What was the yuppie?

25:39And I think that sort of took hold and at least part of the culture, for sure. And I'm wondering kind of how you think their politics reflected these contradictions. You know, on the one hand, you emphasize that, especially coming from this more like hippie generation background or some of them, they had this sense of, you know, cosmopolitanism and appreciation for diversity and, you know, generally socially liberal, I would say, or that's at least the impression I got growing up in New York. But then on the other hand, this sort of like hyper capitalist emphasis on success. Do you see that as like a central contradiction in their politics where they're, you know, liberal in some areas, conservative in others?

26:25Yeah, I think that's a really good description of their politics. I'm not sure they necessarily saw it as a contradiction, although I think it's easy to sort of think about it that way, that way now. So you're right. But I think it's all comes from what are the forces that are shaping those views. And so on the social issue front, they are products of the 1960s, and you're right, are very much in favor of things like they're pro-choice when it comes to abortion. They're pro-women's rights. It's really the first generation of women that are really building careers for themselves. They're pro-civil rights, pro-diversity, all those sorts of things.

27:02I think the economic conservatism comes in some ways from some of what the country went through in the 1970s when there was a sense that government had grown too large and that government was sort of stifling capitalism and we need to get government out of the way and really let robust capitalism take over. And I think that's the mindset that yuppies embrace. I think when we look back in retrospect, you can see how out of control that got and has gotten. But I think in the moment that they're thinking about it, they're not necessarily seeing this as a contradiction. Totally. This also brings me to, I don't know, I sort of see in this discussion more the roots of where we're at currently with the status quo of the Democratic Party in a way, or that's at least sort of like the public perception of like the coastal elite ethos.

27:52But I'm wondering, you know, Donald Trump was like a big figure in New York City at exactly this time or like a rising star, I suppose. Do you see Donald Trump as like part of this moment, the yuppie moment? Why or why not? So he's definitely part of the 1980s moment in terms of that sort of bigness and over-the-topness. And in some ways, he checks many of the boxes of yuppiness. So he's a graduate of Penns. We went to the elite school. He's involved in real estate. He makes a lot of money. He wears suits and that sort of whole upscale thing. And yet at the same time, I don't think he really feels like a yuppie, in part because his tastes were so garish.

28:41You know, yuppies were all about white walls on their under in a sort of minimalist aesthetic in their in their townhouses. And Trump is throwing gold plated everything on Trump Tower. So in some ways, he's part of this moment. And in other ways, I think yuppies that in 1984 would have laughed and looked down their nose at Donald Trump saying, oh, he's not one of us at all. He's something else. Yeah, there's almost like a thread of like proto-hipsterism within yuppiness kind of. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it. But obviously the irony of all this, and like one of the through lines of my book is I'm trying to track this sort of division between what we have now come to call the coastal elites and the working class.

29:26And, you know, ultimately it's Trump who succeeds politically because he taps in to the grievances of that working class and taps into what in many cases are very legitimate grievances, that they've been really overlooked when it comes to the way the economy works. So he's such a fascinating figure in this whole story in the sense that he's one foot in, one foot out, but at the end, he sort of gets the last laugh, at least politically he does. He's not like trying to reconcile irreconcilable contradictions within his own mind or something the same. I don't think he ever tries to reconcile anything in his own mind.

30:00He just I'm Trump. I move forward. One thing I've sort of been wondering from reading your book is are the yuppies like as a culture? You know, we have culture and we have politics. Are the yuppies something that's kind of actually inherently political or inherently apolitical or maybe both? Or maybe something that's now changing in our contemporary context? I think they're kind of both. I'm not sure yuppiness was meant to be political, but I think ultimately it was and is. So I've been asked the question, do yuppies still exist? And one way I answer that question is to say, well, I think the remnants of yuppiness still exists in a number of different ways.

