Dr. Sarah Robey
Interviewee: Dr. Sarah Robey
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: The Berlin Wall, Polish Solidarity, Tiananmen Square, the dissolution of the Soviet Union: the end of the Cold War created cultural and political reverberations around the globe. Americans celebrated the United States’ triumph over the Soviet Union, having “won” a conflict that had dominated international affairs for half a century. Yet the end of the Cold War wrought changes in American culture that are sometimes difficult to trace, especially in comparison to the waves of revolution and mass demonstration that characterized other parts of the world between 1989 and 1991. This talk will explore some of the subtle ways that the end of the Cold War influenced American culture, many aspects of which have only become apparent in the three decades since. I contend that the experience of the 1980s and 1990s not only helps us understand American culture in the era since September 11, 2001, but also lends insight into the lasting influence of these decades in American culture today, from pop culture to politics. Bio: Dr. Sarah Robey is Assistant Professor of History at Idaho State University, where she teaches courses in American history, the history of the Cold War, the history of science and technology, and the history of energy. Her research focuses on the intersection of American culture and public life and the history of nuclear science and technology. Her first book, Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State, will be published with Cornell University Press in early 2022. She also has a forthcoming chapter in Energy Cinema (West Virginia University Press, 2022), which explores how popular entertainment served as public nuclear education in the early Cold War. Robey holds a PhD in History from Temple University and has held past fellowships at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the Philadelphia History Museum.
Date: 2021-10-19
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Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for today's connected conversation. I like to remind you all that you may submit any questions using either the Q&A feature or the chat located at the bottom of your screen. And with me today is Doctor Sarah Robey from Idaho State University. It's an honor to have you with us tonight. And I turn or today and I turn it over to you.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Doug, for organizing this. Thank you for graciously allowing me to reschedule earlier this year when I. When I couldn't make the first date. And thanks to the IHC for, all of its really important, support for folks like me in Idaho. So. All right, so when we think about the end of the Cold War, I imagine images like this come to mind for a lot of us.
You know, Polish solidarity, evolving over the course of the 80s. We've got, mass protests in a lot of countries all over the world. Some scholars have called the period from 1989 to 1991 the era of the people, right? It had, the Cold War had come to define global politics for decades. And, you know, so much changed in the span of just a few years that it's become kind of difficult for historians to write about the 80s or 90s and not consider, the long shadow of the end of the Cold War.
In this way, I think it's a little bit of a historical juggernaut. We might think of compounding, the the difficulty of writing about this era without considering the Cold War. Is a general reluctance among many historians, although not all of us. A reluctance to tackle events that are too close in recent memory. We do this, with an eye towards maintaining objectivity.
Some of us struggle to find to figure out what our archival base would be to study of the recent past. We like to have hindsight, of course. There are many considerations that lead, historians to be a little wary of, studying the recent past. So much so that when I first started my PhD program in 2009, I was it was kind of taboo to think about, choosing a topic that was in the 1990s.
A lot of our dissertation chair steered us a little backwards in time from the 1990s. It was just too recent. This, fortunately, is changing as time marches forward. So to do the eras that we historians study, I bring this all up to say that the historical analysis of the very recent past can be a difficult task, especially when we think to leave the realm of well-documented high politics and start to consider something as amorphous a topic as culture.
What I've brought today is one historian's view of the longer term impact of the end of the Cold War on American culture. And we should remember this is a history that is still developing as we speak now. The consensus among historians and political scientists is that the U.S. didn't so much win the Cold War as the Soviet Union lost it.
Most of the recent scholarship in global history and foreign policy argues that while the Soviet experiment certainly did fail, it was more due to internal fracture than external pressure from the west. Now, the idea that President Reagan won the Cold War certainly holds a lot of weight still in our our political culture today. So we can definitely discuss that in the Q&A.
But for our purposes today, I want to think about how one of the most remarkable aspects of the end of the Cold War was that, from an American perspective, from the perspective of American society, there were very few markers of drastic change. Okay. Now, to be fair, compared to nations where a governing structure, was toppled, you would not expect to see quite as much of a rupture in the nation that did not lose the Cold War.
The U.S. did, however, lose a powerful foe in this moment, both in terms of the realpolitik of having this kind of massive, global superpower rivalry, but also in the imagination of having the Soviet, sort of competitor out in the world. This is something that translated into culture and politics. I'll come back to this later on.
But we should just think that, we just should consider that the end of the Cold War in the United States was not a dramatic reinvention of our, our political system or our economy, again, like it was elsewhere. But just ten years after the official end of the Cold War. The terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, and their immediate aftermath provided a much more visible, tangible period of cultural change in the United States.
