A Hinge of History
1980 in American culture
Today is the official publication day for my new book 1980: America’s Pivotal Year. I’m marking the event by posting the following excerpt. I hope you’ll like it—and spread the word. Thanks. —Jim
WE LIVE AMID multiple calendars. Some are cyclical (seasons, holidays, generations); others are linear (seconds, minutes, lifetimes); still others are personal (graduations, marriages, retirements). Within these temporal dimensions, one of the longer units of time is that of the decade. Actually, the concept of a ten-year segment as a cultural measuring stick is itself a historical construct, one that became a form of cultural shorthand back in the 1890s—“the Gay Nineties,” as they were sometimes retroactively described. But such shorthand really dates back to the 1920s, perhaps because these were years in which the mass media of radio, film, and tabloid journalism came into their own, generating troves of sounds, words, and images that have been associated with a particular interval of time. Subsequent intervals have been similarly stamped and remembered ever since.
Of course, the demarcation of when decades begin and end is not precise. The twenties are commonly regarded as beginning in 1919 (in the aftermath of world war, rioting, and a pandemic) and ending in 1929 with a stock market crash. Of course, the decade was more complicated than this, not only because the so-called “Roaring” Twenties really only started roaring mid-decade, but also because these were years of sharp cultural bifurcation: the Jazz Age and the day of the flapper, yes, but also a time of drought, religious conservatism, and the Ku Klux Klan. The thirties, which are generally demarcated by the Great Depression inaugurated by the stock market crash in the closing months of the twenties, are typically remembered as stretching until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in (late) 1941. The “sixties” are sometimes pushed back to the fifties in terms of the Civil Rights movement and as far forward as Watergate in the early-to-mid seventies. The 21st century is often regarded as starting on September 11, 2001. And so on.
The year 1980, then, is actually a bit of an anomaly in that it is widely believed to actually mark the beginning of the eighties—a decade seemingly embodied, for better or worse, by the figure of Ronald Reagan—and one globally regarded as ending in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the bipolar world of the Cold War. Here, too, it’s possible to quibble; there were clear signs of the economic libertarianism represented by Reagan, for example, in the decision of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, to de-regulate the trucking and airline industries in the late seventies, and the coming cultural wave of the eighties was clearly telegraphed by the release of Star Wars in 1977, among other cultural touchstones. But it is truly remarkable to consider the confluence of forces—conservative politics; evangelical religion; a new awareness of tradition and patriotism—and the way they were reflected in specific events such as the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Olympics, the Iranian hostage crisis (which began slightly before, and ended slightly after, 1980) and of course a presidential election that resulted in a realignment whose echoes remain with us still. The year marked the beginning of a moment that has actually persisted for multiple decades.
This transition and its echoes have been amply documented by many historians, most recently and impressively by Rick Perlstein in his magisterial Reaganland, the final installment of his four-volume history of modern American conservatism. What this considerably slighter book purports to do is somewhat different, in that its ambit is more cultural than political, focusing specifically on popular culture. By boring in with granular detail on a few key touchstone documents—obscure as well as legendary ones—it will capture a zeitgeist as it shifts, identifying those elements that harken back as they jostle with others that point forward. The effect will be analogous to capturing in slow motion the mysterious but unmistakable process by which a child grows.
The organization of the book is fairly straightforward. It begins with something of a prologue in the form of a chapter on the culture and politics of the year 1979 in the United States, and how that year reflected the decade that preceded it, even as there were tremors of change. It’s followed by a second chapter sketching the political climate in the first half of the year, notably the early months of the presidential election campaign. The core of the book consists of four chapters—one on movies, another on music, a third on television, and a fourth on bestselling books—exploring the major cultural works of the year and the ways in which they reflected the receding and emerging trends that characterized the year. A chapter that looks at the climax of the presidential election is followed by a brief epilogue that peeks ahead to the 1980s and beyond.
For some, a book like this can serve as an exercise in nostalgia. The past can be a nice place to visit, even a refuge, and I think that for many people who were alive at the time, the moment recorded here is a one that echoed into the early 21st century—an era which, however promising or even precious it may be for any number of people, has been one of war, economic upheaval, epidemiological crisis, and political polarization. This is not the first time a large number of Americans have felt their country was going in the wrong direction—indeed, the dozen or so years preceding 1980 were one such moment, which is why the ones that followed can seem like an interlude in retrospect.
Be that as it may, one may still legitimately ask what the larger point may be in this exercise. There are three answers to this question. The first is that readers will be asked to entertain—a verb used advisedly here—the proposition that 1980 was a hinge of American history, a time when a vibrant culture emerged from a season of doubt into an Indian Summer of revival. There is an inevitable degree of subjectivity in such assessments, and indeed the same person can look at the same period differently from different vantage points in one’s lifespan. Which is precisely why it’s worth doing—it offers a sense of (shifting) perspective that can help us see the present more clearly no less than the past.
Second, 1980 was an important year in American history because it inaugurated an era of political logic whose impact remained the prevailing common sense long after the 1980s were over. When Bill Clinton—a Democrat elected president because he successfully repositioned the Democratic Party toward the right— famously said “The era of Big Government is over” in 1996, this child of the sixties was essentially conceding that the eighties had colonized the nineties. The two George Bushes were very much the heirs of Reagan, and even Barack Obama (who had complimentary things to say about Reagan when he was running for president himself) was forced to accept the presumably libertarian character of the American economy when he bailed it out in the aftermath of the financial crisis and adopted an essentially hybrid public/private model of health care in the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Donald Trump was in many ways Reagan’s opposite in temperament when he was president, and it now appears he has destroyed the ideological foundations of a political coalition that has dominated American politics for the last 40 years. But the loyalty he continues to command nevertheless rests on the rhetoric and instincts of modern conservatism, even as Trump discarded many of its core components (along with the sunny temperament that made Reagan’s message so appealing to so many for so long).
Finally, at perhaps the most important level, this project is less about culture, politics, or 1980 than it is a meditation on the nature of history—its role in making sense of the world. All human attempts to envision the world as it is (was, will be) are necessarily partial. That’s because they’re edited—their creators decide what to include, and exclude, from the literal or figurative stories they tell in inevitable human subjectivity. Beyond that, there’s also the fact that the world keeps changing, and so that any truth, no matter how closely it approximates reality, is likely to lose accuracy over time. That’s why we keep writing histories, and why the past keeps changing. But the elusiveness of the past doesn’t quench the need we have for stories, or attempts to refashion them. In any event, historical accounts are never entirely fictitious, because, whatever their limits, they’re rooted in events that really did happen—fixed points in time and space—even if those points can be connected in different ways, and even if there will inevitably be arguments about their shape and significance. And agreement, too, at least among some of the people some of the time. It’s in the space between argument and agreement—a sweet spot that’s not always obvious, but believable and perhaps useful—that characterizes the best histories of our time. The hope here is that it will capture what amounts to a piece of slow-motion photography of 1980.
But perhaps the best metaphor to invoke at the start of this study comes from Roman mythology, specifically the god Janus, the two-faced figure who looks forward and back—the patron saint of transitions, so to speak. It would be fair to say that any given moment in history is Janus-faced, in that it simultaneously embodies what has been and will be. But certain moments seem to capture this duality with notable clarity, and 1980 appears to be one such year. The goal in the pages to follow will be to bring both into focus in a way that’s not so much timeless as timeful, showing the way that our lives are lived on the three temporal planes of past, present, and future. This is the way history gets made—and remade—all the time.