Back When I Lived in 1980

(in 2020-22)

Ronald Reagan campaigning for president in Florida, 1980. His election was indicative of a sea change in American politics — and culture.

I am now finishing my 20th book, slated for late next year (more on that one another day). The previous ones have ranged across a series of topics in American life—the Civil War, Roman Catholicism, the U.S. presidency, film history, even a foray into fiction. My tendency in many of them is to explore the nation’s past panoramically, beginning in colonial times and running into the present. In recent years, however, my work has centered on the 1970s and 80s—decades that coincide with my own youth, but which are now passing from the realm of memory into that history. There was my study of the celebrated sitcom All in the Family, for example. And another on the films of Martin Scorsese. And a third looking at the way TV shows from the late 20th century have portrayed U.S. history. And now I have wandered in the realm of micro-history, joining the ranks of those who have written about particular years like 1491 or 1831 of particular valence in American culture and society. My new book, 1980: America’s Pivotal Year, will be officially published next month (though it’s available now).

Nineteen-eighty has been much studied by political historians, and remembered vividly by many of those who have lived through it. In large measure, that's because there was a major electoral realignment that year. The incumbent president, Democrat Jimmy Carter, was unexpectedly defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan, an insurgent candidate many Americans had trouble taking seriously when they didn’t detest him. (Sound familiar?) But like him or not, Reagan’s election ushered in what we know as a period of neoconservatism that continued long after he left office at the end of the decade. When someone like Democratic president Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” it was compelling evidence that the logic of Reaganism maintained political appeal straight through the end of the 20th century and beyond. Vestiges of it persisted into the tax-cutting mentality of former president Donald Trump, though Trump’s channeling of political resentment was at marked variance with Reagan’s sometimes exasperatingly sunny disposition.

Politics notwithstanding, the primary focus of my book is the popular culture of 1980—traced in chapters on the films, music, TV shows, and bestselling books of the year—and how they revealed a nation in transition. In ways that I regard as truly uncanny, many of the works released that year are notable in the ways that seem both documents of the seventies as well as the emerging eighties.

Take, for example, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1980 album Double Fantasy, released just weeks before his tragic murder on December 8th of that year. In a number of respects, Double Fantasy is a quintessential work of seventies equality feminism: John and Yoko each sing 7 tracks, chronicling a marriage in which he’s a househusband and she runs a corporate enterprise (namely Lennon’s business empire). But stylistically, Double Fantasy—notably its leadoff single, “Starting Over”—is a self-conscious throwback to earlier eras in rock & roll history, anticipating the return to tradition that would soon be found in acts ranging from the Stray Cats to (improbably enough) the Talking Heads. To the end of his life, Lennon was ahead of his time.

Other examples abound. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate—an infamous financial disaster that’s nevertheless an interesting movie—wrote immigrants into the Western in ways that reflect the ethnographic preoccupations of the seventies while resurrecting the grand traditions of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Milton Friedman made a splash with his bestselling free-market manifesto Free to Choose—and did so through the venue of seventies-style public television. The Confederate-inflected TV series Dukes of Hazzard, whose main preoccupation was car chases, was nevertheless situated at the ideological crossroads of Jimmy Carter’s Georgia and Ronald Reagan’s Orange County. Meanwhile, disco queen Donna Summer was maintaining her status as a sex goddess—but moving toward embracing her evangelical Christian heritage, as reflected in her 1980 album The Wanderer.

It is a truism, even a cliché, that any given moment in history is a moment of transition, because that’s what history is: a chronicle of change. But I try to make the case that 1980 is an unusually vivid snapshot of this process, and is intrinsically interesting on that basis alone. But the project inevitably has a personal dimension, as I spent 1980 in high school, and revisiting this material was thus a trip down memory lane, one I began taking in the summer of 2020—a period when so many of us felt our lives were on hold in what would prove to be an extended moment of Covid. I don’t imagine it will be too long before we get histories of the long strange trip we are now finally finishing.

Earlier this week, I was driving home and heard the 1987 Belinda Carlisle pop song “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” I never thought much of it at the time (though I was a big fan of the Go-Gos, the band Carlisle led earlier in the decade). On this listen I found myself appreciating the song’s exquisite production values and the surprising muscularity of the rhythm guitar (the credit for which goes to Rick Nowels, who co-wrote the song, something I had to look up). I found myself wondering: am I hearing the song more clearly now, or am I indulging in a form of nostalgia (my attention to the production mingling with memories of my beloved best friend, now deceased, with whom I was living at the time)? History is a surprisingly slippery business, a source of comfort and heartache and a reminder to try to live fully in an ever-receding present even as we are pulled back, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Learn more about 1980: America’s Year—and please spread the word! Thanks.