We can think of this not only in the framework of collective trauma, but in the quick culmination of two hot wars and the establishment of agencies like homeland Security and other apparatuses of national security programs. But if we choose to see 9/11 as an aberration, we missed out on certain important continuities in American culture, both before and after the end of the Cold War, and certainly since 2001, as well.
Some aspects of Cold War politics and culture were so far entrenched by the 1980s as to become thoroughly normalized, thoroughly baked in to our mainstream understanding of American ideals. And these were things that were easily adapted to a changing global situation in the 1990s and into the 9/11 era. So let's think about some of these political continuities. First, the Cold War left several important permanent imprints on American political institutions.
For one thing, the early years of the Cold War oversaw the creation and reorganization of several critical arms of our federal government the national security state, as we call it today, was born of the late 1940s, just as the Cold War was starting. The reorganization of the American military and national security offices into the Department of Defense within the executive branch is a great example, a big scale example, but it's also emblematic of the many drastic changes in governance during this pivotal early Cold War period.
We should think, too, of the CIA, for instance. This was a product of the early Cold War era. You know, the CIA had a major covert role in US foreign policy making, over the course of the Cold War. Things that we are still uncovering in our scholarship today. And while it was established long before the Cold War, the FBI's power powers expanded very considerably during the Cold War years.
So when historians look at the political, consequences of the Cold War period, we think, there's a consensus that the cumulative effect, institutional effect of the Cold War was a significant expansion of federal power, a significant expansion of presidential authority, and an expansion of the power of national security offices. One of the great ironies for Cold War historians is that, if you look to domestic politics in the U.S. during this era, you see a consolidation and a centralization of power at the exact same time that the United States is sort of operating out in the world, preaching a, an ideology of democracy, diffused power and this sort of
thing. Anyway, just sort of an aside, that's that's sometimes puzzling for Cold War historians. Secondly, perhaps there we go. Not nukes yet. Secondly, for individual American citizens, the Cold War recalibrated the balance between individual liberties and privacy on one hand and national security imperatives on the other. At times, this relationship was pretty unbalanced. We can think of the years of McCarthyism, repression in the early 1950s.
You know, the kinds of civil liberties that were suppressed in the pursuit of quashing domestic anti-communism. At other times, however, the perceived overreach of the Cold War national security state was subject to severe pushback and severe public criticism. We should remember, you know, the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy was was pretty brief. Less than a decade.
Right? And his ultimate downfall was thanks to, backlash from members of the public and members of other parts of the federal government for oversight, stepping with the power of the national security state. Other things, other times where we can see, public pushback against, powerful national security agencies. We can think about, the Pentagon Papers, which were a 1971 press exposé of 25 years of, kind of, lies and untruths, being perpetuated by the president, by the president, by the, the military about, U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Around the same time, we also have Nixon's impeachment and resignation. Also something that really stirred up a lot of public pushback against, especially agencies like the FBI. We have a little bit later, the Iran-Contra scandal. Later, even still, there were, you know, allegations revealed about the FBI's surveillance of civil rights leaders and other radical activists throughout the Cold War.
The list goes on and on and on. Right. But even still more often than these moments of imbalance between security and liberties or public pushback against that imbalance, more often the power of the national security agencies was pretty invisible. And, that is a structure that we are certainly still, kind of wrestling with in our democracy today.
But thinking back to this moment, right around 9/11, after the terrorist attacks in 2001. This Cold War era political willingness to adjust the balance between, liberties and national security. That willingness was once a once again invoked to fight the war on terror. The Patriot Act, which passed through Congress just six weeks after 9/11, made it easier for law enforcement to surveil American citizens at home.
It expanded, counterterrorism efforts among law enforcement agencies again, many of which, operated within, the sphere of, the domestic space in the United States. Now, in the intervening years, the Patriot Act has been subject to a good amount of criticism. Several of its provisions have been rolled back. But once again, this general structure still remains with us.
The balance between privacy and security still hangs in the balance in American culture today. There continues to be a heated debate in our society about the limits of federal authority, a government accountability to its citizens. Transparency. Right. And the kind of transparency that citizens expect in a Democratic state. We can look to more recent examples like Wikileaks and the US government's response to that.
Even more recently, we have the Panama and Pandora papers, which once again have reinvigorated conversations about, you know, transparency and secrecy in the upper echelons of power in the world. And all of these things have also been used as tools of protest and instigators of major public debate. Finally, there are a few, Cold War hangovers, so to speak, that I'd like to address briefly.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that the teeth of the Cold War conflict, nuclear weapons, are still very much with us today. There are still over 13,000 nuclear warheads in existence. Over 90% of which are held by the United States and Russia. Now, this is much less than the 65,000 or so that existed at the end of the Cold War.
