--- title: How the 1980s Permanently Shaped America description: The 1980s both revitalized American business and destabilized American workers, writes Jonathan Kaufman. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/09/15/how-the-1980s-permanently-shaped-america/ author: Jonathan Kaufman article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-09-15T10:00:03.972Z article:modified_time: 2026-09-15T10:00:04.271Z article:section: Ideas og:title: How the 1980s Permanently Shaped America og:description: The 1980s both revitalized American business and destabilized American workers, writes Jonathan Kaufman. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/09/15/how-the-1980s-permanently-shaped-america/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebe19dbff28ecc57/6a7e115dce8afd2496524885/1980s-culture.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1911 og:image:height: 1075 og:image:alt: 1980s-culture.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How the 1980s Permanently Shaped America twitter:description: The 1980s both revitalized American business and destabilized American workers, writes Jonathan Kaufman. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebe19dbff28ecc57/6a7e115dce8afd2496524885/1980s-culture.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  IDEAS Time ideas # How the 1980s Permanently Shaped America > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. by [Jonathan Kaufman](https://time.com/author/jonatan-kaufman/) ## Jonathan Kaufman Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, author, and professor. Sep 15, 2026 10:00 AM UTC  fotograzia—Getty Images by [Jonathan Kaufman](https://time.com/author/jonatan-kaufman/) ## Jonathan Kaufman Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, author, and professor. Sep 15, 2026 10:00 AM UTC Like most Americans, I arrived at the election watch party on Nov. 4, 1980, expecting a long night. It was a little before 9:00 p.m. in Chicago. By 9:05 the television networks had called the election for Ronald Reagan and against Jimmy Carter. I was 24\. The party’s host, a good friend and conservative, Reagan-supporting medical student, laughed exuberantly. Stragglers walking into the party were stunned that the election night was already over. It was to be the first of many surprises in a tumultuous and defining decade. Over the next 10 years, as a reporter and writer, I covered many of the events of the 1980s. I was interested in an eclectic mix of issues, which led me to crisscross the country and to fly around the world: the rise of the power of business and the continued immiseration of poor Black Americans; Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president and the controversies that swallowed him; the rise of China and the massacre in Tiananmen Square; and the eruption of anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, an assignment that ended as I flew home at the end of the decade on Christmas 1989. Three years after that shocking election night, in November 1983, I was sitting in the newsroom of _The Boston Globe_, where I worked as a reporter. An editor came by and assigned me a story on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. How was Kennedy remembered? I started making phone calls. Kennedy was a hometown political hero, and, not surprisingly, memories of his presidency and the 1960s were bathed in hope and optimism. Then a professor I called pulled me up short. “You know,” he said, “one day people may look back on these as the good old days.” That seemed absurd. _The Globe_, like Boston and Massachusetts, was liberal. Three years into the Reagan presidency, there were massive layoffs and factories closing in the Midwest. I recently bought a house in a gentrifying part of the city with a mortgage interest rate of 16%. The liberal assumptions that had governed American politics since the New Deal were under systematic assault. Yet, in hindsight, that professor turned out to be right. We were witnessing the construction of modern America—the economic systems, media landscape, and political structures that still govern our daily lives 45 years later. The decade began with Americans worried about losing their leading role in the world, beset by rising oil prices, high interest rates, stagflation, and surging Japanese competition that was laying waste to American manufacturing. The decade ended with a booming economy and the resurgence of American optimism, leadership, and confidence. Then, like an exclamation point, in 1989, Eastern Europe jettisoned communism, soon followed by the Soviet Union, joining China, which remained a police state but injected the free market throughout its economy. The 1950s and the start of the Cold War had shaped America’s military and geopolitical place in the world. The 1960s, with its civil rights protests, antiwar movement, and stirrings of women’s and gay liberation had redefined what it meant to be an American and had expanded liberalism. The 1980s—for better and for worse—rewired the way most of us live and work, the way we get our news, the political choices we have. So much flowed from that decade. I covered Jesse Jackson’s quixotic campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988\. Twenty years later, I was covering the breakthrough campaign of Barack Obama. Working as a national reporter for _The Wall Street Journal_ gave me an intimate view of how a new business class, including Jack Welch, was reinventing and reinvigorating business and the American economy—and the price we paid. I covered the economic boom of the 1980s as it crested into the 1990s. I profited from it as the stock market surged, swelling my IRA, and my house grew in value year after year. Having left New York City at its nadir in the 1970s to go to college, I then witnessed the city’s stunning rebirth—joking that streets my mother wouldn’t let me walk down I now couldn’t afford to live on. I traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, and saw early the price of inequality, the pain of workers laid off from shuttered steel mills and auto parts factories, and the devastation of small cities and towns. I lost touch with a college roommate who, it turned out, was spending his time fighting for the—I thought hopeless—dream of gay marriage. So much of what unfolded starting in the 1980s wasn’t “either-or.” It was “both-and.” The 1980s both revitalized American business and destabilized American workers. The drive for deregulation both unleashed innovation and enabled dangerous speculation. Media fragmentation both increased creativity and choice and decreased shared truth. Everyone likes to write about the 1960s—the protests, the music, the cultural upheaval. Chroniclers have generated shelves of books and television specials celebrating that decade’s drama. Many Americans know more about what happened in 1968 than in 1988\. But while we obsess over the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, we’ve largely forgotten the decade that actually built the world we inhabit. _Reprinted from When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country–and Led Us to Today by Jonathan Kaufman with permission from Viking._ [TIME Ideas](https://www.time.com/ideas) hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. 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