If you’re reading this, you probably remember the utter shock you felt on Election Night 2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to win. What may be harder to imagine today is that in the liberal world, the shock level was almost that high on Election Night 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. In retrospect, that was the dawn of the historically inevitable Age of Reagan; in the moment, Reagan’s victory contravened liberals’ long-held conviction that the conservative wing of the Republican Party was marginal, not central, in American politics. In 2024, with our political system deeply polarized, low functioning, and apparently unable to bring the country together to solve problems and build a better life for ordinary Americans, it’s tempting to search for an origin story. What was the fateful wrong turn? And one place one might find it is the 1980s, when the benefits of economic growth started to skew toward the affluent and the tone of mainstream politics became more combative.
Economists, sociologists, and political scientists have produced a small library’s worth of books about this; now we have two books by culturally oriented journalists, looking in unexpected places for the answer to the great mystery. For academics, this might be called a search for an independent variable, and they would be expected to test each possibility rigorously against others. Journalists get to be more fanciful, and perhaps to have more fun. So it is with these books, which in effect offer two quite different independent variables that might help us understand how we got here. In Steven Hyden’s There Was Nothing You Could Do, it’s the release and reception of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the U.S.A.; in Tom McGrath’s Triumph of the Yuppies, it’s the rise and fall of a much-discussed cultural type of that era.
Perhaps you’re too young for either of these to ring a bell, so let’s start with a little history. Springsteen became famous with his 1975 album Born to Run and his long, electrifying live performances, but then he brought out three albums that seemed to represent a deliberate retreat from the spotlight—particularly the third of the three, Nebraska (1982), a collection of Woody Guthrie–like slow, sad stories recorded without a backup band. Then, boom, came Born in the U.S.A., which was loud, arena friendly, and packaged, back when album covers were a thing, in echt-American iconography: Springsteen in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, in front of an American flag. Yuppies was a term popularized by the Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, as shorthand for “young urban professionals.” The emergence of the yuppie as a social type was notable, because it went against two previous prevailing pop culture narratives: first, that the Baby Boom generation was centrally defined by idealism, even protest (yuppies were materialistic and drawn to business careers); and second, that affluent, educated people, as they entered their thirties, would move to the suburbs and start families (yuppies gentrified city neighborhoods, went to restaurants and fitness clubs, and put off marriage).
For liberals, what might be most disturbing about the politics of the moment is that they are losing the loyalty and trust of the Americans they think of as their natural allies, those who are not prospering. The Republican Party has been successfully wooing voters in left-behind places, voters who didn’t go to college, voters with precarious jobs, even (starting from a low baseline) minority voters. Awareness of this phenomenon hovers in the background of both these books. Bruce Springsteen’s songs are deeply rooted in working-class, nonmetropolitan life, and he attracts an audience that crosses cultural and political divides even though his own politics seem to be left-populist. Could studying him closely reveal something that liberalism could use to reverse its fortunes? Yuppies, on the other hand, were widely despised, as symbols of a kind of self-regarding elite liberalism that alienates everybody else. Could everything that has gone wrong be their fault?
McGrath devotes a good deal of Triumph of the Yuppies to describing large changes in the basic organization of the American economy. As he points out, median family income doubled between 1940 and 1970, then stalled. The advent of NAFTA and other free trade agreements caused devastating declines in manufacturing employment, and more broadly in the economies of midwestern industrial states. The American corporate welfare state that took shape in the 1950s, offering generous health care, pensions, and job security, deteriorated severely thanks to a new, Wall Street–oriented version of corporate capitalism personified by Jack Welch of General Electric, the most admired CEO of the late twentieth century. A newly empowered financial sector, personified in McGrath’s book by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert, aggressively rearranged assets in ways that contributed to inequality and dislocation. When Reagan ran for president, he tapped into the economic discontent Americans were feeling—“I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression,” he said in a televised address shortly after taking office—but his remedies, tax cuts and deregulation, did not make life better for the working class.
It’s eternally tempting for liberals to think that if they can find just the right cultural note to strike—less yuppie, more peak Springsteen—then their natural constituents will come home, abandoning the resentment that politicians like Donald Trump offer. It has been a rarely successful quest.
