The 1980s Are Back, and Not in a Good Way

New York Times

16-02-2025

When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America's greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a 'shining city on a hill' where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn't get in the way.
Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on 'Family Ties,' who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn't see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the '80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs).
Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it's the '80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November's election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member's only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump 'is making it sexy to be Republican again. He's making it glamorous to be a Republican again') or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar's New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It's laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread.
These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late '80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I'm talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can't understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they've turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times.
Mr. Trump's '80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published 'The Art of the Deal' and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a 'short-fingered vulgarian' — but he embodied what many people who weren't rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.
More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media's imagination.
Many people who watched Oliver Stone's morality tale 'Wall Street' missed the satire in the 'greed is good' speech and moved to New York hoping to become the next Gordon Gekko, or at least live like him. At the time, the real-life Wall Street executive Michael Milken, who would later go to prison for securities fraud, was a national celebrity. (Trump pardoned Mr. Milken in 2020.) The takeaway for young people was easy: Any kind of moralism around moneymaking was regarded as uncool, or possibly even un-American. Mr. Trump embodied this archetype. He told a story about himself that in typical Trump fashion laundered his history as a beneficiary of nepotism who began his career with a few million dollars of help from Dad and often suggested that he had made it in New York City with the pluck and determination of Dolly Parton in '9 to 5.'
Yes, there was talk at the time of Trump running for president. But it came across mostly as an exercise in brand-building. Certainly, no one imagined that he would be seriously proposing that America annex Greenland and Canada. But if you understand that his worldview is permanently frozen in the '80s it explains, in addition to his fondness for Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Village People, that many of his foreign policy notions were largely formulated through the lens of the Cold War, in which two superpowers negotiated a state of peace via mutual deterrence. The opposing power is no longer Russia, however; it's China. Like Reagan, Mr. Trump is championing a 'Star Wars'-like missile shield project, an Iron Dome, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in charge of putting together.
The slogan that Mr. Trump cribbed directly from Reagan, 'Make America Great Again,' speaks to a longing for a revival. Reagan was mad at many of the same things Mr. Trump is — affirmative action, regulation, big government, high taxes, the Panama Canal, the Department of Education — but this time Mr. Trump, abetted by Elon Musk's squad of former interns, some still not old enough to legally drink, is doing more damage to those institutions and policies more quickly than Reagan ever did. Reagan, just like Mr. Trump, was often callous about people he did not see as important: To use one notorious example, members of his administration joked about the AIDS epidemic and abetted its destruction by initially refusing to do anything about it, stigmatizing it as a disease its victims deserved. (Mr. Trump's move against the United States Agency for International Development, among many other things, has already halted treatments for H.I.V. patients in poor countries.)
It's easy for someone my age to look back on the glamour of the Reagan years with nostalgia for the aesthetics and excesses of the '80s, which I then misunderstood as a kind of abundance. As a Christian conservative, I never experienced many of its cruelties firsthand. After Reagan's second term, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it felt like America had won something.
But I know now that for much of the world, the shining city on a hill appeared more like the distant compound of a Bond villain. Nancy Reagan's antidrug campaign seemed virtuous when my fifth-grade teacher made our class memorize all the street names for PCP in case we ever encountered it in rural Alabama. I later understood the war on drugs as a prosecutorial cover for persecuting and incarcerating Black people. My isolation in a small, culturally monolithic community rendered these things invisible to me as a child, when the Reagan years were all glitter, big hair and fun.
As an adult progressive, I can now recognize that there's a cruelty underneath the glitter, an appeal to would-be elites who want to build a world for themselves while putting everyone else in their place. Reagan was an early architect of Mr. Trump's policies and ideas, but in pursing them he didn't try to burn down everything in his path. (He also won by a far more decisive margin.) The MAGA kids, perhaps not understanding the way Mr. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the Constitution, or caring what that means, are entranced by some of the same things I was at a much younger age. It all feels oddly familiar, like we've been here before — but not in a good way.