It is not an exaggeration to say that an entire way of American life died in 1981.
Ronald Reagan’s summary dismissal of the striking PATCO—the union of federal air traffic controllers—was a shot directly across the bow fired at working people with the temerity to organize. A footnote to history at this juncture, but a prophecy in the moment. The circumstance was complex—the union overreaching in their demands, Reagan philosophically draconian—but the net result meant the end of the modern labor movement as it had previously existed.
Per labor historian Erik Loomis: “It had three massive impacts. First, it ended the great militant decade of public sector unionism that had begun with the 1970 postal workers strike and that had led to major strikes throughout the decade. Second, it gave space for private employers to bust their unions too—and the ’80s was filled with companies breaking union contracts that had existed for decades. Third, it made unions scared to strike. The number of workers on strike each year plummeted after 1981 and has never recovered.”
The punishments just kept coming for working people: NAFTA and wage stagnation, the opioid crisis and mass incarceration, the cold shoulder of a Democratic Party too interested in courting Silicon Valley and suburban elites to remember their rank and file, and the false profiteering of Donald Trump. None of it was unforeseeable, or unavoidable. It’s just that, save for lip service, no one within the political class really cared. Watching the beginning of that long downward trajectory commence, Bruce Springsteen worked on Nebraska.
“I Guess There’s Just the Meanness in This World”
Notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska turned 40 this year. The initial shock of its fathoms-deep menace remains undiminished, its major themes more resonant than ever. It’s a 40-minute recitation of corruption and violence that reimagines the to-live-outside-the-law-you-must-be-honest folk heroes of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding as a promenade of pointlessly marauding psychopaths.
Recorded almost entirely to a Tascam four-track, Nebraska is a stark vision of American degradation seen through the lens of a guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic grown prosperous as the world around him becomes less and less reasonable. Its central mystery feels in many ways unresolved: How did Springsteen get from the joyous automotive liberations of Born to Run to the hellscape highways of Nebraska in seven short years? Or was the distance really that far?
