An amazing thing I am learning more and more about the 1980s, with every passing scandal — starting with Roy Moore, then passing to Brett Kavanaugh and now to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and state Attorney General Mark Herring — is that they were actually much longer ago than we have been led to believe. The thing we have to understand about them, indeed the primary thing, is that they were A Much Different Time. This is an enormous breakthrough, as far as the study of the 1980s goes.
You may, naively, think you were alive in the 1980s, may even in moments of weakness claim to remember things that happened during this decade, may even feel that, really, it was not that different from being alive today, but that cannot possibly be correct.