2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
From the Global Village to Bowling Alone
The neoconservative counterrevolution that began with George Wallace reached its zenith in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Though he was the oldest president ever to be elected, Reagan projected youthful optimism when he proclaimed, ‘It’s morning again in America.’ In Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (1987), Garry Wills summed up the late president’s popular appeal. ‘Reagan runs continuously in everyone’s home movies of the mind. He wrests from us something warmer than mere popularity, a kind of complicity,’ Wills explained. ‘He is the great American synecdoche, not only part of our past but a large part of our multiple pasts.’ Besides his influence on politics, Reagan had a significant impact on mainstream culture as a symbol of renewed American optimism after the disasters of Vietnam, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis. No wonder that Sean Wilentz called his history of the years between Richard Nixon’s resignation and Barack Obama’s election The Age of Reagan (2008). Wilentz argues that only a few American presidents have defined their era, including Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt — and Reagan.