Who could have been the Left's Reagan?
- Thread starter Vidal
- Start date
Well, that's my point actually. Indeed to stand as a positive rallying point, it is necessary not to react against another view that has certain empirical strengths, but rather to come from a consistent standpoint of one's own that guides concrete policy.
Let's consider what Reaganism is--clearly not some ideological invention Ronald Reagan came up with out his own brain; Reagan was always a spokesman and a salesman, not a thinker. His success personally was in symbolism, not personal strategic or tactical genius nor deep thought. It was I think critical to his success that he deeply believed this stuff, and in projecting that he was quite sincere, something I think voters could see and credit him for.
The discussion has been focused on the '70s and early '80s, most people trying to position the "Leftist" (in scare quotes because they then aren't positioning them in ideology and policy as leftists but rather as homeopathic Reaganites in their own right, which is the wrong direction--maybe easier to "win" that way, depending on one's assessments of what is possible and can resonate with voters, but the effect is to shift the dialog right, not left) to win in 1980, avoiding '76 like a third rail. I say strike while the progressive iron is hot; a good TL for people serious about a leftward shift of national mentality would be that one by @Yes about McGovern winning in '72, but here we seem to assume that is out of bounds. In even the mistaken IMHO maneuvering to make it '80 instead of '76, there is probably not a Ronald Reagan Presidency to react against; the general rightward drive of the Republicans of OTL is going to be embodied either by someone else, or Reagan much later, or in some cases '76.
I think if Reagan had got in in '76 he'd frame the challenges of Carter's OTL term in ways that get him reelected in 1980, even if in the ATL the USA is objectively worse off. Or of course trigger World War Three in which case electoral debates are rather moot!
With or without a Reagan brand, a lot of forces were converging in the later '70s to promote a distinctly rightward momentum. A lot of people who were basically reactionary against trends others see as positive--racial integration, feminism in general and increasing perception of reproductive freedom as a right in particular, gay rights, etc--along with stuff like detente with the Soviets--aligned with corporate sector actors who saw opportunity to sink a bunch of New Deal era restrictions in pursuit of greater profits, mainly due to the inability of the evolved New Deal/postwar/Cold War routine practices to work well to please anyone in the stagflation crisis. I think we should make no mistake though, people lining up behind deregulation and "supply side" mentality were largely driven by deep ideological resentment of what had in fact been working pretty well up to the end of the '60s.
In fact I believe the post-war/early Cold War economic boom of the West was in some sense built on sand--it was believed that the empirical Keynesian methods embodied in the post-New Deal systems were a permanent and effective fix of the basic dysfunctions of capitalism, but in fact their working well in the 1945-70 period related to circumstances temporary on a generational scale. When the potentials of several related circumstances were exhausted, stagflation under those particular regulatory methods became the new normal. In order to get out of the mire they were in, something had to change.
It is a question of values though, what changes.
The corporate sector is basically opportunist, but also ideological in the sense that they have an obvious preference for private property to be supreme. In good times it is acceptable that workers do well too, but in tougher times, it seems self evident to successful and powerful businessmen that they take priority. After all, they believe themselves (absurdly IMO) to be the creators of wealth and everyone else just lives on their sufferance. So it is in their own enterprises they own and control, and so they think the world should run. They don't mind being Santa Claus when there is plenty to go around, but fundamentally under the jolly exterior, survival in a tough competitive business environment requires one to be unreconstructed Scrooge at heart.
Or worse, we can give Dickens's character moral credit for living himself as frugally as he expected his workers and the "surplus population" to live, or die; plutocrats in general have a double standard. As the politically salient matter of who actually had to go to Vietnam and risk getting shot up or worse, and exposed to all sorts of PTSD inducing horrors, to defend the interests of whom demonstrates. In the coming political generation, Democratic Vietnam vets who actually went in country, or more generally served in the military in regular capacity by regular rules, were a stark contrast to Republican cheerleaders and sneerers at the alleged softness of their opponents--who were of the right generation to have put their bodies where their mouths were, but with few exceptions such as McCain, had just an amazing array of excellent reasons why they themselves did not go. Contrast this to McGovern who had been a WWII bomber pilot, or Carter, a career Navy officer. In this 1970's generation of course such service, as say Bob Dole's (he suffered pain from WWII injuries lifelong) was far more bipartisan.
So this is the base of the Reagan Revolution. A coalition of reactionaries roundly defeated in a landslide in 1964 with Barry Goldwater as their standard bearer versus LBJ (who unlike most other leading politicians of his age, did not serve in WWII, admittedly) who were in fact deeply committed to plain racism, in this post-'64 era often veiled, but the evidence was there to those with eyes to see, allied with the country clubs, projecting a message of a society fundamentally stratified by wealth but with the ideological lure of prosperity for all versus bureaucratic stagnation, a general scapegoating of intellectualism as "effete" to use Spiro Agnew's term, often tied to a religious fundamentalism that gave all this a coherent frame. (To be sure, other devoutly religious persons interpret the Christian message rather differently, but I am talking here about a faction that was cohering as a political alliance).
The advantage the Republicans had then, and have now, is that indeed they do stand for something. This movement has a coherent identity and an agenda justified in terms of its values.
