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INTRODUCTION

A Decade of Decades

In one sense nothing distinguished the 1980s as a decade; instead, its cultural preoccupations and political symbols were borrowed from other decades. Little during the time was original or new: almost universally the art and literature of the period required some sense of precedent in order to be under-stood; politics and culture seemed locked into agendas set prior to the decade. The dominant political figure of the era, President Ronald Reagan, expressed an economic philosophy derived from the 1920s (or, perhaps, from the 1890s), a populist rhetoric borrowed from the 1930s, the can-do optimism of the 1940s, and an anticommunism straight out of the 1950s. His political opponents at-tacked him via the liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s or through the social radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The arts and fashion in the 1980s were dominated by stylistic borrowings: Art Deco from the 1930s, Abstract Expressionism and film noir from the 1940s, commercial kitsch from the 1950s, rock music and countercultural experimentalism from the 1960s. American lifestyle during the decade witnessed a continuing clash between the Reagan generation, who derived their sense of the "normal" or "natural" from the 1940s and 1950s, and the baby boomers, who challenged these norms in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s, in other words, contained the volatile historical forces and cultural conflicts of much of twentieth-century America.

Pastiche

In another sense the retrospective character of the 1980s was the distinguishing feature of the decade. Even the mostly new or unprecedented part included reworkings or refashionings of older styles and ideas. Rap music, the most original musical style of the period, exemplified the reworking of the past implicit in most 1980s culture. Built on samples of sound and bits of rhythm borrowed from 1960s soul music and 1970s funk, rap was the most obvious type of expression that the literary critic Fredric Jameson termed pastiche—one based on arranging the fragments of the past in a new form rather than creating a wholly original art. Film, television, and literature were similarly marked by pastiche, gestures toward the conventions of the past rather than breaks with those conventions. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones films reworked the 1930s movie serial; The Cosby Show re-created the family sitcom of 1950s television; Less Than Zero (1985), the best-selling novel of Bret Easton Ellis, was an extended homage to J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Jazz and country-and -western music were dominated by "traditional" stylings and gestures toward the past. Postmodern architecture combined the conventions of modernism, Art Deco, neoclassicism, and Renaissance architecture; the postmodern art of Julian Schnabel or the Starn twins literally fragmented and recombined earlier artistic styles. Even economics and politics in the 1980s were distinguished by pastiche, by their retro character. The "revolutionary" foundation of supply-side economics turned out to be a hodgepodge of traditional Republican economic theories. And even the new political phenomenon of the "sound bite"—a pithy, televisable quip to take the place of substantive rhetoric—was analogous to the samples of funk music in rap: quick blasts of the familiar in a seemingly new arrangement.

The Superficial

Rap samples and political sound bites both distinguish another dominant feature of the decade: the superficial. The 1980s were an insubstantial period, one given to surface and design rather than substance and content. The decade reveled in the glitzy and the glamorous, in the slightly trashy aesthetic of the newly wealthy. As hippies left their Vermont communes for Wall Street and traded in their Volkswagen vans for Audis, the symbols of "thirtysomething" success became the yuppies (young urban professionals or, more accurately, young upwardly mobile professionals—a play on the counter-cultural polital party the Yippies). Television programs such as Dallas Dynasty, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous parlayed the public's thirst for diamonds and dirt into success. Nancy Reagan's $45,000 inaugural gown set the tone for expensive style during a decade preoccupied with such wealthy figures as Donald Trump, Malcolm Forbes, and Tammy Faye Bakker. Pop singers such as Madonna and Michael Jackson became famous by striking poses, shedding and adopting multiple public personae, and always expressing an all-important attitude. Fashion models, famed for a depth that ran skin-deep, became international celebrities. Even the gritty television detectives of Miami Vice wore Armani suits. When ABC producer Roone Arledge moved from sports programming to the news division in the early 1980s, he brought with him slow-motion replays, quick editing, and flash—a style of attention-grabbing news presentation that, by the 1990s, set the industry standard. While critics deplored the emphasis on the sensational in culture, many intellectuals adopted bits and pieces of French post structural philosophy to reassure the public that there was, in fact, no such thing as substance. To many, such as literary critic Paul de Man, life was the play of image and myth; the search for authenticity, for substance, betrayed a hopeless—if not reactionary—effort to secure meaning in a world that was ultimately meaningless. To poststructuralists the style and glitz of the 1980s represented nothing if not cultural and philosophical progress.

