He starts poor, acquires wealth, and then loses it. Rocky’s financial trajectory follows the pattern sadly all too common for professional boxers. ![]() Britain’s prime minister in the 1970s referred to the “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.” If the “go-go” decade of the 1980s, and the neoliberal paradigm which followed it, represent one tradition in conservative thought, it is not, as it might appear, the only one. In America, it might have been the Democrat Roosevelt who introduced a top tax rate of 94 percent as an emergency wartime measure, but the Republican Dwight Eisenhower did not cut it during the recovery of the 1950s. Conservative thinking was more paternalistic and sceptical of free trade. In the United Kingdom, the economic policies associated with Margaret Thatcher would, in the 19th century, have marked her out as a Liberal. ![]() They are profoundly concerned with … prospering in the world”-there was another tradition more sceptical of the pursuit of wealth and free markets. While this had been a strain of conservative thinking-the Republican Calvin Coolidge had remarked in the 1920s, “the chief business of the American people is business. If there is a single fictional character who is seen to represent the ideology of the ’80s, it is Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, who famously declared “Greed is good.” Even China’s communist leader Deng Xiaoping is said to have remarked, “To get rich is glorious.” Free-market, “winner takes all” capitalism was the spirit of the age, and governments across the West saw their duty as getting out of the way to allow their citizens to make money. In a globalised world, he is resolutely local. In an age which fetishises technology, he is unashamedly old school. His reaction to the Boxing Commission’s proposed refusal of his licence would gladden the heart of any small-stater.Īnd yet, in a time which prizes wealth and fame, he shows the downsides to both. His overt religiosity-he prays before every fight-would, in an American context, suggest he is a Republican. That Rocky Balboa made National Review’s list of the 50 best conservative movies demonstrates that the Right is happy to adopt the character as one of its own, as should the frequency with which his speech to his son in the film is cited by that side of the political divide. ![]() From his first appearance as a washed-up club fighter via his reincarnation as a retired champ back for one last fight to the mentor role in Creed, Rocky has displayed a consistent philosophy, but one which often harks back to an earlier form of right-wing thinking. But a fully paid-up follower of the Reagan/Thatcher orthodoxy? Not really. Although he made his debut in 1976, Rocky’s heroics in Rocky IV established him in the pantheon of Reaganite America, emblematic, like Top Gun’s Maverick, of a confident, can-do nation all too ready and able to kick Commie butt to show the superiority of Uncle Sam and his political model.īut while Tom Cruise’s brash fighter jock was a good match for the cocky confidence of 1980s America, Sylvester Stallone’s boxer, like his misfit veteran Rambo, was always a more nuanced representation of the zeitgeist. If, at the height of the Cold War, you fly to Moscow and beat two metres of ice-blond Soviet beefcake to a pulp while wearing stars-and-stripes shorts, it is hard to avoid becoming an American hero.
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