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Who could be a "Democratic Reagan?"

I agree fundamentally with the point that there was a general global trend to the right, but I feel the question is more about which actors are controlling the realignment, not whether it was inevitable or not.

Reagan himself was dead-set on winning the White House in spite of his age after ‘76, but you could’ve just as easily had a world where he sat out 1980 and John Connally picks up the mantle of the conservative movement leader. Or, you could have a scenario like described earlier where Ford wins another term and Ted wins in 1980, but instead of being some super muscular liberal, he bows to the pressures within and without his party and implements some sort of austerity/neoliberal agenda (maybe with the exception of Ted’s desire for universal healthcare).
 
What caused the Overton window to shift to the right was the disastrous Carter administration. Carter was not a liberal but the failures of his administration became associated with liberalism.
I’d actually say that it was the Johnson administration that caused the Overton window to move right.
 
This is the Great Society, War On Poverty, Medicare/Medicaid Johnson we're talking about here and not his Libertarian Conservative cousin that no one remembers?
Yes, it was backlash towards all of that in the mid-to-late 60s.
 
Yes, it was backlash towards all of that in the mid-to-late 60s.
That backlash though elected Nixon who economically was essentially your Old School Post-Kenyesian Republican, Nixon didn't really change any of the War On Poverty stuff.

I think the question that is being asked in the Post-Nixon era is one of Economics, of a Monetarist Consensus model which was the main Rightward shift of America politics, of the Conservative force in American Politics embracing Neoliberal consensus leading to the destruction of the Liberal Reforms of the 60s.

Reagan was that conclusion for the shift.
 
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I think Goldwater was the catalyst and Reagan the resolution though.
I realised I should have used Conclusion, balls.
Civil rights is what created the backlash I think.

But injecting the economic agenda wasn't necessarily a given.
Like the only other administration that I can think of during the Nixon period that tried to Liberalise the economy was Ted Heath's attempt in 1972 which lead to the economy crashing and him eventually losing the election. There was the beginnings of the Neoliberal Market Economy shift but it was the flood in the late 70s.
 
*Smacks Head Against Desk when I remember Pinochet and Shock Tactics*

Yeah but then when you're dictator you don't care about the fact the material conditions for it aren't here if the ideology is.

In the US it needed to gather enough popular support to happen, which happened with the construction of a large middle class under the New Deal with enough of a buy into the capitalist system to be convinced to throw themselves and their children to it, combined with a shock making people seek answers.
 
As long as this pivot to the left doesn't have to also take place in the early '80s, I think this is doable or even something that you can argue has actually happened with, say, Obama - go back to 2004 and gay marriage is legal in one state, 24 million less people are insured, and the progressive standard-bearer from Vermont talks about how he wants to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. That's a decade and a half ago. You can point to areas where Obama didn't shift the discourse left, or that he bears hardly any concrete responsibility for (gay marriage) but I think one has to be in full on "we have never won ever" lefty misery mode not to notice that he presided over the Overton window sliding left just like Reagan presided over it sliding right.

Frankly, Carter and Clinton are more exceptions than the rule in cringing away from the core tenets of their own party and getting little to nothing in return (in fairness, I think both were trying to cope with the wave that Reagan rode rather than on principle hating the poor, at least going off of Carter's career post-presidency and Clinton's career pre) and so most successful ATL Democrats are likely to meet this criteria, just because most successful partisans do shift their country in the direction of their party.
 
Civil rights is what created the backlash I think.

But injecting the economic agenda wasn't necessarily a given.

I think Goldwater was the catalyst and Reagan the resolution though.
That's part of it, but keep in mind Goldwater bandied about his ideology in Arizona in the 50s and changed both AZ political culture and the AZGOP long before that. You also see similar phenomena in California but a relatively stronger union base at least delayed it somewhat (though not by much - see Jerry Brown, who frankly cannot hold a candle to his father)

I think the culprit here is the postwar rise of suburbia, which frankly is a reaction to decisions mostly made at the end of WWII.

If it's only social liberalism you need a Reagan type for, that would be Obama as mentioned above. Or with slightly different political choices, Jerry Brown.
 
That's part of it, but keep in mind Goldwater bandied about his ideology in Arizona in the 50s and changed both AZ political culture and the AZGOP long before that. You also see similar phenomena in California but a relatively stronger union base at least delayed it somewhat (though not by much - see Jerry Brown, who frankly cannot hold a candle to his father)

I think the culprit here is the postwar rise of suburbia, which frankly is a reaction to decisions mostly made at the end of WWII.

If it's only social liberalism you need a Reagan type for, that would be Obama as mentioned above. Or with slightly different political choices, Jerry Brown.

Yeah suburbia and its populating white middle class is likely to be a big part of it, I agree.
 
Just realised rereading the opening question that if we can have any time period I could say that Walter Reuther being on a JFK/LBJ ticket as Veep and then muscling his way into the White House is the best way in a Post 1950s America to gain a Muscular Liberal/Social Democratic America.
Didn't @gentleman biaggi do something with a similar premise?
 
Kirk Douglas would be an excellent choice as far as actor turned politician goes, but that wasn't particularly what you were asking. Someone like McGovern would work quite well if he was successful in '72. Birch Bayh, our favorite founding father, works as well.
 
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