Alex’s social attitudes were generally fairly conservative. However, if memory serves, there was one episode that dealt with racism (a black family moved into the neighborhood, maybe next door, i don’t recall), and Alex was clearly opposed to racism.
I don’t recall any episodes that dealt with gay rights or immigration.
I don’t think Alex would have had the racist view of immigration that many Republicans seem to have, but as a Reagan Republican with generally conservative views I think Alex would have been very much opposed to the Democratic policies of making things easy for illegal aliens. I think Alex would also be a firm supporter of the Republican “America First” policy.
Even though Alex had generally conservative social views, he was a bit more progressive on social issues than most Republicans of that era. I think he would have been generally supportive of gay rights, but might have been opposed to gay marriage, preferring to allow gays to have civil unions instead. In other words, he would not have been opposed to gays, but he would have been opposed to what he would view as attacks on conservative institutions and ideals like marriage.
That’s a lot of guesswork and opinion on my part though. I don’t recall gays or gay rights being part of any episode of the show.
The irony of that is that in large measure our “Democratic presidents in recent years” have promoted parties that are in substantial measures in alignment with (at least later stage) Reaganism including dismantling the ‘entitlement state’, engaging in covert warfare around the globe (Obama dramatically expanded the extrajudicial drone killing program, and Biden did essentially nothing to reign it in), and the neoliberal economic paradigm has ‘flourished’ by exploiting the middle class, neglecting essential needs for lower socioeconomic demographics, and concentrating wealth at the upper echelons to ‘trickle down’, just like Robert Mundell and Milton Friedman intended.
Keaton might be a reluctant Trump booster or an enthusiastic MAGA, counting all of the returns he can get under completely unregulated ‘free market’ capitalism (although he’d probably be unhappy with tariffs and neutral-to-negative on immigration crackdowns as they reduce sources of cheap labor), but he’s definitely voting Republican.
I recall that specific episode even though I didn’t typically watch the show, and Alex Keaton essentially jumps up from behind a couch in some kind of neighborhood meeting to explain home depreciation and how the elimination of ‘redlining’ pradtices doesn’t really affect it. It’s not a particularly principled argument but while the running joke about Alex is that he’s an archconservative of the Reaganite mold, he never really makes any starkly objectionable conservative statements. He’s kind of the conservative counterpart of the ‘liberal’ characters of The West Wing who go on in long soliloquies about progressive principles that map to nothing anybody in the Clinton Administration conceivably would have said.
Republicans of the Reagan era were not particularly anti-immigration, and Reagan explicitly supported immigration reform and amnesty for ‘illegal’ (undocumented) immigrants. In fact, opposition to reforming (specifically eliminating quotas and streamlining the immigration process) was a Democratic issue of that era with the concern ostensibly being undercutting labor by providing willingly non-unioned low wage labor.
With spare exceptions nobody really talked about ‘gay rights’ on network television until the late ‘Eighties or featured homosexual characters except in occasional guest roles in ‘lest ye be judged’-type storylines, and even the ‘very special episodes’ on the AIDS crisis were almost exclusively framed as a problem for people who got contaminated blood transfusions or heterosexual women infected by bisexual men. For sure nobody was talking about same sex civil unions much less marriage or adoption, or legal protections against employment discrimination, harassment, or legal prohibitions against ‘sodomy’ that carried severe criminal penalties in many states. When St. Elsewhere did episodes on sex reassignment surgery and AIDS from homosexual sex there was an enormous backlash and threats of boycotting sponsors by the then-dominating ‘Moral Majority’ (ironically run by Jerry Falwell, Sr.) and associated Evangelical groups that almost got the show cancelled.
To be sure, there’s no problem finding people who chose one party or the other to rebel against their parents and simply form their identity around the name; likewise, you have people who agreed with the politics back in the 80s, subscribed to right-wing media, and became the frog in slowly heating water, not changing the channel and not noticing that everything was changing around them; but, that all said, you also have labor unions and wage laborers switching sides; CNN choosing people who matched the ideology of the Dixiecrats that were ejected by the Democrats during the Nixon era, like Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, and shipping them all day ever day for decades as “representative” Republicans, rather than people with beliefs like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, who matched the real form of Republican thought during that era.
And if we look at the Straight Dope, we see some number of former Republicans who perhaps shifted sides under Bush II or as they saw Trump coming up in the world. They’re now billing themselves as Democrats. That doesn’t mean that they were born that way.
