Red Dawn Rising: As Political Map Goes Blue, the Right Wing’s Favorite Flick Makes a Comeback
In the summer of 1984, with “Morning in America” well underway and a national election heating up, our Cold War skittishness was quickly giving way to militant triumphalism. The year before, the U.S. had invaded Grenada. Over the summer, a team of America’s best and brightest athletes rebounded from our boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games with a big, showy display of American exceptionalism held in Los Angeles, the city America goes to for lies about itself. And the weekend of the closing ceremony, a movie called Red Dawn opened in theaters, sparking the interest of a nation of impressionable kids raised in fear of what lay on the other side of an ever-shrinking world. Read More