Thankfully, but nevertheless, nuclear weapons still have a major pull over our foreign relations and our relationships with both our allied nations and our enemy or competitor nations. It also bears saying that the US military industrial complex is as healthy as ever. The trillions of dollars spent on the war on terrorism are is evidence of that.
And whatever political opinions you hold about US interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's not a stretch to say that there are major parallels between military expenditures during the Cold War and after 9/11. Now, I couldn't find a graph that did exactly what I wanted here. But you can see, you know, just what kind of relationship we're talking about.
Just since the end of the Cold War. Our military diplomatic alliances are also artifacts of the Cold War. NATO was formed in 1949. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a collective security bulwark against Soviet expansionism. And though US membership in NATO has certainly come under Partizan scrutiny over the last recent years, for the time being, NATO remains one of the United States most important diplomatic commitments.
Now, even the Cold War imperative of defending American style democracy in the world has opposed the post 1989 analog. It's a little bit of an imperfect analogy, but a lot of the interventionist impulse, that had characterized U.S. foreign policy before the end of the Cold War, that found a home in American initiatives to expand economic globalization and encourage U.S. style capital markets out in the world.
And I think we can all agree this certainly continues today. Okay. I promised you a discussion of culture. And that's not just about federal policy making and foreign policy. So the question becomes, can we make similar arguments about American cultural continuity over the past 30 or 40 years? Well, the answer is yes and no. And kind of and maybe, as I was brainstorming ideas for this lecture, I did have to face the realization that not everything is about the Cold War, said the Cold War historian, rather reluctantly.
This, for example, I'm not entirely sure that the revival of 90s fashion and the journalistic hand-wringing over it, can be explained by the Cold War or 9/11 or any of the things that we've talked about thus far. But if that's what you came here for, I won't leave you hanging entirely. I'll come back to some of this a little bit later.
Instead, I have pulled together a couple of cultural observations that I think can be traced to the continuity between the Cold War and the post 9/11 era. Okay, so for one thing, there are some, interesting continuities in terms of the cultural othering, that pervades the last 30 or 40 years. Now, very briefly. Othering is the term that humanities scholars use to describe the harmful, explicit and implicit ways of establishing in groups and outgroups, us and them.
And in a lot of situations that we're talking about today, American and other. Right. Not American. American culture has a long history of harmful othering, from the codification of racial categories as a means to defend slavery from anti-immigrant sentiments and attitudes. You know, really, throughout a lot of American history, disparaging cultural stereotyping. These are all forms of othering.
And othering is deeply entrenched in American culture. Now, one way that, historians of popular culture think about fiction forms. So here, you know, we're talking about, novels and film and television and that sort of thing. One of the ways that we think about fiction is to think of fiction as a mirror to current mainstream social concerns and fears, and it would it would likely not surprise you that one of the ways that pop culture films, especially do the work of othering, is to make an outsider group scary, vile, immoral, disgusting.
During the Cold War, American culture had a pretty clear and obvious other right. And that's communists both at home and abroad. We can certainly see this in all of the political structures that I've already discussed here, but also in pop culture. Just one example of many, many, many, you know, think about all of the James Bond films that featured villains who were Eastern European or Russian or Communist of some sort.
Also think about how many, many nuclear weapons they were all trying to steal. But nevertheless, this is a good example of of cultural othering of communists in pop culture during the Cold War years. But after the Cold War ended, it wasn't quite so easy. Right. A lot of, a lot of Americans kind of said to themselves in the early 90s, you know, well, maybe not literally, but we can see traces of this in pop culture.
You know, who are the others now that the Cold War has ended? What sorts of things are speaking to people's concerns and fears now that this cultural vacuum has opened up? And, you know, the Soviet other is no longer a viable part of of kind of our fiction stories in some respects. We might point to domestic fears as something that eclipsed, Cold War kind of communist othering.
In popular culture. After the Cold War, crime, especially drug crime and gang crime, was at the top of political, political priorities in the 1990s. Several new crime bills, the continuation of the war on drugs, the mass and the expansion of mass incarceration and the resurgence of family values in politics are all good indicators of that.
And we are certainly still dealing with the racial fallout of the inequities built by this system and this overarching concern with domestic crime during the 1990s. But if we think about how this expressed itself in pop culture, it probably would not surprise you to know that the Law and Order television franchise debuted in 1990 and witnessed an enormous growth in popularity and the different types of shows over the course of the 90s and into the 2000.
