The political conservatism of John Hughes. By Michael Weiss - Slate Magazine
Some snippets:

Hughes was also the first Balzac of homeroom, arguing that what stratified public education as much as looks, popularity, or natural herd instincts was net worth. Even those dismayed by the cheap sentimentality and wafer-thin plotlines of his films could at least appreciate seeing class presented as not something you skipped but were defined by. Hughes, though, was never quite the antagonist of the status quo he made himself out to be. He was actually a political conservative, and his portrayals of down-and-out youth rebellion had more to do with celebrating the moral victory of the underdog than with championing the underprivileged. In Hughes' hormonal vale of tears, snobs and elitists were the ones who ruined wealth for everybody else.

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If false consciousness runs at equal pace with cant in these twin fairy tales, it may be because the man Roger Ebert once called the "philosopher of puberty" was mugging for a counterculture in which he never fully believed. Apart from the music—the Beatles, Dylan—Hughes' own coming-of-age was characterized not by the egalitarian zeitgeist of the '60s but by a funk of jealousy for what the Jonses had and the Hugheses did not. (The first Chevy Chase Vacation movie was based on a Hughes short story rooted in the boyhood trauma of never being taken to Disneyland.)

Hughes grew up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and also in a small town just outside Chicago, the model for his fictive "Shermer, Ill.," where a lot of his teen flicks took place. As he tells Kevin Bacon on the Some Kind of Wonderful disc, it was the sense of entitlement of the neighborhood trust-funders that got him down: "I knew kids that in the third grade would say, 'When I'm 18, I'm getting $22 million dollars.' " We should be grateful that talk like this didn't turn him into the Michael Moore of the Stridex set. Rather, it was Ferris Bueller—a character Hughes claimed to strongly identify with—who mouths his creator's worldview early in the famous day off:

-Ism's, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus but it still wouldn't change the fact that I don't own a car.

P.J. O'Rourke could have said it better himself, and did in fact when he co-edited the National Lampoon with Hughes in the mid-'70s. They were the two Midwestern conservatives, or "Pants-Down Republicans," on a masthead otherwise mostly comprised of vestigial Harvard hippies slouching their way out of the Me Decade. In O'Rourke's book, Republican Party Reptile, this GOP schismatic was eventually updated and defined for the '80s as a "disco Hobbes" into sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as much as guns, SDI, and the flat tax: Ted Nugent fused with Tom Wolfe, in other words. Enemies on the right included the stuffed shirts and old-money bores—parents of the Steffs and Hardys of the world—while the new and improved Reaganite gentry was seen as something to aspire to. (Some people have to work for that $22 million.)

It's worth noting that both O'Rourke and Hughes at one point penned jokes or dialogue for Rodney Dangerfield, whose high-society-skewering, upwardly mobile alter egos—think Caddyshack, Back to School, and Easy Money, which O'Rourke co-scripted—were the perfect embodiments of the Republican Party Reptile ethos. It's true that Hughes remained mute on his partisanship just as he was being hailed as the reigning auteur of angst, but a 1988 Premiere profile brushed up against his convictions by calling him the "sort of guy Norman Rockwell might have been if he'd lived in Hollywood." This was an apt comparison, and not just because that same profile tells us that Molly Ringwald owes her career to Girl at Mirror. It should have come as no surprise, then, that a faint smirk of family-values-friendly subversion stamped itself on all of late Hughes, which is to say his even more establishment period as a filmmaker. From The Great Outdoors (in-laws sure are difficult) to Home Alone (towheaded McMansion latchkey kid foils robbery, saves Christmas) to Dennis the Menace (overall-wearing scamp of the manicured lawns sling-shoots his way straight into your heart)—these were comedies for the Dan Quayle in all of us.

Gen X nostalgia is as interesting for what it remembers as for what it chooses to ignore. Every so often, you'll turn on TBS and be forced to take inventory of the popular culture of your youth. Trading Places delivered its comeuppance with a switcheroo act of commodities fraud;* the true nemesis of Ghost Busters wasn't Gozer but the EPA; Stripes is all about making a kind of screwball peace with the military-industrial complex … Sure enough, there's Harold Ramis—another Lampoon alum, who directed Hughes' screenplay for Vacation—reflecting on the Chicago Seven hearings in a recent interview with the Believer: "They ran up and down the street, smashing car windows and stuff. My first reaction was, 'Yeah, right on!' But then I thought, 'Wait, I'm parked out there.' " The polite term for this gentle rightward shift when it happens to artists and intellectuals is embourgeoisement. What a shame the philosopher of puberty never warned kids about that.