Nicolaus Mills opens his critical retrospective of the cultural and political landscape in the 1980s by recalling Nancy Reagan's decision to order a 220-place setting of raised gold paste Lenox presidential china to the tune of $200,000. At another point in history, the First Lady's decision might have caused a large enough political controversy to effect serious, even fatal, political damage. But this was 1981. The US was trying to forget the humiliating 1970s, a decade that had seen presidential resignation, a long-fought and costly war and an economic malaise bought on by the inability of federal economists to overcome the structural flaws of a worn-down Keynesian capitalism. Reagan's campaign, indeed, his two terms in presidential office, were founded on the reverse projection, if not the actual achievement, of cultural triumph, success, power and status. As Mills quite rightly points out, nothing was more important to 1980s culture than its symbols.

What has become clear nearly forty years on, is that much of this culture of triumph was driven and fuelled by an ideological free market libertarianism that promoted vast capital accumulation, the prioritisation of private enterprise and the financialisation of all sectors of society, while simultaneously reducing state intervention and passing unprecedented corporate and personal tax cuts. Charles Murray's Losing Ground gave ideological efficacy to the idea that welfare and social security were morally corrupting crutches for the working classes, and the Laffer curve provided the necessary economic proof that an overhaul of the tax system would boost economic efficiency. Addressing the cultural hot-button topic of children's entertainment, and reflecting dominant deregulatory ideology, Mark Fowler, the Federal Commissioner, was reported to have said that it was down to the ‘magic of the marketplace’ to look after the nation's children. The language of finance – buyout, leverage, acquisition, takeover – became the language of success. Ethics, particularly in the world of business, became irrelevant. Only pessimistic left-wing political activists – a term highly charged with the anti-patriotic undertones of communism – would oppose such a promising cultural enterprise. While history is never an exact science, it is fair to say that in this instance, the 1980s were predictably cyclical. Almost a century earlier, similar legislation had been enacted that ended restrictions on income and inheritance tax to prelude the gilded age.