What didn't the electorate like about the 1980s democratic party?

[Meursault]

It wasn't so much a negative response to the Democrats of the 80s (the DLC misdiagnosed the Party's problems) as it was voters retroactively taking revenge on the Party for the 1960s. Note, for instance, that the number of self-identified pro-life proponents was actually lower in the Reagan era than in our contemporary period.

[Meursault]

And you'd be astonishingly wrong for myriad reasons (not the least of which being that Reaganaut conservatism was the antithesis of the conservatism of the 1950s; there were more contradictions than commonalities between them.).

[Meursault]

You've utterly missed my point, Naso: you don't get the 1980s without the 1960s and 1970s, for an immense number of reasons. For instance - Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, that emodiment of staid Eisenhower organizational capitalism, is the antithesis of the Yuppie Reagan individualistic capitalism. It took the inward-focused counterculture, with its "Okay To Be Me" and Human Potential Movements, to get from A to B.

[Meursault]

The Boomers [/i]never[/i] "grew into their parents' views" (though they think they have). I'm on a phone and so cannot post links, but Google 'There Is A Policeman Inside Our Heads - He Must Be Destroyed'. It'll take you to an Adam Curtis documentary that makes a compelling case that Reaganomics was actually a structural adjustment of capitalism to the anti-institutional value set of the counterculture, not simply a throwback to the institutional, conformist capitalism of the 1950s. You are positing continuity; you should instead look for an epistemological break.

[Meursault]

And on a (literally) lighter note, spoken, as it were, in your language: what do you the omnipresent pastels of the 1980s were, if not the pale shade of 1968s tie-dye psychedelia? And there is a reason Michael Mann chose "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for the climax of Manhunter.