Reagan and Public Discourse in America

Reagan and Public Discourse assesses the rhetorical legacy of the Reagan presidency. The essays in this collection focus on a variety of domestic and foreign policy controversies and identify a broad range of persuasive strategies and devices to reveal how Ronald Reagan both appropriated and transformed American public discourse in the 1980s. They analyse Reagan's impact not only on the policy issues of the 1980s but also in the process of public political discourse itself. Ronald Reagan was hailed by his supporters as the ""great communicator"" and dubbed by frustrated opponents as being the ""Teflon"" president; but both sides have recognised the importance of his rhetorical strategies as being the key to the success of his administration. This volume is concerned with an assessment of Reagan's policy, performance, and leadership, and explores the impact of Reagan's administration on the quality of public political discourse. It argues that without an understanding of Reagan's discursive strategies, one cannot fully appreciate how his administration seized and held political power in the United States for the decades of the 1980s. The contributors uncover ways in which Ronald Reagan helped to change how we talk about public issues, and, just as importantly, what kinds of issues we talk about. They find Reagan a constricting and distorting influence; his rhetoric tended to remove some issues from public debate and to limit the discussion of others chiefly to rituals, gestures, and evasions. The authors assert that from nuclear strategy to social welfare programmes, from budget policy to military intervention, Reagan's rhetoric impoverished and perverted political discourse in the public sphere.