If 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.