The thing about a centrist Reaganite Lite is that they don't commit to a world view in the same coherent sort of way. What they are doing, as in the Dukakis example where the advocate stresses "deeds not words," is empirically muddling along, taking the institutions as given and incrementally fiddling with them, without much consistency. This is very well when things are working well, and for some it is the goal of good institutions to achieve this state where everything runs on autopilot. That is what the happy face assumption of market based superiority is all about; we are supposed to trust that whatever emerges from the interplay of billions of actors in the market must be the best possible outcome. That presumption is a key part of the Reaganite package.
Thus, the best we get from a "Leftist" who has no alternate consistent place to stand is a slower drift in the same general rightward direction. This is the basic wrongness of many suggestions offered here.
So OTL, Reagan gravitated, by his personal inclinations and character (as perhaps shaped by the beliefs and convictions of his wife Nancy nee Davis) and connections, as a frequently tapped spokesman for corporate interests, into the consistent advocate for this overarching world view. Now of course there was and is diversity within this coalition. I doubt Reagan personally had a lot of animosity for gay people for instance, I suppose his long immersion in Hollywood circles wore off any conditioned homophobia. But his policies on these matters were rather relentlessly hostile.
The fundamental basis of a reactionary, conservative world view is authoritarian after all. Fundamentally, it is about believing that in the diversity of human types, order must be imposed. Libertarian market based reaction is founded on an interpretation of Jeffersonianism that merges with Hamiltonian reasoning quite smoothly to conclude that a good society is one in which the minority destined to drive and rule the age can emerge from the mob, and then the basic inferiority of the common orders not rising to the top in free competition is best embodied by their loyal deference to these natural leaders, taking orders in the workplace without selfish class-based trouble making.
It is a fact that Reagan-Thatcher type authoritarianism is mixed up with certain democratic ideals, although Thatcher, a deeper thinker than Reagan, was pretty forthright about undermining conservative claims to be democratic at all. (Had by some improbable process, no American leader arisen to embody what we call Reaganism OTL, I suppose Thatcher would be taken as the moral leader by default. She did get there first, becoming British PM before Reagan could take office in the USA after all).
Now then, what sort of values would countervail the rightward, authoritarian drift so apparent OTL?
Let us assume that the leaders are no Leninists! It would not be probable any child of the American system allowed to rise to a level of strong Democratic contender for the Presidency in the 1970s or '80s would be a socialist. (I can take this farther back and suggest situations where say Norman Thomas might be in a position to become President, back in the 1940s, perhaps, but the discussion here has pretty much taken the OTL '60s and Nixon's election in 1968 as a given; POD is later).
I think this gives us George McGovern in fact. Coming out of the 1940s, American liberalism cohered around the idea that keeping private enterprise at the center of our society, but suitably regulating it in the public interest, was the key to a good way of life. Having read some of the essays of John Kenneth Galbraith, I believe he expresses the basic world view fairly well. Galbraith and other New Deal era liberals believed that with suitable countervailing power on the corporate sector, the rational interest of even highly centralized, near monopolistic corporations would gravitate toward preserving their operations as institutions, rather than a maniacal focus on profit above all else, and that workers organized in unions in these big enterprises would find common ground with their bosses for cooperative consensual outcomes. It was OK in the view of many New Dealers if the regulatory agencies provided by Federal and state government were in effect captured by the same managers who ran the companies supposedly regulated; in fact the workplace would be a major social and political center run on semi-democratic lines, with unions, as authentic representation of the worker's interests, having a sort of parliamentary function.
In regard to the major social earthquakes of the 1960s and the shaking of confidence in US institutions resulting in the '70s especially with the spectacle of Watergate and its exposure of general abuses of power across the board, a liberal answer is to build on what works and is positive in American society. Social liberalism can be quite forthrightly seen and represented as a healthy and hopeful fuller flowering of basic American patriotic democratic principles, of embrace of diversity and our commonality as free people who have possibility opened to them by the abolition of reactionary repression in the hands of an increasingly awakened public, losing timidity and ceasing to be intimidated.
This of course is exactly what reactionaries fear as the apocalyptic breakdown of order as they perceive it. It is part of the Reaganite package, which would exist to challenge a liberal one should it have found a Lion champion, whether Reagan gets his name on it or not, to attribute any and all problems great or small to the breakdown of such authoritarian order as they assume to be the natural and necessary condition of civilization. It is therefore necessary for a Liberal Left Lion to demonstrate that a decent order with advantages can be approached by humane and fair and open means.
In this context the can of worms opened by the Church committee investigations and Watergate/Vietnam fallout in general is an opportunity as much as a threat. The Reaganite answer was to try to stuff it all back into Pandora's box, to break the law if necessary (as in Iran/Contra) to restore the stealthy, sneaky, hypocritical practices of domestic policing and international manipulations to status quo ante. A McGovernite possible approach is to instead say that the USA holds itself to higher standards and to insist that agencies under the control of the President learn to achieve public protection and order by above board and proper means. Applying such a policy to foreign policy could enable a McGovern-Carter '76 administration to handle various foreign policy challenges quite differently, in a morally consistent and open manner.
Obviously if a person believes all this liberal stuff is so much unicorn magic and twaddle, and the world really is basically a place where rival powers fight one another ruthlessly and the only safety lies in superior force and guile, such a policy must be doomed to fail. If so, there is no basis for a leftist analog of Reagan anyway and the Reaganites are just fundamentally right.
