In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory against Jimmy Carter brought a new American politics to the fore. Among the words and ideas that came to define the 1980s were jelly beans, Moral Majority, free-market capitalism, trickle-down economics, Star Wars Defense, and Glasnost. But one word, curiously, was absent from Reagan’s vocabulary: Sacrifice.

In fact, historians have noted that Ronald Reagan was the first president in recent memory to rarely utter the word as a calling for Americans. While Jimmy Carter and the many presidents before him spoke of the need for Americans to sacrifice, Ronald Reagan quietly sanitized his speech of such notions. In fact, his aides tested various words for maximum effect with focus groups and decided against using images of sacrifice, suffering and pain as a calling for Americans in Reagan’s speeches. The result was a politics that resonated with the original “Me Generation” of the 1980s, a generation sold on the greed of Gordon Gekko, the consumerism of free market capitalism, and the self-absorption of endless acquisition.

But, curiously, for the first time in thirty years, the word “sacrifice” has emerged again in presidential politics. There was a time when the call for Americans to sacrifice for others was the hallmark of a presidential speech in this country — from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Kennedy. Tonight, the word sacrifice resounded again from the lips of the president elect. And as I survey the decadence of the 1980s and 1990s, I have to believe that this may be a good thing. A very, very good thing.

In his first inaugural address Reagan said, “The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.”

These words are so similar to Barack Obama’s words delivered tonight from a stage in Chicago, with one major adjustment —Obama told Americans they’d have to sacrifice, for others, and they applauded.

“This victory alone is not the change we seek,” said Obama. “It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice. So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.”

What all this means — if anything — I am not sure. But in the midst of an economic crisis and global environmental crisis both exacerbated (if not produced) by the excesses of American consumerism, I have to believe it is a good thing.