Reaganism's Dark And Lasting Shadow: How Right-Wing '80s Pop Culture Lives on in Today's Politics

If David Sirota is right, and the culture of the 1980s is defining most of modern America, maybe there’s a connection between Charlie Sheen’s “issues” and American political culture. Sheen’s first film role was in the mid-1980s as one of the young anti-Soviet revolutionaries in the right-wing kitsch classic Red Dawn. Oliver Stone then cast him as one of the idealistic young soldiers in Platoon and as the center of his 1987 critique of Reagan-era financial malfeasance in Wall Street. To the extent that the public internalized him as “Charlie Sheen,” and not just the characters he played, his compelling 2011 meltdown is a cautionary tale about the spiritually dead end street of hyper-individualism. (And if Sheen bounces back as his gift for self-mockery suggests he might, his comeback could be a metaphor for the defeat of that very same darkness ).

In any case, in light of the of significant influence of the Tea Party and their ilk, progressive and Democratic communications professionals must come to the grips with the fact, once and for all, that logic and rationality are not the primary motivators of political culture. But what to do about it? George Lakoff and Drew Westen have both written usefully about how progressives and Democrats can improve the way they address various American publics. It’s not enough, however, to simply frame an issue or to speak emotionally to make an impact; communicators and movements need to understand the existing psychology and the unconscious of the people they are trying to move. Many culturally induced nerve endings, hidden from the view of polls and focus groups, help determine political currents. These hidden psychological currents cut both ways. In the last year Democratic researchers did not anticipate a populist susceptibility to the whopper about “death panels” and Republicans failed to unearth a residual affection for labor unions.

Sirota’s brilliant new book Back To Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now-- Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything (Ballentine) describes modern America in the context of the cultural byproducts of the Reagan era that Sirota and others of his generation were exposed to, particularly popular American films, TV shows and advertisements of the decade. He widens our understanding of the psychological terrain where political battles are fought and his book should be required reading for anyone who presumes to measure or influence public opinion.

Americans who were high school seniors when Ronald Reagan started his second term in 1985 are in their forties today, many of them occupying positions of power in business, the media and government.

Most public discussion in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday centered on his administration and his opaque personality. But Reaganism, the philosophy of conservatives who have appropriated him (sometimes in direct contradiction of some of the Gipper’s actual policies), has had a much bigger impact on modern-day America than has the man himself. Reaganism’s agenda included the reversal of the economic egalitarianism of the New Deal and the Great Society, and a revival of militarism to counteract the effects of the anti-Viet Nam protest era. Many of the dark and irrational currents in modern politics originate in the culture of the '80s including Islamophobia, hatred of government, excessive deference to the military, exaltation of the rich and individualism to the exclusion of community in the tradition of Ayn Rand, and a nasty contempt for anything that gets in the way of profits -- including concerns about the environment and human rights.

The primary cultural trope of Reaganism was to de-legitimize many of the progressive cultural ideas that had gained power in the 1960s and '70s, --what Sirota calls the “Die hippie, die” initiative (the phrase was the title of a South Park episode). The policy trends that Reaganism aimed at quashing fell into two broad categories: the expansion of government limits on big business (through environmental laws, workplace regulations, support for unions, and financial regulation) and the politically salient questioning of militarism that had been spawned by the Viet Nam War protest movement.