The End of the Reagan Era and the Return of American Potential
January 20th 1981 was a monumental day in American history. I was home for college on winter break the day that Ronald Reagan took office, a day when 52 American hostages were simultaneously being released from more than a year of captivity in a newly hostile Iran. The synchronicity of these two events cemented in our national mythology the belief that this new president had been solely responsible for springing them free.
Our nation had just weathered a decade of international humiliation — Watergate, a military vanquishing in Vietnam, waiting in lines for gasoline, and the disorienting powerlessness we felt from some obscure country holding our own people hostage and telling us what to do. This stuff didn’t happen in America. It all clashed with who we thought we were — with our super-powerful self-concept and our bottomless reserve of righteousness that came with being the greatest country in the universe. Our national psyche was confronting something with which we were wholly unfamiliar: failure.
And then along came the Gipper — Ronald Reagan, the perfect man to restore our pride, our heritage, our shining city on the hill. In 1981, our national hunger to be proud again was strong enough for us to swallow as much artificial flavoring as we could digest, because what we really needed at that moment was not…
