Sliding Doors Moment

 

Every close presidential election in the USA is a sliding doors moment. I don't really know what would have happened if Dewey defeated Truman, but that would have been consequential, because Truman was in charge of putting together the post war order.

What if Nixon had defeated Kennedy? Nixon was one of those conservatives which drove the Republican party down the road of racial resentment and small government mentality. What if he had taken office during the time when the Civil Rights movement were ongoing? There would not be a Kennedy or a Johnson presidency. Or maybe Kennedy would have defeated him in 1964. Maybe he would have pulled off that realignment sooner, since he was the transition between the pre-1968 party system and the post-1980 Reaganite system.

In truth, the Democratic Party coalition was going to break up. For them to be the party of the working class whites, the Dixiecrats and the downtrodden minorities would have been an explosive mix. The Civil Rights movement lit the fuse that would have blown up the party.

If Nixon had been elected in 1960 and become a one-term president, with Johnson or Kennedy taking over in 1964, history might have played out more or less the same. Quite possibly without the Vietnam war. One could only speculate.

What if Al Gore had defeated Bush? If Al Gore had defeated Bush, a lot of the things that would have happened in the Bush term would not have happened. 9/11 may or may not have happened, considering that the second Bush took his eye off Al Qaeda to home in on Iraq. The Afghanistan war might have happened, because Al Qaeda might have struck in any case. But the Iraq war would not have happened.

If the Gore presidency was like Clinton's Gore might not have been able to stop the housing crisis turning into the Great Recession. The US would have been able to start tackling the climate crisis earlier, but sooner or later a Republican would be voted in, and a lot of the progress would have been rolled back.

What if Hillary Clinton had defeated Obama? Hillary Clinton might have been able to claim the presidency. Nobody by this point would have been interested in another 4 more years of Republicans. What would Hillary Clinton have been able to accomplish? It's a little hard to think of her being very different from Obama's. The problem is that she might have been a 1 term president. But then again, I don't think Mitt Romney would have made a terrible president. And then maybe Obama might decide to have another go, I'm not sure, but there's this possibility that Obama would have found it harder to win the presidency at a subsequent attempt? I'd say that Reagan, Nixon and maybe Biden did not win the presidency on their first attempt.

What if Hillary Clinton had defeated Trump? I'll leave the historians to discuss this.

There's this foreignpolicy article about the different political party systems over the years. It seems as though the semi-stable one that we've had for the last 30 years or so, the one that started with Reagan, is falling apart. It was so stable that you roughly knew which states were going for Democratic, which ones were going for Republicans, and which were the toss-ups. (For a few elections in the row, the toss-ups were Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida). But the shattering of the Democratic Party's blue wall presented an interesting situation, even though those states fell to Trump by miniscule margins. If long term trends have the midwest swinging to the republican party, then there would need to be another big swing in the South, for Texas and Georgia to swing towards the Democrats. We don't know if that will happen. We don't really know what the new political system is going to be, because everything is in flux at the moment.

There are a lot of Democrats saying that if Biden wins the presidency, there's a lot they could fix about America. The Democrats have had 4 years out of power, and they were able to regroup, reorganize and think about a lot of reform. It's possible that Obama came in too soon for them to turn America into a more socialist direction. And who knows what they're now capable of achieving? Some of them are saying, the Democrats have acted with restraint, whereas the Republicans have been going in with extreme tactics. So all we need is the Democrats to go in with more extreme tactics and we can counter with that, right? No, not really, because everything just makes the political scene more polarised than before and before you know it, everybody's taking the nuclear option, everybody's getting more and more polarised.

Whoever wants to fix America back up has to think about, what's the best way to avoid polarity. And I don't know how people are going to do it if they didn't manage to do it during Obama's time.

And that's why the next election is going to be the ultimate sliding doors election. America is about to find out for itself