Here's a wild card: 1976.
Ford wins and all the woes of the late 1970's get pinned on the GOP. Watergate, vietnam, "malaise," Iranian hostage crisis, all perceived as a 12-year Republican orgy of incompetence and corruption. There is never a Reagan Revolution (with all that entails) in this timeline! Ted Kennedy (or someone very much like him) wins a landslide in 1980, opening the door for a second Great Society with Democratic super-majorities in Congress.
Makes me sick to read. Not just because that’s the seemingly 9th different scenario that could’ve easily saw the Kennedy’s back in the White House (which I would love although not nearly as much as if it had been a second JFK term, RFK of JFK Jr) - but because the electoral map would be a lot more favorable to Democrats and so many policies which have made our economy imbalanced & unfair - would not have been enacted - we would be far better off today
Oh what could have been
The only problem with this is that the supermajorities would consist of Watergate Babies elected in 1974. That Democratic Congress inaugurated the neoliberal era.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/... Indeed, a revolution had occurred. But the contours of that revolution would not be clear for decades. In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. By 1975, liberalism meant, as Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.
Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.
The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.
IRL, Carter himself contributed to the neoliberal turn for the same reasons.
https://www.salon.com/2011/02/08/lind_reaganism_carter/These things are historically determined, because Capital is historically conditioned. Just as Herbert Hoover's Republicans anticipated the New Deal in response to the Depression, so too did 70s Democrats contribute to the rise of neoliberalism well before the "Reagan Revolution". It may have been married to socially liberal policies, but the results would have been largely the same.