This era of especially television culture, but also in film, was a revived era of the cop show. And you could make the argument that this popularity, was evidence, you know, of Americans feeling less safe than many actually were. But there's another trend that I find even more relevant here. Film scholars have noticed have noted a general trend over the course of the 1990s that action and spy and thriller films increasingly featured rogue actors as the villains.
And here I don't mean actors as thespians, but people who act alone, as the plot driver. The films that come to mind first for me or those in the Die Hard franchise, but also films like True Lies, all of which deal with the trope of a rogue villain and often a rogue hero. Positioned as the only person to stop the rogue villain.
One major causal factor, in this trend is most certainly the rise of real life hijackings and terrorism across the 1970s and 1980s, much of which was perceived to be the actions of, you know, crazed lone individuals or small scale radical organizations.
After 9/11 and the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The trope of the lone extremist easily evolved to incorporate themes of jihadist terrorism, and also the complexities of attempting to wage war on non-state actors. While certainly some films in the very early years of the War on Terror valorized military warfare, often at the expense of any kind of nuance or empathetic racial categorization.
Just as many films dealing with the themes, involved in the war on terror, illustrated the moral ambiguity of fighting terrorism. Here, I think of the Bourne franchise. Right. So, the Jason Bourne movies, all of which have plot lines. I hope this won't spoil anything, but, these plot lines revolve around corruption and the blurring of lines between good guys and bad guys.
You know, despite that thoughtfulness, if an action film can hold the potential to be truly thoughtful, despite all of that, there is often some blatant or at least subtle othering and racialization of Muslim characters in these films. So the pop culture sort of transition from Soviet state sponsored villain to non-state terrorist villain was not always a direct or simple evolution.
The simple moralizing of Cold War era good nations and bad nations just didn't fit the post 9/11 world particularly well. Regardless, both during the Cold War and since film and other pop culture forms have betrayed some of the worst impulses of American xenophobia and villainization and othering. Sometimes when we watch these films now, ten, 15, 20 years later, we are acutely aware of how much our culture has shifted away from the problematic portrayals that we might see.
You know, we watch and cringe at a certain treatment of a minority character, or a foreign character or a female character. But what we have to remember here, if we think about pop culture as a mirror to society, however imperfect it may be, we have to consider that these, these attitudes and these these kind of imaginaries were, they held at least some sway in the era in which these films or other pop culture forms were released.
Another thing that we can observe in pop, popular entertainment about this Cold War to 9/11 villain transition is how the weapons of destruction have changed. Instead of an insidious plot to start a nuclear war, or frequently more frequently during the Cold War, a misunderstanding, a terrible misunderstanding that could start a nuclear war. Our stories since 9/11 have often more often featured biological weapons or chemical weapons.
And as the modes of destruction from the anthrax scares of the early 2000s to the biological terrorism scares that still pervade our conspiracy theories, the popular concern is no longer with world ending h-bombs, but rather world ending contagions and outbreaks. It's no wonder that the 21st century has thus far been the golden era of zombie entertainment. And although it may seem like zombie films might be able to sidestep issues of direct xenophobia, the genre has not always been particularly enlightened in its treatment of race, disability, and other eugenics issues.
But all of this is certainly related to what we were just talking about with non-state actors. It's a lot more believable and a lot more entertaining. I would argue for a million a movie villain today to get Ahold of some anthrax, sarin gas, a vial of zombie virus than it is, for a villain to acquire and launch a nuclear warhead.
So the weapons of destruction here have changed. And again, I think that is a reflection of the evolution of this history since the end of the Cold War.
Anyway, when Doug first invited me to contribute to this series, he asked if I could speak to some of the reasons for the resurgence of 1980s culture in our world, in our present moment today. And although I haven't exactly spent any time in the archives studying this issue, I don't know what those archives would be, but it is an important one.
It is a very important one, and I think it is linked in to a lot of what we've talked about today. When I mentioned before that not everything is about the Cold War. I am being honest that I'm willing to accept that. But I do think that we cannot forget about the role of nostalgia. There is a reason why entertainment culture, including fashion like we saw before, why that can be cyclical.
And although this is way outside of my professional depth, it's something that I sort of have a popular interest in. And I'm excited to speak about it for a little bit here. I've often wondered why, did some strange version of 1960s counterculture fashion have a resurgence in the 1990s when I was a child? Why?
