Hendrick Hertzberg, one of Carter's speech-writers, discusses how the speech, it's historical impact and after-the-fact misinterpretation It's a great read, mostly an excerpt of his 1995 book, "Politics", and some re-contextualisation for a 2009 Obama-era reader.

Much of the period's trends were laid at Carter's feet, as happens to all presidents. From http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/anxiety.htm

Trends in American Society in the 1970s

1. Higher Divorce rates

2. Increased Pre-marital Sex

3. Fewer women having children

4. Increase in Couples living together

5. Increased Recognition of Homosexual lifestyle

6. Rise in female-headed households

7. Rise in Drug use

8. Rising crime rates

9. 10 to 15 percent annual inflation rate

10. Increasing costs of energy. Energy Crisis.

11. Growing concern about an environmental crisis

12. Increasing concern about carcinogens in food and water

13. Declining standard of living

14. Increasing number of women working

15. More equality for Women and Blacks

16.Increasing use of sex to sell products.

17. Decline in mainstream, mainline Christian-- Protestant and Catholic--church attendance among the white, American middle-class.

18. Growth of fundamentalist, evangelical churches-- Baptist and Methodist--and television ministries among Southern whites and American working-class.

We can only understand the 1970s as a decade of disillusion, cynicism, bitterness, and anger by examining it in t he context of the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate and the Cold War. The American people were increasingly disillusioned with the government and their democratic institutions in the 1970s. The Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Watergate damaged Americans' faith in their government and their leaders. Burdened with this political disillusionment, American society in the 1970s was also underseige by economic decline and declining standards of living. For many Americans, the 1970s became a decade of transition--marked by confusion, frustration, and an overwhelming feeling that America had lost its direction, as if the very future of the "American experiment" and the "American Dream" might be in question. In the 1970s, Americans were faced with unresolved conflict and problems that challenged the very heart of the post-war liberal consensus; they faced economic stagnation and recession, increasing poverty, decline in their standards of living, fears that the American Dream was becoming harder and harder to achieve, and bitter divisions over America's fundamental cultural values.