30:41But the biggest is sort of the economic divide in the country. I mean, to me, what yuppies represented and were part of was a particular segment of American society saying, all right, we're going to build an economy that works really well for us and we don't care if it works for anybody else. And it turns out it didn't work very well for anybody else, but it worked really, really well for this sort of small group of people. I'm not sure yuppies thought about that in political terms, but ultimately that's a political issue as we're currently dealing with. And, you know, when you get down to more partisan politics, you know, yuppies may have been more Democrat than Republican in the 1980s.

31:21Although I suspect over the years they swung back and forth between the two parties. So it's a little bit hard to answer. They're not political in that kind of, you know, partisan sense. But I do think there's sort of a political economy way in which the whole movement is kind of political. I don't know. Does that answer your question? Yeah. No, it does. I think it's a little chicken and eggy kind of, you know. Yeah. Well, and I would say the other way that yuppies, there certainly is a political connection is that, and I read about this in the book, that yuppiness as a cultural force and a media phenomenon really happened in 1984, specifically because of the candidacy of Gary Hart, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984.

32:03and he's sort of a dark horse candidate that ends up challenging Walter Mondale, who was a very traditional New Deal kind of Democrat. And Hart is a different kind of Democrat. He is what would become known as a new Democrat in the sense that he's liberal on social issues, but more conservative on economic issues. And even though Hart doesn't win the nomination in 1984 and then has his whole monkey business scandal in 1987 and 1988. His version of the Democratic Party is really the same as Bill Clinton's. And, you know, from there into Barack Obama, it is sort of that neoliberal, well-educated coastal elite version of the Democratic Party that kind of currently exists and, you know, maybe is maybe shifting, but sort of what we think of as the modern Democratic Party really has its roots back in 1984.

32:53And Cary Hart's main constituency, and this was written about over and over, were these young urban professionals, these yuppies, that were becoming such a force back in the 1980s. We've talked a lot about what yuppies are. Can we talk about a little bit what they're not? Because I do feel like there are so many cultural gradients around consumption and capitalism and culture and semiotics in the 1980s in this time period that they emerged. And I want to make a little clearer where they sort of fit on that spectrum. So what are they not? Who are they not? Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of a hard question to answer because, you know, as I said at the beginning of our conversation, there's not necessarily, this is not a strict, well-defined group of people.

33:37It's a label that gets placed on people with certain characteristics. And even, you know, I write in the book about a time period that's roughly 1980 to 1987. And even the definition of yuppiness changes a bit over that seven-year period. The word yuppies is originally really just a descriptor of these, quote, young urban professionals who are moving into certain neighborhoods in Chicago. And it doesn't have a lot of this sort of other baggage that comes associated with it. By the time we get to 1987 and the end of my book, and the book basically ends with the stock market crashing, yuppies are almost really referred to just as these traders on Wall Street that brought the stock market down.

34:15And so there's an evolution in there. And the word becomes, by the way, increasingly pejorative. You know, if you called somebody a yuppie in 1983, well, that might fit and they might not care. By 1987, it's like, you know, those are fighting words. So you take that back. In terms of what they're not, I mean, I keep going back to this idea of success. I mean, I think it's easier to define what they are because there are so many people that were not yuppies. And in fact, there was this great resentment towards yuppies by the time we get into the middle and late 1980s. So it's a little bit hard to list all the things they're not because they're not many things, if that makes any sense.

34:53In some ways, we're talking about some of the extremes of behavior and of taste. And yuppiness might also be on a spectrum that someone could be a little yuppie and other people are really, really yuppie. and there's a bunch of in-between. So I wrestled with this question writing the book too. Like, do I need this very, very strict definition? And I think what I finally concluded was no, because there isn't really one. Right. The point is that it's actually not a strictly defined thing. Right. And the point more is these forces are in play in the country. So whether it's an economic force or a focus on achievement or sun-dried tomatoes are the thing that everyone has to have.

