We’re hurtling towards the modern age. When we left, the Cold War had settled into detente and the First World experienced economic growth that had never been seen before, largely leaving the rest of the world behind. Once you get into the 1980s, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, you get a very curious change. After thirty years of government-led growth, suddenly government became very bad.
A large portion had to the in the 1970s. The US government made what seemed to be a lot of errors under Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. You have Vietnam, the oil crisis, all the stupid shit in the 70s (which really was America’s worst decade), Nixon getting the boot, Iran, and worst of all, economic stagnation.
Reagan embraced neoliberalism and rode the wave of minimalist government to office. He was backed by economists like Milton Friedman, who were extremely persuasive that government intervention often did more harm than good. Neoliberal philosophy was also about embracing technological change, incorporating Japan. It introduced the idea of export-led growth and easing capital mobility so that the economy could focus on developing technology to improve productivity. It was about government planting the seeds and letting the market do the work, rather than considering the government to be shepherd of the people.
However, Reagan took neoliberalism to an extreme. He reaped his anti-government stance to a new level, that all government development was bad. He successfully railed his anti-communism into anti-social change in the US too, exciting Republicans that abortion was bad, gays were bad, and anything the government did to help the poor or disadvantaged was bad. He really is the father of the current GOP, despite all the jokes about Republicans worshiping him.
Part of the appeal was that Reagan’s economic team saw numerous structural problems created by the government in the previous thirty years. Friedman was the first to point out that Social Security was designed for an extremely small group, but it had been expanded by political interests and was going to cause fiscal instability with the Baby Boomers. Stagflation of the 70s also poked a lot of holes in Keynesian thought and the government’s ability to control or eliminate recessions, and the situation became critical when unemployment shot up under Carter. A theme in the modern age is that people will trust the government so long as it can provide low unemployment, low inflation, and somewhat equal growth. When it fails to deliver or things go wrong, the government can expect a lot of unrest and in a democracy, to get the boot.
The 70s was also a time when liberals became anti-American and anti-West. The hippies railed at problems like pollution, inequality, preventable diseases, the havoc of modern war, etc., and they laid it all at the feet of the white man. They blamed Europe but mostly America, saying that they caused these problems and more importantly, owed it to the rest of the world to fix it. Reagan was successful at leading the charge against this sentiment, striking a nationalist chord that the troops deserved respect, modernization was unequivocally good, and America is the best country in the world and more importantly, it doesn’t owe a goddamn thing to the world when we offer them freedom and prosperity. And voters ate it up – after all, who wants to listen to a rant that it might be a bad thing that America won World War II?
Undoubtedly, Reagan is the face of the 1980s. He birthed the modern conservative age and he’s one of the most influential presidents ever, successfully turning America into a center-right nation as the rest of the First World took a turn for the left. He has big accomplishments, such as pushing over the Soviet Union, deregulating government control of the economy, and ushering in an era of monetary policy. Whether that’s a good thing is a whole other question, because Reagan also unhooked barriers to high deficits and high national debt, brought the church into questions of social policy, and told bankers that greed is good.