Conservative politics enjoyed a revival during the 1980s and 1990s. Identify conservative goals and assess the impact conservative policies had on American society.

The 1970s were a period of disillusionment in the United States among people across the political spectrum. In the aftermath of a decade (the 1960s) of genuine transformation for Americans, the '70s were dominated by the Watergate political scandal, followed by a period during which two presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, were considered by some as ineffectual, weak, and amateur. The decade ended with the news dominated by the Iran hostage crisis, which was seen by many as an embarrassment to the United States and a sign that the country had lost its prestige, its power, and the respect of the world.
Conservatives blamed the situation on the dovish Carter and the supposed moral ambiguity that had dominated American thinking and politics beginning with the liberalism of the 1960s. Religious people were upset over the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade and over the general freedom with respect to sexual matters that had become normal in American life since the late '60s. There was also a belief that the country had become too "socialistic," that labor unions were too powerful, and that the United States should restore either some form of laissez-faire capitalism or at least roll back what was perceived as the excessive taxation of wealthy people and other impediments to the wealth of the owner class.
Ronald Reagan had already, based on his governorship of California, established himself as a focal point of the conservative movement. In his 1980 campaign, he presented himself as a spokesman for these conservative positions that had the goal of rolling back or negating the liberalism that was said to have taken over the country. It was similar to Richard Nixon's approach in 1968, but Reagan's was much more forceful and charismatic. In a comforting, somewhat avuncular manner, Reagan made explicit certain points that previous Republicans had either not needed to state directly (such as the "trickle-down" theory of economics) or had not actually believed in because they had not been as ideologically oriented as Reagan and his advisers. The result in November 1980 was a landslide victory for Reagan, his re-election four years later, and the election of George H. W. Bush, Reagan's VP, to the presidency in 1988, largely based on Reagan's prestige.
In my view, the effects of the Reagan years were far-reaching, regardless of how one judges his policies. Reagan's prestige was, and is, partly due to the confident persona he projected. The apparent economic upturn of the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which many attributed to Reagan, added to his reputation and have even resulted in his being respected and praised. A kind of militant conservatism, projected by radio talk hosts and others, grew out of this success story, as it appeared, of the Reagan years. Hardline ideological positions on policies explicitly favoring the wealthy became more strongly entrenched among conservatives, while Democrats and progressives in general found themselves increasingly on the defensive, often seeming to have to apologize for being "liberals." And yet, of the seven presidential elections since the end of the Reagan-Bush period (1992, '96, 2000, '04, '08, '12, and '16), four have been won by the Democrats—Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. And two of the three Republican victories, in 2000 and 2016, were ones in which the Democratic candidate—Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016—won the popular vote. In other words, Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the seven presidential elections going back to 1992—the end of the years of Reagan and his successor George H. W. Bush.