35:30Those are the important things. You could probably also have like a kind of yuppie who was maybe a finance bro who was more interested in fitness than consuming all the right kinds of literature or something, who qualifies as a yuppie. But then you could also have a professor at Berkeley who lived maybe a more outwardly intellectual or bohemian life, but was also into the same furnishings or whatever. I think that's exactly right. I think there are different tribes of yuppies that one could easily come up with.

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36:41You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. All right. So let's talk about yuppies in the urban environment, the you in yuppie, if you will. How did yuppies impact the cities that they moved to? What are the transformations that they set in motion that we're maybe still seeing play out today, for better or for worse? Yeah, I think we're definitely still seeing this play out today. So yuppies were more or less the first real gentrifiers when it came to cities. And this goes back to what we were talking about before in terms of rebelling against the previous generation.

37:29Many, many yuppies grew up in the suburbs all across America. And by the time they're ready to move out on their own and are making a living, they are rejecting that sort of bland, vanilla, suburban lifestyle. And they want, in some ways, the edge of living in a city and also the cosmopolitan nature of living in a city. So really beginning in the mid to late 70s, you start to see tens of thousands of younger college graduates start to move into what were at that point not particularly nice neighborhoods in places like New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago. You name the city, the phenomenon is kind of the same.

38:08It's originally known as the back to the city movement. You know, these young people moving into economically depressed neighborhoods and buying, whether it's a townhouse or an old Victorian or even a loft for not much money. I mean, there are there are, you know, I found some stories of people buying brownstones on the Upper West Side of New York for, you know, like thirty thousand dollars, fixing them up. And then once that starts, they start to attract other people just like themselves. So over the course of a decade from, say, 1977 to 1987, you see a lot of these neighborhoods really, really start to change.

38:43So the Upper West Side is one that I read a lot about in the book in terms of how it really gentrified. There are certainly plenty of other places in New York. Places like the Back Bay in Boston and the South End in Boston get very, very gentrified. and you name the city, you can probably pick out two or three neighborhoods that really get gentrified during this period. And obviously, we are still dealing with the effects of gentrification today because it just only becomes much more and more widespread. And in fact, you have many cities today, there are very, very affluent parts of cities, and then there are some depressed parts of cities with not necessarily much in between.

39:20And that's a phenomenon that has been going on, honestly, since the late 1970s, and yuppies were very much on the sort of ground floor of that. Let's talk a little bit about their consumer preferences and their presence in these cities, specifically in terms of something you alluded to earlier, which Emily and I are both very interested in, which is the trajectory of media and entertainment industries because of this. The New York Times and NBC, I think, are both really interesting examples of this, of how we started to see the media and entertainment industry shift because yuppies were in these cities.

39:54They were buying things. They were reshaping the cities. They were, as you mentioned, that first wave of gentrification. Yeah. I mean, there's really kind of a sub-narrative to this, and someone could do an entire book just about how media changes over this period. So pre-yuppie, pre-1980, and then again, that sort of immediate post-war era, mass media is really mass, right? There are three television networks, you know, there are daily newspapers and there are big magazines like Look and Time and Sports Illustrated. And the goal of almost all those media as entities was to reach as many people as possible.

40:29The media environment starts to fracture a little bit in the 1970s going into the 1980s. And what starts to emerge is that having the largest audience isn't necessarily the most important thing anymore. So a newspaper like the New York Times says, well, we don't necessarily have to have the biggest circulation for our newspaper. What we need is the best demographic to read our newspaper. And so they lean really heavily into being the publication of choice for well-educated, which translates into very affluent consumers. And that works as a business model for them because you have all of these upscale brands that want to reach these people with disposable income.

41:08And so for the Times, it becomes this sort of juggernaut for the 1980s into the 1990s in terms of just being a publishing success. You know, reach upscale readers with content that appeals to their tastes. So there's a lot of lifestyle content, a lot of writing about food, writing about shopping, or writing about real estate. And it's kind of the same model that NBC starts to take in the 1980s under a guy named Grant Tinker, who became head of the network. And it's really when the whole idea of must-see TV comes into being with NBC on Thursday nights, you know, with the Cosby show and Cheers and, you know, a number of those other programs.

