Demographic Changes and the Culture Wars

Demographic trends also changed the United States. In keeping with economic deindustrialization, the nation saw a continued shift of population from the Rust Belt states of the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt states of the South and West as people moved in search of jobs and opportunity. There was also a new burst of immigration, this time from Latin America and Asia. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was a compromise reform that gave amnesty to illegal immigrants then in the United States and imposed penalties on businesses for hiring illegal immigrants in the future. A few years later, the Immigration Act of 1990 attempted to connect immigration more closely to job skills by easing the way into the country for more highly educated workers.

The ongoing “culture war” between liberals and conservatives over social values was multifaceted. The debate over abortion continued, with two Supreme Court decisions, Missouri v. Webster (1989) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), narrowing but not overturning Roe v. Wade (1973), which had legalized abortion. A debate over family structure and single motherhood erupted when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the television show Murphy Brown for featuring a single mother. The emergence of AIDS in the 1980s brought to the forefront questions about society’s acceptance of homosexuality. College campuses became ground zero in battles over diversity, multiculturalism, the teaching of western civilization courses, and affirmative action, which had been an object of controversy even before the Supreme Court’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978.

The AIDS Crisis

In the early 1980s, doctors noticed a disturbing trend: Young gay men in large cities, especially San Francisco and New York, were being diagnosed with, and eventually dying from, a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Because the disease was seen almost exclusively in male homosexuals, it was quickly dubbed “gay cancer.” Doctors soon realized it often coincided with other symptoms, including a rare form of pneumonia, and they renamed it “Gay Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID), although people other than gay men, primarily intravenous drug users, were dying from the disease as well. The connection between gay men and GRID—later renamed human immunodeficiency virus/autoimmune deficiency syndrome, or HIV/AIDS—led heterosexuals largely to ignore the growing health crisis in the gay community, wrongly assuming they were safe from its effects.

The Reagan administration met the issue with indifference, leading liberal congressman Henry Waxman to rage that “if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent . . . rather than among gay males, the response of both the government and the medical community would be different.”^[1] Some religious figures seemed to relish the opportunity to condemn homosexual activity; Catholic columnist Patrick Buchanan remarked that “the sexual revolution has begun to devour its children.”^[2] The federal government also overlooked the disease, and calls for more money to research and find the cure were ignored.

Figure 1. The pink triangle was originally used in Nazi concentration camps to identify those there for acts of homosexuality. Reclaimed by gay activists in New York as a symbol of resistance and solidarity during the 1970s, it was further transformed as a symbol of governmental inaction in the face of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s.

Even after it became apparent that heterosexuals could contract the disease through blood transfusions and heterosexual intercourse, HIV/AIDS continued to be associated primarily with the gay community, especially by political and religious conservatives. Indeed, the religious right regarded it as a form of divine retribution meant to punish gay men for their “immoral” lifestyle. President Reagan, always politically careful, was reluctant to speak openly about the developing crisis even as thousands faced certain death from the disease.

With little help coming from the government, the gay community quickly began to organize its own response. In 1982, New York City men formed the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a volunteer organization that operated an information hotline, provided counseling and legal assistance, and raised money for people with HIV/AIDS. Larry Kramer, one of the original members, left in 1983 and formed his own organization, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), in 1987. ACT UP took a more militant approach, holding demonstrations on Wall Street, outside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and inside the New York Stock Exchange to call attention and shame the government into action. One of the images adopted by the group, a pink triangle paired with the phrase “Silence = Death,” captured media attention and quickly became the symbol of the AIDS crisis.

Others sought to humanize AIDS victims; this was the goal of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a commemorative project begun in 1985. By the middle of the decade the federal government began to address the issue haltingly. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, called for more federal funding on AIDS-related research, much to the dismay of critics on the religious right. By 1987 government spending on AIDS-related research reached $500 million—still only 25 percent of what experts advocated. In 1987 Reagan convened a presidential commission on AIDS; the commission’s report called for antidiscrimination laws to protect people with AIDS and for more federal spending on AIDS research. The shift encouraged activists. Nevertheless, on issues of abortion and gay rights—as with the push for racial equality—activists spent the 1980s preserving the status quo rather than building on previous gains. This amounted to a significant victory for the New Right.

Popular Culture of the 1980s

Popular culture of the 1980s offered another venue in which conservatives and liberals waged a battle of ideas. The militarism and patriotism of Reagan’s presidency pervaded movies like Top Gun and the Rambo series, starring Sylvester Stallone as a Vietnam War veteran haunted by his country’s failure to pursue victory in Southeast Asia. In contrast, director Oliver Stone offered searing condemnations of the war in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Television shows like Dynasty and Dallas celebrated wealth and glamour, reflecting the pride in conspicuous consumption that emanated from the White House and corporate boardrooms during the decade. At the same time, films like Wall Street and novels like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero skewered the excesses of the rich.

The most significant aspects of popular culture in the 1980s, however, was its lack of politics altogether. Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and his Indiana Jones adventure trilogy topped the box office. Cinematic escapism replaced the social films of the 1970s. Quintessential Hollywood leftist Jane Fonda appeared frequently on television but only to peddle exercise videos. Television viewership—once dominated by the big three networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS—fragmented with the rise of cable channels catering to particularized tastes. Few cable channels so captured the popular imagination as MTV, which debuted in 1981. Telegenic artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson skillfully used MTV to boost their reputations and album sales. Conservatives condemned music videos for corrupting young people with vulgar, anti-authoritarian messages, but the medium only grew in stature. Critics of MTV targeted Madonna in particular. Her 1989 video “Like a Prayer” drew protests for what some people viewed as sexually suggestive and blasphemous scenes. The religious right increasingly perceived popular culture as hostile to Christian values.