With the conclusion of their Philadelphia convention, Democrats concluded their battle over the political legacy of the 1990s. Outside of party politics, the past five years have witnessed an equally important war of position over the preceding decade, the 1980s. History is indeed written by the winners, and until recently, the Reagan-Bush landslides defined the decade in popular memory. In the past few years, that narrative’s dissenting voices have rewritten the period’s history, championing the conservative coalition’s victims rather than its stalwarts. Today, the 1980s increasingly belong to its losers and outcasts, even if in some larger sense, Ronald Reagan’s victories over the American conscience remain intact.
Time Magazine summed up the conventional wisdom in the period’s immediate aftermath, writing, “Doesn’t anyone have a kind word for Wall Street’s gilded ’80s? The new decade is barely six weeks old and already stores are piled high with books that portray the past ten years as a sink of avarice and excess.” Satirized in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the decade’s “greed is good” ethos was tagged as all but homicidal by Bret Easton Ellis in his classic “American Psycho.” So intensely did Ellis revile the decade’s mainstream, he implied only a serial killer could find meaning in Phil Collins and Huey Lewis’s music. In the 90s, “Fight Club,” “Se7en” and “The Silence of the Lambs” made a definitive break from conservative 80s films like “Top Gun,” “Red Dawn” and “Back to the Future,” while Kurt Cobain pushed the music industry towards an anti-establishment pose, toppling Michael Jackson from atop the charts in the process. Later mythologized in “Donnie Darko,” “The Wedding Singer” and Bowling for Soup’s “1985,” the essentially conservative vision of the 80s survived for decades.
All of that changed with the rise of Barack Obama’s political coalition, which was everything Reagan’s was not. In both 2008 and 2012, a young, urban and proudly liberal electorate delivered victories over opponents who described themselves as “foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution.” At the same time, the legacy the Republican Party left behind was too consequential to forget altogether. As Obama himself said, Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path” and “changed the trajectory of the country… in a way Bill Clinton did not.” Contemporary artists began to reclaim the period’s pop culture for themselves, as black people (“Straight Outta Compton,” “Creed”), gay people (“Dallas Buyer’s Club”), feminists (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) and leftists (“The Americans”) became our new ’80s heroes. After their tragic deaths, we are more likely to think of the subversive David Bowie and Prince as the decade’s defining rock stars rather than Jon Bon Jovi or Bret Michaels. Occasionally, the likes of Donald Trump, the decade’s ultimate “greed is good” icon, will re-emerge to remind us how ugly the decade’s politics were, but it is the progressive version of the era that is prevailing.
Recasting the decade is not without its perils. With “1989,” Taylor Swift rebooted the yuppie culture author Tom Wolfe so despised by giving it a hip, urban facelift. Rather than chasing a house in the suburbs, today’s yuppie serves her hyper-individualism with a side of kale. In one of the cruder attempts to revise the ’80s, director Paul Feig attempted to drum up controversy around his all-female “Ghostbusters” remake by telling audiences, in Eileen Jones’s paraphrase, “If we didn’t all go see it as an act of feminist solidarity, no Hollywood movie would ever again feature several women in lead roles.” Disguising an ad campaign as a social movement, Feig offered feminists a commodified version of their own sense of justice.
Feig’s marketing strategy illustrates the extent of Reagan’s triumph — even when pushing for social change, people now express that desire in consumerist, free-market language. Reagan of course didn’t invent American consumer culture, but after the cynical ’70s, his mission statement, “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” marked a hard stop to the eroding New Deal political economy. For all the left’s victories shaping contemporary culture, inequality today is dramatically higher than when Ronald Reagan was president, a trend Obama couldn’t reverse. There are some artists, most notably in the vaporwave movement, who recognize the disconnect between ’80s symbolism and lived reality, but winning representational battles over the period is cold comfort as an equitable society slips further out of reach. As long as this is the case, we will still be living in the America Reagan left for us.
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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