In terms of domestic policy such as battling stagflation, a liberal of this type, observing that when the chips are down the corporate sector is increasingly ruthless against their workers and the common welfare in general, will gather political support in the grassroots to standing up to corporate malfeasance quite as much as that of FBI and CIA shenanigans, making explicit the principle that the workplace is not just a private deal between a boss and each individual worker, but a social institution embodying much of the power of our nation. It might be that attempting to reform the workplaces piecemeal will show itself to be manifestly a lost cause, and then a President whose top priority is the welfare of the common citizen might rethink the approach to move away from the comfortable platitudes that social welfare would largely work out as an amicable consensus between workers and bosses, and instead turn to national institutions to set various floors under the population, explicitly and forthrightly justifying the reasons why the wealthy of the USA should pay higher taxes on the grounds that the overall success of the nation benefits them disproportionally as persons, in proportion to their wealth in fact. That their wealth and its secure, stable enjoyment, both on a personal scale and more importantly in their control of the work of the nation, is secured by public consensus that they play a vital role, but that does not make them the sole arbiters by divine right either.
So a concrete instance would be giving up on hoping that say health care would be taken care of pretty much by all workers being represented by a union that negotiates a good and adequate form of coverage in the private market with their employer, and turning toward developing a comprehensive public option that all citizens can fall back on. This is of course redistributive in nature; if we fund it entirely out of Federal taxes, the rich are paying for the healthcare of the poor. (Then the unions can drop negotiating for piecemeal packages subject to the whims of their bosses year to year, the employers can drop their share of funding and the general headache of these negotiations).
Where Reaganites, as a logical conclusion of their privatized form of authoritarianism, sought to eliminate public support of higher education in favor of loans that formed a lucrative profit opportunity, it might go largely unremarked and taken for granted as continuity with the recent past that college funding stems largely from Federal grants instead, as had been the case for decades. (In turn, this reliable but constrained source of funding might prevent the spiraling rise of college costs that happened OTL). This would not be something McGovernites could make a lot of hay politically over, since in the ATL no one knows what the OTL reality would turn into. It would in fact be a point of objectively conservative continuity with past practices that worked well enough. But maintaining and expanding this support, both via subsidizing individual student tuition and ongoing and expanded grants for institutional purposes to the universities, would be a concrete and consistent part of a populist-liberal ideology.
Along these lines, we might see heavier than OTL funding of community colleges, as practically free to citizen attendees, with few strings in the form of a prescribed intense academic course to follow, rather citizens of all ages, from high school students undertaking some intensive study toward their planned college or career future, to displaced workers learning new trades or just taking general culture classes for their own self-chosen enlightenment and engagement. Gradually such institutions could expand their scope and offer a strong alternative to more traditional colleges, and a lifelong open door to academia as individual citizens choose to take it a la carte. This would go a long way toward redressing basic problems in our K-12 institutions I think.
The problem with K-12, from a liberal-libertarian point of view, is that like many social institutions universal public education of children is a double-edged thing. On one hand, it is definitely a source of training and one hopes even sometimes comprehensive education, which has value for the children enrolled. On the other--frankly one reason public schools exist is to take children off the labor market. If we follow through on Reaganite ideological logic, all families should be self-reliant, and that includes taking responsibility for their children's education. But realistically in the sort of polarized by wealth society they assume the natural base state of things to be, many families are in fact going to be desperate for income, and we know what happened in the classical liberal (in the European and more academically proper sense, not the loose sense of a euphemism for soft progressivism that has been current in the USA at least until recently, that I am calling say McGovern a Liberal Lion) regimes of Britain and the USA, is that child labor proliferated. Indeed in a classic Jeffersonian ideal society of small property owners, mostly farmers, it was normal and necessary for quite young children to do economically important chores, even heavy and hazardous farm work, so it was unclear where the boundaries lay between that and a situation where a child works 16 hour days 6 days a week with only 8 on Sunday as a day of rest, for a pittance of a wage that barely pays for their own upkeep but without which that child, left solely to the meager abilities of their own parents, would surely starve. But this is in fact the kind of thing that naturally emerges in an unregulated capitalist marketplace; obviously the availability of very cheap child labor causes the wages of adults to also spiral downward, locking in and perpetuating a gross social evil as the natural way of things. Public schools exist in part to check this spiral by taking the kids off the market, and this then requires they be herded up and kept busy at school, because if we just let them roam around loose quite a few of them will offer to work for money, under the table and criminally if necessary. There are other and one might say better reasons to require higher education of teens, not to mention elementary education as a basis of fundamental citizenship, but this is in fact I think a decisive element in why and how universal public education to the age of 18 became the norm in America.
So the kids are in school, but a lot of them would just as soon not be there. How we achieve better outcomes for them while they are stuck there is a deep moral obligation that has to be solved; they didn't ask to be there! (I think it is not inconceivable we can approach the problem creatively in such a fashion that larger percentages do want to be there, while accomplishing actual education at least as efficiently and effectively as we do now; this is of course part of my leftist perspective).
But anyway, massive support of public community colleges given a very broad academic mandate to address quite high levels of academic achievement on an a la carte, take it or leave it basis, would go a long way toward remediating the basic shortfalls of mandatory K-12 education. Adults, young but really of all ages, have a different perspective and can rationally and freely decide to commit to education they want, if we can remove heavy financial barriers.
