In the nineteen-eighties, the yuppie served this self-definitional function—am I pro-yuppie or anti-yuppie?—exceptionally well. It enabled people to orient themselves to the times. Far more people hated yuppies, and everything the yuppie stood for, than wanted to be yuppies, of course. The term itself is a put-down. It’s close to “puppy,” and no one wants to be a puppy; everyone wants to be the big dog. But more people had contempt for hippies in the nineteen-sixties and beatniks in the nineteen-fifties—or have today, for that matter, for Zoomers—than aspired to be beatniks or hippies. “Beatnik,” too, is a put-down, a mashup of “Beat” and “Sputnik.” (Both are “far out.”) “Hippie” is a dismissive diminutive of “hipster.”
Social types are also useful as personifications. You know a hippie or a yuppie by sight. They wear a certain kind of shoe, eat a certain kind of food, drive a certain kind of car. LSD was the hippie drug, associated with dropping out. The yuppie drug was cocaine, associated with life in the fast lane. Terms like “hippie” and “yuppie” come fully loaded. They provide a completely accoutred objective correlative to a certain package of tastes and attitudes. If they luck out, they come to stand for an era—usually, since we have ten fingers, a decade. When we think of American life in the nineteen-eighties, we think of the yuppie.
Tom McGrath’s “Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation” (Grand Central) is an entertaining recap of that period. McGrath doesn’t offer a novel sociological interpretation of the yuppies. What he has to say about them would have been conventional even during their time. His research consists of interviews with veterans of the decade, his citations are mainly to magazine articles, and his stories are taken from the headlines. You have seen this movie before. If you’re old enough, you were in it. It’s fun to rewatch, though.
“What I want to see above all,” Reagan said the year before he was reëlected, “is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.” The remark seemed to capture the spirit of the age. It wasn’t just O.K. to be rich; it was good to be rich. It justified the American way of life. Young people who had money were unashamed about it. The well off talked openly about how much they were making and how much their houses cost.