MARK JUDGE: Justine Bateman and the return of the 1980s.

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 Spiers 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 fashion’s taken on “a slightly modernized 80s look.”

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 Spiers exemplifies this negativity. She once admired the 80s as a young 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.

Read the whole thing.