And one of his campaign ads in 2016 had Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman, in it.
As an evil villain.
As an evil villain.
Correct. Yeah, that‘s the other thing. The Steve Bannon version of Donald Trump, which is to say, yeah, racist, xenophobe, bigot, all that. But yes, we’re going to keep your Medicare, keep your social security. It’s going to be better than it ever was. We’re going to spend trillions rebuilding the infrastructure. If he had governed like that, this unusual Republican who’s not going by the normal Republican tenets, I believe that a lot of people on the left and liberals would have held their nose and said, “Yeah, not bad.” And he’d have 65, 70% approval rating now. I really believe that.
Instead what he did, because he’s an idiot, and because he understood that Republicans are elected, Republicans are quislings, and that all they want—because the prime directive of the economic evil geniuses is keep taxes low, keep regulation off of business. So he gave them all that. Oh, that’s what you care about, fine. Whatever. That’s how it works.
Right. Well, another subplot to your book is the cultural effect of all this redistribution of wealth to the top and the politicization of it, the political economy of it, which was that—you call the ’60s and ’70s “Peak New,” right? This is when we had all gotten used to a level of just continual change, which is part of the American impulse to reinvent constantly. Well, that began to slow down, and you noticed it from looking at a photograph of some people from the ’80s recently, maybe in the last 10 years. Tell me about that.
Well, and in fact I noticed it and then wrote a piece about it for Vanity Fair magazine that appeared in 2011. I happened to see this picture in 2007, I think, in the New York Times. It was a profile of Steve Rubell and his partner, who started, of course, Studio 54 and had become big hotel impresarios. Anyway, it was a picture of them and their staff at Morgans, which was this first fancy, boutique hotel in 1986. Anyway, all these waiters and attendants and bellpeople, big crowd of attractive young people standing outside with their bosses on a Manhattan street. It was 20 years old, this picture. That’s an old picture. Almost nothing about any of them, the way they were dressed, looked, groomed, looked anything other than 2007. And I thought, That is weird, isn’t it? Because of course for my whole lifetime, and then before my lifetime, things changed every decade, pretty significantly. I mean, cars look different. The way people did their hair and groomed themselves and dressed looked different. And design looked different, and each decade had its own character. I thought, Well, that’s weird.
So I began trying to figuring out…I became obsessed with this and why did that happen, and when I wrote about it—I wrote an essay about it—I didn’t really connect it very much to what had happened economically, what was happening economically at the same time. Again, I’m not such a conspiracist that I think the evil geniuses are genius enough or powerful enough to have contrived to stop that kind of cultural change.
Reverse engineer culture or something.
No. However, I do think they were synergistic, and I do think…that things after the ’80s really stopped after we spent a decade or two just wallowing in nostalgia, which was, the degree of the wallow, new for America. This stasis has happened, and I really do think that it has served the interests of the people who don’t want big political and economic change to make people to think, without even thinking that they’re thinking, but just, Oh, no, things don’t really change. It’s the same. Listen to the same music. This new singer is not so different than the singer that was 20 years ago. What has happened so radically new since hip-hop, let’s say, as an example in pop culture of a truly new thing in the ’70s and ’80s. But what’s been as big as that? And you can go through the whole realm of culture and think, That’s weird. Again, I mean, so while I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I am a seeker of unified theories of existence.