How does the war between Michael J. Fox’s two most iconic characters define our politics today? What can The A*Team tell us about anti-government sentiment and hired guns like Blackwater and Halliburton? And how did the words “transcend” and “post-racial” lead from The Cosby Show to President Obama?

To answer those questions, one needs to look no further than David Sirota’s new book, “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now — Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything.”

Sirota is the former jugular-slashing, left-wing, mad-as-hell political operative who gave up trying to influence policy from the inside in order to commentate about the madness of it all. Now, the Denver-based radio host, syndicated columnist and author of two must-read best-sellers has offered his least aggressive but most accessible work yet. Sirota wraps his heavy arguments in the flag of light nostalgia, arguing that everything we need to know about the political and social world around us can be explained through the prism of the go-go 1980s, with its “Greed is good” mantra, revisionist history and Reagan quoting Rambo.

In the interest of full disclosure, I first met Sirota in 1997 when we both attended college in Evanston, Illinois. He made his most persuasive arguments through film and television quotes then, and he continues to do so today. For our generation, raised on pop culture, this might just be the best “serious” book you read this year.

Slade Sohmer: In this book you make the case that 1980s pop culture, old-school Wall Street madness and political chicanery are the clear influencers on how we view the world now. What’s Michael J. Fox — as Alex P. Keaton and Marty McFly — got to do with how we live?

David Sirota: Michael J. Fox’s two most iconic characters in the 1980s were Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton. Those two characters perfectly represent exactly how the 1980s was revising and reimagining contemporary American history on ideological lines.

Think about it: Marty McFly was a suburban teen fleeing the cartoonized dangers of modern life (ie. bazooka-weilding Libyan terrorists stalking the suburbs) into an idyllic Fifties of unity and safety. Alex P. Keaton, by contrast, spends his life lambasting his parents’ Sixties idealism.

This “Back to the Future”-versus-”Family Ties” war between the 1980s version of “The Fifties” (supposedly 100% unified, universally happy, optimistic, safe, etc.) and the 1980s version of “The Sixties” (supposedly 100% violent, chaotic, overly idealistic, etc.) defines our politics today.

We are, for instance, supposed to forget that America in the actual 1950s was basically an apartheid state, and also had a 90% top tax bracket. Likewise, we are supposed to forget that the 1960s saw great progress on civil rights and that liberals in the 1960s ultimately helped end the Vietnam War.

The dominant political narrative today – whether through the Tea Party or through criticisms of President Obama as a supposed “socialist” – tells us that if we only go back to “The Fifties” (ie. the 1980s-revised memory of the 1950s) and shun “The Sixties” (ie. the 1980s-revised memories of the 1960s) then our problems will be solved. It’s the replay of a bad 1980s movie, but it keeps playing.

SS: Your past literary efforts — The Uprising and Hostile Takeover — as well as your columns and radio show are insightful calls to action. Is this book, laden with ’80s zeitgeist, a similar call to action veiled as a giant pop culture reference? And what action would you like to see?

DS: As opposed to my first two books, this is more of a cultural commentary than a call to action. But it’s not commentary for commentary’s sake – and you are right, there is a message in this book. And that message is pretty simple: before we can mature beyond our Eighties-inhibited world, we need more of our society to better understand what a radical departure the Eighties was from our own previous history. It’s easy to forget this point because Eighties-marketed isms –- narcissism, militarism, racism, to name a few – are now so baked into our present culture that it seems like the long-term norm. Those ugly forces never became such mass-marketed, cheered-on, and ubiquitous parts of society before that decade.

So it’s important for there to be a deeper awareness that the Eighties pathologies that still define us today represent something ahistorical. Appreciating that basic fact is key because it reminds us that there is another way into the future than simply our current Eighties way – a way that is more about common good, a way that we’ve actually tried and succeeded with before the Eighties intervened.

SS: You bring up how people have tried (and are trying) to market the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. What effect does that effort have on the way in which we live, and how do you think will people 20 years from now look back at the 2000s?

DS: There is always an ongoing battle to define history – it has marked societies since the dawn of human history. The battle between “The Fifties” and “The Sixties” (ie. the images of those eras, rather than what those eras actually were) that really started in the 1980s defines our entire political debate. It’s everything from the Tea Party folks talking about taking the country “back” to the criticism of Obama as a supposed “socialist” who has ties to Sixties radicals. Obama himself recognized this and tried to end it with his primary campaign that promised to be an end to the “old battles” of the real 1960s. But even he hasn’t been able to escape it. That’s because we’re not really having a bttle in this country about the actual 1950s and actual 1960s – we’re having a battle about the 1980s VERSION of those eras – and it still continues.

When people look back on this moment, my guess is they will see what I am saying in this book – that this era remains an extension of that 1980s framework. They will look at political “eras” and probably count this moment among the larger “Reagan Era” precisely because the Reagan Era stories are the ones we are still telling ourselves.