I'm giving broad outlines here of a world view quite different than Reagan's, that does not require a foil of being against Reaganism to stand as positive guiding values on an American patriotic basis. This is what I am talking about, making such values work concretely to demonstrate them, and that they have enough continuity with the practicalities and aspirations of common American life to serve as an alternative center around which large numbers of US citizens converge as The American Way.
It does have to be positive and not negative. Reagan symbolized and championed a right wing authoritarianism with a libertarian guise and inspired enthusiasm and devotion toward it among people it was objectively harming. As I leftist, I do credit my side with more intellectual and moral integrity and I think we could have such a thing as I am projecting onto McGovern without hypocrisy or self-deception--at any rate, any self-deception involved will be discovered, and handled in the light of the basic principles as a call for further progress along the same lines.
I do think that such progress would in the long run proceed through social democracy toward democratic socialism and ultimately lead to the abolition of market regimes as obsolete as well as dysfunctional in some aspects and oppressive in others. But that would be based on working out the possibilities of regulated capitalism incrementally, not some sweeping imposition overnight. McGovern would not set out to do that, though if that is the direction it progresses in--lawfully, peacefully, productively--I think he would approve in retrospect. He would not, in 1976, be setting out to abolish American capitalism; he would in fact sanely and sincerely believe he is strengthening its foundations, and his honesty in that conviction might carry across to the general electorate.
That would be a Left Lion in action, doing these things out of consistent and widely adopted principle consistent with deep American values.
It is as I stress a matter of values and goals. A lot of people credit Nixon with being some kind of liberal; actually he was I think someone who would be quite pleased with the way global neoliberalism has developed and the degree to which a New Deal liberal mentality has been discredited, but he lived and worked in an era where those values (in need of updating and revision but not I think fundamentally wrongheaded in fact) were quite strong, the generation that personally experienced the Depression and WWII was in charge of things and they were very suspicious of going back to the bad old days before FDR. I think your implication that Reagan was "less conservative" is based on an illusion projected by these limits still being a tight squeeze on what he could get away with in his day too. In fact if we go back to the writings and vision of conservatives such as William Buckley at the very height of the apparent triumph of a New Deal based consensus in the later '50s and early '60s, we see consistent reasoning from their premises consistent with the most alarming reaction we have seen articulated any day, from theirs and before to the present day.
Reagan was a consistent reactionary who had to contend with a lot of liberal institutional inertia.
Also, people aren't generally cartoon villains, out to do Evil for the Lulz. People like Buckley, and Reagan, and Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh, and so on, all believe in this stuff in some sense. This is honestly how they think the world works, and how things ought to be.
So Reagan for instance might not have been a personal homophobe, and perhaps he adopted what amounted to quite hostile policies not out of any deep animosity but out of the broader values of conservative authoritarianism. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is the basic framework of conservative morality after all. It is all about connections, place in society, and individuals who either enjoy standing themselves or can get the protection of someone who does can do any damn thing, provided they avoid much in the way of public scandal and avoid hurting anyone--who matters. People Who Matter is a key and fundamental idea of authoritarian dominator civilization as we have inherited it for many thousands of years since the invention of agriculture made plunder and exploitation profitable. People Who Matter must receive respect and deference and presumed to be exemplars of propriety by virtue of who they are. It is important not to blow the cover of the facade of order and virtue. But if one avoids the sin of scandal, privilege is what properly goes to authority in this world view. There is one rule for them, and whomever they whimsically take under protection, and another for the mob which is naturally sullen, unruly, and inclined to take everything down to wrack and ruin if not policed and generally ruled over.
In that context, the important thing is to maintain ostensible standards of virtue, not to guarantee these are actually practiced. Between the privileged indulging their privilege and the ruled mob sneaking off to get up to any crimes they can get away with, "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" as conservative-reactionary apologist George Gilder quoted someone or other back in his heyday in the early '80s. Conservative morality then is built on a structure of rules that need not be pragmatic in the least; they are basically just open license for authorities to crack down on anyone, as they elect to, like laws against jaywalking. That is the function homophobia for instance plays--anyone can be accused of being sexually deviant, the power lies in making the charge, not in evidence for or against it in actual fact. Conservatives fear that by removing such arbitrary sticks to beat people with, order must fail and society collapse. In this fear they are I suppose generally sincere. They don't put much faith in the idea of justice; what matters to them is power, whether one is on a team that is righteous because it wins thus demonstrating its success.
So Reagan possibly had zero animosity against the gay folk whom he brushed off (leaving them to twist, without the moral example of a President accepting them openly as real people, in general gay-bashing bigotry which is of course often murderous, and then to leave a public threat disease to proliferate by selective neglect of the welfare of the population it was simplistically perceived to target).
Reagan I think disoriented and confused many of his most complacent and strident backers when he saw ABC TV movie The Day After dramatizing (in soft focus actually) the horrors of a nuclear exchange, and asked his Defense advisors if they could assure him the terrors of the movie were all made up and a real war would be less awful. When these advisors, put on the hook like that, could not offer him any such assurances--he shifted his policy from his tough guy looking for a righteous fight to serious negotiations with the Soviets toward avoidance of such war. Prior to the ABC movie I think we have every reason to think he really did have quite an optimistic notion of a winnable nuclear war; the fact that it could shake him does show he was not a total monster after all. (Also that he was no great intellect of course, though a broader concept of intellect gives some credit to the kind of thing actors can do; I believe he was quite shrewd when it came to projecting his own image; that was his job more or less, and he knew how to do that). His turnaround on the US/Soviet hard line confrontation was a definite break in the ranks, but I think this says more about the basic irrationalities of authoritarian reaction than it does about Reagan not being one. Something got around the ideological defenses.
