Donald Trump: the last of the Yuppies Their Eighties triumph has turned into tribulation

I know something about yuppies: the acronym for the young urban professionals who entered the popular imagination in the Eighties, obsessed with their money, their careers and all the preoccupations, predilections and playthings that came along for the BMW ride.

I myself had matured from Pepsi to Michelob to bloviating with great intellectual depth and subtlety about olive oil from Tuscany. From my elite institute of higher education I had descended upon the big city, sold magazine articles, then the book, then the movie rights — all of which was mere preamble to the first Cuisinart, the first VCR and chopping shitake mushrooms on butcher-block countertops. I was convinced that The Big Chill was a major cinematic achievement and that Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was the great American novel. As my wife and I strolled from our renovated loft in an old industrial building — our little corner of real estate procured by means of a mortgage at a ridiculously high rate our dual-income household had been ridiculously happy to obtain — we took our first bite of forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden that was New York City: not an apple, but a David’s Cookie.

So it was with great anticipation that I began to flip through the pages of Tom McGrath’s Triumph of the Yuppies. Finally, someone might bring order and perspective to the cognitive dissonance of Jane Fonda workouts, LL Bean suspenders, MBAs, hardwood floors and the epic advent of The Preppy Handbook.

Of course, McGrath would not be the first to go long or short on the Eighties, from the frenzied traders of Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker to the toxic class warriors of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to the epicureans who populate the infamous comic book series, Yuppies, Rednecks, and Lesbian Bitches from Mars. Still, I nurtured hopes that, at long last, McGrath might shed light on an enduring paradox: how a decade of hard work, high hopes and extraordinary ambition led us to our present moment of collective anger, distrust and despair. Today, our world is threatened by the last (and arguably the apotheosis) of the yuppie tribe, Donald Trump, who still believes a red tie is de rigueur, that lying is a form of venture capitalism, and that lipstick on a pig is a good business strategy — as long as it’s Dior or Louboutin. But perhaps that would be too much to ask of McGrath, or of any author of a book that also includes musings about Tofutti.

To his credit, the author earnestly reminds us that: “while thousands of people in Ohio and Michigan were visiting soup kitchens, and two-thirds of all Americans reported feeling anxious about losing their home or business… people who were well off were spending freely on things like travel, high-end real estate, jewelry, gourmet food, fine wine, and furs.” Unfortunately, McGrath offers no profound explanation for the fact that the evisceration of the American middle class went unnoticed by so many, except for the mesmerising pull of watching rich people behave badly on 357 episodes of Dallas and 220 episodes of Aaron Spelling’s Dynasty.

The book underscores the injustice of America’s tragic split, but stops short of condemning my generation’s blithe indifference to other people’s suffering, which could only be matched by our fascination with other people’s money. There is no moral outrage here, no foreboding sense of privatisation’s ineluctable advance across the globe, no disgust registered about the fact that finance capital writ large would leave a trail of third-world misery. And there’s no sense of how that fatal fracture between haves and have-nots might eventually be turned to profit by those who would exploit envy, resentment and rage, and turn the disempowered remnants of a disillusioned electorate into incensed insurrectionists, as was the case on 6 January.

Ignoring such intimations of impending doom, McGrath keeps to the straight and narrow by following the story of Michael Milken, who rose from finance nerd to junk bond king before succumbing to securities trading fraud. He details General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s conquest of the quarterly report while ruining livelihoods across small town America. But he fails to deliver a deeper sense of why, at the time, we actually envied our friends with MBAs who were heading for the C-suite. While we knew something of immense import was going on in the offices Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Shearson Lehman and Kidder Peabody, we did not really consider that 100 hours at the office each week might have some impact other than who could pick up the check at Nobu.

The yuppie era saw American innocence sacrificed on the altar of corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts and junk bonds. McGrath contrasts Ronald Reagan’s rosy speeches with the economic realities of a hollowed out middling class and the sociological stratification that resulted in two Americas. But here, too, he fails to note the ominous bifurcation of ad man Hal Riney’s promise that “It’s morning again in America”. This optimistic declaration that led Reagan to the Oval Office would eventually decay into the paranoid catalogue of American carnage that drove Trump to the same destination in 2016 — and might once again do the trick.

We are reminded that elitism, white flight, racism and cocaine-fuelled corruption went along with Perrier, Cross pens and premium ice cream. But Yuppies struggles to tell a pair of irreconcilable tales: McGrath must deliver the failures of the United States auto industry, the tragedy of the United States steel mill worker and the devastation of widespread farm foreclosures — while not forgetting to note the surge of coffee culture in Seattle and McMansions in Connecticut.

Perhaps it is fitting that McGrath’s emotional register goes no further than irony, typified by his narration of Jerry Rubin’s journey from Hippie to Yippie to Yuppie to stockbroker to capitalist nabob of networking — then back to cultural irrelevance. But McGrath’s irony ends there, neglecting to add how Rubin’s collection of 70,000 business cards from his fellow yuppies would lead to the venal absurdities of Soho House and Zero Bond.

How else did the army of rapacious Material Girls and Saab-driving Modern Families define today’s cultural arena? McGrath had a chance to connect the yuppie’s infamous commodification of everything everywhere all at once to a world in which Eighties fashion icons such as Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt would make that Eighties mantra, “dress for success”, into a full-time gig for influencers. But once again he shies away from the ugly truths that raw lust for fame, money and power would grow into armies of living, breathing avatars of capitalism — from toned pecs to perfect complexions.

McGrath describes the change to language itself, as in the yuppie’s spreadsheet-adjacent parlance of “interface”, “bottom line”, “fast track”, and “prioritise” — but will not take the next discomfiting step: that modern love and friendship would eventually align with algorithms. Nor does he delve into the meta-textual obsessions of the era, the victory of surfaces over depth, the defeat of Sixties idealism by the trivial pursuit of pop culture regurgitation, as the interrogation of corporate and political responsibility was replaced by a more pressing question: Who shot J.R.?

Yuppies also fails to show how the rapey ruthlessness of Dynasty‘s Blake Carrington might have had anything to do with the rise of a philandering nepo baby whom the ultimate chronicler of yuppie mores, Spy magazine, famously dubbed a “short-fingered vulgarian” — Donald Trump. In this regard, McGrath may be guilty of ignoring the most plangent of all yuppie phenomena, namely the origins of the absurd dictum that in order to succeed we must all become our own brands. This scourge was not lost on that same Eighties real-estate developer, who after a series of business failures and financial losses of more than $1 billion (and the ultimate embarrassment of being banished from the Forbes 400 list) reached a fateful decision: This particular über-yup would no longer develop and sell properties — or anything real, for that matter — but only his gilded name. The consequences would be devastating.

A quarter century after the Iranian hostage crisis doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency and made the star of Bedtime for Bonzo into the most powerful man in the world, a new era came to dawn. On 8 January 2004, The Apprentice made its debut on NBC, delivering an unending feast of yuppie signifiers to the short-fingered vulgarian himself. It was the moment triumph transformed into tribulation.

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Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. His next project is a book about the world’s first political reactionary.

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