As an eighth grader in 1999, did I perform in a middle school musical titled groovy, a tribute to the 60s? What was it about the 60s in the 90s that resonated? Write 30 years later? Why was it so captivating to much of sort of my adolescent consumer culture and pop culture in that moment and that of many of my elder millennial peers?
So in that respect, I think maybe it's not surprising that now, 30 years later, we're seeing a revival of certain elements of the late 80s and 90s, things that a certain kind of population of folks rapidly approaching the age of 40, experienced in their youth. Nostalgia for the past is incredibly powerful. We know this. It can be comforting in times of flux and crisis.
And if the past 18 months have not been a time of flux and crisis, I'm not sure what qualifies. But here's one final thought on nostalgia. In just the past few years, we've started to see a small resurgence of popular entertainment plotlines that have either been firmly situated as the Cold War story or use something implicitly Cold War ish in as a premise in Hollywood films like Atomic Blond, The Man From uncle, our reinventions of the Cold War spy film.
I'd even put Red Sparrow in here, although it's not set in the cold War, it's playing on explicitly Soviet and US spy themes. Now it's Russian and US spies. And then there is my personal favorite, category. And that's the top secret laboratory gone wrong kind of genre. Now, this came of age in the nuclear moment of the 1950s with, besides, you know, science fiction, we've got mutant ants and lizards and shrinking men and giant cats usually, due to some sort of radiological mishap, but tracing their origins back to national laboratories, which, again, were just becoming these, powerful institutions, in the early years of the Cold War.
But the genre of big laboratory, government laboratory going wrong. The genre's more recent reincarnations are very, very good.
Of course, my favorite here in this category is Stranger Things. For those of you who haven't seen the series, 19 Stranger Things is a 1980s period piece set against the backdrop of Hawkins National Laboratory, which is a Department of Energy site that somehow manages to create a parallel dimension and some pretty terrifying monsters. Now, Stranger Things is a well-told story.
It's creative and it's innovation. Innovative television. In an era of big budget Netflix productions. But it's also deeply, deeply nostalgic. And that's one of the reasons I think it is so popular today. This is the Cold War reinvented. Okay, as you might have gathered by now, historians are driven by the need to identify change and continuity, but it's often not nearly as cleanly cut as that.
In the case of our very recent history, as it is for a lot of eras in history. It's perhaps most fruitful to think about the ways that history evolves on a trajectory of adaptation and replacement. And I think, especially when we talk about the last 40 years, there are, big benefits to thinking about the history evolving in that way.
So are we still living in the Cold War? Well, I think probably not. Although maybe we can talk a little bit about that in the question and answer. A better question, I think, is are we still living with the Cold War? And in my opinion, the answer to that is unequivocally yes. The question just becomes, for how long will that be the case?
Thanks very much.
Doug Exton: Yeah, thank you for the wonderful presentation and I agree with you. Stranger things is a phenomenal show. But one of the things that resonated me resonated with me, that you touched on the very beginning was how, you know, kind of the 80s and the 90s are seems like two recent, you know, for history to, you know, be looked at.
And that's something that like just for me, when I think about the 80s, I'm like, oh, that was like forever ago. But like not too long ago, when I think of the 90s, I'm like, oh, that was yesterday. But the 90s were 30 years ago. So I think that's something that I feel like a lot of people probably also kind of have that same mentality with, you know, in that sense, like it's far away, but it doesn't feel that far away.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. And this is certainly fodder for a thousand memes on the internet right now. Right. So, the civil rights movement was as far from the 1990s as the 1990s are from today, for instance, those sorts of comparisons that sort of horrify anyone who's concerned with, their own age and the rapidly evolving ravages of time. But yeah, there is a certain, kind of temporal difficulty, because, you know, we're living through recent past, and starting to study it as, as history, and it's, it's harder than something that's much more, much more removed from our own time period.
Yeah.
Doug Exton: And then we do have a question from the audience. They're asking if, just for clarification, that othering is a feature of most societies and it's not just unique to American culture.
Dr. Sarah Robey: 100%, yes. But, yeah, this is this is a tool of, lots of formal institutions in all sorts of societies and cultures, as well as informal institutions and informal groups. This is by no means unique to the US.
Doug Exton: And then another question is, you mentioned that McCarthy was part of history for a decade. Would you be able to clarify that? The audience member thought he was here and gone much more quickly than that.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Could you repeat the first part of the question you cut out just a little bit?