The Fundamentals

As poststructuralists often presented their arguments in an unreadable style, few outside of academia agreed with their propositions. More-over, the success of classics scholar Allan Bloom's best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), was as telling of the philosophical sympathies of the decade as anything written by the poststructuralists. Against the embrace of the superficial offered by the poststructuralists, Bloom argued for a return to the fundamentals of philosophy, to the tried truths of Plato and Saint Augustine. His basic argument was reflected elsewhere in the culture. It was a decade in search of fundamentals, not only in philosophy but also in education, religion, lifestyle,, and politics. After experiments with open classrooms and new curricula in the 1970s, conservative educators led by Secretary of Education William Bennett called for a return to "excellence" and to the fundamentals of education: English and mathematics. In religion fundamentalism was a small movement that began at the turn of the century, specifically in response to the challenge evolutionary theory presented to orthodox Protestantism. By the 1980s it superseded mainline Protestantism, becoming a formidable cultural presence capable of forcing high-school science classes to adopt the biblical story of creation as an alternative to Darwinism. The 1960s countercultural experiments with alternative lifestyles had all but fizzled out by the 1980s, leaving many in search of "fundamental" family structures and "traditional" lifestyles. And the political conservatism of the decade was dominated by a rhetorical call to the fundamentals of old-fashioned Republicanism: patriotism, anticommunism, and balanced budgets.

Contradictions of Conservatism

Conservatives and fundamentalists during the decade liked to think of themselves as restoring substance and values during an insubstantial and valueless decade. But as the overriding social movements of the decade, conservatism and fundamentalism were fraught with contradictions, not the least of which was the charge by critics such as essayist Barbara Ehrenreich that both were in fact superficial and shallow. Bloom's scale of philosophical virtue and truth were keyed toward a preindustrial age, and few actually read his best-selling book. Educational conservatives often touted twenty- or thirty-year-old curricula, as if they were appropriate for a decade marked by the increasing use of computers in the classroom. Fundamentalists proved remarkably selective at reading the Bible, ignoring a host of injunctions regarding charity and pride, and were often more adept at political protest and self-enrichment than at pious practice. The reinvention of the family and "traditional" lifestyles had more in common with the fictional families of 1950s television sitcoms such as Ozzie and Harriet than it did with the actual history of families or the realities of making a living in the 1980s. And old-fashioned Republicanism was hardly in keeping with tradition, as 1980s conservatives expanded their definition of patriot to include men such as Oliver North, who violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution; hectored endlessly about anticommunism while pursuing business deals with the authoritarian leaders of Red China; and—under two successive Republican presidents—racked up the largest federal debt in American history.

Reagan

Conservatism was fraught with contradictions during the decade because—like liberalism during the 1960s—it was expressed by a variety of groups often working at cross-purposes. Religious fundamentalists pushed a Puritan evangelism at odds with anti-authoritarian libertarians; neoconservative intellectuals embraced a scale of values alien to free-market entrepreneurs. A common commitment to anticommunism, a disdain for the radicalism of the 1960s, and an antipathy for government regulation bound these groups together at the beginning of the decade. Even these bonds, however, were less important to conservatism than was the figure of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan took office in 1981 by appealing to the varied conservative groups, as well as to traditional Democratic voters disaffected by a poor economy. Reagan had the ability to represent almost all things to almost all his supporters. They saw in him what they wanted and glossed over the rest: fundamentalists loved him for his rhetorical invocation of piety despite the fact that his opponent in 1980, Jimmy Carter, was a more diligent, practicing Christian; millions saw Reagan as the champion of family values, although he was the first divorced president in American history; many were enamored of his populist image, while his closest associates were millionaires; Reagan was lauded for his tough approach to foreign affairs, despite the debacle of the 1983 marine deployment and withdrawal in Lebanon and even though Carter pursued more aggressive policies toward the Soviets; Reagan was cherished as a strong leader, even as the Iran-Contra scandal raised serious questions about his competence as president. None of it mattered. As a figure, as a symbol of the office of the presidency, Reagan was the perfect projection of the multitude of the nation's hopes and aspirations, suffering dearly after the defeat in Vietnam, the disgrace of Watergate, and the disintegration of the economy in the 1970s. The man acted like a president, and in the 1980s acting was enough.

