Please indulge me or ignore me while I work through some old aesthetic and political traumas on this sweltering hot Sunday afternoon by drinking a gin and tonic and writing a little thread regarding right-wing men's fashion in my childhood days.

1. The insufferable Alex P. Keaton. Back then, brats like him still seemed harmless enough to be laughed at. Just a bit of collar and cuff showing under the dark v-neck. Don’t look at Nixon--look at the perfectly groomed hands grasping him so delicately.

2. George H.W. Bush, boating. The windbreaker is slick, but the striped trousers clinch the look. In summer, this species of rich guy is known to migrate as far as Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, seeking climates cool enough for ‘layering.’ Hobbies include golf, union-busting.

3. Gekko, obviously. You think of 1980s Republicans favoring Brooks Brothers, but some of them liked the sleazy glamor of a double-breasted Italian suit. A douchebag icon, proving that a film’s moralizing matters less than its power to glamorize the bad guy. Big suspender energy.

4. Antonin Scalia boldly mixes several phallic symbols here: a pen, a pipe, a necktie broad as the Mediterranean. Self-styled edgy white liberals liked to say they disagreed with Scalia's opinions but respected his intellect. What’s he smiling about, the death penalty?

5. Speaking of phallic stuff, here’s Dan Quayle’s “Standing Firm.” 10,000 hours of underpaid labor to produce the fabric for his enormous purple sweater. Really unwinding here without a tie. Is he at the polo grounds? This photo should include a land acknowledgment.

6. Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince. There is a lot of pastel here. It could hurt your eyes. Alfonso Ribeiro did the world a favor by turning his “performativity” on the prep look, letting the sadness of the uptight wealthy show through at the seams.

7. Tammy Faye always steals the show, but don’t sleep on Jim Bakker’s stripey blue on blue. Look, young people, I know that "grunge" was an embarrassment to my generation. But if you want to understand why we had to do it, well, this kind of stuff is the reason why.