First development is the Vietnam war
After the Tet offensive everyone started understanding how unwinnable the war was, in the words of Walter Cronkite, and they started opposing it seeing the war as anything but noble. The war lasted during the early seventies before Nixon pulled the troops out and left Vietnam on its own after which Vietnam lost the war to Northerners.
Second can be the Watergate
Nixon was elected to be the president however nobody knew what he would do in the seventies. He caused the biggest scandal in US political history when the Watergate scandal was revealed and it was found that he had been spying on political opponents in order to get information that would help him win the next elections.
Another can be Jimmy Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis
After Jimmy Carter was elected president in the 70s, there was a hostage crisis because American people were taken as hostages since Carter allowed the Shah of Iran to go to the US. Iranian people took the US people as hostages and this was not resolved until Reagan became the president after Carter.
Another can be the southern strategy
The southern strategy was a plan from the 70s in which the Republican party developed an electoral plan to get the support of white southerners by appealing to racism against African-American people. They did gain a huge amount of white voters and a domination of the region which had traditionally been supportive of the democratic party.
Another can be the failure of the South East Asia policies
Because of the way that the Vietnam war was fought an lost, the whole thing resonated with the area around it. Not only did the communists win in Vietnam, but it spread to other countries around it like Cambodia where a genocide was caused by the government led by Pol Pot in the 1970s. It is believed that 2 million people died. Laos also implemented a communist regime after a long and bloody civil war.
Another is the 1973 oil embargo
There was a war in that year between the Arabs and the Israeli and OPEC, the organization in charge of exporting oil, decided to put an embargo on all countries that had supported Israel. This included countries like the US, UK, Japan, Canada, and similar, and the embargo had a huge shock as there was suddenly a lack of oil and prices soared. This was devastating for the economy and the society.
The seventh can be the Roe vs Wade case
In this case, the question of abortion was examined by the supreme court. Although the supreme court established that women getting abortions is a part of their privacy under the due process clause, anyone assisting them would be punished as this was considered to be illegal. This was a huge cultural shock because it divided the nation into two groups that we nowadays know as the pro-life and pro-choice.