If all Republicans from the 1980s - businessmen, white collar laborers, lawyers, etc. - became MAGA, and then you also add all the factory workers, conspiracy theorists, anti-war cranks, and vaccine skeptics to that bundle then Trump would have won 70% of the electorate, not some number near 50%.
Some people shifted from D to R and some from R to D. That’s the only way that you achieve similar spreads as the Reagan era, with a completely different map.
The bastion of anti-Reagan opposition was centered right in Trump’s treasure chest of support.
If he fell into the right-wing media trap, he would 100% be a Trumpist today. Propaganda works.
If he avoided that, he would be like the former Republicans on this board, some posting in this very thread, who are generally anti-Trump.
I really don’t think it has anything to do with intelligence – lots of dumb people vote for Dems, lots of smart people vote for Reps. But, if you spend your day listening to propaganda on Fox or reading it in your Facebook feed, it’s going to work.
Keep in mind that approximately half of the politically-engaged population of the US are Trumpists. So when looking at anyone, and asking “Would they be a Trumpist?”, if they were more Republican-leaning than most, the answer is probably yes.
If we only stick to the end of Family Ties, we know he does well in school, and gets a job on Wall Street. Too many different things could have happened during that time: success, failure, getting rich, getting Madoxed, etc. My read - he made and makes a lot of money, but isn’t keeping much of it beyond appearances - mostly because he’s on his 2rd, 3rd, or maybe even 4th wife/lover. After all, he’s rich, he’s charming, and he is not particularly faithful. So the first few times, he didn’t have a pre-nup, and being found the offending party for likely affairs, got taken to the cleaners. He still does well, but the costs of supporting a few ex-wives, and possibly a current wife and lover are putting a huge strain on him.
In this scenario, he could actually be a real Trumpist to a degree. A casual philanderer, one who feels he’s been done wrong by ‘liberal’ assumptions of behavior, always being asked to not be a casual misogynist . . . there would be a lot of appeal. He’d probably say he was supporting Trump 100% for the typical Republican reasons - strong borders, lower taxes, more trickle down, less political activism, but deep down he wouldn’t be nearly as critical as the Senatorial version would have been.
It’s possible. My opinion on the matter is certainly the more negative of the two. The reason I am . . . cynical, is that I tend to find that life after college tends to grind away a lot of idealism in the pursuit of success. And Alex is very ambitious, determined to prove himself, and to be aggressively different from his parents. Taking into account his going to work in ‘Greed is Good’ Wall Street of the late 80s, I cannot help but expect the worse.
And no, I didn’t think Alex was Trump-casual or crass with women. But getting himself in trouble and divorcing a few times? That would be the norm for a successful young man in that situation. And that in and of itself could easily sour him.
But you are correct D_G - I am still looking at the worst case scenario for a young man who when last seen had a lot of possibilities. If there is such a thing as ‘heaven’ for past sitcom characters, we can all hope that for his sake he found a way to balance his desire for success with his moral compass. It’s a trial many people in this world have attempted and failed.
Which, if you had included the entire statement (as seen below) instead of needlessly truncating it would have been apparent as to my intent:
Please do not truncate sentences or quote someone in a way that takes the statement out of context and makes it appear to say the opposite of the clear intent.
It’s completely hypothetical. We’re talking about a character in a tv show. One who was written as a caricature of young Republicans at the time. Any prediction on how he would relate to the grotesque that is today’s modern Republican party is complete conjecture. It’s fun to think about of course, and we’d all like to believe that an older wiser Alex would disavow the evils of MAGA, but at the end of the day, such discourse is the definition of hypothetical.
[Moderating]
This quote loses a lot of context from the original post, enough to significantly change the meaning. It’s best practice to include the context in a quote, or where that’s not practical, to at least indicate the presence of more context with an annotation such as [SNIP] or an ellipsis.
I liked him as a character, so I’d like to think he became a never-Trumper. Follows The Lincoln Project and that type of thing. Maybe voted Democratic in a pinch, but otherwise writes-in Reagan.
It’s interesting reading the replies to the same question back during Trump’s first term when he was just a corrupt buffoon, as opposed to those now when he has turned into a malignant aspiring despot. It’s easier for me to see Alex gloss over the actions of his first presidency, but much harder to envision him overlooking those of his second.