who survived Sadlowski and company’s reforms. Lifestyle liberals are enthused by the NMP’s McCall-esque fixation on the spiritual and aesthetic destruction wrought by unfettered markets. Women and black voters find Pritt a welcome contrast to her rival, ex-President Webb, whose comeback campaign is heavy on the “white working class” rhetoric.
She wins the nomination and opens up a slim lead. During the campaign, there is a wave of neo-Nazi bombings of 3E offices and Planned Parenthood clinics, and Dornan, as unfiltered as ever, hints that it might be a false flag operation by the antinatalist Deep State. This does not go over well.
Pritt’s large personal mandate is not matched by majorities in Congress, and the New Millennium Plan does not survive contact with political reality. Everybody can get excited about clean energy projects and more interurban rail, and the United States quickly takes the lead in the former sector, but how does all this stuff about free prescription drugs and college stipends square with the dogma of Limits? Generous maternity and paternity leave laws are the only new social spending to go through, and along with the Supreme Court’s legalization of euthanasia they contribute to a conservative backlash at the polls. Only by the hard work of her labor allies does Pritt scrape to re-election victory, and the result is so close and contentious that it inspires dark references to the Daleys and Jimmy Hoffa.
Pritt’s second term is dominated by the Second Kurdish War. The US takes a supporting role this time, but the collapse of Iran’s longtime puppet government in Iraq and the opening of a wider regional conflict still has domestic ripples as oil prices soar in the depths of winter. It is time to reactivate the Jackson Act. Wearing a parka and a Miners for Democracy beanie, the president signs an executive order reviving the Economic Stabilization Board and imposing rationing. This time, however, the economists on her advisory council have a different ultimate goal in mind.
The strategy laid out in the Black Mountain Memo is to keep rationing permanent, reducing the potential for future supply shocks. However, it goes on to suggest a slow and intentional escalation of prices to wean America off of fossil fuels entirely. Reports of Pritt’s reaction remain contradictory, and prices don’t change significantly for the rest of her term. However, when the memo leaks in the runup to the 2008 election, it confirms many Americans’ fears that the burden of a green, steady-state economic transition will fall on them.
Showing perhaps more courage than sense, Jontz confirms that he would use the executive price-setting power to phase out fossil fuels, with the rise in gas prices offset by progressive cuts to personal income tax. Unfortunately, President Pritt’s longstanding opposition to gasoline taxes was well-documented on video, already packaged for campaign commercials. The Vice President is forced to run against his own administration’s record. Already smarting from a primary battle against John Hickenlooper, who tried to outflank him on the left by promising to reform the NLUO and build housing again, Jontz loses handily to the second woman President.
Linda Smith is a new breed of Republican. In Congress, she voted for elements of the New Millennium Plan, embracing an image as a compassionate conservative and a pragmatic environmentalist; as Governor of Washington she fashioned herself as a champion of low taxes and private property rights; and throughout her career she stood as a staunch Meesean social conservative, attacking euthanasia and spitting venom at The Gays. President Smith’s America is a land of bioswales behind white picket fences, a land where “NLUO reform” means sprawling acres of LEED-certified McMansions, a land where queer communities across the country are besieged under a veil of pseudofeminist rhetoric, a land where the militarized police drive electric APCs. In a word, it is an era of complacency. The country remains on track to meet its Jakarta targets, but by the mid-2010s it is increasingly clear that it will not be enough. Not only were the targets were based on early, optimistic climate models, some countries such as China have simply disregarded them. 2016 is set to be another crisis election.
Susan Sadlowski Garza, the Governor of Illinois, is no mere dynast, although her father’s role in Jackson II and the revitalization of the labor movement definitely boosted her early career. She has restored dignity to her soiled office by crushing the Daley-Madigan machine, and she has led the liberal governors’ resistance to the Smith administration’s institutionalized racism and homophobia. However, at the moment she’s riding on a wave of grassroots enthusiasm from the so-called Millenarian generation, young people transfixed by the Age of Aquarius notion that we are on the cusp of great possibility and positive change. The most radical elements of her coalition are calling for full national mobilization against climate change, including the full implementation of Black Mountain, hard caps on resource consumption, and a final nail in the coffin of Growth.
The shock-jock of white backlash, onetime Cleveland Mayor and onetime head of Democrats for Dornan, has not held elected office in decades but has cruised the primary nevertheless. In his disregard for the GOP’s traditional fiscal reticence, right-wing radio host Dennis Kucinich is President Smith’s natural heir, but his conservatism is anything but compassionate. His campaign pays lip service to the need for climate action, but asks why Americans should have to suffer for others’ sins, blames ecological destruction on the industrialization of China and Indonesia, and darkly repeats old conspiracy theories about the globalist 3E and white genocide. Instead of encouraging the heinous crime of abortion, he insists, we need to close the borders and keep out the immigrants who will spill out of our overcrowded cities and despoil America’s natural splendor.
The choice is clear: ecosocialism or ecobarbarism.