Defining a Decade

Living in the Eighties

Edited by Gil Troy
and Vincent J. Cannato
Oxford, 240 pp., $21.95

On the cover of Living in the Eighties there are three photos: one of Ronald Reagan, smiling, with an American flag behind him; one of the classical façade of the New York Stock Exchange; and the third of Madonna, barely out of her teens, wearing her no-longer-unmentionable lingerie as performance rig and her natural hair color with an incongruous and outsized belt buckle inscribed “Boy Toy.” 

What brand, do you suppose, could cover those three things, if not the decade named in the title? 

The need to brand decades, like other things, is essentially a marketing tool, but political branding has this peculiarity: that the brand itself always represents a political struggle. Were the eighties the decade of greed and excess, as those who were out of power for most of it now maintain, or were they a golden age when America won the Cold War and Reaganomics brought prosperity to more Americans than ever? 

To their credit, Gil Troy and Vincent Cannato make some effort to treat this marketers’ mêlée evenhandedly. They have collected a dozen essays by as many different hands on many different aspects of the decade, and they lay out in their introductory essay the two rival viewpoints into which they naturally fall. On the one hand, there is what they describe as “The ‘Golden Age’ narrative,” which sees Reaganism as a long-delayed return to normalcy after the cultural and political aberration of the sixties. On the other are those “critiques of the 1980s as a ‘Gilded Age’ ” that are themselves “tinged with nostalgia for the 1960s. For these critics, the narrative is one of ‘backlash,’ of resentful white males depriving blacks, women and the poor of whatever gains they made during the 1960s.”