Doug Exton: Oh. My apologies. That McCarthy was part of history for a decade.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. So, the first kind of. Well, the problem is we call McCarthyism, like what we call McCarthyism is much bigger than Joseph McCarthy's tenure in the Senate. You know, a lot of the domestic anti-communism kind of trials and, extreme public scrutiny started in the late 1940s, not with McCarthy, but with who attacked the House un-American Activities Committee, and continued into McCarthy's tenure in the Senate, in the early 1950s.
McCarthy was censured, I think 1956. I can't remember now. Somebody is going to have to correct me on that. In the mid 1950s, and, you know, was out of Congress not long after that, anti-communism as kind of a more generic idea certainly continued in our, in our culture much longer than that. But historians have identified a certain extreme fervor of, prosecuting and persecuting, you know, kind of radical beliefs, in this kind of more discrete moment in the early 1950s.
And then anti-communism definitely had a resurgence in the 1980s as well.
Doug Exton: And then has it become easier for historians to find more diverse sources of information for historical events? And I would assume, you know, the more recent past, so to speak, a lot easier.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yes and no. So it really depends what you're studying. I mentioned in passing that, you know, studying high politics and diplomacy and kind of big scale national events even is a lot easier. Because we can look to newspapers, right? We can find editorials, we have transcripts of presidential speeches, and on and on and on.
You know, the source base there is easier to identify than center was 1954. Thank you. The the source base is easier to identify, there than if for things like popular opinion or kind of more cultural trends and this sort of thing, where the pool for sources could be really, really quite wide. The other thing I will say about studying the recent past and the challenges and benefits, is that a lot of stuff is easier to get at, but there's much, much more of it.
As soon as we got into the age of digital recordkeeping, you know, I have friends who are who are doing, you know, Twitter research, right? Looking at the early days of Twitter and trying to figure out what people were talking about and getting mad about in the early days of Twitter. Can you imagine what that research looks like?
You need all sorts of digital tools to help you pass through just the mass amount of all sources. So, I don't know, I feel quite lucky that I wasn't trying to do dissertation research about, the recent past in the, you know, with records in the digital age. I don't know what's next for historians as we transition for much more kind of paper and physical sources into the digital realm.
I think on the whole, it's going to get more challenging to do historical research.
Doug Exton: Yeah, I agree, especially with the access, you know, everyone and I was saying it's a bad thing by any means. But before like you had to know where to go to find the information. But now in the digital age, anyone can get that information, you know, and create their argument from that information. So it also gets to a point where you know what makes your argument or your paper more unique.
In a sense I feel like.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. Well and there's we also have to be much more skeptical of digital sources, for all sorts of reasons that I'm sure folks in the audience would, would, connect with. You know, we live in an age of misinformation, and the digital world makes that a lot easier than it used to be.
Doug Exton: And then as time passes on and there's more distance between, you know, the traditional Cold War time period in the day we're living in, do you think it'll be harder to resurrect communism, as, you know, the villain or the the other?
Dr. Sarah Robey: So resurrect, I'm assuming we're talking about, like, having communist villains up here continue to appear in our popular popular culture. Yes, probably. I think that that, anti-communism and communist fear is still a big enough part of our political culture right now. And it's a big enough part of things that people actually remember living through that.
I think it's particularly resonant right now. I think as distance, as more distance now happens between, this, this era and this very intense political fear, I think it's going to be harder and harder for audiences to connect with. I think that for films or television to portray that, they're going to have to be really heavy handed in what anti-communism looked like.
And it was heavy handed. Let's let's be real. But, you know, I see this with my traditionally aged, you know, freshman students when we talk about McCarthyism. It's like, I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to them. How could this guy have gotten away with this? Couldn't everybody just see that he was, you know, see through his antics?
So I think that's evidence that probably we're moving more in that direction, that it's going to be harder and harder to use communism as a scapegoat.
Doug Exton: Yeah. And I would agree with that because I'll show my age here. I graduated high school in 2016. But I took AP, U.S. history in that kind of time period of the Cold War was the hardest for me to, you know, wrap my mind around, you know, bull kind of what you said. How was McCarthy able to do all that stuff?
He did, but also, how is the Cold War, you know, a war when there wasn't, you know, a blatant, clearly defined like battle ground and stuff like that, like with World War One and two. So I do think, you know, I think what you said, it will be harder, you know, as the new generations are further disconnected from that because it's not in your day to day life.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. And even though the big the super power competition was certainly a directive, a lot of global politics and conflict, we can't forget that there were a whole series of hot wars under the umbrella of the Cold War. I mean, in this country, we have Vietnam and Korea, but all over the global South and a lot of, formal, formerly colonized nations.
