Word: dallek
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Robert Dallek's Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism, shows this psychological mastery to be the principal Reagan strength. Reagan is portrayed in the "ideologue as politician," a package of symbolic responses that fit an American need to feel good. Unlike other more traditional books on Reagan--for instance, Lou Cannon's Reagan--Dallek's is a psychological portrait that seeks to explain Reagan's image of himself and the image he portrays to others...
...Dallek, a UCLA professor, begins by pausing briefly, but crucially, to examine Reagan's autobiography Where is the Rest of Me?, and a particular episode in which Reagan, a young schoolboy in Dixon, Illinois, remembers seeing his father drunk on the back door-step. The example is illustrative of his general approach; Dallek retrieves from this incident the basic Reagan ethic of self-reliance that Dallek asserts pervades Reagan's policies as president. Moving onward, Dallek tries to show a panoply of instances in which Reagan actions reflect deep-seated personal values. He wants to find the bases of Reagan...
...While Dallek incisively analyzes Reagan's symbolism, he does not, however, sufficiently show the connection between Reagan's values and what America thinks it needs. As other analysts have done less elegantly, Dallek depicts Reagan's symbolism as incredibly simplistic. But why has the sell worked? Here, Dallek is no more probing than the hundreds of other pundits who have asked the same question, and in the end he leaves us nothing but his liberal bitterness. "Reaganomics doesn't work," he proclaims like the rest of the pundits, wondrous at the country's "gullibility." But the point is that...
...Still, Dallek's psychoanalytic approach is not without merit. In describing the Reagan symbolism, Dallek has hit upon the political nerve that makes him in some ways the Jonathan Schell of anti-Reaganism. Dallek, like the antinuke writer, is trying to assess the psychological impact of a horrible danger--in this case, Reagan's policies. Moreover, like Schell, Dallek describes in encyclopedic detail the features of his awful portrait of the Reagan phenomenon--a survey which reveals journalists and pundits sometimes shocked, sometimes disbelieving, and sometimes simply sardonically amused. The value of the Dallek survey is that, like Schell...