SS: Who do you think does more damage to Main Street: The Gordon Gekko corporate raiders or the Bernie Madoff market swindlers?

DS: They are really one and the same because they are rooted in the idea that “greed is good.” That said, I think the good news is that this is one of the 1980s tropes that is being most fundamentally challenged right now. The Wall Street meltdown was the culmination of Gordon Gekko-ism, and while the political/economic debate among elites still remains tied to the “greed is good” idea, I think more Americans are starting to realize that there has to be a different way.

SS: Take us through your A-Team as an anti-authority, anti-government hired gun analogy.

DS: The A-Team stands as one of the most unselfconsciously ridiculous spectacles of meme-amplification in TV history. And remember – this wasn’t some small production. This was one of the single most popular programs on TV – and specifically among preteens (age 2-11!). So this was a show with a huge following of people whose brains were in their most formative stage.

Considering all that, and considering the storyline of the A-Team, the show provides a perfect example of how we were sold the idea that the government is both inherently inept and evil. Think about it: The premise of the A-Team is that these good guys were unduly incarcerated by the government, and for a crime that their government jailers secretly ordered them to commit. Additionally, the government is so incapable of performing the most basic incarceration functions, it lets these framed do-gooders “promptly” escape (as the voiceover tells us) and then can’t track them down – even though the government knows their rough location (Los Angeles, as the voiceover says), and even though average individuals can find them whenever they “have a problem” (again, the voiceover).

That gets to the ultimate anti-government narrative: the A-Team busies itself righting societal wrongs that its government pursuers refuse to fix. This was the “rogue” meme of so many 1980s productions, from Highway to Heaven to the Ghostbusters to all the private detective shows. They told us that “if you have a problem” you cannot rely on your government – you can only rely on the hired gun. In the 1980s, kids called that hired gun The A-Team – and today those kids-turned-grownups call it names like Blackwater or Halliburton or Goldman Sachs. It’s all rooted in the same Eighties ideology that says societal problems are best handled by the private gang rather than the public institution.

SS: How did the 1980s change our views on race?

All you have to do is look at how Barack Obama was branded as “post-racial” to see the echoes of how the 1980s started saying that acceptable African Americans were only those who “transcended” their race. This is straight out of the 1980s – and specifically, from the Cosby Show. During the 1980s, there was a whole debate about whether the Cosby Show was doing enough to talk about persistent racism in America, and Cosby made the point that if he would have designed the show to raise those questions, the white audience would not have accepted his show. This is exactly the same challenge Obama faced. He knew that if he was defined by his race, White America would not have embraced him.

This is, of course, not a referendum on Cosby or Obama. It’s a commentary on what White America accepts and doesn’t accept, and how White America is still only willing to accept (in a mass way) African Americans who are billed as “post-racial.” Think about how bigoted that entire 1980s frame is, the idea that a black person is supposedly only acceptable if he/she runs away from (ie. “transcends”) who they are. And yet, since the 1980s, this idea has become the assumption — it is racism shrouded in the veneer of tolerance, with people citing the promotion of individual “transcendent” African Americans to pretend bigotry no longer exists.

What’s fascinating is that Obama himself expressed an understanding of this right as the 1980s was becoming the 1990s. That’s right, in 1990, upon being elected Harvard’s first African American Law Review editor, Obama told the Associated Press that “It’s crucial that people don’t see my election as somehow a symbol of progress in the broader sense, that we don’t sort of point to a Barack Obama any more than you point to a Bill Cosby or a Michael Jordan and say ‘Well, things are hunky dory.’”

Those words could be said today about Barack Obama being elected president — but they aren’t, because so much of White America since the 1980s has been dishonestly citing the promotion of individual African Americans as supposed proof that racism no longer exists. Guess what? Racism still does exist, no matter what the 1980s has made us believe to the contrary.

SS: Not to ask you to play pop culture futurist, but given your skills at identifying the lasting memories of the ’80s, what celebrities, TV shows, films and news events will shape the next 20 years of American society and politics?

DS: We have to remember that for every generation since the 1980s, politics and pop culture are one and the same to many Americans. That is, there is no real boundary between entertainment and politics. In the 1980s, you had Reagan quoting Star Wars and citing Rambo to justify administration policy. Today, you have Sarah Palin with a reality TV show and Barack Obama making Star Trek references.

That gets to the answer of your question – I think the biggest celebrities who transcend politics and pop culture will be the ones who really shape our debate moving forward. The difference between now and the 1980s is that the celebrity culture is a bit more unpredictable – it’s not just network TV stars and top politicians. There are whole Internet-only celebrities who are going to be the new Alex P. Keatons. So in that sense, the competition to define this age and the future era is a bit more open and populist – but also potentially even more ridiculous than the Big 80s.

Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now — Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything is officially for sale, and you can buy it on Amazon.com here or at your local bookseller. We urge you to do so. It’s informative and entertaining. A rare treat.

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