You know, the Cold War was anything but cold in a lot of places. And so, when you start thinking about actual hot war, it becomes, almost harder to empathize with this massive ideological, you know, like, what does that mean when people are dying? And, and so there's some really smart histories that have been published in the last 10 or 15 years that suggest that we reorient how we study this global history, to amplify, the stories of, of not the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but other nations that lived through this period or died through this period.
Doug Exton: And then kind of taking a little bit of a switch. Do you think there's some postwar, continuity that can be applied to, you know, education, you know, specifically how there's the big shift towards Stem and away from humanities or liberal arts degrees?
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. So that sort of has had a, an imperfect cyclical history too. In the early years of the Cold War, particularly by the mid 50s, there was a huge emphasis on Stem, what we would now call Stem education. They didn't call it that back then. But incredible amounts of funding that went into the, K through 12 science education, as well as, university and advanced degrees in the sciences, engineering, technology, all done in the service of beating the Soviets.
Right? We got it. We? This is the middle of the atomic age and the space race and the nuclear arms race. We have to have the intellectual upper hand. Right? And the best way to do that is to foster, you know, education for for young people from the start and feed them into the sciences. And so you have lots of folks that got science and engineering degrees, at college in the 60s who paid virtually nothing because, the government subsidized, that education.
So but, you know, that didn't last forever. It's an expensive kind of program to maintain, especially with all the other, expenses of the Cold War. I don't think that emphasis ever went away, though, and certainly now with the emphasis on, Stem education, both in k-through-12 and at at in higher education. It's really interesting because we have parallels now with we have to out out educate China.
We have to we have to have the upper hand in science and engineering and especially digital skills. In this kind of moment in 2021. So there are some interesting parallels, ones that I can speak much better to about the earlier Cold War, than today. But I think some of these things do persist in our culture.
Doug Exton: Yeah. And then kind of thinking about, you know, the typical villains of the Cold War specifically, you know, China and what is now known as Russia. You know, do you think there's the shift in terms of where that personification, so to speak, when, you know, China became global capitalism and, you know, Russia, USSR became like the Russian mafia?
Do you kind of see that as a connection and a role?
Dr. Sarah Robey: Absolutely. I think we're dealing with a right now a reconfiguration of global power. There are some criticisms of, of the U.S. in the 90s before the war on terror, that, there was a little bit of retrenchment in terms of maintaining kind of, friendly diplomatic relations. I don't know that I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.
But the idea there is that it didn't set us up particularly well to deal with the 9/11 world and the rise of China in particular. So a yes and no to to your question. I mean, historians are always very wary to say that history repeats itself like that is not something that any of us subscribe to because the context is always different.
Yeah. But it is very difficult to not see some of those similarities in terms of, of the global geo power, global geopolitics and global power now. The question about the there the part about Russian mafia. I don't know how to answer that. I don't it's too far, too far afield from what I'm an expert in.
But it has been very interesting to see how power has reorganized itself since 1991 or even since 9/11.
Doug Exton: And then circling back to, you know, media and pop culture. You touched on Law and Order, which I love all those, you know, cop shows. Bones is one of my favorite. But do you think, you know the rise of true crime and horror and, you know, maybe it is just because it's October, but I feel like I'm seeing a lot more horror, you know, movies and shows all over social media now.
Do you think those are kind of a new version of playing on a cultural vacuum or, you know, reinvention of the cop show? Again and, you know, modification to make it, you know, even more popular?
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. I do think that, some of our kind of more current nuanced ideas, especially about race and gender, are, coming on to these established pop culture forms. We can talk about horror and, and, you know, the cop show or movie drama or genre, not drama. So I'm thinking here, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Yeah. Which, is a show that night quite have enjoyed.
Even though I sort of cast a skeptical iron on, on some police shows, but especially in its last couple of seasons, has really tried to grapple with some of the, current in this moment, conversations about, you know, police authority, the kind of racial dynamics involved in policing the United States. And that's been interesting because that's a sitcom like, it's funny.
But I think I would commend that show for kind of figuring out how to combine, you know, a kind of, current, empathy with what's going on in our nation right now with its established, established genre. I think probably so. Full disclosure, I'm not a huge horror fan, so I can't say that I'm particularly well read in horror films, but I would be hard pressed.
I mean, you can see this actually, shoot, I can't remember the names of what I'm thinking of right now, but I think that you are seeing to see some of these current ideas about, culture trickling into these established forms. Even in horror, I would be shocked if, if, if that wasn't happening.