But of course my whole notion that this sort of Machiavellian world view is not the only truth and not the final answer to how humans should live depends on the idea that minds can be changed.
No, I make a distinction between pragmatism that avoids thinking too deeply about where things are headed and where they should head, versus having a long term vision that is at any rate different than the broad coalition Reagan became the icon and cheerleader of. And specifically that a left liberalism can in fact have moral integrity and intellectual cohesion and someone who fully qualifies as a Left Lion to be an alternative to Right Reagan will have to embody that consistent conviction. Maybe as with Reagan someone else can do the intellectual heavy lifting, but the common welfare liberal values have to be held as imperatives by the person who becomes their symbol. However good or bad they are as an intellectual laying it all out in detailed logic, they have to have the instinct to veer in this way, to judge these are the correct choices to make, and to express their grounds for doing so so that the broad public has a lot of people in it who either are guided or have their minds changed by this example, or else recognize it as an expression of values they have shared all along.
We could in fact have some fellow I suppose who seriously does not go that deep and just pragmatically kludges along, and just happens to express some behaviors that can be intelligibly understood as consistent and grounded in a congenial world view. But I think the odds are dead against it. Someone who does not, in some fashion or other, think for themselves and develop some consistent and workable values, will be guided in their bumbling by conventional wisdom, which has nothing new to offer to inspire public minds, or take as exciting novelties or clever tricks to apply to particular problems, measures that have a reactionary effect, in part because the culture was abuzz at high levels with apologists for reaction in the 1970s. Certainly the corporate sector as well as other influential types will applaud and encourage bumbling in that direction!
So I think I am actually saying the dead opposite, that since the path of least resistance in a society with authoritarian and plutocratic elements mixed into it is to defer to that reactionary path, a Left Lion must be more thoughtful and self-critical and clear in their minds how their values oppose taking the path of least resistance and must justify first to themselves the harder work and greater risks involved in taking a higher road--but if taking a higher road can work and pay off, it should then be fairly easy for such a person to explain lucidly and in a manner that resonates, why it was necessary and good to do as they did, and why these values should guide future decisions.
marathag
Banned
Carter started the ball rolling on many things that many gave full credit to RR, like deregulation, getting tougher on crime, reducing waste in Government, and the post Vietnam military buildup.
No RR, that trend is still ongoing. People were getting tired of what the Left(and even Tricky Dick's Leftish take on the Economy) had been doing since JFK was shot.
Ni Reagan? someone like him would fill that void
Carey or Askew n '80 after a Fod second term would force things quite a bit to the left in some ways. National healthcare, a basic income, stronger union rights, some sort of jobs guarantee.
I know Carter did a lot of stuff that is reasonably framed as Reagan Lite, which is precisely why I dismiss the idea that someone who sees Reaganism as we know it as pretty much inevitable, which you seem to be flat out declaring here, because it is basically correct, can be a "Left Reagan." As I said it is little different than meeting the challenge of Moon Landing by the year 1000 by jiggering with the calendar so year One is 1000 AD by the OTL calendar. If "Left" can only mean "Right Lite" then calling Carter Left Reagan is just fooling around with labels.
What is needed is someone who can approach the challenges of the age from a forthright, thought out, distinct and coherent leftward position that by its nature resists the rightward drift and inspires people to have renewed confidence in precisely what you write off as doomed and discredited. Perhaps McGovern, and perhaps not anyone very famous OTL, can do this in the mid-70s or early '80s and perhaps it is thus pragmatically impossible until a later date or with an earlier POD. Going later takes us into Current Politics territory, the boundaries of which have never been defined but I have seen someone actioned on that grounds with regard to a thread then in the 1880s--using rhetoric that would be more authentic to the OTL 1880s than today to boot. Going earlier might be more productive but I suppose we are stuck in a 1970-1990 time frame for reasons I have not been challenging.
So your ability to characterize Nixon's actions as "Leftist" seem to demonstrate you reject the idea there could possibly be a meaningful leftist alternative to Reaganism, to propertarian and authoritarian neoliberalism basically, Thatcherism. You might be correct; I don't think so obviously.
As to whether anyone allowed anywhere near power in the American system of the 1960s and '70s could possibly embody a principled leftward stand, which if we reject some outre ATL form of radicalism (say, someone reads Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed and sets about to make Odoniansim a real revolutionary movement--you can blame LeGuin in part for my own radicalism, as my screen name should demonstrate and disclose openly) or any association with Marxist radicalism, would pretty much have to be a subtle but still meaningful deep conviction in the populism of a New Deal liberal mentality, along the lines of Harry Truman's quite sincere Common Man populism.
But such principles would foreclose the possibility of such moves as appointing Volcker to the Federal Reserve Board; they would rather point toward having taken measures to reform the Fed and many other institutions somewhat earlier.
It would not foreclose the "Carter Buildup" of US military forces by any means--as noted McGovern was a WWII veteran and as much a Cold Warrior as anyone, he certainly would not be seeking to undermine or weaken US military security! But it might well involve taking a different line toward the nature of military contracts, and toward personnel policy within the military.