41:45It wasn't necessarily at least going into the idea into this that they would necessarily draw the biggest audiences possible, but they were going to draw the quote highest quality audiences when it came to income and the ability to spend money. And again, it turned out to be sort of a brilliant business move on the part of NBC in part because yes, they reached that, that high end demographic, but it turned out a lot of those shows also just became the most popular shows in the country. So they sort of, you know, won on both ends of the spectrum. So the sort of idea of niche media in a way or catering to an affluent niche.

42:20And I imagine also that these publications realized that they could create a sort of identification as well on the part of the readers or viewers where, you know, I just have memories growing up in this time period of, you know, receiving the Sunday Times as like a point of pride. I'm a good Times reader, you know, and I keep up with everything that they're talking about, and I'm up on all the latest things. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Reading the Sunday New York Times was certainly a status symbol in and of itself. The Wall Street Journal sees a huge uptick in circulation in the 1980s, because, you know, for maybe a different tribe of yuppies, You're reading the journal every day is a really important thing.

43:04Publications like Architectural Digest really take off because it just sort of speaks to that level of sophistication and that sense of being cosmopolitan that yuppies had. So, yeah, I mean, consuming these types of media said something about who you were the same way that, you know, driving a BMW did. This is all about projecting out into the world who I am. And it's such an interesting point because I think we really still see this playing out today with like, you know, publications catering to niche millennial audiences or, you know, HBO, for example, catering to this sort of elevated, like comparing like an HBO to a Netflix where Netflix feels like the everything streamer or everyone streamer.

43:47And then HBO, at least at least historically, has it has this elevated quality to it. And I and I still see that also even with with NBC where well, I guess I don't know what's going on with MSNBC, but I just remember growing up in New York City. You know, NBC always had this little this feeling of cachet to it in some way that the other sort of just general television news channels didn't the sense of sophistication. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And then then you can get reactions to these kinds of things. And I think that's in some ways where Fox News comes from. You know, it is we are not the snooty elitist thing of an NBC News or any of the network news.

44:32past we're going to give you a different version of the news and um we don't care if we're not perceived as sort of you know cool we think there's a massive audience out there to be reached you know by by looking at the news through this through this other lens so um but i tend to think about all this stuff i wrote an earlier book about mtv that came out a number of years ago and mtv was in that early early wave of you know catering to a very very specific audience so i mean it came on the air in 1981 and defined its demographic as people between basically 12 and 25. And the whole idea was, this is not your parents' television network.

45:11It's geared specifically to you. And it has, you know, becomes a phenomenally successful brand. And it has enormous brand identity because it was really good at sort of saying, we're just for you, we're not for everybody else. But that happens across all media for decades after that, for sure. Yeah, really what it is, is seeing, you know, it's like the emergence of the of the lifestyle brand, which of course is now something that has been ripped from the clutches of traditional media and is now part of social media. Yeah, it really pinpoints, I think, when quote unquote lifestyle actually became part of the quote unquote news, right?

45:46Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I could be wrong, but I can't really like pre-80s, I can't really think of any instances of that beforehand with the exception of like subcultural or countercultural magazines, like music magazines, basically. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Culture journalism, which is what our podcast is about nominally. But it's a slight tweak where it's less about culture. Lifestyle is not culture. There are overlaps. But lifestyle now becoming something a little bit separate from culture. It's like because there's a gate to be kept for it, I guess. Well, the lifestyle becomes about consuming the right culture, which gives an economic reason to write about it, I guess, for the publications, because people want that.