Doug Exton: And then obviously this is more of just a you kind of your thoughts, but we had an audience member ask if you think we are or will be entering a, you know, so to speak, new cold war with China.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yep. I don't know. My opinion here is that we should be very careful to think that the past gives us a ton of insight into what is going to happen in the future. Again, we are in a massively changed moment than we were 30 or 40 years ago. And I think it's, it's too easy to say that it's going to, you know, us competition with China is going to, you know, follow along the same contours as what happened in the early and later Cold War.
One thing I will say is that I think in our moment right now, the United States is much differently positioned in a global community than it was in 1945. So the US emerged out of World War two. This really dominant economic and political power. It scraped. It consolidated quite a lot of international power, as a nation.
So, you know, in the 40s and 50s and 60s to, and so I think if we're going to toy with the question of whether we're entering a new Cold War, we have to consider that, like the US is not as clear cut. A global superpower as it once was. Yes, it is still a very dominant nation, but we're not coming out of a war where lots of countries suffered devastating population and monetary losses.
I think we're getting off to a very different start if we are entering a new Cold War with China.
Doug Exton: You know, it wouldn't look the same. No, I mean, you also don't have that same kind of.
Conflict over, you know, Berlin, for example, you know, tearing down the Berlin Wall. There's nothing set up like that currently. You know, with the US and China both being involved with one specific geographic entity.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. I think the closest thing we have to that is. Yeah, I think the closest thing we have to that right now is, the South China Sea and shipping channels and a couple of, like, really critical places in the US. But even still, it's it's it's not the same. The Iron Curtain is invisible if it exists at all.
Here.
Doug Exton: And then would you be willing to touch on, you know, kind of explaining why othering can be seen as a problem? You know, kind of, you know, like a 50,000ft, you know, unemotional kind of point of view.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. Well, so establishing group identity is not inherently bad, right? You know, this is our religious identity or this, you know, is our ethnic or racial identity or all sorts of other kind of ways of creating group identity isn't inherently harmful. The way we use othering, though, in, certainly in history, is to talk about how that establishment of group identity can cause real harm to the people not included in that group identity.
So I think if if we could yes, othering can exist without being harmful or negative, but I think I would call it something else just because this is sort of a technical word that we're using. And it's important to remember that, othering or establishing group identity and not group identity, is often done in the pursuit of, reaping benefits for the in-group.
Now those can be very tangible benefits, very important, benefits. But they can also just be sort of much more inconsequential things. And so yeah, I think as a, as a historical theoretical concept, othering is very, very useful. But when we use this idea out in kind of more a general sense, there are lots of different, more nuanced ways we can talk about what it means to establish identity and, and the opposite of whatever that identity is.
Doug Exton: No, I totally agree with that. And I think, you know, obviously, as we've talked about throughout this whole presentation, you know, context is really important to, you know, because for me, I think an example of othering would be like me and my close friend group versus people I'm not friends with. You know, and that's more of a harmless version of it.
However, you know, us as the US and then Russia as the other. Obviously, that has a lot more implications than, you know, your friend group and not friends.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Right. Especially if you consider all of the economic, political, military structures that were done in the service of that of othering. In your example that your friend group example in the service of the other thing having to do with the Soviet Union. Yeah. But you know, I'm thinking about high school clicks now. High school clicks can be, not very positive either.
Anyway. Yeah, but your point is a good one.
Doug Exton: And then, you know, we don't have any more questions. So I'm just going to ask you an off the wall one. What is your favorite trend that's been coming back from the 80s and 90s.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Not clothes. I mentioned hand-wringing about about 90s fashion. I think that some of those things are best left, left in the past. I think we're I see a lot of my students rediscovering really great music, I think. I'm biased, but I think 90s music was like a really complex and varied decade of music.
But like really great music came out of that, that moment. And so I think that as folks are rediscovering some of these very important bands, from the 90s, that's, that's fun to watch and, 100% nostalgic for me. Totally. You know. So I think that that's been a lot of fun, for me to watch happen especially like on social media and TikTok.
Oh, I know that song. Yeah. I don't know all the lyrics to that song. Somehow, decades later.
Doug Exton: Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that like 80s and 90s music is having such a big wave. You know, it's not just like a minor like, oh, this is like making a slight comeback. It's more this is here in force. And if it's not the exact song, it's like the essence of the song repurposed.
Dr. Sarah Robey: You know, it.
Doug Exton: Was the weekend for example. A lot of his music is very much 80s.
Dr. Sarah Robey: Yeah. Yeah. So we can, we can look at the sound like synthesizers and the sorts of a, it's used in, in early hip hop for instance. And, and then coming back. Yeah. There are things that just even without being samples or covers just sound like they're from that era. Yeah. Really interesting stuff. Well.