A blogger at TPMCafe points me to yet another attempt at Ronald Reagan hagiography, this time the creation of Ronald Reagan Boulevard in DC. If these folks had their way half our public spaces, streets and monuments would be named after the Gipper. At what point this crosses outright over into totalitarian-style forced memorialization, I don’t know. Since I’m not one to bandy about the terms totalitarian or fascist lightly, the charge is levied advisedly: the totalitarian cult of personality works on the theory that if you put up enough pictures and name enough streets, the veneration will follow. It’s the opposite of the populist cult of personality (problematic in its own right), wherein the kind of virtual collectivity in a mass public sphere collapses into adoration of a charismatic person. Oddly enough, at the time, Reagan did represent the populist model of charisma. Today, however, the Reagan Legacy movement is not about communitarian commemoration of a collective past, but rather seizing levers of public power to win battles in a very present ideological struggle.
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