The Conservative 1980s

One of the strongest influences on American culture in the 1980s was brought about by the election to the presidency of the Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan ushered in a return to American conservatism during his two terms in office. His political ideology rejected many of the liberal attitudes that had dominated the years of the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, through the 1960s and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Roosevelt faced the Depression and put in place a social and economic agenda called the New Deal. Johnson likewise helped pass progressive social programs and civil rights bills. Republicans of the 1980s proclaimed that they would undo the “welfare state” and cut the power of the central government. The result, they argued, would be a strengthening of America's capitalist economy.

An anti-Communist fervor, promoted by the Republicans, harkened back to the cold-war ideology...