General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It's amazing that over the span of two decades, America went from this... [View all]Blanks
(4,835 posts)The TV series 'Family Ties' was very popular and it was about an aging (grown up anyway) hippie couple raising a conservative (Michael J. Fox) son.
We always rebel against our parents. So we have a popular TV series with a handsome young conservative star. The other factor is that the folks who suffered through the Great Depression weren't as prominent as they were the previous 20 years. This is one of the reasons why republicans haven't been obliterated the same way they were after the Great Depression for causing the latest downturn. The stock market crashed in '29 and Hoover flailed for almost 4 years while people suffered. Contrast that to the recession occurring in 2007 (after Bush was in office for over 6 years) and peaking after he left office.
EVERYONE (ok, a large majority of people) blamed the Great Depression on republicans because of the way they dealt with the stumbling economy after the crash. Reagan blamed his huge recession on Carter because he'd just taken over from him.
My point is that those who ran the show during the Reagan years had learned from Hoover's mistakes (improved the technique even more under Dubya), and they took advantage of the natural born tendencies of young people to rebel against their parents.
Of course it was also about the time the MIC was getting control of the television networks too.