Erk, big question! The Reagan/US experience was different in the details, but broadly followed the same road and rationale. I'll cover the UK case as I live here. It's a huge topic, so I've probably summarised this poorly...
Thatcherism ushered in a widespread, total belief in materialistic individualism. Until the recession, anyway.
Not just the cliched Harry Enfield loadsamoney, or for US readers Gordon Gekko "greed is good" in Wall Street, and the rise of the yuppie, but the abolition of the majority of the post-war consensus. Thatcher herself seemed to have a genuine, but strange, belief that this would turn us all out like the little old lady mentioned in the GP. We'd have massive amounts of civic and social pride, whilst inhabiting a society where everything has been shaped around the individual alone, with competition for everything. Others in government were far more straightforward about the intended result.
Anything collective was bad. The welfare state, public housing, public ownership, public amenities were bad, as a matter of dogma. Even when they were good. That included tiny things like the council employing park keepers and gardeners, or big like providing enough public housing. You could buy your public housing, but the local council was not allowed to build a replacement or spend the proceeds on buying a replacement. Post-war, through the seventies, both political parties agreed, and even competed, to provide adequate public housing, public facilities, adequate regulation, an adequate safety net etc.
There was plenty wrong with the UK in the 70s, and some of the Thatcher changes were necessary. Just some. Unions were certainly overly powerful. Others, from the long term perspective have been remarkably damaging. It didn't have to be so brutal. It didn't have to go from safety net to now where we have a punitive, vindictive welfare system intended to punish and stigmatise. After 40 years of neoliberal policies to end state control and direction, local government is more centrally funded and controlled than it's ever been.
We ended up with individual insurance and pension schemes. Invest in the wrong scheme? Tough shit. The employer was divested of any responsibility to provide for their workers with a collective scheme. Not just pensions, but connections to the community, fair wages, wage differentials, job security. Billions in proceeds from oil or privatisations? Piss them away in tax cuts. Norway built a national investment scheme that's worth hundreds of thousands for each citizen. Collectivism is always bad.
As so often is the case, the right answer was somewhere between the two extremes.
Maybe the erosion of the safety net and the great disconnect between productivity increases and increases in wages?
People who were not independently wealthy are not able to afford to do anything with their time that doesn't earn them money. People are less able to take risks, more apt to settle for less so long as less is stable and safer.
There is also a chilling effect on communities as everyone scrambles to "get theirs" when these support systems have their legs kicked out from under them.
It was an explicit policy goal of both Reagan and Thatcher to destroy the power of organised labour, and along the way all sorts of small community activities got swept away. Working mens' clubs, bands, and so on. Providing beautiful flower views for the neighbourhood with no commercial motive is "socialism", or something like that.
Of course, it was never directly stated like that, and conservatives continue to occasionally extol voluntarism. But they don't practice it or celebrate its values among themselves. The people celebrated in the post-80s society are those who can take the most, not those who give the most.
There's also possibly a gendered component to this; the hidden army of little old ladies and stay-at-home mums who overwhelmingly organise "community" activities. The 80s made it a lot harder to be a non working parent, so the mums went out to work and the children were left with the grandmothers.
Let's not forget the famous, defining, Thatcher speech:
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation"..."There is no such thing as society." -- https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Given the chaos of the 70s, this argument had a strong point. However, the effect of saying the government no longer had an obligation to house people had the obvious effect:
"“Will the Prime Minister accept,” he demanded, “That, 10 years ago, in 1979, there were 2,750 households in temporary accommodation in London; that the current figure is over 25,000 and that a further 2,000 people are sleeping on the streets?" -- Jeremy Corbyn MP, May 8 1990.
Good feedback - we were actually thinking of adding tags for it which can be filtered. once we increase the assortments of the UI Kits - we will be sure to add this feature.
