For Some On The Right, It's Forever 1985

Of the many fissures into today's conservative-leaning electorate, one of the biggest is this--we don't even agree on what era we're living in.

Several years ago, there was a sitcom called 30 Rock, starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. In the show, Fey ‘s character has a brother who was injured in a 1985 skiing accident and the subsequent brain trauma left him forever locked in 1985. Baldwin—who ironically plays a diehard conservative named Jack Donaghy, expresses envy over the fact that in the brother’s world, Reagan is still president. Little did the fictitious Jack Donaghy know that if he just traveled in certain circles of a certain generation of conservatives today, he would find entire groups of people for whom its forever 1985.

There are several tells of Republicans who are mentally locked in the wrong era, but these are the two most significant dividing lines in 2024:

Institutional Trust

A trust in major societal institutions is a cornerstone of conservatism. In 1985, and well beyond, conservatives still generally trusted the key institutions of society. The phrase “institution” is broad, but just consider them to be the societal organs that produce mainstream opinion and are trusted to enforce civic order.

Institutional trust is necessary to maintain some level of societal consensus. But what happens when the people who run those institutions prove unworthy of that trust?

The 21^st century has seen various hoaxes, that are “highlighted” by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the rationale for the COVID-19 lockdowns. It includes the National Security apparatus manufacturing the Russia Collusion scam, which hamstrung an American president’s relations with a nuclear power. It includes stirring up trouble on January 6 to try and create a fake insurrection narrative, which fomented societal division at home. It includes the government agencies that are supposed to regulate Big Pharma and the financial industry instead caving in to them.

We can’t possibly cover all the institutional failures here, but they all boil down to one common theme—the people in charge can’t be trusted.

This, quite frankly, is an utterly disastrous situation for a society to be in. Perhaps fear of acknowledging that reality and all of its implications is what keeps so many conservatives locked in 1985.

A good tell as to whether you’re dealing with a 1985 conservative is whether or not they think there is any basis at all for the myriad of indictments against Donald Trump. To whatever degree they think there is, that’s the precise degree they are living in the wrong era and are in need of updating their mental software.

Russia

The 1985 conservatives’ continued trust in institutions is sad, but more because of what it means about how far our country has fallen. The same can’t be said for their obsession with Russia. This is just flat-out dangerous and has led us to the brink of disaster.

We are now 33 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, and yet these 1985 conservatives (overrepresented among Republican elected officials) insist on invoking Reagan’s name in “standing up to Russia” as they push us into an increasingly dangerous situation in Ukraine.

My wife and I went and saw the movie Reagan over Labor Day weekend, with Dennis Quaid playing the Gipper. I was glad to hear them showing Reagan telling Mikhail Gorbachev “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

One recalls that even at the height of the Cold War, in 1985, just prior to Gorbachev’s rise to power, Reagan never considered launching long-range missiles into the heart of Russia the way today’s neo-conservatives who routinely invoke his name are advocating. He also declined to take steps that would have destabilized currencies behind the then-Iron Curtain, something that would have only increased misery among the peoples of Eastern Europe.

Today’s 1985-style conservatives have effectively reduced the Reagan foreign policy legacy to his speech earlier in the decade correctly calling the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire.” Mentally locked in the 1980s (and perhaps watching the original Top Gun), they ask us to ignore the complete collapse of the Soviet Union, ignore that over the last 33 years, it’s the United States who has been the country engaged in aggressive military adventurism abroad and ignore the fact that Reagan never thought the peoples of the United States and the peoples of Russia should be forever at odds with each other.

To try and guess what one man, who passed away in 2004, would think about events that are transpiring two decades after his death is dicey. But I’ve read a lot of Reagan books, including his own diaries, and it’s very hard to fathom that he would be okay with this weird 1985-ish fetish exhibited by social media influencers who claim to speak his name. It’s hard to think that he would have signed off on direct military incursions into Russia itself—which has already happened—or firing long-range weapons into Russia (which is being actively considered at this very moment).

Living in the present moment is hard. Perhaps nothing is harder. From the national perspective, it can be particularly scary when the country you live in is giving off all kinds of “end of empire” vibes for anyone with even a casual knowledge of history.

But here’s how I see our current reality—we live in a country where, two months from now, our election will decide whether or not the Republican candidate goes to prison for the rest of life for manufactured “crimes”. And where the Democratic candidate is an installed puppet who never won a primary, never appears on media, and is there solely to make certain war can continue to be waged abroad.  

All of which is to say we’re long way from 1985 and Tip O’Neill telling Ronald Reagan “after six o’clock we’re friends.”

We better live in the world as it is, not the one that’s decades past. Perhaps we can all call on our Our Lady of Sorrows (feast day on September 15), who faced the most brutal reality of all-time—a human race that crucified its own Savior—and went right to the foot of the Cross to deal with it. Mother of God, help us through this.