Over the next 10 years, as a reporter and writer, I covered many of the events of the 1980s. I was interested in an eclectic mix of issues, which led me to crisscross the country and to fly around the world: the rise of the power of business and the continued immiseration of poor Black Americans; Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president and the controversies that swallowed him; the rise of China and the massacre in Tiananmen Square; and the eruption of anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, an assignment that ended as I flew home at the end of the decade on Christmas 1989.
Yet, in hindsight, that professor turned out to be right. We were witnessing the construction of modern America—the economic systems, media landscape, and political structures that still govern our daily lives 45 years later. The decade began with Americans worried about losing their leading role in the world, beset by rising oil prices, high interest rates, stagflation, and surging Japanese competition that was laying waste to American manufacturing. The decade ended with a booming economy and the resurgence of American optimism, leadership, and confidence. Then, like an exclamation point, in 1989, Eastern Europe jettisoned communism, soon followed by the Soviet Union, joining China, which remained a police state but injected the free market throughout its economy. The 1950s and the start of the Cold War had shaped America’s military and geopolitical place in the world. The 1960s, with its civil rights protests, antiwar movement, and stirrings of women’s and gay liberation had redefined what it meant to be an American and had expanded liberalism. The 1980s—for better and for worse—rewired the way most of us live and work, the way we get our news, the political choices we have.
Everyone likes to write about the 1960s—the protests, the music, the cultural upheaval. Chroniclers have generated shelves of books and television specials celebrating that decade’s drama. Many Americans know more about what happened in 1968 than in 1988. But while we obsess over the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, we’ve largely forgotten the decade that actually built the world we inhabit.Reprinted from When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country–and Led Us to Today by Jonathan Kaufman with permission from Viking.
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