“When being happy was cool.”

It’s a simple five-word comment that I recently came across on YouTube about a video of young people club dancing in the 1980s.

The dancers do, indeed, look happy, with colorful clothes, fun haircuts, and self-confident smiles.

There is a lot of cultural and spiritual meaning in those words. There was a time in America when it was cool to be happy. Conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, and Ronald Reagan insisted on being “happy warriors,” while the Left complained about how miserable everything was living in the awful United States. One of the most popular songs of the 1980s was “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

What is needed is a new, invigorating use of our happiness muscles. It’s not hard to do. We live in the greatest and freest country in the world. We still produce good movies, great novelists and artists, and incredible musicians. (Seriously, visit a jazz club.) 

That doesn’t mean we have to ignore any bad news about the economy or illnesses or wars. We just do what we did in the 1980s — realize there is only so much you can do to save the world, and after taking in a small amount of news, make it a habit of escaping into long hours of happiness. And most importantly, ignore leftists demanding that you be unhappy. 

Culture is more important than politics, and when a culture tells you it’s cool to be happy — to love your country and the people, places, and institutions in it — it has a much greater effect than any political party or speech.

Since the end of Soviet communism around 1990, the Left has unexpectedly won the younger generations to unhappiness. But this trend began decades earlier. 

Happiness in America fell out of fashion when punitive liberalism, the philosophy of the Left, took over the national psyche in the 1960s. The phrase “punitive liberalism” was coined by James Piereson in his groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. The book argues that in the 20th century up until the 1960s, liberalism was largely a doctrine of maintaining government programs and slowly expanding freedom and equal justice for all people. Up until the 1960s, liberalism was not radical. It was competent, patriotic, often anti-communist, and did good things. 

But when Kennedy was killed, as Piereson argues, liberalism changed. Unable to accept that Kennedy was a martyr to the Cold War, that he had been murdered by communists, liberals rushed to blame Kennedy’s death on America itself. Liberalism as a patriotic and happy philosophy began to crumble, replaced by the New Left. The New Left was violent, anti-religious, paranoid, and utopian. Piereson argues that the old liberalism was thus replaced by punitive liberalism. This new ideology taught that America was to blame not only for Kennedy’s death but for everything wrong in the world. It became cool to hate America, which deserved to be punished. 

One of the reasons people are so nostalgic about the 1980s is that it was the last great pushback against punitive liberalism. We were happy despite the fact that liberals kept telling us the world was a terrible place. Under Reagan, the economy was booming, our sports and popular culture were fun and patriotic, people were dating and falling in love, and young people enjoyed themselves in dance clubs, such as the one in the video I saw. Without a digital blanket to hide under, we took a lot more risks. The payoff in happiness was huge.

Nobody knew it at the time, but the good times were about to end in the 1990s — and beyond. Punitive liberalism, which had hibernated in the universities, reentered the bloodstream of the nation. President Barack Obama saw the country as something that needed to be “fundamentally changed.” “Wokeness” broke out of its lab and contaminated the country. 

In a 2022 article about the death of social life at Stanford University, Ginevra Davis described the purge of happiness: “Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”

One of the things many of the commenters on the 1980s dance club video noticed was the variety of styles. Punk, preppy, New Wave, elegant, and chaotic — everybody had their own style. It seemed like the fun would never end.  

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Now, we live in a colorless, secular monoculture. G.K. Chesterton once argued that modern men have not grown tired of evil but of what is good: ”They become weary of joy. They stopped worshipping God and start worshipping idols, their own bad imitations of God, and they become as wooden as the thing they worship. They start worshipping nature and become unnatural. They start worshipping sex and become perverted. Men start lusting after men and become unmanly.”

As most of us who were on the dance floors as teenagers in the 1980s can attest to, it’s impossible to get tired of joy. Don’t let the media and the Left tell you otherwise. 

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.