As the 1970s drew to a close, many Americans felt demoralized and adrift. The economy struggled to improve and America’s standing in the world seemed in decline. Presidents had proven either untrustworthy (such as Johnson and Nixon) or ineffectual (such as Ford and Carter). It is no mistake that some of the most enduring images from this period involve retreat: a smiling Nixon boarding a helicopter after resigning the presidency in disgrace, the final American helicopter departing the U.S. embassy in Saigon with desperate refugees clinging onto the craft, and a botched attempt to rescue hostages in Iran.

Americans posed questions during the 1960s about how to improve society in the midst of affluence. From the trauma of 1968 to the “Reagan Revolution” of 1980, these hopes seemed to dissolve into questions of how to navigate what social critics were starting to call “an age of limits.” After a full generation of postwar prosperity, Americans found themselves having to grapple with scarcity. Oil and petroleum that had once seemed limitless was now carefully rationed. As the withdrawal from Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and the SALT talks each demonstrated, there were also limits on how fully the United States could imprint its worldview on other nations.

The novelist Tom Wolfe would memorably label this period “the Me Decade,” with the improvement of oneself taking precedence over the common good. For some, this sentiment was realized in the rise of self-help books, and the proliferation of subcultures ranging from punk to disco, from “nerd” culture to evangelical revival, to provide a highly individualized sense of meaning and community. Indeed, even large-scale social movements seemed to splinter into sects of identity politics, as suggested by the rise of AIM, gay rights advocacy groups, and theatrical protests such as those of WITCH.

This is not to say, of course, that there were not groups and movements that made demonstrable progress in these years. For the first time, Americans belonging to a group that would eventually label itself LGBTQ had a cogent sense of identity and pride, and were beginning to achieve some bedrock civil rights. Feminist groups continued to make gains in striking down laws that treated the sexes differently, even as the ERA faltered. Yet, for every step forward, resistance to the changes they represented in American culture came to the surface. These reactions tended to focus not on expanding rights, but on preserving a way of life that seemed under attack. Phyllis Schlafly argued against the ERA from the viewpoint that it would erode special privileges and legal protections women already enjoyed. Hard hat protestors saw themselves not as lawless rioters, but as defenders of American patriotism under attack by the antiwar movement. In challenging busing as a means of desegregating schools, angry Bostonians challenged a bureaucracy that had expanded in the wake of Great Society and civil rights reform.

The 1980s and the Reagan presidency would not resolve these disagreements so much as reframe them. Although Reagan and the conservative movement he brought to power were not reactionaries, much of their vision for the United States would come from an idealized understanding of the postwar years in America. As divorce rates, crime, and drug use all rose discernibly, conservatives championed the nuclear family, religious values, cuts to the welfare state, and a renewed opposition to the Soviet Union as the tonic to American malaise.