Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 during a period of frightening economic crisis initiated a period of transformation in US government and society many historians judge as fundamental as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Evaluate these two moments of change. Are they comparable? Why or why not? How did Reagan change the country and the world?

In answering this I would first make the point that in terms of severity, the economic crisis of the early 1930s was much worse than that of 1980. In the Great Depression, there were, at least at the start, none of the safeguards in the economic system that we have now, such as federally insured banking, social security and Medicare. The period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s was, by contrast, one of recession, a milder type of economic downturn. What troubled Americans in 1980 was the perceived weakness of US foreign policy and "lack of respect" for America in the world. The focal point was the Iran hostage crisis and the Carter administration's inability to do anything about it. The nonstop media coverage for over a year made this seem the greatest "humiliation" ever "inflicted" upon the US to many people.
Back in the 1930s, the problems, by contrast, were entirely economic for the (at the time) relatively isolated US. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in addition to creating the New Deal, which for the first time provided some degree of a social safety net for Americans, projected a sense of strength and warmth in his "fireside chat" radio talks and his general demeanor. Fifty years later, Ronald Reagan also projected a sense of strength and confidence, but he did so in the service of ideas that were chiefly the opposite of Roosevelt's. Reagan and his surrogates expounded the idea that the "weakness" of the US was caused by the "liberalism" that affected foreign policy and that had created a supposed unfairness to big business and American entrepreneurship. His aim was to weaken or destroy the labor unions. When he fired the air-traffic controllers, this was a signal of his declared "toughness." He and his advisors promoted the famous "trickle down" theory of economics, which stipulated that by making the wealthy people even more wealthy, the money would trickle down to the middle class and the working class, and everyone would be happy. He made appeals to the religious values of Americans and "talked tough" against the "evil Empire" of the Soviet Union in explaining his desire to "bring it down."
Few Americans remember that the recession actually became worse during the first two years of Reagan's administration. The later upturn, in my view, had much more to do with the boom in technology than with any policy of Reagan's. In the 1980s, the computer industry began an enormous expansion that created a huge number of jobs for people in the tech world. This was the principal reason the country emerged from the recession. Though Reagan's acceleration of the arms race was one factor that eventually "brought down" the Soviets (which did not actually happen during Reagan's administration but instead during that of his successor, George H.W. Bush), it was more the internal defects of the Soviet regime and the resistance by the labor movement in Poland that caused the "evil Empire" to collapse.
Despite these differences, during both FDR's and Ronald Reagan's administrations, the country went from a "bad place" to a better one over a period of years, both economically and psychologically. Many people, not only conservatives, assert that it was only the armaments build-up and our entry into World War II that finally ended the Great Depression. But Roosevelt was the one who spearheaded these factors as well. His opponents were in favor of a continued isolationist policy and saw no need to destroy Hitler or to help Britain and France. Though nothing similar can be charged against Reagan, the Iran-Contra affair was, or should have been, a huge embarrassment to his administration. Instead, people like Oliver North became heroes to the conservative establishment and a symbol of defiance against "the liberals," who had become increasingly demonized in the American collective consciousness. This ongoing "anti-liberal" bias, which has been adopted even by many Democrats, is part of the legacy of Ronald Reagan.