"The Decade That Ruined Everything"

Read the full piece at The New York Times.

I spent the 1980s in newsrooms and boardrooms, watching companies get reshaped, watching regulators get dismantled, watching a small group of conservative strategists play a very long game. At the time, I thought I was covering a temporary correction, a pendulum swing that would eventually swing back.

It didn't.

In my new guest essay for The New York Times, I argue that we're not living after the 1980s. We're living in them. The decade built an "invisible architecture" in corporate America, the media, and the courts that still governs how we live today. Jack Welch's obsession with shareholder value at GE. Mark Fowler's dismantling of media regulation at the FCC. A student debating society at Yale that grew into the Federalist Society and now shapes the Supreme Court.

None of it happened by accident. It was planned, coordinated, and patient, and I think that's the part we tend to forget.

I also write about what it would take to build something different now, and why the most useful model might not come from the right at all, but from the 32-year strategy that won marriage equality.

This essay previews some of the central ideas in my upcoming book, "When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country, and Led Us to Today," out September 15.

Read the full piece at The New York Times.