The '80s Never Ended

Recently reading David Sirota's Back to Our Future I thought again that the 1980s do define our decade, though the explanation I find satisfying, I dare say, runs somewhat deeper than his--specifically that it was the time when the right-wing cultural counter-offensive underway since the 1940s (an adjunct to the more central political-economic counteroffensive we think of as neoliberalism) finally dominated the mainstream.

Why then and not earlier? Simply put, as the stimulus of post-war reconstruction and automobile culture ran their courses, as the war economy ground down the economic machinery sustaining it (the Cold War killed the gold standard and the Great Society together), as Europe and Japan's assimilating American-style mass-manufacturing made the world market very crowded; and the pace of technological innovation and its associated productivity increases slowed, while the old resource profligacy proved unsustainable; Big Business already felt its profits squeezed in the 1960s. In the 1970s post-war boom altogether turned to post-war bust, worsening matters, while inflation may have made manufacturers uneasy but was positively toxic for finance. Meanwhile the leftward shift of society was felt as intensely threatening, even in the core, Western, industrialized nations. (Remember, for instance, the hysteria of British right-wingers about some imminent union/leftist takeover of the country that had them cooking up coup plots against Harold Wilson?)

At the same time, amid danger there was also opportunity, the decay of the post-war consensus making their going on the offensive seem not only more urgent, but like it had a chance--as by getting the public to think the trouble was that things had gone too far left, rather than not left enough. Meanwhile, both sides of the counterculture provided material to work with--not just the much ballyhooed backlash against it, which, in a demonstration of the validity not of the horseshoe theory by which they set so much store but the fishhook theory they have marginalized, shifted ever-shaky "liberal" centrists right into its ranks in practice and even in name, but the counterculture itself (certainly, as it appeared in the U.S.). More emotional than intellectual in its foundations, strongly inclined to individualism, never very strong on the issues of economics and class, it was possible to exploit its impulses on behalf of not just consumerism (as Thomas Frank has made all too clear), but the full-blown neoliberal economic agenda--turning the hippies into yippies and just plain yuppies.

What we have lived through in the last four decades has been the epilogue. But, perhaps, also the prologue to a new story . . .