It would certainly suggest, in the name of higher principle, more constructive attempts to negotiate a relationship responsibly with various agencies in say Nicaragua and Iran, perhaps restraint in the matter of arming the resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (perhaps indeed arming them in part, to demonstrate capability and in service of the principle of national autonomy, but then offering to mediate some kind of truce rather than count on turning Afghanistan into the USSR's Vietnam).
If you really believe Nixonomics deserves to stand as an example of authentic leftist principles in action, then we are of course talking about different worlds that work differently, and words that don't seem to mean much at all.
Again, if we think in categories that are 100 percent conventional in the typical language of the day about what constitutes "Left" versus "Right" we are in fact surrendering the ball to the notion that Reaganism as we know it is inevitable. If Humphrey or Kennedy or McGovern insist on dealing with organized labor in entirely conventional terms, then they hae nothing new to offer on that front.
The problem with the 1970s was that business as usual was not working. A left alternative to the corporate, conservative favored "revolution" of denouncing and discarding New Dealism in favor of Old Time Religion in general policy must seek new approaches to revive the values they seek to conserve.
Now, perhaps Humphrey and Kennedy are indeed more deeply leftist, maybe.
Humphrey had one shot at being President--well, two, if we can envision an easy fix for Vietnam that makes that problem go away, but Vietnam in retrospect I think was a landmine we had to step on somewhere, sooner or later. What was repugnant and demoralizing about the Watergate/Vietnam revelations era was in large part exposure of practices the US global security establishment indulged world wide, and routinely. The difference was the Vietnamese gave us a lot more effective resistance than usual, and this led to a more massive overt intervention that ripped the usual mask of plausible deniability and lack of general public interest off. So I don't think it is reasonable to Hail Mary Vietnam as an issue away. The process of our sinking into that quagmire was the outcome of bipartisan Cold War foreign policy consensus after all; butterfly JFK's assassination and he is the one facing the heat LBJ took OTL. Get Nixon in in 1960--and perhaps we get WWIII, and perhaps we get Nixon discredited and a Democratic slam dunk in '68. Vietnam is going to happen, and it is going to be a bear politically, I suppose.
So discounting the prospect of HH sitting faithfully by LBJ while being abused by him the way Johnson generally did with people, and getting the 1972 nomination by party coronation as we'd then expect, he is up against partisan fatigue by then anyway--but that's not going to happen, LBJ can't weasel out of Vietnam and it will eat him up, so that puts us on OTL track, with HH the diversion Democratic candidate.
Well gosh, he almost won actually. In a three way race with George Wallace spoilering it as a right wing populist, he and Nixon were neck and neck in popular vote (neither getting a PV majority). Just a few fluctuations here and there, and Humphrey wins and we have to wait a while to have Dick Nixon to kick around again--if a second loss in a decade does not manage to sink him once and for all finally.
Here's the thing though; I think for a forthright, consistent, inspirational moderate left wing creed distinct from the flawed elements of New Deal liberalism to form, we need the challenges that Watergate and Vietnam brought to the national table. We need to see stuff like COINTELPRO and the nature of Phoenix in Vietnam exposed. We need to see that business as usual involves quite UnAmerican practices, as we like to think of ourselves anyway, and for someone to come forth and say it is past time for us to abandon these relics of a barbaric and brutal past and take a higher road in practice as well as rhetoric.
Without such challenges, we are limping along on patches and band-aids, and no deep soul searching can reframe the basic enlightenment humanism of the New Deal mentality to make it truer to its premises.
The USA has been juggling the live grenade of deep radical implications ever since 1776. The Patriot revolutionaries, most of whose leaders were quite wealthy establishment men as well as pretty well educated, knew they were opening Pandora's Box when they invoked the principle of democracy. Within a handful of years, John Adams's own wife was admonishing him in letters "not to forget the ladies," and calls for universal adult (male) suffrage were going forth, along with abolitionist appeals--this largely out of New England of course, but not entirely. Time and again critical political struggles have been waged over just how much farther we should allow the concept of universal equality and equal rights for all to ramify further, or whether it is past time for a reactionary rollback, and we certainly have had those too.
To play a role comparable in magnitude to Reagan's iconic one OTL, I think we need a pretty deep revision.
Being a darling or champion of "organized labor" is ambiguous in this context in particular. Certainly no heir of the New Deal's legacy of broad vision could attack unions categorically, nor seek to attrit them as an evil judiciously. But just rolling over and pretending the unions that exist are somehow paragons of democracy themselves is not very principled either. What a left champion would be doing is seeking to get the unions to reform themselves, and not to limit and reduce their scope but in service of broader and deeper expansion--on principles ordinary people (if not necessarily very many managers or corporate board members) understand and approve. Unions as they were OTL at this date were often quite corrupt, narrow in their thinking, and sometimes socially reactionary. As a leftist, to me the solution is not to try to limit or destroy them but to reform them--and to alter the roles they play, to be a bit more explicitly political, regarding the labor-management relationship as something which, if we are to view it at all humanistically, has to be seen as basically political, not just a matter of private contract.
So it might be someone who is not overtly hostile to unions but has not been favored in a close relationship with them might be in a better position to rearrange the board a bit like that. Certain unions, headed by certain figures, will, or rather their leaders will, see these reforms as a threat.