46:35Yep, exactly. Yeah, I love that. Lifestyle was about consuming the right culture. Yes, yes. It's all about status, isn't it? You sort of touched on this a little bit earlier, but do you think of the yuppie era as something that is over and done with, kind of confined to this past era of history? Or is it sort of just a permanent fixture in American culture now where each successive generation of, you know, literal young urban professionals sort of falls into this mode a bit? I think it's a really interesting question, and we could probably spend five hours talking about just this question of whether there are still yuppies or not.

47:09I do think that the impact of 1980s yuppies lives on in the way that I mentioned before in terms of the structure of the economy. I also think that the remnants of the original yuppies live on in things like interest in food and fitness and certain lifestyle brands. Those sort of originate with the yuppies, and I think those are still very much with us today. At the same time, there are obviously still lots and lots of young urban professionals, young people who live in cities and have gone to good colleges. And I think, you know, what's different about today's young urban professionals versus the ones that I wrote about from 40 years ago, some of the signals are different about what it means to be a member of that tribe.

47:47But I still think a lot of it comes back to an embrace of a certain kind of status. You know, to go back to what we were talking about earlier about whether it's a political phenomenon or not, you know, I think yuppies defined status more about economics and the things that you own and the amount of money that you make. I think in more recent years among the current crop of young urban professionals, political positions can be a kind of status, right? So most young urban professionals lean farther, farther left. And I think for many of them, that is sincere and deep-seated. But I think for some, it's also sort of the fashion of the time to be progressive.

48:22We might be starting to see a shift in that right now. But I think they embrace status in some ways through politics as opposed to the car that they drove or the gourmet food store that they buy their food from. Totally. Definitely in recent years, I see that with the politics. And I think even at the same time, if I look at my generation, there are also contradictions or almost like similar paradoxes where you'll define yourself through your leftist politics, but you'll still, you know, care deeply about what the things you buy say about you. And I'm just thinking of this funny here in Philly, in South Philly.

49:01I don't know if you heard about this like new restaurant in South Philly called or it's a wine bar called Superette. No, I don't think I have. In my neighborhood, which, you know, has been gentrifying for some time, this French wine bar called Superette opened up that is very chic and sells all of these like cheeses and sandwiches and fancy wines. And it's like all the rage. And I'm seeing all of the millennials who have moved to this neighborhood flocking there and they're obsessed with it. And there's like lines to get in. And it's like that same place. It has some differences from like a wine bar that might have appealed to the yuppies in the 80s, but it's really kind of the same thing.

49:40And so like all of my friends who are mostly quite politically progressive are still like, oh, but I want to go to, you know, a French chic wine bar. And I also think that maybe millennials in general sort of just have inherited some of the tastes of their parents' generation. I think that's probably right. I think the millennials, I mean, in many cases, yeah, are the children of yuppies. And so they're raised with a certain sophistication. And it's not surprising that they would continue to have those sort of tastes, you know, by the time they're in their 20s and 30s or getting into their 40s.

50:12But that's surprising. But right, even though it can be sort of paradoxical when trying to superimpose, their political choices and their lifestyle choices don't always seem to align perfectly. Exactly, which is a continuing issue. But it is interesting also that sometimes the specific tastes or the specific thing that you ascribe to that connotes status can shift. Like, you know, a big thing with our generation was also embracing poptimism where, you know, it was no longer considered socially acceptable to only like, quote unquote, elite high culture. You know what I mean? But it also in some level just becomes like another example of how you're aligning yourself with the dominant yuppie class.

50:54I love the fact that you guys do this podcast because I think there are it's like there are rules that sort of rise up around lifestyle and culture and they're in place. And then people decide, well, no, we need to break those rules. Then breaking the rules become the new rules. And it's just sort of this constant and probably going faster than ever because of social media, just this constant shift of sort of what's the end thing now. Right. And I think we all like to think that we're making decisions completely on our own and no one controls us. And yet I'm not so sure that that's true. That's why I think culture is such a such a powerful thing.

