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How 1980s Yuppies Gave Us Donald Trump
A wealthy New York real estate mogul may not have seemed particularly well suited for the role of populist hero, but Donald Trump’s historic realignment of white working-class voters not only delivered him the presidency in 2016, but changed the GOP as we know it. A recent Gallup survey indicates that more Republicans now identify as working or lower class than Democrats. And white voters without a college education, once a core Democratic constituency, remain a key element of Trump’s reelection bid heading into November.
But for all the ink spilled over Trump’s connection to the white-working class, it’s actually a very different demographic that explains his ascension: Yuppies.
If you really want to understand Trump’s appeal, you need to go back a few decades to examine the social forces that shaped his rise as a real estate developer and remade American politics in the 1980s. Specifically, you need to wind back the tape to the 1984 Democratic primary, the almost-pulled-it-off candidacy of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and the emerging yuppie demographic that made up his base. They don’t remotely resemble the working-class base we associate with Trump today. But together, they helped shift the Democratic Party’s focus away from its labor coalition and toward the hyper-educated liberal voters it largely represents today, eventually creating an opening for Trump to cast Democrats as out-of-touch elites and draw the white working class away from them. In fact, if it weren’t for 1980s yuppies and the way they shifted America’s political parties, the modern MAGA GOP might never have arisen in the first place.
Read the rest of this article at:Politico
Could Steampunk Save Us?
This summer, I bought my wife a vintage watch—a model called the Big Crown Pointer Date, made by the Swiss company Oris. The watch was manufactured in 1995, and is small, elegant, and mechanical, which means that it doesn’t contain a battery; instead, you wind it, and it tells the time using an ingenious system of gears. The Pointer Date takes its name from what watch people call a “complication”—an added feature beyond timekeeping. It has a fourth hand, which reaches out to the edge of its face, where the numbers one to thirty-one are arranged. At midnight, the hand ticks forward, making it possible to see one’s progress through the month as a movement around a circle.
Even though the watch was assembled by hand nearly thirty years ago, it still works perfectly. But “perfectly” has a particular meaning for a mechanical watch. Not every month has thirty-one days, and so the date must be periodically adjusted. Moreover, its timekeeping drifts by a few seconds each day; as a result, my wife must occasionally synchronize it to the time on her phone. Whether all this is annoying or charming depends on your point of view. “Mechanical timekeeping devices were among our first complex machines,” the science fiction novelist William Gibson has observed, and among “the first to be miniaturized”; when wristwatches were new, it seemed remarkable that each was its own little gear-based world. Today, mechanical watches have come to feel “archaic in the singularity of their function, their lack of connectivity.” Yet the fact that they tell time in isolation, Gibson writes, also makes them “heroic.” By contrast, a smartphone’s primary purpose isn’t telling time but being “a node in a distributed network.”
The distance between a mechanical watch and a modern smartphone seems to embody the divide between the pre-digital and digital worlds. We imagine that people used to live among eccentric, fiddly, physical gizmos, whereas now we navigate a network of infallible devices animated by code. But the digital age is often more fiddly than it seems. In 2022, Nate Hopper wrote for this magazine about the complicated system that keeps all of the Internet’s digital clocks synchronized. At its center are atomic clocks, which measure the passage of time by tracking the quantum transitions of electrons. Atomic clocks are unimaginably precise. Unfortunately, Hopper writes, the Earth isn’t: its rotational speed “is affected by a variety of atmospheric and geologic factors, including the behavior of the planet’s inner layers; the reshaping of its crust, such as through the growth of mountains or bodies of magma; and the friction of the ocean’s tides against the seafloor.” As a result, each year, the planet spins a little more slowly—and this “risks opening a rift between the time as told by atoms and the time as told by astronomy.” Like my wife, the world’s timekeepers have been forced to adjust their clocks, adding thirty-seven leap seconds since 1972.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Every second feels like an eternity when you’re hovering four inches from Stevie Nicks, noodling around with her blouse. This is Stevie Nicks, the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice — as a member of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. Stevie Nicks, whose legendary shawl collection resides in its own temperature-controlled vault. Stevie Nicks, who, at 76, has become an obsession of younger generations, from her American Horror Story appearance to the original poem she wrote for Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department to a recent viral TikTok video, where she intensely stares down her ex-boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham during a 1997 performance of “Silver Springs.” (Yes, Nicks has seen it.)
This is also Stevie Nicks, who’s somehow gotten a long, spiraled, gold ring she’s wearing stuck in the mesh fabric of her blouse, requiring the up-close-and-personal assistance of an interviewer she met only minutes ago.
Read the rest of this article at: Rollingstone
Before the gig economy consumed a third of the workforce, it was mostly musicians who worried about gigs. There are debates about the origins of the word—some believe it derives from an eighteenth-century term for horse-drawn carriages that may have doubled as stages for performers, while others contend that it was adapted from a Baroque dance called the gigue. But the “gig,” as shorthand for a casual, one-off paid performance, entered the popular lexicon during the Jazz Age of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. There was a mystique to the gigging musician wandering the big city in search of work, because this work was creative, improvisational, at times transcendent.
Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century, Franz Nicolay argues in a new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” could be forgiven for assuming that working one’s way up from gigs to a steady job in music was a plausible career path. You might not make it as a chart-topping star, but there were still opportunities for “band people”—the “hired guns” or “side-of-the-stagers” who offered structure and support. Music was everywhere, and there had to be people to play it. Nicolay’s book details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. Not that the spotlight in question shines all that brightly to begin with; most of the dozens of artists Nicolay spoke to work in commercially tenuous realms, such as indie rock or punk, in which a band like Sonic Youth represents the imagination’s zenith.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Occasionally there comes a news story so on the nose, so illustrative of the characteristic excesses and inequalities of our age, that it would be too inelegant an allegory for JG Ballard. It has been almost two years since I began following the story of semaglutide drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, when they first began to be spoken about not as the diabetes treatment they were originally conceived of, but as a new weight-loss wonder-fix available only to the super-elite. Over those two years, these drugs have filtered into mainstream consciousness. Already, those prescribed them for diabetes have complained that the boom in demand has impacted their ability to access necessary healthcare, not merely a means to a certain aesthetic.
The company behind such drugs, Novo Nordisk, was accused of choosing to disregard the health of those in developing countries as it announced last week that human insulin would no longer be available in the injectable pen form currently used as standard. While analogue insulin, composed of man-made substances which make it more costly and out of reach for many people of deprived means, will still be available in pen form, those reliant on human insulin will be forced to use outdated glass vials and syringes, a harder and less convenient way to inject. Those affected are angry at what they say is the company’s prioritisation of the profitable new weight-loss industry, into which they have invested an additional $4.1bn to meet demand, over the needs of those suffering from a disease. Novo Nordisk denies these allegations.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Stateman
