The New York Times is afraid that the 1980s are coming back.
In a recent column, “The 1980s are back, and not in a good way,” writer Elizabeth Spires lamented that President Donald Trump has brought back the era of greed, when “being rich and preppy looked cool.” As in the Reagan era, young people are “rejecting the progressive politics of their elders.” Even fashions taken on “a slightly modernized 80s look.”
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To which I say, awesome. The 1980s were not only fun — something that wokeness has tried to kill — but were also the first pushback against what historian James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism.” Punitive liberalism was hatched in the 1960s. It is the idea that America is a corrupt and sinful nation that needs to be punished.
Punitive liberalism fell out of favor in the 1980s, but crept back in the 1990s — and became a nasty contagion in the Obama years. Wokeness is nuclear-powered punitive liberalism. Everyone is racist, everyone is homophobic, capitalism is evil, shame, shame, shame.
Elizabeth Spires exemplifies this negativity. She once admired the 80s as a long girl in rural Alabama, but now knows better: “for much of the world, the shining city on a hill [President Reagan evoked] appeared more like the distant compound of a Bond villain. Nancy Reagan’s antidrug campaign seemed virtuous when my fifth-grade teacher made our class memorize all the street names for PCP in case we ever encountered it in rural Alabama. I later understood the war on drugs as a prosecutorial cover for persecuting and incarcerating Black people. My isolation in a small, culturally monolithic community rendered these things invisible to me as a child, when the Reagan years were all glitter, big hair and fun.”
Like most ideologies, Spires doesn’t comprehend that there is a reasonable medium between blind patriotism and hating your own country. That is to say, you can intelligently love your country. This attitude was common in the 1980s. Those of us Generation Xers who were young at the time understood that racism was still a problem, that gay people were still being treated unfairly, and that America had made mistakes. Vietnam was still in our living memory. The cooler people of the decade even scoffed at hyper-patriotic movies like Top Gun, which many of us found cheesy.
This didn’t mean we didn’t love America. It simply meant that we had an informed, intelligent opinion about it. We weren’t perfect, but America was a great place to live — and heaven compared to the hell of communist Russia.
One famous person who gets this is Justine Bateman. Bateman, a star from the 1980s and now an accomplished producer and director, has gained recent notoriety on social media by taking the common sense ethos of the 1980s. Bateman has been championing free speech, art, and America as exceptional — all while resisting endless jingoism. Bateman wants young people to do what we did in the 80s — think for themselves. She recently posted this on X: ”If you’re under 30, you’ve most likely been convinced that you need to politically ‘resist the other side.’ You’ve been cheated.” Bateman argued that voters should “insist” candidates “audition for your vote” and that voters “examine their actions objectively and decide if, in the big picture, this is benefiting America as a whole.”
The writer Paul Elie is also celebrating the 1980s. In his brilliant, absorbing new book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, Elie describes how so many young people viewed America in the 1980s. It was a time when both celebrity artists Andy Warhol and Pope John Paul II could be loved by the people — indeed, Elie’s book opens with the two men meeting. Zeroing in on the New York of the ’80s, Elie notes that “the city was characterized by its celebrity nightlife: discos, launch parties, black limousines, lines of cocaine on the counters of mirrored bathrooms. And it was defined by squalor and decay.”
Yet despite the drugs and the decay, people saw excitement, fun and opportunity: “And yet those of us who had come from somewhere else were struck by the stone-and-iron solidity of the city, not by the signs of decay. New York City in that moment was as ancient-seeming as Rome. It was an unreconstructed place, free of the shopping malls and space-age sports arenas that had transformed the mainland. It was still in touch with the dark forces of clan and tribe and territory, of sin and retribution, and the Old World feel of the city was what set it apart from continental America.”
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He goes on: “The city was powered by the shared belief that it was the center of everything and that being a New Yorker gave your life meaning and purpose. It was this belief that drew you there and held you there.”
This describes so much of life in the 1980s in America, not just in New York City. It’s thrilling to feel that kind of energy coming back.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.