From Acting to Being

The large electoral majorities by which Reagan won in 1980 and 1984 not only con-firmed his skills as a actor, but in an indirect fashion reaffirmed a waning American confidence: that acting was the first step to doing, that one could project an image and in the process become it. The self-appointed global destiny of America was called to question by Vietnam; Reagan insisted that America project an image of world leadership and that the leadership would follow. If Nixon's illegalities undermined the luster of the presidency, Reagan's careful attention to the pomp and circumstance of the office could restore it. And proper confidence in economic possibility bootstrapped the return of prosperity. Confidence required conformity. If believing was precedent to doing, no one could afford to be skeptical. A Reagan opponent who suggested that it took more than an image of strength to make a strong nation was by his skepticism guilty of undermining the nation's power. Given a choice between such skeptics—or even the occasional realist—the public would turn every time to Reagan's genial and hale confidence that one could make things better by acting as though they were better. Hence the majority of the public's embrace of a glitzy 1980s style of patriotism that was found in movies such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Top Gun (1986), patriotic country-and-western ballads, televised Fourth of July spectaculars—even commercials that equated buying trucks to national loyalty. But the fervor and insistence of patriotism during the 1980s always carried the hint of overstatement, a fear that things were no better in the 1980s than they were in the 1970s, so when skeptical voices arose in the culture during the decade they were often denounced.

Culture Wars

Partisans of the Reagan agenda saw divergences from their confidence as disloyalty and often attacked those who refused to conform to the program. Opponents of the Reagan program in turn enlisted the most incendiary tactics of the 1960s counterculture to antagonize and oppose conservatives. Disputes over 1960s legacies such as affirmative action, feminism, and gay rights were particularly heated. Artists versed in the street polemics of the 1960s, such as Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Keith Haring, at-tacked the conformities of the decade in word and image. Conservatives fired back with assaults on rock music, including those led by the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC), or with studies such as that published by Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography, or by denouncing public funding of the arts. Conservatives banned school textbooks that taught evolution and sex education; radicals responded with works such as "Dread" Scott Tyler's 1989 Art Institute of Chicago installation, What Is The Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, whose dissent from mainstream values was profoundly alienating. From the speeches of Jesse Helms to the photo-graphs of Robert Mapplethorpe, different groups in society appropriated culture and used it to argue against other groups—or perhaps more appropriately, to argue past them.

The Economy

Nothing undermined American confidence as much as the deplorable state of the economy. As the decade began, wracked by simultaneous double-digit inflation and unemployment and a growing trade and budget deficit, the American economy seemed antiquated, inefficient, and overburdened. The solution pro-posed by Reagan and his supply-side advisers combined tax cuts and assertive leadership to spark capital investment and modernization. But supply-side economics did not work exactly as planned. Profits on overseas investments paid a greater return than modernizing American industry. Tax cuts paid for transfers of capital and labor abroad. By middecade economists discussed "deindustrialization"—the dismantling of large-scale American manufacturing, especially in the steel industry—and Wall Street made new hay with "leveraged buyouts" (LBOs)—hostile stock takeovers that were the first step to the sell-off of industrial assets. The effect on American labor would have been devastating were it not for the astronomical amounts of borrowed money that the government spent on military goods. By 1989 the government was spending $303 billion per year on defense—more than $500,000 per minute—and that money propped up an important sector of the economy. Yet paying the money back would obviously be a major problem in the future. There were, moreover, industries doing well in the 1980s: the computer industry, making enormous profits and promising to facilitate a further revolution in communications; a healthy aviation industry; and retail discount merchants, notably the Wal-Mart retail chain. Working wives, often in the service industries, increasingly acted as primary contributors to individual households and kept paychecks flowing during the decade. But positive economic forces did not stop the overall decline in wages when adjusted for inflation, a disintegration ongoing since the early 1970s. Moreover, hidden tax increases in the form of rising Social Security with-holding and the growing federal debt promised that de-spite Reagan's promises to get the government off the back of the individual taxpayer, in the future Washington would press the citizenry ever harder to repay federal debts to wealthy creditors. As economist Benjamin Friedman put it in his 1987 book The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, "America has thrown itself a party and billed the tab to the future."

