Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff as "Reagan Dawn" Artifact

First off, I want to acknowledge that I have not been writing in this space. I have been focusing my efforts on my Substack (where I tend to do more political stuff) and on a couple of research projects. Come autumn I am planning on doing one of my patented "listen throughs" on Richard Thompson. In the meantime, I am re-reading a book that has me thinking again about what I call the "Reagan Dawn."

This is my name for the pop cultural moment lasting roughly from 1979 to 1981 that coincided with Ronald Reagan's election. The culture in this moment both reflected and drove the conservative political turn. I first wrote about it back in 2015 (!) and if I had the time, tools, and talent I'd write a book about it. Some of these pop cultural artifacts are pretty obvious, like Disco Demolition Night. Others are not.

That hit me while re-reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. I'd read an interesting piece on him for The New Republic by Osita Nwanevu that made me want to revisit this book, and one of my daughters had also recently gotten obsessed with NASA. I first read it in 1999, before I had really started digging into the history and culture of the 70s in a serious way, and so did not contexualize the book as a product of the Reagan Dawn back then.

From the outset, Wolfe has embarked on a project of reclamation. In heaping praise upon military test pilots and the Mercury astronauts picked from them, he is intentionally elevating the kinds of men and qualities poo-pooed by the counterculture. In a foreword he wrote in 1983 he explicitly states that his point was to elevate military officers, who he felt had been denigrated in books about war going back to key Great War works like All Quiet on the Western Front. The men he profiles -military, white, traditionally masculine, Protestant, family patriarchs, lovers of hot rods, disdainful of NASA scientists- are exactly the kind disdained by the counterculture. In the context of post-Vietnam War America this reclamation project is freighted with deeper meanings and symbols.

Wolfe makes clear that the men he profiles love their country above all else, which is the reason why they are willing to face death and make widows and orphans of their families. These men themselves stand for a "real America," one that Reagan promised to revive. Writing in the late 70s after the big cultural and political breaks of the 1960s, Wolfe offers a tantalizing nostalgia for the Mercury program, with its origins in the Eisenhower years and the first orbits before that fateful day in Dallas in 1963. Wolfe's book came out in the era of the Iran Hostage Crisis and a general yearning for national renewal, exactly the thing Reagan promised. Nor for nothing, Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980 was "Let's Make America Great Again." Then under Reagan and now under Trump the "great" era is located before 1965. 

The thing with Wolfe is that he is such an engaging prose writer (in non-fiction, at least), that I am happy to go for the ride even if I can tell where he is slipping in his own ideological commitments. The test pilots and astronauts are indeed impressive people and their accomplishments are worthy of praise. What's funny reading the book today is just how much his side won. You can't go to a baseball game without there being a moment or two of military worship, for example. I have also been struck by how much conservatism has degenerated in the past four decades. As much as I disagree with many of Wolfe's assumptions, he's a good writer and a person that I am inclined to take seriously. I was trying to find the equivalent today of a conservative kind of writing meant not to be polemical but entertaining and all I could come up with was The Babylon Bee. That pretty much says it all. 

This got me thinking even more whether Reagan's long shadow has finally passed. While supply side tax cuts are a zombie idea that won't die, Trump's economic policies are hardly the kind of thing that would have pleased The Gipper. Democrats are also now far less likely to be cowed by charges of "socialism." I used to think of Reagan Dawn as the moment that our current political economy came into being. Now I am not so sure.