The 1980s were the anti-1960s, the conservative backlash and counter revolution against the 60s cultural revolution, and the result was a fantasy politics and revision of history that still is understood simply as reality for much of the population. In some cultural studies reader, I can remember an interview with a Vietnam veteran who said that he could no longer remember what the war had been like because it seemed as if his memory of it had been shaped by its portrayal in popular films. I wonder if the 1980s wasn’t the Great Revision
How many television mini-series in the 1980s were devoted to the theme of Soviet invasion? The Day After (1983), Amerika (1987), World War III (1987) all aired at a time when weapons manufacturers like General Electric, Reagan’s former employer, were cashing in on his administration’s arms build-up, a policy which tripled the national debt, ramping it up to World War II levels to fight a Cold War that had already ended with détente. General Electric, of course, wasn’t merely a defense contractor, but also a media company in its capacity as owner of NBC, a major television network.
And look at all the Vietnam revisionism films of that period, like Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Hanoi Hilton, Good Morning Vietnam, Bat 21, the list goes on and on. Consider films which appealed to a crack pot right wing subculture which believed that the Vietnamese were still holding POWs as late as the 1980s (as if it even makes sense that the Vietnamese would keep POWs and not tell anybody) like Rambo II, which reversed the politics of the first Rambo film and book, or Braddock Missing in Action, starring apocalyptic right wing crackpot Chuck Norris. This myth was, in fact, a big part of the reason why the POW MIA flag is the only other flag to fly over the capitol other than the national flag.
Here’s an interesting and weird fact: The mini-series itself was pioneered by Lew Wasserman, head of MCA Universal and former Reagan golfing buddy. In fact, their association went back decades, as Reagan negotiated with MCA in bad faith on behalf of the Screen Actors Guild. There was even a DOJ investigation which accused MCA of violating antitrust laws in acquiring Universal. Foreshadowing Iran Contra, Reagan, when testifying, acted confused, like he couldn’t remember what happened. Did he have Alzheimer’s in the 1960s?
And consider the politics of a parade for returning Vietnam veterans like the one held in New York City as late as the 1980s. What was the symbolism of something like this for the reactionary and populist right wing whose mythology held that the New Left had hamstrung the U.S.’s ability to win the war and that anti-American leftists had spit on our heroes when they returned and called them “baby killers?”
Reagan’s electoral success is attributed to former democrats breaking ranks, and not all of them were located in the South. Many were disaffected liberals or “blue dog” democrats, or they were evolving neoliberals who believed they were former left wingers who had been “mugged by reality,” to quote Irving Kristol. The timing is right too if you consider that the Baby Boomers, who dropped LSD and protested the war while Jerry Rubin warned them never to trust anyone over thirty, were themselves heading off into their thirtiess by the time Reagan was elected. They were taking on mortgages and starting families of their own, this generation which had never known the poverty and struggle their parents had known in the depression and World War II, and who had instead been raised on post war television, affluence, and consumer culture. Did their collective super ego kick in as they reevaluated their conservative parents’ value system?
You really have to wonder what it means that Ken Kesey’s “super kids” were voting for a return to the patriotic and anticommunist values of their childhood when they had watched Reagan himself play the cowboy and hero in numerous television shows of their youth. Even in aesthetics and design, you can detect a return to patriotic futurism and the debt-fueled consumerism of “keeping up with the Joneses” that was common to their childhood. The connections start to get truly bizarre if you try to read a film like 1985’s Back to the Future through this lens. They get weirder still if you try to read Zemeckis’s later films like Forrest Gump through the lens of the 1990’s end-of-history myth and a post-political America in which capitalism was the last man standing in the great ideological battle of the 20th century.
The Reagan admin. conceived of its place in history consciously. Reagan was the “great communicator” of patriotic narratives, according to Reagan staffer David Gergen, who explained the conscious and intentional concern for narrative that “perception management” entailed in a book called Eyewitness to Power. Reagan was the first conservative president elected in the post-Nixon, post-1968 convention, post McGovern Frasier-era. After a decade of conservative hand wringing about primaries and caucuses being binding and the road to party nomination having shifted, from party insiders and vetting among political elites, to media newsrooms and vapid popularity contests, Reagan was the first Republican president elected in a new era of mass media.
This anxiety about being able to appeal to youth and mindless consumers at the ballot box was quite real among conservatives. You can see it in the endless analyses of the first televised presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy in which style, youth, and good looks were believed to have trumped substance and common sense. They feared that a youth-oriented consumer culture would be easily swayed by the hollow sex appeal or excitement of a John F. Kennedy while unable to see the pragmatic merit of conservative ideals. After the disastrous failure of Vietnam abroad and the equally failed support of segregation and opposition to the civil rights movement at home, the conservative Alex P. Keatons whimpered about being the misunderstood political nerds and outcasts cut adrift in a dangerously vapid, media saturated America full of beautiful people and cool kids who didn’t know any better. In column after column, article after article, this trite and unfounded sense of persecution is echoed all throughout a conservative intelligentsia populated by embittered squares who saw themselves as cultural martyrs for traditional values, order, and authority, paragons of common sense and the lone islands of sanity in a world lost to the moral relativism and frivolity of a liberal modernity.
Jeanne “Death Squads” Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN ambassador and probably the real architect of his genocidal and repressive foreign policy in Latin America, frets about this endlessly in her academic output in the 1970s. She whines about McGovern Frasier and how it will replace the wisdom of party insiders with bread and circus media spectacle in determining presidential nominees. In her 1979 defense of death squad terror in Commentary magazine, she speculates that one of the reasons Americans couldn’t grasp the importance of militarily backing repressive satrap states like Somoza’s Nicaragua was that Somoza himself wasn’t particularly good looking.
To this end, Reagan’s presidency was consciously theatrical, a cynically contrived spectacle for a population that a right wing academic, corporate, and policy elite no longer trusted after having been abandoned and repudiated in Vietnam. Reagan’s presidency was sold as “morning in America” after the long dark night of post Vietnam failure, drift, and malaise. In his farewell address, he called the 1980s, “the Great Reawakening,” meaning that the myth of American innocence didn’t have to die with the failed imperialist war in Vietnam, model villages (concentration camps), and Agent Orange deformities. The American historical narrative for the right didn’t have to be a tragedy. Believing itself to be the indispensable “city on the hill,” jingoist, patriotic cowboy capitalist America could ride again and once more and wave its big stick around in America II: Rollback, the shitty direct to video sequel.
We can look at any front and see that the U.S. took a sharp turn in the wrong direction in the 1980s, from incarceration rates, to the cost of college, to wage stagnation and the decline of organized labor, to the encroaching militarization of police, rising consumer debt, precarity, and the development of an emerging plutocracy. And yet, I think, when most Americans look back on it, they remember it like a movie. It even ended like a Hollywood narrative, with Reagan, the Jimmy Stewart-esque “ordinary man who became an extraordinary leader” storming Washington like Mr. Smith and confounding all the egg-headed intellectuals and anti-American Soviet-appeasers by winning the Cold War. Reagan said “tear down this wall!” and magically it happened. The music swelled, the crowd cheered, and left the theater. Well the shitty summer blockbuster crowd pleaser is over, the credits have rolled, so what now?
