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To take an obvious issue, just how different was Reagan from his predecessor? In terms of popular memory, the contrast seems absurd: the Gipper versus the Wimp. But Carter and Reagan had much in common. Carter was more conservative than is often recalled, and Reagan more liberal. On issues of gender and morality, Reagan had a distinctly moderate record, having endorsed the ERA and opposed California's anti-gay Briggs initiative. His two terms as governor included liberal measures on abortion rights and no-fault divorce, not to mention a fairly progressive tax policy and a respectable environmental record. At times, he looked like the kind of politician the Reaganites were warning about. The two men also shared much in their idealistic moral vision and their religious sense of national purpose. Both saw national problems in moral terms, as issues of the human heart. Neither was reluctant to invoke moral justifications for policy or to see a divine hand in political destiny, and both were attacked for religious sentiments that the secular-minded regarded as naïve or hypocritical.

While any reconstruction of alternative realities must be speculative, we might reasonably ask just how different the America of the Eighties would have been if Jimmy Carter had won the 1980 election—and that could have happened quite easily. Any number of events might have transformed the political landscape of that year. Carter's Tehran hostage rescue might have succeeded in April 1980, while through the summer, Reagan supporters worried that Carter might arrange an October Surprise, a last-minute diplomatic breakthrough that would bring the hostages home in time for the election.

And in that case, how different would the 1980s have been? After all, the New Cold War was already in progress following the Afghanistan crisis of 1980. Other areas of crisis in the early 1980s would certainly include Poland and Central America, while the United States would have to respond to recent Soviet missile deployments in Europe. It would have been natural for any U.S. administration to try and weaken the Soviet bloc through proxy forces, who would receive clandestine support or training from the United States. Well before the 1980 election, Carter began U.S. support for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas. In the last days of his presidency, Carter was sufficiently alarmed by the imminent collapse of the Salvadoran regime to restore U.S. military aid. In December 1980, he warned the Soviet government against military intervention in Poland. Throughout 1980, we can discern the stark anti-Communist mood of the Reagan years, the renewed patriotic upsurge, and the quest for decisive leadership.

When comparing the 1970s with the Reagan 1980s, we often forget how many of the characteristic trends and symbols of the Eighties originated in the Carter era, a point rarely made or pursued by Troy. Usually regardless of federal attitudes or policies, America was simply becoming more socially conservative in these years. The drug war, most famously directed against cocaine and crack cocaine under Reagan, originated in the anti-PCP ("angel dust") panic of 1977-78, and was in full flood by the early 1980s. Already under Carter, American society was becoming much more penally oriented, with the dramatic upsurge of incarceration rates, and the restoration of capital punishment. Fears of rape and child sexual abuse, which so reshaped attitudes towards gender and sexuality, again originated in the late 1970s. Increasingly, the roots of domestic Reaganism seem rooted in the debates and conflicts of 1977, in that year's attacks on feminism and electoral attempts to reverse gay rights. Even the AIDS scare, so often cited as the symbolic end of the sexual revolution, was closely prefigured by the herpes panic of 1980-82. Of course herpes was nothing like so lethal in its effects as AIDS, but looking back at the herpes literature now, we must be struck by how precisely it pioneers the rhetoric of the AIDS years, with the language of epidemic, plague, and scarlet letters. Reagan succeeded so thoroughly because he inherited a country alarmed by the extent of recent social revolutions, a country seeking an opportunity to be "scared straight."

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