But being able to stand up to them--then see to it that the outcome is not union busting as such but rather reform within labor organization--can give such a person credibility to champion a more usefully democratic form of labor representation and independence.
Overall, I figure that to say Humphrey, or Ted Kennedy without a Chappaquidick scandal around his neck, just plays the game and gets elected and incrementally massages old New Deal/Great Society platitudes in subtly evolutionary ways, is asking for a soft bell jar of an ATL without the challenges of OTL. Without such trials as Vietnam and Watergate and the whole rise of the visible counterculture in the later '60s, we don't get the necessary wake up calls to rethink things, but with those in place--it is rough water indeed. Without Nixon's self-immolation, and the tough problems of the 1970s, probably there is little traction for anything but business as usual, and in the mean time, right wing forces are brewing and marinating and fermenting away and will take center stage sooner or later--the question is, what stands on the other side of the stage? An effective counterbid for the allegiance of popular minds, or just stubborn reaction against it?
I'm quite pleased with the discussion! I am really looking for a two-term Democratic president who, could win in the 1980s (or perhaps with some ATL its the 90s), and preside over two terms of economic success, etc. that makes him universally adored by the left of the American spectrum, much as Reagan is revered among the right.
Real success on the left involves pioneering largely unexplored territory, we can't really know what the exact nature of success on leftist terms would actually be, if we start from a premise of someone within the narrow and especially anti-leftist US normal Cold War era spectrum. Such a person, or rather movement somewhat coordinated and led by such a President, would be making it up as they go along, without benefit of established academic theory or plain example.
But I think such success involves deepening and widening the principle that we are all in this together, that a society is a community of people with reciprocal obligations that exists in order to enable individuals of our inherently social species to survive and if possible, prosper. It is a rebuke, or preemption, of radical individualism such as the Libertarians proclaim as principle, while still affirming that each individual remains unique and therefore we should cherish everyone, not just those born lucky in the better off classes with suitably white skin. Success in such an approach seems sure to build solidarity and general commitment to a form of highly enlightened and altruistic patriotism, to the claim that the American Way is better because it is devoted to enabling individuals to be their best.
On the pragmatic level, I think it should be clear that a deep inherent tendency of capitalism is to concentrate wealth, and that therefore countervailing institutions that redistribute it downward actually help sustain capitalist forms in a state where they seem to work well and according to textbook principles.
The main reason such an approach would seem to be dangerous and sure economic disaster is the "strike of capital," is the persons of great wealth asked to pay a huge bill for a society they don't control fully sulking and withdrawing their investments, or transferring them overseas. Managing this is going to be a minefield for such a movement, but one possibility is that if hostile capitalists seek to hoard or otherwise withdraw, that opens the field of competition to others, who might be more willing to play the liberal game--after all, it gives them the opportunity that otherwise would have been monopolized by the established players. This creates a cadre of alternate corporations and owners who have some committment to this evolving variant and leaves the more hostile conservatives to twist in the wind without the benefits of access to the US market system--which in the 1970s and '80s remained the biggest and most potentially lucrative by far. 60 percent of an expanding USA might be worth more than 90 percent of one stagnating as OTL, and if not actually worth more--at any rate, to these lean and hungry (but willing to play by nicer rules for the opportunity to get into the game) new players, it is all money new to them, even if it is a lot less than what their predecessors would have demanded.
So these kinds of things change the rules of the game, and might change the basic dynamics, alter the form of the business cycle--indeed a major goal of any moderate-left President serious about the welfare of the general masses would be to seek to smooth out and effectively abolish the business cycle, seeking to find the tools necessary to sustain steady and intelligent growth on a sustainable and predictable basis.
So again I don't think we should be thinking in terms of navigating the shoals of known OTL economic patterns, trying to time Presidential victories to phase into OTL booms and upturns which after all happened on neoliberal terms. This is just a matter of seizing masks.
A serious Left Reagan would be someone who presides over hashing out new methods that make for better prosperity for all, sustainably, and thus crumples up the economic map of our OTL history and tosses it out the window.
But I think such success involves deepening and widening the principle that we are all in this together, that a society is a community of people with reciprocal obligations that exists in order to enable individuals of our inherently social species to survive and if possible, prosper. It is a rebuke, or preemption, of radical individualism such as the Libertarians proclaim as principle, while still affirming that each individual remains unique and therefore we should cherish everyone, not just those born lucky in the better off classes with suitably white skin. Success in such an approach seems sure to build solidarity and general commitment to a form of highly enlightened and altruistic patriotism, to the claim that the American Way is better because it is devoted to enabling individuals to be their best.
On the pragmatic level, I think it should be clear that a deep inherent tendency of capitalism is to concentrate wealth, and that therefore countervailing institutions that redistribute it downward actually help sustain capitalist forms in a state where they seem to work well and according to textbook principles.
