Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 117

on political books
Can the 1980s
Explain 2024?
The yuppies embodied the winning side
of America's deepening economic divide.
Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left
behind. Two new books consider what
liberals can learn from the decade.
By Nicholas Lemann
I
f you're reading this, you probably remember the utter shock you felt on Election Night
2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to win. What may be
harder to imagine today is that in the liberal world, the shock level was almost that high
on Election Night 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. In retrospect, that
was the dawn of the historically inevitable Age of Reagan; in the moment, Reagan's victory
contravened liberals' long-held conviction that the conservative wing of the Republican
Party was marginal, not central, in American politics. In 2024, with our political
system deeply polarized, low functioning, and apparently unable to bring the country
together to solve problems and build a better life for ordinary Americans, it's tempting
to search for an origin story. What was the fateful wrong turn? And one place one might
find it is the 1980s, when the benefits of economic growth started to skew toward the affluent
and the tone of mainstream politics became more combative.
Economists, sociologists, and political scientists have produced a small library's worth
of books about this; now we have two books by culturally oriented journalists, looking
in unexpected places for the answer to the great mystery. For academics, this might be
called a search for an independent variable, and they would be expected to test each
possibility rigorously against others. Journalists get to be more fanciful, and perhaps
to have more fun. So it is with these books, which in effect offer two quite different independent
variables that might help us understand how we got here. In Steven Hyden's
There Was Nothing You Could Do, it's the release and reception of Bruce Springsteen's 1984
album Born in the U.S.A.; in Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppies, it's the rise and fall of
a much-discussed cultural type of that era.
Perhaps you're too young for either of these to ring a bell, so let's start with a little
history. Springsteen became famous with his 1975 album Born to Run and his long,
electrifying live performances, but then he brought out three albums that seemed to
represent a deliberate retreat from the spotlight-particularly the third of the three,
Nebraska (1982), a collection of Woody Guthrie-like slow, sad stories recorded without
a backup band. Then, boom, came Born in the U.S.A., which was loud, arena friendly, and
packaged, back when album covers were a thing, in echt-American iconography: Springsteen
in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, in front of an American flag. Yuppies was a term
popularized by the Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, as shorthand for " young urban
professionals. " The emergence of the yuppie as a social type was notable, because it
went against two previous prevailing pop culture narratives: first, that the Baby Boom
There Was Nothing You
Could Do: Bruce Springsteen's
" Born In The U.S.A. " and the
End of the Heartland
by Steven Hyden
Hachette Books, 272 pp.
Triumph of the Yuppies:
America, the Eighties, and the
Creation of an Unequal Nation
by Tom McGrath
Grand Central, 336 pp.
Washington Monthly
117

Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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