The Long Hangover of the Roaring Eighties

‘When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved the Country — Then Broke the Country — and Led Us to Today‘By Jonathan KaufmanViking, 320 pagesYou wouldn’t know that America emerged triumphant on the world stage at the end of the 1980s reading Pulitzer-Prize-winning novels like John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest.” By 1990 Updike’s everyman protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom had run a once-successful Toyota dealership into the ground, prompting a scolding from a Japanese executive.In case this symbolism is unclear, Harry later volunteers to march in a local parade dressed as Uncle Sam, and nearly collapses due to his poor physical health. It’s a tension that remains with us 40 years later. Did the 1980s inaugurate a national renewal or a “greed is good” culture that ended in collapse?“The pessimism and gloom of 1979 had turned into the optimism and assurance of 1989,” Jonathan Kaufman writes in his new informative but uneven history. “America had won the Cold War, exposed the bankruptcy of communism, and wiped away criticism of capitalism. Freedom — both political and economic —had prevailed.”To his credit, Mr. Kaufman, a former Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg journalist, does not offer up a one-sided historical screed. “The 1980s both revitalized American business and destabilized American workers,” he writes. “The drive for deregulation both unleashed innovation and enabled dangerous speculation. Media fragmentation both increased creativity and choice and decreased shared truth.”All of which is true — and, by now, quite familiar. Both the left and right, in fact, have so thoroughly chewed up the eighties and spat out their ideological takes that the time is ripe for a more nuanced swing at bipartisan mistakes which left us with our 21st-century mess.Mr. Kaufman hints at such an approach. He surveys the decade through the eyes of five Americans – some famous, like crusading General Electric CEO Jack Welch. But there’s also Ronald Reagan’s FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who “methodically dismantled the economic regulations and political protections governing broadcast news.”Set aside Mr. Kaufman’s assumption that there is something inherently good about government “protection” of the news business. The point here, again familiar, is that Reagan won the White House running against “the government,” much to the chagrin of many Democrats.They forget that the broad American left had been using the very same government as a punching bag for decades. “In the 1960s, the government was the enemy,” Mr. Kaufman notes, in a section about a labor organizer and women’s rights activist named Karen Nussbaum, who became disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s shift from class-based to identity-based politics.Mr. Kaufman — and other historians — would do well to consider the “Reagan Revolution” as merely one chapter in a much longer saga about Americans’ ambivalence, bordering on political schizophrenia, about the role of “government” in their lives.Mr. Kaufman also profiles the African American financier John Rogers, as part of a broader narrative linking Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama during an era when “individual Black success…masked collective decline.”Tracing individuals through the currents of history has yielded brilliant books such as J. Anthony Lukas’ hefty Boston epic “Common Ground,” or Jonathan Rieder’s insightful New York City study “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism.” A more recent example, from 2017, is Amy Goldstein’s “Janesville” about the sprawling impact of auto plant closures in Wisconsin.Mr. Kaufman’s portraits, while often interesting, sometimes hover between a dry recitation of events and an evaluation about whether or not they were good or bad. Jack Welch, he writes, “help(ed) destroy the world in which he had grown up,” Kaufman claims, “a world in which a working-class train conductor with a high school education, protected by a union, could earn enough to buy a house, enable his wife to stay at home, and raise a son who would live a life far better than his parents had.”That’s one way to look at it. Another is that America’s stunning post-war prosperity was, in part, the product of decidedly unique global circumstances that would always be hard to maintain.Mr. Kaufman’s analysis of the international scene may be the most interesting portion of “When America Roared,” in part because he was on the ground covering events from Tiananmen Square to Berlin. “The Chinese aren’t good at making cars,” he quotes a diplomat as saying. “But they are very good at repression.” This prompts Kaufman, four decades later, to wonder: “What if it turned out that they were good at both?”In the end, the 1980s’ most enduring legacy may be a stubborn, misguided nostalgia. Fierce demands for economic individualism on the right and cultural individualism on the left later turned to shock when beloved communal values —faith for some, trade unions for others — rapidly deteriorated.Until pundits and party leaders confront their own role in the demise of values they claim to cherish, we’ll keep getting selective memories like this from Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom: “I miss it…The Cold War. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning.”

The Long Hangover of the Roaring Eighties

The Long Hangover of the Roaring Eighties

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