Post-punk treated Reagan’s rise as Ballard’s fiction coming true

Evidence

It’s hard to remember now, but in the period after Vietnam and before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, America was a paranoid and enfeebled nation, Nixon-sickened and introspective, scared of its own shadows. Post-punk was there to witness — and mock — the seeming absurdity of the idiot actor Reagan being wheeled on to give America’s confidence a shot-in-the-arm, although initially even Reagan’s rise to power seemed to be a kind of sinister post-punk prank, since it made eerily real what had been predicted by one of perhaps post-punk’s most important influence, Ballard. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of culture predicting and mocking political reality — like fake news/political satire literature, and the Reagan-as-Ballard framing echoes how fiction licenses real politics. — connects to: Pop culture captured Reaganomics corroding intimacy before protest music did — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1387; Postmodernism theory was born in the euphoria of the Reagan bull market — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 237

Broader Connections

• Pop culture captured Reaganomics corroding intimacy before protest music did #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1387
• Postmodernism theory was born in the euphoria of the Reagan bull market #expands (0.72) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 237