The main reason such an approach would seem to be dangerous and sure economic disaster is the "strike of capital," is the persons of great wealth asked to pay a huge bill for a society they don't control fully sulking and withdrawing their investments, or transferring them overseas. Managing this is going to be a minefield for such a movement, but one possibility is that if hostile capitalists seek to hoard or otherwise withdraw, that opens the field of competition to others, who might be more willing to play the liberal game--after all, it gives them the opportunity that otherwise would have been monopolized by the established players. This creates a cadre of alternate corporations and owners who have some committment to this evolving variant and leaves the more hostile conservatives to twist in the wind without the benefits of access to the US market system--which in the 1970s and '80s remained the biggest and most potentially lucrative by far. 60 percent of an expanding USA might be worth more than 90 percent of one stagnating as OTL, and if not actually worth more--at any rate, to these lean and hungry (but willing to play by nicer rules for the opportunity to get into the game) new players, it is all money new to them, even if it is a lot less than what their predecessors would have demanded.
So these kinds of things change the rules of the game, and might change the basic dynamics, alter the form of the business cycle--indeed a major goal of any moderate-left President serious about the welfare of the general masses would be to seek to smooth out and effectively abolish the business cycle, seeking to find the tools necessary to sustain steady and intelligent growth on a sustainable and predictable basis.
So again I don't think we should be thinking in terms of navigating the shoals of known OTL economic patterns, trying to time Presidential victories to phase into OTL booms and upturns which after all happened on neoliberal terms. This is just a matter of seizing masks.
A serious Left Reagan would be someone who presides over hashing out new methods that make for better prosperity for all, sustainably, and thus crumples up the economic map of our OTL history and tosses it out the window.
I think a “Left Reagan” doesn’t imply socialism or anything like that. Just an influential Democrat who fundamentally changes the party. Such a role could be filled by someone like Gore, making the party generally centrist but with a focus on science and technology.
Thomas1195
Banned
This is already OTL with Clinton and the New Democrats. The OP most likely wants Liberalism a.k.a American non-socialistic leftism to remain dominant within the Dems.
Does it have to be one president, or could it be more than one, as in one dies in office, allowing another to ascend? For example, might we be able to have Ford win in 1976, then Henry "Scoop" Jackson die in office during his first term after having been elected in 1980? Then, say, Vice President Askew becomes the progressive hero?
It certainly would not initially, What happens long term--depends on what one believes is possible.
Sticking to conventional wisdom, socialism is at best an unworkable Utopian pipe dream and serious intelligent people believe a fundamentally capitalist society is the eternal fate of humankind, and ought to be thankful that is so.
If that is so, then of course a centrist technocratic focus stringing the dying unions along on life support until they go under and doubling down on the notion capitalism is a meritocracy, telling the majority who are losers it is their own damn fault for not being smart enough or diligent enough to be one of the big winners, solidifying the support of "middle classes" who are actually generally middle managers, engineers, and so forth, letting flaky marginal people rant and rave, is a path of success of sorts. But only of sorts, because the logic involved, the world view and values, gives no reason not to go full on Libertarian AnCap, versus corporate techocracy, as the political spectrum, and AnCap has political traction among the numerous losers since the notion is widespread that the tremendous concentration of wealth we observe and could observe in the low-regulation classic Victorian/Gilded Age surges of capitalist industrialism is some kind of political artifact, and if we tear down government enough to drown it in a bathtub, somehow or other wealth spreads around wider and grows faster. Thus, it amounts to Reaganism Lite which soon is countervailed and dominated by more logically consistent and ideologically resonant full on neoliberalism. The sort of rising polarization of wealth concentrated in the hands of a quite irresponsible casino economy few and the powerless many left with stagnating or declining standards of living, if we make the ASB assumption no one turns to more classically leftist radicalism, is that eternal fate of the future. Picture a Gucci boot, stomping on the faces of the vast majority, its owner sneering "sucks to be you," forever.
Now of course in the USA of the 1970s, a real Marxist is going to be on the fringes ranting, and any politicians placed to be elected will have no truck with the idea that the means of production should be seized and socialized.
But on the other hand, this generation remembers the Depression and the managed solidarity of WWII, and doesn't think it is unAmerican to see to it that capitalism does deliver on the promise of a rising tide that lifts all boats, and does understand that just saying the platitude does not make it so, one has to look and see what the tide is actually doing, and different means of trying to make it rise first of all have different effects on the boats, and some work better than others. A Left Lion is going to be someone who looks to the Common Man as the barometer of success, and doesn't limit their definition of Common Man to corporate middle management levels of income either.
If we undertake to manage the performance of the capitalist based system to intervene in obvious breakdowns and dysfunctions, and manage relief and intervention and regulation with an eye to ard seeing to it living standards and entrepreneurial opportunity are maintained for the smallholders, the low end wage workers and genuinely small businesses, we will find ourselves having to develop quite extensive and sophisticated economic models indeed. In effect, the state will be gradually taking on the function of the capitalist classes, making somewhat different decisions based on different values. If democratic accountability is a real thing at all, and can be maintained and strengthened, then the resulting mixed economy offers less and less rationale for the role of private capitalists as the necessary decision makers of business strategy.
The question is moot if we assume that capitalists, deeply resenting these incremental manipulations, champion a political alliance shutting down these expedients.
But if that does not happen because the regulated economy proves to be a political winner, gaining mass support enough to offset the entrenched power of capital and win over allies who would defer to capitalist direction otherwise, this is my grounds for predicting an evolution toward democratic socialism as a permissible political position and then expanding to become the policy consensus and status quo, euthanizing the belief that markets are essential to prosperity and human freedom.
Apologies; a computer glitch caused an incomplete version of this post to stay up a long time without my being able to finish it!
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