None of this was part of the official story of the yuppies, which focused closely on them and what at the time seemed to be peculiar cultural tastes. Why did they prefer to pay good money for Grey Poupon mustard (instead of French’s), Perrier water (instead of tap water), and Häagen-Dazs ice cream (instead of Baskin-Robbins)? Why did they seem to be preoccupied with the price of real estate, above all other economic issues? Why did they see careers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley as somehow exemplifying the spirit of the 1960s? The way McGrath has chosen to frame his book dictates that he cover all these questions extensively, but they come across more as effects than causes—of the generally more materialistic ethos that the unrestrained capitalism of the era engendered, and of the yuppies’ wish to improve their standard of living in minor symbolic ways when the overall tide was running against most of them, let alone people who weren’t urban professionals. Yuppies were neither numerous nor powerful enough to have been the authors of the new American economy. Their larger political effect was probably greater for the people they alienated—those who didn’t share their metropolitan, secular, culturally liberal sensibilities—than for whatever social arrangements they put in place.
Hyden is less interested in political economy than McGrath, and also a less didactic writer. If you have been following Springsteen’s current world tour, in which, on the verge of his 75th birthday, he’s still going strong (though he has to take a break when an ailment strikes), he seems like an eternal figure. The core of his band is made up of musicians he began playing with half a century ago in central New Jersey clubs, and the set list is heavily weighted toward familiar hits that originally appeared on his early albums. Hyden has a charmingly digressive writing voice that gives him plenty of room to remind us that Springsteen’s career has had more phases than we might remember. There were periods when he dismissed his band. There were his unlikely creative alliances with people like the film director Paul Schrader and the angry Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic. There were stretches when, at least judged by his album sales, Springsteen was a faded star, or at least not an artist with broad appeal; he was outsold by other purveyors of heartland rock like Bob Seger, Bon Jovi, and Tom Petty when they were in their prime.
One has to tease out Hyden’s main point from all his interesting ruminations and side trips, but here’s what I think it is. Born in the U.S.A., usually seen as a turn toward the commercial and celebratory imposed on Springsteen by his producer-manager, Jon Landau, was actually a brilliant and hard-to-replicate straddle of the American cultural divides that were emerging in the 1980s. Yes, the title song was hearable as a patriotic anthem, as it famously was by the conservative columnist George Will (who praised a Springsteen performance he had attended for displaying “hard, honest work and evidence of the astonishing vitality of America’s regions and generations”), but it actually was a memorably bitter account of a Vietnam veteran’s unconscionable abandonment by his country after it had “Sent me off to a foreign land /To go and kill the yellow man.” Yes, the sound of the album was upbeat, but the content of the songs was right in line with the material on Nebraska. Yes, the best- known video version of a song from the album, “Dancing in the Dark,” was cheesy, but most of the other videos, directed by the indy filmmaker John Sayles, were not. Hyden himself, as a seven-year-old boy, was captivated by the album, even though most of the songs were about people who were roughly the same age as yuppies but whose lives had faded into despair after a brief late-adolescent paradise of sex and fast cars.
Springsteen in those days was neither purely mass nor purely elite. Most of his songs were about men, but women loved him. Most of his songs were about dead-end lives, but yuppies loved him. He was neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democrat nor Republican. (Hyden reminds us that Springsteen stubbornly refused to endorse Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign against Reagan in the year Born in the U.S.A. came out, although he did object forcefully to the Reagan campaign’s efforts to claim the album as an endorsement of Reaganism.) The cultural space that he had carved out doesn’t seem to exist anymore, possibly even for Springsteen himself. Hyden appears to disapprove of Springsteen’s 21st-century rebirth as a kind of national healer, whose songs have gone from, in his terms, descriptive to prescriptive. (Hyden identifies this trend as beginning with the post-9/11 album The Rising.) The Springsteen who appears at late-October rallies for Democratic presidential candidates, who made a Super Bowl ad for Jeep called “The Middle,” who recorded a podcast with Barack Obama and titled an episode “American Renewal,” is not the Springsteen Hyden fell in love with. He has gone from actually bridging divides to calling for bridging divides. And, on the other hand, the divide-bridging aspect of Born in the U.S.A. as a cultural artifact that Hyden admires did nothing to halt the onward march of inequality.
It’s eternally tempting for liberals to think that if they can find just the right cultural note to strike—in terms of these books, less yuppie, more peak Springsteen—then their natural constituents will come home, abandoning the sarcasm and resentment that politicians like Donald Trump offer as salve for their very real wounds. It has been a rarely successful quest. Even people who seem as if they can pull it off can lose their magic. Our national divisions are so deep and profound that one tiny misstep, involving an unconscious cultural slip that can be exploited by Fox News, can disable efforts to bridge them. For liberals it might be better, though harder and less emotionally satisfying, to make policies that will provide the great majority of Americans with the lives of security and opportunity that they long for, and then see if the cultural expressions will take care of themselves.