Boom

Supply-side economics not only facilitated the deindustrialization of the economy, it also advanced a growing divide between the economic classes in the 1980s, a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy unprecedented in American history. For the rich the 1980s were boom times. Because of Reagan's 1981 restructuring of the tax code, the rich had more disposable wealth. Wall Street soared in the greatest bull market in history. Corporate mergers and the creation of huge multinational concerns were news in the entertainment and communications industry, facilitated by government deregulation and lax antitrust enforcement. Entrepreneurs and buccaneer capitalists such as Donald Trump, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky were national celebrities, acclaimed for their "art of the deal." In every major American city, the status symbols of the new elite—foreign automobiles, hand-tailored suits, cellular phones—made an appearance. Prices for art works rocketed to new heights. Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses each surpassed __BODY__ billion in sales in 1987, with individual paintings such as Vincent van Gogh's Irises selling for $53.9 million. Tickets for concerts and other cultural events also fetched dear prices. (On Broadway Les Miserables took in advanced sales of $12 million in 1987.) Best-selling novels such as Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Slaves of New York (1986) examined the lives of the new elite and the decadence their wealth purchased. Cinema also focused on money in movies such as Wall Street (1987), Working Girl (1987), and Fatal Attraction (1988). Even the defendents in the most sensational trials of the 1980s were rich and prominent people, including Jean Harris and Claus von Bulow. Judging from the books and movies of the 1980s one would think all America wealthy. But statistically less than 1 percent of wage earners were doing fantastically well. For much of the rest of America the 1980s revealed new depths of poverty and despair with levels of misery approaching that of the developing countries.

Hype

One reason many viewed the 1980s as a boom period was because of the "hype" that surrounded the decade. Hype was a slang term for a massive advertising campaign, usually implying that the goods to be sold were not all the advertisers promised. Hype was manifest in most every level of life during the decade. Advertising and marketing assumed new levels of sophistication, with children's television coordinating their activities with toy manufacturers, soft-drink manufacturers placing their products ostentatiously in mainstream films, and the creation of the world's first nonstop commercial cable channel—MTV, whose twenty-four hours of music videos acted as sensational advertisements for records and com-pact discs. Hype made rock superstars of more than a few mediocre artists, who used vocal overdubs and new music technology to gloss over their lack of talent. Sports be-came a multibillion-dollar business, and baseball and football players wrangled endlessly over contracts, while sporting-goods endorsements by athletes such as basket-ball star Michael Jordan filled the airwaves. Artists such as Julian Schnabel had savvy agents such as Mary Boone to advance their fortunes. Even opera star Luciano Pavarotti marketed himself like a rock star, with Pavarotti's Greatest Hits! becoming a best-seller. Hype promoted dubious medical and scientific technologies, such as the artificial heart and cold fusion. But hype was manifest most tellingly in politics, where along with "sound bite" and "spin" (to interpret a political act, usually from a partisan perspective), hype insisted that things were working even if they were not; or—as in the notorious "Willie Horton" ad campaign during the 1988 presidential election—hype insisted that some things were so, even if they were not. By the end of the decade politicians of every political persuasion, just like rock stars, businessmen, and baseball players, had a coterie of hired image makers and press managers to churn out photo opportunities and policy papers for the public. Hype had become a political and cultural science.

