Makemakean
Mr Makemean
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Again, global phenomenon.
Thatcher did not win in Britain in 1979 because English voters were angry about black people in Mississippi getting civil rights in the 60s.
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Who could be a "Democratic Reagan?"
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Again, global phenomenon.
Thatcher did not win in Britain in 1979 because English voters were angry about black people in Mississippi getting civil rights in the 60s.
I agree. But I think there's a social conservative shift that overlaps with a global economic one, and that one is more local, though.
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Global phenomena have regional causes. America's rightwing swing cannot be separated from Civil Rights backlash. There's a reason Reagan did his 1980 States Rights Speech outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
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And to add on to @Japhy ’s point , you say that like there weren’t civil rights marches in the U.K., or that ‘68 didn’t happen in France, etc. Or for that matter decolonization on a global scale representing an aspect of a similar and related phenomenon which absolutely affected western nations outside the U.S. and that in part what happened in those countries and the countries around them was fed by the reaction to that.
Elektronaut
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None of that is relevant to why the UK shifted to the economic right. The reason why that shift happened across the west is doubtless complex but probably mostly due to the economic contortions of the seventies. Just as with the rightward shift, you also had other common factors occuring across multiple countries like labour unrest.
Saying it happened because there was a civil rights backlash everywhere is just Americentrism, honestly.
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The thread is about US Presidents
Elektronaut
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I'm not saying that there was a civil rights backlash everywhere; I'm saying that there are plenty of global trends that constantly, and consistently, interact with one another - especially in culturally similar countries like the West - and that implying, as was implied, the U.S. Civil Rights situation and backlash that can be ignored as a partial cause because there was nothing similar elsewhere, doesn't work, because similar things did happen elsewhere and those played into the way the world's social, political and economic orthodoxies changed over the course of the 1970s both in their own countries and around the world, and that all of these affected American politics.
Obviously the individual circumstances in each country are as different and individual as each of the countries is, but global trends and local circumstances would both naturally affect what the political winds were in the United States and lead to a Democratic Reagan. Because all of that being said this is a thread about alternate American politics and I didn't believe I had to specify that I was meaning to express how it would affect American politics in a thread about alternate American politics.
EDIT: I will admit, looking back at the post, that may have not been entirely clear.
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Makemakean is wrong to try and write off local occurrences playing a role in why the US turned rightward. Saying Civil Rights didn't play a role in Reagan getting elected is Americentrism is to be completely frank, utterly ridiculous. Thatcher's election might as well have occurred in 1679 for all the relevance it has on this anyway.
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Elektronaut
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I didn't say that. Obviously there's a huge interplay between the Republican right and segregationism post-war, which goes back at least as far as Goldwater lauding segregationist audiences in the south in the early sixties, in preperation for his presidential bid.
It's just not the dominant issue which shifted things right globally. Which was what Makemakean was addressing. I don't think he was dismissing a role, I think he was just putting a different emphasis. If the post-Yom Kippur oil shock hadn't happened, 1976 plays out differently. If the post-Iranian revolution oil shock hadn't happened, 1980 plays out differently. I guess these happened far away though, so don't count.
Makemakean
Mr Makemean
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Yeah, pretty much. The post that I was reacting to said this:
...and my idea was essentially, no, I don't think you can point to a backlash over civil rights as being the key to explaining why America turned rightwards. Did it have an effect, was there a backlash on civil rights? Sure. But there were countless other factors in play, and I would say that for the most part those factors were global in nature.
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Beata Beatrix
Camille Paglia on Judge Dredd
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I mean, ironically, it could well be Reagan himself if you want a liberal actor turned politician. Or it could be Kirk Douglas, or Paul Newman, or Robert Redford, or James Garner or Robert Vaughn from Man from UNCLE.
If you want an era-defining liberal Democrat, I think Ted Kennedy is a good shout, as might be the often-overhyped but still impressive and considerable Hugh Carey, or, God help us all, Jerry Brown. (Consider all Dead Kennedies jokes already told, OK?) I think Brown and friends personify the sort of strange deeply liberal fiscal conservatism that could well become endemic to American politics in the same way Reagan's take on the same idea was in the 'era of limits'.
Visigoethe
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There's probably a pretty good parallel timeline somewhere with Fred Harris/Peter Shore being ATL's version of Reagan/Thatcher. But instead, it is left-wing economic populism combined with scepticism of bureaucracy and a liberal interpretation of patriotism becoming the dominant transformative political ideology.
I think the macro-economic trends are the critical things that you would have to reverse. But maybe you could do something with an alternative Lordstown strike in 1972 resulting in a re-invigorated, decentralized, labor movement and more support for workers' ownership as an alternative to neo-liberalism and de-industrialization. The 1975 New York City bankruptcy is another big turning point.
I think the macro-economic trends are the critical things that you would have to reverse. But maybe you could do something with an alternative Lordstown strike in 1972 resulting in a re-invigorated, decentralized, labor movement and more support for workers' ownership as an alternative to neo-liberalism and de-industrialization. The 1975 New York City bankruptcy is another big turning point.
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In a list I did with @Oppo both did appear as his suggestions for a Post-Reuther consensus America.
I do get the feeling that Fred Harris would be the pick for a Democratic Party that just kept losing throughout the 70s after Nixon, despite going with Moderates.
I think there’s also untapped potential for a story in someone like Harris coming to power but, given the strains of right-wing opposition active within the Democratic and Republican Party’s at the time, gets hamstrung in Congress and then we just have permanent 70’s, permanent stagnation.
I've always gone for Peter Graves as the Democratic expy of Reagan, i believe there were a couple of attempts to get him to run for elected office but he wasn't interested. I think he fits the bill a little better than an A-lister, which Reagan himself wasn't.
Burt Lancaster another for his long history of activism.