51:26You know, but we do things and are not necessarily even sure why exactly we do them. So let's throw in one more, which is, you know, as we were just talking about and what we alluded to a little bit earlier, like, you know, there's elements of sort of like millennial culture more broadly. There's, like I said, some like proto-hipsterism, there's preppyism. Guppy culture really is kind of like a perfect storm kind of phenomenon of culture becoming really clearly commodified in this sort of slippery way that, you know, moves across politics and generations. What do you think are some of the contemporary cultural factors that maybe accelerate or kind of otherwise impact this?

52:04This isn't really the contemporary factors, but I think there's something deep inside human beings that likes many of the things that define yuppiness, right? We like nice things as human beings. We like pretty clothes and we like nice objects. And certainly, I don't know many people that would say, I don't want to make a decent amount of money. I would prefer to starve. I mean, most human beings would prefer the security of financial well-being. So a lot of the things that define yuppiness are, in fact, true among many people. So it's not surprising that some of those things sort of continue on from generation to generation.

52:38To me, what gets interesting is sort of how the pieces get kind of arranged. So, I mean, we've just been talking about sort of millennials that in some ways, you know, young urban professional, the millennial version was a status symbol was your progressive politics. I do wonder whether we're seeing a new version of that. I mean, there was a cover story in New York Magazine maybe a month or two ago that talked about sort of the young Trump supporters who are not the forgotten white working class. They are graduates of very good schools, but have nothing to do with progressive politics. They're all in on sort of MAGA.

53:11you know, when you look at pictures of them, they look not too dissimilar to yuppies from the 1980s. And it's all about sort of that aggressive form of capitalism and sort of a more aggressive form of conservative politics. So yeah, I really love the headline on that one, the cruel kids table. Yes, right. Because that story was so well done because there is just sort of this meanness about it. And I'd wonder whether that's going to stay in this little pocket or whether that starts to spread out. And we're going to see more of that in the next couple of years among Gen Z and as Gen Z gets a little bit older.

53:44I don't know. But that's one of the interesting things about observing culture is that the pieces get thrown up in the air sometimes and they come down in a way that you didn't expect. So we'll have to see where this goes. Yeah, there's this whole kind of aesthetic thread that this writer and trend forecaster, Sean Monaghan, pinpointed recently where he says that there's this sort of rising aesthetic called Boom Boom, where it's like literally the sort of aesthetics of the 80s, kind of the Donald Trump 80s in a way, but in general, like what restaurants used to look like, office furniture, office decor, certain types of like old fashioned lighting, wearing traditional corporate work clothes is like coming back now.

54:27I had a friend, very fashionable friend who has actually been on this podcast, Ruby Justice Thillow, came to visit Philly recently, and he was saying that in New York, people don't wear sneakers anymore. They only wear dress shoes. I don't think he was referring to people who are necessarily conservative, but you can kind of see that vibe in the magazine spread you're talking about. I don't know. This all just feels very relevant. Yeah. I mean, I do feel a little bit sometimes like there's some deja vu happening for me. I spent a couple of years writing this book with my brain really deeply immersed in the late 70s and early 1980s.

55:00And when a couple of years ago, we suddenly started having, you know, inflation not seen in 40 years. I'm like, oh, I've just been reading about this in the 1970s. And then you have a conservative politician sort of get elected, you know, in Trump, but in the same way that Ronald Reagan did. And then, oh, it's not just a one-off election. This is a sort of wave election and there's a movement happening here. And it's like, oh, all of this feels very, very familiar to me. Now, a lot of the specifics are different, but, you know, history in some ways feels like it does repeat itself. It's wild. All right.

55:30Well, Tom, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for writing this book. And yeah, is there anything else that our listeners should know? Do you have any upcoming events you'd like us to plug? No, I just, I hope people, you know, the book is called Triumph of the Uppies. I hope people get out there and buy it. It will be out in paperback a little bit later this year. But thank you guys for having me on. This was just such a really fun conversation and you have fantastic questions. So it'll be fun to talk about all this. Thank you. Appreciate that.

56:02This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.