America in 1945 Against America in 1980

In 1945 the United States had just helped win a world war, held sole possession of the atomic bomb, and commanded the largest economy on earth. Government had grown enormously to fight the war, and most Americans trusted it to keep delivering: jobs, growth, and global leadership. That trust held through the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, a stretch historians call the postwar consensus, when both parties broadly accepted anti-communism abroad and a managed capitalist economy at home, and the federal government kept expanding its reach through the GI Bill, highway building, and eventually Johnson's Great Society.

By 1980 that confidence had cracked. The Vietnam War dragged on for years, cost tens of thousands of American lives, and ended in a withdrawal that looked nothing like victory. Watergate showed a president, Nixon, using the machinery of government to spy on and sabotage his political opponents, then resigning rather than face impeachment. Stagflation, the combination of high inflation and high unemployment, baffled economists who thought one usually came down when the other went up, and it made the federal government look powerless to manage the economy it had once seemed to master. Each crisis chipped away at the assumption that Washington knew what it was doing.

Calling 1945-1965 a consensus hides how contested it actually was. The Red Scare split Americans over how far anti-communism should reach into private life. Civil rights activists faced violent resistance while the federal government moved slowly and unevenly. Vietnam itself grew out of consensus-era containment policy before it tore the consensus apart. The suburb, the Cold War, and civil rights are one story: all three ran through the question of who got to share in American prosperity and power, and by 1980 that question was wide open.