of partisanship and the ostentatiously partisan occasion of his speech, televised in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. That disavowal itself also depends on Reagan’s image of the Democratic Party as drifting toward a Stalinist authoritarian version of socialism. The bad faith of his trope is undeniable, especially when one recognizes that Reagan ostensibly refuses partisanship only to immediately define his own party as agents of “man’s age-old dream” of freedom, and dehumanize the other party as a mindless colony of insects bent on dystopian oppression. We will see homologous rhetorical gestures repeated throughout this book, as various characters deny or conflate the differences of left and right, claiming for themselves universality and agency, while objectifying others as mere negations of universal value, truth and right.
Reagan’s frame and premises—defining the struggle between left and right in the United States in terms of individualism, freedom or liberty, the same terms used to define the reasons for US opposition to the USSR—have essentially been accepted as the default explanation for the national turn away from the progressivism of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Within this frame, US democracy is defined as consistent or even coterminous with private property, both subsumed by the signifier “liberty,” and this is placed in opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the signifier under which the socialism of the USSR is identified with any system of communal ownership or wealth redistribution. Never mind that none of these identifications are rigorously defensible, let alone self-evident, as they ignore contradictions internal to each society. In both the US and the USSR, a professed adherence to principles of equal distribution of power is belied by traditions of terrorist governance that have maintained disproportionate power for elites. While the United States touted its principles of political equality, its unequal distribution of wealth and privilege guaranteed inequities in political and legal representation and enforcement. And while the USSR boasted of its principles of economic equality, its inequitable distribution of political and legal enforcement and representation guaranteed inequalities of wealth and privilege. In both cases, mutually reinforcing inequalities and inequities ensured that, for most citizens, their nations were neither a pure heaven of freedom and opportunity, nor a pure hell of oppression.
Reagan calls analytic attention to one such contradiction internal to US democracy in this period by means of the caveat he places on freedom, specifying that it should be “consistent with law and order.” In a speech given in support of Barry Goldwater, famously an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, this caveat carries significant semantic weight—just as it would for Richard Nixon in elections to come. The record of the Nixon and Reagan administrations demonstrates that freedom “consistent with law and order” meant freedom inconsistently distributed and defended along lines of race, sex, class and religion. His record marks Reagan as a counterrevolutionary figure in the trajectory of US democracy, in which the rejection of aristocratic rule has progressed incompletely and unevenly toward broader inclusion. And yet his inconsistent support for individual freedoms places him in the mainstream of US history, as the rhetoric of liberty has always been partly inconsistent with structural inequities in production, law and policy.
This inequitable recognition of citizens’ equal right to liberty is the condition for a function of Reagan’s rhetoric of depoliticization that is not so much persuasive as it is permissive, and which remained durably effective even in his post-presidency and after his death. This permissive gesture is also occasioned by the unpopularity of Goldwater, whose extreme views would win over only the five states of the Deep South and his home state of Arizona, earning him the smallest share of the popular vote ever received by a major-party candidate for US President. By positioning himself as voice of the unassailable center and standard, and by presenting his views as an expression of universal values, not partisan agendas, Reagan invites supporters of the far-right candidate he endorses to shelter under the strength and confidence of his rhetorical persona. It is a protective and permissive rhetorical posture, a claim to universality that guards against the disapproval of others, in which his audience is invited to share. That rhetorical posture would persist throughout his presidency, helping to normalize the polarizing policies that would constitute his administration’s putative ascension toward freedom—which included support for dictators,4 paramilitary death squads5 and apartheid regimes at home and abroad,6 as well as agitation against women’s reproductive rights,7 and the neglect of tens of thousands of queer citizens dying of an unchecked epidemic.8
In one sense, this relational pattern of assimilation or destruction of every difference, this aggressivity toward outgroups, is a function of what Slavoj Žižek calls “the totalitarian Master,” whose calls for discipline and renunciation provide cover for an invitation to transgress “ordinary moral prohibitions.”9 One follows such a figure so that one may unleash one’s own aggression on those who are designated as enemies, outsiders or subalterns, surrendering the rights and responsibilities of self-determination to the Master in exchange for permission to violate the rights of those “beneath” or outside the hierarchical order. While Žižek opposes this totalitarian Master to Theodor Adorno’s “authoritarian personality,” these explanations are not precisely at odds, as both define the consistency of an excessive deference toward those above one in a social hierarchy with demeaning violence toward those below.10 This relational structure behaves in accord with Jacques Lacan’s definition of madness, which is not exemplified best by a commoner who believes himself to be a reigning king, but by a reigning king who believes himself to truly be a king. In other words, the belief that one’s position truly expresses a substantial distinction is a signal error of madness. This faith in necessary referentiality is also a signal condition of unexamined privilege.
While Adorno’s model interprets this relational structure of deference and aggressivity in terms of a “personality type,” Žižek treats it as a social fantasy, a shared structure of enjoyment into which one is initiated by the rhetoric of a central figure, around which a group organizes the rules and values of its relations. This helps to explain why followers of authoritarian figures or personality cults sometimes seem indifferent to the harms they suffer as a result of their leader’s policies or actions. Harms caused by Reagan’s neoliberal policies were not confined to minority communities, but also hit the white working-class communities who were a key part of Reagan’s successful electoral strategies. Those communities were deeply impacted by union busting, shifts in the tax burden toward those with less wealth and income, weakening regulatory protections, and encouragement of domestic deindustrialization and offshoring. These policies contributed to a period of wage stagnation that began in 1980 and still continues, even as wealth and productivity has increased exponentially.11 But if Žižek’s Master offers a compensatory exchange of social benefits for psychic benefits, this is not proffered or accepted as a conscious bargain. The mechanisms by which such contracts are foreclosed from attention, disavowed or denied—not to mention the generically fascist character of this arrangement—have only become topics of greater interest during the Trump administration. These mechanisms are important to the study of interpretation, and especially to theoretical reflection on the social construction or production of meaning.
Such foreclosures and disavowals are part of the social technics of knowledge production, information distribution and meaning making. If the negative consequences of Reagan’s policies and priorities cited above are not what first come to mind when one encounters his name, this is explained in part by the partisan politicization of education, media and interpretation. Already in 1982 Mitchell was defining the New Right in terms of this partisan attack: “The emergence of Reaganism has brought the pressure of economic and political reality directly to bear on the practice of criticism and scholarship. The intellectual and academic community, that part of society which lives by and on interpretation, finds itself threatened with loss of power, jobs, and prestige.”12 In literary studies, these losses persisted in every decade since Mitchell’s caution, despite repeated promises of a boom just around the corner. There is no way to predict whether this trend will dramatically alter its trajectory, or simply continue until graduate education in literary study collapses entirely. But it is clear that the efforts Mitchell describes to undermine the prestige and security of workers in the academic humanities comports with other efforts
