PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! For the Week of 7/28/2025 ( 80s Politics, The Reagan Era and Thatcher's Britain)

The Reagan era — a time when the American Dream got a perm, Wall Street got high on its own supply, and compassion was drowned in a jacuzzi at Studio 54.

 This was the decade when *greed* wasn’t just good — it was federally endorsed. When your country told you that if you weren’t rich, healthy, or white with a good TV smile, you probably deserved whatever hell you were living through. AIDS? Ignore it. Crack epidemic? Criminalize it. Union workers? Fire ‘em. Trees? Cut ‘em. Poor people? Trickle something on them and call it economics. 

Ronald Reagan sold optimism the way televangelists sell salvation: loud, rehearsed, and with a suspicious bank account offshore. “It’s morning in America,” he beamed, like some kind of demented cheerleader for a dying empire — while actual Americans were waking up to layoffs, homelessness, and lethal indifference.

 Don’t have healthcare? Bootstraps. Can’t afford college? Bootstraps. Your rent is half your income? Pull harder, baby.

 Meanwhile, Nancy was telling us to “Just Say No” — as if the drug war wasn’t already being waged directly *on* Black communities, while white stockbrokers freebased next to fountains made of cocaine and Perrier. 

Ah yes, Reaganomics. The original MLM scam. Give billionaires more money and trust they’ll spend it on us somehow — like benevolent feudal lords in pastel blazers. Spoiler: they didn’t. 

Instead, they bought yachts, deregulated everything but their egos, and called it *freedom*. Wealth didn’t trickle down — it evaporated upward. But go ahead, keep voting against your own interests. Daddy Reagan said it was patriotic.
 

Let’s not forget: this was an actor. A literal B-list cowboy who confused movie plots with foreign policy. He thought *trees caused pollution*. He joked about bombing Russia into oblivion. He called ketchup a vegetable in school lunches. But hey, he looked good on camera and made white America *feel* safe — which is the only metric that’s ever really mattered.
The 80s weren’t just cruel — they were *confusing*. You were supposed to love your country while watching it gut public services. Celebrate capitalism while the savings & loan crisis looted your future. Support “family values” while divorcing your soul from any sense of shared responsibility.

 It was all very chic in a psychopathic sort of way.

 Reagan didn’t govern. He *performed*. He was the prototype for every blandly affable, morally vacant man who came after: Bush, the orange menace, your boss, that guy who runs HR with Ayn Rand quotes in his email footer. 

 He taught America to smile while bleeding.
 


Hunter S. Thompson once said Reagan was “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”


Fran Lebowitz called the ‘80s “a decade where people moved to New York to make money instead of art.”


And when asked if Reagan ended the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly replied, “He did nothing of the sort — he read cue cards.”



So next time someone waxes nostalgic for the 'good old days,' offer them a commemorative boot in the face. They can pull themselves up with it. 

Lunocracy UK: Thatcher’s Britain — Iron Fist, Hollow Core

If Reagan was America’s affable televangelist, Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s iron nun — striding into post-war despair with a handbag full of austerity, contempt, and unrelenting certitude.

 She didn’t just privatize public utilities — she privatized hope. Thatcher took a coal-smudged, union-bolstered nation and turned it into a hostile takeover with better grammar. 

And why would she ever course correct? Turning implies flexibility. Humility. Qualities Margaret viewed with the same disdain she reserved for miners, single mothers, and anyone making less than six figures.

 She spoke with the icy precision of a CEO addressing ants — and governed the same way. She crushed the unions like stale biscuits and scolded the nation into an economic experiment no one voted for but everyone paid for.

 Working-class? Should’ve bought shares. Unemployed? Should’ve tried harder. Hungry? Try patriotism for breakfast. 

Thatcherism wasn’t just economics — it was a cultural reckoning. Public housing? Sold off. Public pride? Monetized. Communal values? Replace with shareholder meetings.

 The trains got worse, the phones got privatised, and entire towns were turned into relics of a pre-Thatcher civilization — complete with food banks and damp.

 And somehow, this all got marketed as ‘modernization’. A boot stamping on a miner’s face… stylishly. 

Morality under Thatcher was weaponized. Gay people? Legislated into silence (see: Section 28). Poor people? Blamed for their own plight. Immigrants? Barely tolerated if they boosted GDP.

 She claimed there was ‘no such thing as society’ — just individuals and families. Which is like running a hospital and denying germs exist. 

British punk didn’t just happen — it *erupted* from Thatcher’s Britain. Billy Bragg, The Specials, even the Pet Shop Boys were coded acts of rebellion. She was the perfect muse for rage and eyeliner.

 And yet, she was beloved by those she harmed the most — the aspirational poor, desperate to stop being poor even if it meant becoming monsters. That’s the legacy: divide, conquer, and sell the pieces back at 13% APR.

Margaret Thatcher didn’t die. She simply deregulated herself into the shadow realm, leaving behind a broken NHS, a devastated North, and a political blueprint still photocopied by mediocre men in pinstripes.

 She made cruelty look competent — and that’s the most British horror of all.

 As George Monbiot once put it: “She taught us to think like accountants and live like strangers.”

 So if someone tells you Thatcher saved Britain, check their wallet — and then their soul.

"I only wish I could have been at her funeral — to make sure it was real." A miner’s daughter interviewed by The Guardian.

 "If this country had a memory, we’d bury her legacy with her body."Anonymous street graffiti in Brixton.

"It's not so much about her death, it's about the death she caused." Billy Bragg, musician and working-class bard.

"She didn’t believe in society because she didn’t like people. She believed in markets because they never cried or complained." Owen Jones, columnist, historian, and destroyer of centrist delusions.

 

 

 

Reagan and Thatcher were the prom king and queen of neoliberal decay — he with the Hollywood smile and weaponized optimism, she with the moral rectitude of a vengeful headmistress. Together, they glamorized cruelty, deregulated decency, and convinced two nations that compassion was weakness and wealth was virtue. He sold missiles wrapped in movie scripts; she auctioned off society like it was a jumble sale. And while they danced through the ‘80s on the graves of unions and public services, their ideology metastasized — not dying, but franchising. Now, in 2025, their spiritual heirs sit in boardrooms and parliaments, peddling privatized futures, AI overlords, and austerity 2.0 while the planet chokes and billionaires build escape pods. Reagan promised “morning in America.” Thatcher said “there’s no such thing as society.” Turns out, they were both right: it's morning, and there’s nothing left but debt, branding, and dust.