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In the late 1970s, moods and gas tanks were low in every sense of the word. Russians were invading Afghanistan, Iranians were mullah-handling American hostages, Jimmy Carter was talking malaise, and the sociologist Daniel Bell was writing of "the end of American exceptionalism." Not just disco, as every graffiti complained, sucked. But the gloom was blown out of proportion. Even in 1978 Alan Greenspan, then an economist in his own consulting firm, was predicting "a record boom" for the 1980s. Because Americans were generally investing more and being taxed less, the boom would take place, he told Time magazine in September 1978, whatever president would inherit the economy in 1980 Carter included. He was right, although the boom happened to fall on Ronald Reagan's watch and continue, with a minor recession in the early 1990s, through Bill Clinton's. By then Bell's pronouncement on the end of American exceptionalism had been replaced by Francis Fukuyama's declaration of "the end of history," in the sense that the battles between world ideologies were over. Communism had lost. Capitalism, like America, reigned supreme, beyond challenge. But if America was so exceptional, why does it happen to be more reviled than at any point in