A Two-Tiered Society

As the 1980s closed, the hype ground on, but reality kept intervening: the stock market crashed; the federal debt soared; the paychecks kept getting smaller; test scores dropped; the space shuttle Challenger exploded; AIDS deaths multiplied; and taxpayers bailed out millionaires who gambled everything in dubious savings-and-loan transactions. The United States seemed to resemble a Third World nation, divided between rich and poor, powerful and weak, privileged and desperate. While the wealthy benefited from advances in medical technology such as laser surgery, gene therapy, artificial insemination, and fertility drugs, soaring medical costs stripped many middle-class Americans of their basic health benefits and their old-age security. (Overall prices rose 142 percent during the decade.) In the early part of the decade yuppies made fortunes speculating on extravagant real estate and condominiums, while the ranks of people living in the street—the homeless—grew by an estimated 25 percent per year, a consequence in part of a loss of $22 million in government funding for low-income housing from 1980 to 1987. Infant mortality rates in the inner city, and the mortality rate among minorities, approached and even exceeded those found in the Third World. As private schooling boomed around the nation, federal cuts in education spending, combined with state tax cuts such as Proposition 13 in California or Proposition 2½ in Massachusetts, had disastrous effects on public schools. In two of the nation's most prosperous school districts—California's Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 area—marked declines in educational scores were evident as schools tightened budgets and wealthy citizens put their children into private schools. Lacking educational opportunities or the prospects of high-wage manufacturing jobs, low-income students fell easily into despair, and the country's inner-city neighborhoods were rocked by violence and drug addiction throughout the decade.

Violence

Handgun sales boomed. New prisons were built and filled at such a rate that by the 1990s the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Child abuse became a national scandal with an astonishing 2.4 million cases reported by 1989. Gang violence became endemic to urban areas, with sensational, nihilistic crimes that shocked the public. By 1989 metal detectors were common in many urban schools, and 66 percent of teachers surveyed by the American Federation of Teachers said they feared violence from their students. A highly addictive new form of cocaine, crack, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, despite highly publicized administration efforts to interdict and wage war on drugs. By the end of the decade, as those in the highest quintile of income in America were predominately white while those in the lowest quintile of income were predominately black, the divide in economic classes widened the racial chasm of the nation. Police brutality became a common complaint of black neighborhoods, the impetus behind the Miami race riots of 1980; while race became the subtext to the stories of the 1984 presidential bid of Jesse Jackson, the MOVE bombing of 1985, the 1987 Tawana Brawley accusations, and the "Willie Horton" ad campaign during the presidential election of 1988. Many urban whites came to fear black crime, despite statistics showing that black-on-black crime was more common than interracial attacks, and a white New York vigilante, Bernhard Goetz, became a hero to some after he shot four black youths he claimed were trying to rob him on a train in 1984. Wealthy white neighborhoods, like those of Latin American land barons, erected walls around themselves and posted guards to keep out intruders. Rich urbanites, like Sherman McCoy, the fictional protagonist in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, sought desperately to insulate themselves from the misery of their poorer neighbors. The nation polarized, becoming economically, racially, and politically balkanized.

New Problems

Part of the problem was generational. The 1980s were locked into an ongoing dispute over values between baby boomers and their parents, using vocabularies and definitions rooted in the past. There were new problems during the decade: AIDS, growing environmental devastation, and gang violence; but the culture remained fragmented, addressing these issues in antithetical terms. Conservatives spoke the language of fundamentals, of nature; baby boomers rearticulated the language of expressive freedom. On hot-button political issues such as abortion virtually no consensus could be generated because groups were speaking at cross purposes. Some younger observers might note that both sides of the abortion debate were expressing a core desire that some element of the human experience be held sacred in a dehumanizing age or that at a time like the 1980s, when mice were patented and computers got viruses, older definitions of the natural needed to be re-thought. Such views were rarely aired during the decade. Between the confrontations of World War II veteran and Vietnam War protester, black teenager and white policeman, religious fundamentalist and feminist, difference became more important than commonality; embracing divisiveness more important than building consensus. The irony, of course, was the 1980s were not supposed to be that way, to the partisan of the Reagan restoration, confidence in the future was a consequence of coming together. But it could never be that simple. Precisely because the 1980s embodied the tensions and forces of so many preceding periods, a World War II-style rallying around the flag was scarcely possible. Instead the 1980s were contested, acrimonious, diverse, and contradictory—like America and American history generally. Perhaps that diversity and acrimony can be a source of enduring strength to the next generation that studies the past carefully but not slavishly, confident enough to frame solutions appropriate to the problems of their time.