Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market, I’d neglected afterward to take a close, careful look at the various pieces of that shift. During the 1980s and ’90s, my focus as a writer and editor was really on the cultural effects of this new America revealing itself—the primacy of selling and celebrity, the mixing of fact and fiction, the shameless ostentation, this ridiculous character Donald Trump. I wasn’t thinking hard about the political economy at
...more
