Style It Takes
The 80s was the last formative decade for US politics. You'd be hard pressed to say for any good, but it certainly defined the future. The New Deal coalition, having shaped politics for the previous half-century was in dissolution, heading to oblivion. Its politics had been personified by Franklin Roosevelt, who in his 1936 Democratic Acceptance Speech said,
“The old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” were all against him. "They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
Jokes like this fell hard on many in the American power structure. People always underestimate how established power detests losing any power or even having it contested. Nor does power have short term memories on such matters. In the 1980s, fifty years of resentment boiled to the surface, wealth would be celebrated and properly worshiped.
The society wedding pages came back to the New York Times. On television, the show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” appeared. Historian Gore Vidal wagged, “The rich don't have lives, they have lifestyles.” My favorite was the Los Angeles Times Real Estate Section always including a couple celebrity homes, each year getting ever bigger and more expensive.
The other day, with one headline, the Wall Street Journal exquisitely summed up four decades of American politics, “Nearly 40,000-Square-Foot Megamansion Outside Washington, D.C., Lists for $39 Million.”
Phew! This is some guy who founded a tech company in the DC suburbs in the late 1980s, selling to Defense and other parts of the federal government.
A 2000 Washington Life magazine interview, and yes, it should have been named Washington Lifestyles, celebrates this random tech millionaire's “entrepreneurialism” and the resulting wealth gained by selling to the Defense Department. He states his three biggest “competitors” were Computer Sciences Corporation(now DXC Technology), business units within SAIC, and certain components of Lockheed Martin. All three are headquartered in the DC suburbs, all three Fortune 500 companies, all three get oodles upon oodles of military money.
Three years ago, CNBC writes, “The five counties with the highest median household income in the U.S. are all clustered together right outside of Washington, D.C., in Maryland and Virginia.” All wealth would be celebrated, so too war-profiteering, at an American level, beyond any the world has ever seen.
With the New Deal, power became centralized in DC as it never had been in the republic's previous hundred-fifty years. By the 1980s, this centralization of power, combined with a broken political system, created a completely unchecked “military industrial complex,” remember General Eisenhower's words, not mine.
If you're going to spend all that money on weapons you need enemies. It’s even better when you can use them, then they need to be replaced. As we've seen in the last couple months, there's no enemy like an old enemy. Last week our hopelessly split, so we’re endlessly told, Congress voted with only token opposition to speed another $40 billion for Ukraine. Much of it is going to end up in the DC suburbs -
$11 billion allows the administration to send military equipment and weapons from US stocks.
$6 billion in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding, another way the Biden administration has been providing Ukraine with military assistance.
$9 billion to help restock US equipment that has been sent to Ukraine.
That's $26 of the $40 billion right there.
In the low political theater that is American politics, the Speaker of the House stood on the floor invoking the Nazarene carpenter for hurried passage of the bill for Ukraine's greater destruction. I think she used the last line of the cruxified Christ,
Ever faster, 1980s’ politics roll to an end. It was always about style, no matter how tasteless, and never, ever about life.