Finally fed up by the intransigence of the party’s conservatives, who forced him to accept a second-rate right-winger as Vice President, FDR walks out of the Democratic Party as soon as World War II comes to an end to create the truly progressive ticket he and Wendell Willkie had long planned. Unfortunately, both Roosevelt and Willkie die before they can consolidate power. President Pappy retreats pell-mell from world affairs and pisses off so many New Dealers that not only does he lose the Presidential nomination in 1948, the Liberal Party actually wins despite its decapitation.
The left’s answer to Thomas Dewey, accomplished young Frisco DA Pat Brown, does his best to rebuild ties with the rapidly Finlandizing countries of Western Europe and to rebuild a new ruling coalition without the Southern reactionaries. To that end, he embraces the labor movement and encourages the CIO’s Project Dixie to break the rump Democrats’ power – leading to him being smeared as a Communist. Estes Kefauver rejects such disgraceful McCarranism, hammering union corruption instead of union radicalism, and nips the incipient New Majority in the bud. He leaves it to surrogates to spew misogynist bile at the Liberal candidate, Senator Gahagan. (Ironically so, as moralistic social conservatism and brutal policing becomes the order of the day under his administration.)
Ralph Yarborough is a new breed of anti-racist Southern populist, product of the brief ray of light that was Operation Dixie. Defeating Kefauver on a platform of peaceful internationalism, civil rights, and health care reform, he finds himself just as stymied by the Conservative Coalition as were Brown and Roosevelt before him. In 1964, that coalition becomes a formal body. The Republicans, who have not won a Presidential election in over thirty years and have drifted into permanent third place under the leadership of ideologues such as Barry Goldwater and Joe Shell, take Jack Kennedy’s vice-presidential slot with gratitude.
The sickly, privileged, red-baiter is the darling of the right, and his nail’s-edge victory over Yarborough is a calamity for the American left. Kennedy is widely understood to be a figurehead for a Congress now moving firmly to dismantle the New Deal. When his many illnesses force him to step aside in favor of his vice-president in 1969, nothing much changes, apart from the name on the ballot paper as the two conservative parties merge. Ronald Reagan is another grinning nonentity – at least until the explosive revelations of his contact with Soviet spies in Hollywood, which force him from office.
Richard Nixon draws up a deal with the USSR, ceding political control of the Old World to the Communists in return for free trading opportunities for American corporations and unquestioned US authority over the Americas. Domestically, he oversees superficial racial integration and then turns to the opposition: the Liberal Party and its affiliated unions. High-profile Liberals like Ellis Arnall and George McGovern are systematically destroyed through character assassination; for leaders of the militant black freedom movement, unsatisfied with his paper reforms, the assassination is literal.
Of course, not all D-Rs are happy with the authoritarian turn the ascendant conservatives have taken, and a reformist emerges from the 1980 convention. Lloyd Bentsen ends the Hemispheres of Influence policy, stirs up conflict with the Soviets, and uses the patriotic cover to free political prisoners and relax the Kefauver-era censorship laws. Who knows what would have happened if Bentsen had lived to see a second term – a return to multiparty democracy, or a thermonuclear war?
The President and Vice President are both killed in a magazine explosion while viewing new ships at the Washington Naval Yard, only months before the 1984 elections. Gerald Ford, the longtime House Speaker, attempts to keep America calm by insisting that it was only an accident and that the election will go ahead as scheduled. Ford is a well-known moderate and a member of the establishment, however, and the steadily radicalizing grassroots of the party insist he must be covering up the culpability of black radicals. Protests break out demanding a delay of the election and a full investigation. Eventually, Ford is forced out and replaced by a nonentity while the hard-right leadership in Congress gins up a witchhunt, looking for black nationalists in the Navy.
The belated 1985 elections see a D-R split and a victory for Maddox, a white-supremacist restaurateur who chairs the loosely party-affiliated National Citizens’ Councils. Maddox’s outsider status, his crassness, and his ties to extreme vigilante violence all make the party establishment uncomfortable, but they cooperate with him until the ever-widening military witchhunts start to destroy America’s defense capabilities. When Maddox is overthrown by his fellow Georgian – Jim Carter, the former chief of the submarine service, whose powerful criticism of government tyranny before the McDonald Committee stirred hearts across the country – it is the end both of D-R rule and of the Cold War.
Carter, for whom military rule is anathema, quickly hands over power to ex-President Reagan, whose long-ago Soviet sympathy is now an asset rather than a liability. The short rule of the Continental Congress remains controversial today: sweeping racial justice measures are enacted and political prisoners freed, but most state crimes are brushed under the carpet and little fundamental constitutional change is made.
Bobby Rush, one of those prisoners, is elected on a platform of red-white-and-blue socialism, having abandoned his black separatist politics in jail. During his first term, the federal government takes control of the commanding heights of the economy, develops a national health care system, and establishes reparations for African-Americans. During his second, it all starts to go wrong. The nationalized industries quickly become rife with cronyism and corruption, while Rush himself begins to exhibit grandiosity and a disdain for civil liberties. When he is dumped by his own party before his bid for a third term, Rush sneers that they don’t know what they’re doing: after him, the deluge.
Indeed, after his departure the country begins to veer between stagnant center-right and paranoid far-right. As our septuagenarian president gears up for his fourth term, the Soviet intelligentsia has begun to speculate breathlessly about a new cold war.