The Eighties Were Worth the Nostalgia

R yan Reynolds kicked up a bit of a storm recently with comments that lashed the decade of the 1980s:

The Eighties was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a f***ing mess. Like you know, people forget that it was like that was a tremendous strife, socio-political tensions everywhere. You know, we’re still like pretty fresh off like a Cuban Missile Crisis, which is only like what 15-20 years before. So, you know, it’s a tumultuous period.

Reynolds, who is five years younger than I am (he was born in October 1976), undoubtedly has a skewed perspective on the Eighties even aside from being a typical Hollywood lefty. First, he’s Canadian — and while the Eighties was generally a good decade for Canada, especially compared with the Seventies, it wasn’t the same as here in America. Second, Reynolds’s elementary school burned to the ground in 1987, and there are reasons to think he set the fire. That sounds like a kid whose issues with the period were not about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Reynolds has talked about having a difficult relationship with his dad, an ex-Mountie, if this gives one some insight into his thinking. (One might also doubt the judgment of a guy who is divorced from Scarlett Johansson.)

Now, it is a truism that we get nostalgic about the past, and especially about the period of our youth and young adulthood, and this tends to gloss over the complexities and faults of any period. It’s also true that conservatives tend to be more nostalgic, given the value we place on gratitude, tradition, and stability, whereas progressives are more apt to fall into the constant denunciations of their forbears. But that doesn’t mean that the nostalgists are all wrong, or solely ideological about the past.

There’s a school of thought that says that what people liked about an earlier time was just that they were younger. Again, there is some truth in the charge. I have lost the cited references by now, but I recall reading about a WPA-funded oral history of slavery conducted in the Deep South in the 1930s, in which the researchers (who I assume were largely or exclusively white) were shocked to occasionally run across elderly ex-slaves who expressed some degree of nostalgia for the time of slavery.

That was not the majority view, of course, but if you think about it, it’s not quite as shocking as it sounds. First of all, it cannot have been a picnic to be black, poor, and elderly at the height of Jim Crow during the depths of the Great Depression. People who are hungry tend to have everything else driven out of mind, and one of the few things slaves rarely had to worry about was their next meal. Moreover, some of the worst parts of slavery were the things that could happen to a slave — sexual assaults, brutal beatings, being sold away from family and friends — and the mind looking back tends to discount things that could have happened to you but didn’t, even if they happened to others. But also, very old people doubtless had fond memories of being young, physically fit, and surrounded by other young, fit people with whom they shared much camaraderie. That’s a similar dynamic to why we find old men fondly recalling their time at war. That doesn’t make war a good experience any more than a smattering of nostalgia from octogenarians made slavery a good experience.

So, yes, all of those things can be true about nostalgia. But the Eighties really were a time worth remembering with fondness, for the same reason I’ve identified as a crucial, underrated element of Fifties nostalgia: The Eighties were palpably better than what immediately preceded them. Oh, sure, there were good things about the Seventies, from movies to classic rock to baseball. I have a lot of fond memories of the Seventies, but they are inseparable from having been a kid, and a kid in a golden age of children’s entertainment, when we had people such as Jim Henson, Fred Rogers, and Charles Schulz in their creative primes. But the Seventies were the decade of malaise, stagflation, Vietnam, Watergate, Iranian hostages, domestic bombing campaigns, skyjackings, urban crime, and social decay.

Of course, for my own tastes and rooting interests, some things really were better in the Eighties. I look back fondly on my childhood because being a kid is great, but being a teenager is terrible. At no point in the past three decades would I have traded adulthood for being a teenager again even for a day. But as a conservative of the Reaganite persuasion, things have never been better than when Reagan was winning successive landslides, driving the young generation to identify as Republicans in record numbers, and carrying a 60-plus approval rating for years on end — and doing it all with class, style, eloquence, and humor. As a Mets fan, I got the only championship of my lifetime with a 108-win team and a conclusion for the ages in 1986; the 1984-90 Mets were undoubtedly the best Mets team of my life. As a Giants fan, I got the first Super Bowl championship in the 1986-87 season, and the team that won that and a second Super Bowl in 1990-91 was the best Giants team of my life. Musical taste is more contingent on one’s time, but my favorite musician is Bruce Springsteen, and Bruce was never more ubiquitous in the culture than during the 1984-87 era of Born in the U.S.A. and the live box set. No rose-colored glasses are required to see these things as having really been better then.

Society-wide, however, the contrast between the Seventies and the Eighties explains why not only my cohort of the teens of the Eighties but also the adults who lived through the decade thought that they were living in good times — just as the adults of the Fifties or the Twenties did, and for many of the same reasons. Things were materially better than they’d been before, with a long economic boom that broke the back of inflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment and produced a surge in median family income. As in the Fifties and the Twenties, you can spot the prosperity of the period from the ways in which it is critiqued as an age of materialism and social climbing — terms nobody used about the Seventies or the Thirties. It was also a time of relative peace; for all of the scaremongering about the threat of nuclear annihilation, nothing in the Eighties compared with the American body counts of the Vietnam War. The ultimate defeat of Soviet communism was a world-historical victory every bit as consequential as the defeat of Nazism — it meant no more Koreas or Vietnams — but at a vastly lower cost. It was in no sense a time of more tension or strife than the Sixties or the Seventies.

While the Eighties had their political discontents and (like any period) their individual losers as well as winners, there was really only one quarter of American society in which the decade legitimately felt like a much worse time, and that was the gay community. The AIDS crisis really felt like the end of the world if the people in your circle of friends were dying in droves. The disease had no treatment or cure until the Nineties, and it went from a mysterious origin to a vector of sexual transmission that brought a screeching and fearful halt to the anything-goes gay bacchanal culture of the Seventies. Naturally, this is a perspective that has been handed down in the entertainment world much more than in the rest of the culture.

But for the great majority of Americans, the Eighties felt like a good time because they were.