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Scholars increasingly recognize the centrality of legal ideas and language to the political vision that inspires American conservatism. However, relevant studies have been limited to the discursive practices that motivate conservative activism at the grass-root level. Exploration of the legal discourses employed by prominent public officials thus carries significant scholarly potential. For example, this chapter's investigation of President Ronald Reagan reveals that his political vision was suffused with legal discourse. Reagan's legal discourse, moreover, has exerted constitutive effects both on American conservatism and on the form and substance of a great deal of contemporary American public policy.

Purpose – This study demonstrates that serious episodes of presidential ill health can have positive impacts on role performance.

Design/methodology – The author utilizes both primary source materials (personal interviews with White House physicians and several other physicians who treated Reagan at the hospital, and the writings of key Reagan aides and family members) and secondary source materials (writings of political scientists, historians, and journalists).

Findings – Reagan was at first in critical condition. It was then that his Secretary of State appeared to make a bold grab for power, an act that contributed materially to the end of his political career. Additionally, the administration’s failure to invoke the presidential disability amendment allowed the official chain of command to be in doubt. Finally, the significant increase in Reagan’s popularity that flowed from his light-hearted demeanor after he was shot is examined here in terms of the President’s subsequent legislative successes.

Originality/value – This study suggests strongly that Reagan’s impressive legislative achievements in mid-1981 were due significantly to his heroic response to having been shot.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

Neoliberal political leaders such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) and President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) heralded entrepreneurs as capitalist heroes, yet for the most part, the policies they enacted did not help real entrepreneurs. Their image of a self-made entrepreneur who thrives in the absence of government action was fundamentally flawed. Their ideology impaired their ability to promote entrepreneurship because they viewed support for entrepreneurs primarily in negative terms as the removal of government tax and regulatory burdens rather than in positive terms as the cultivation of a dynamic market infrastructure. This article presents this argument in four steps, focusing on the US case: (1) how neoliberal reforms embodied internal contradictions; (2) how reforms to market governance undermined entrepreneurship; (3) how other neoliberal policies also failed to support entrepreneurs; and (4) how policies that violated neoliberal principles, such as industry and technology policies, were actually more supportive of entrepreneurs.

The iconic vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returned to cinema screens via Death Wish 2 (Michael Winner) in 1982 and vigilantism would remain a key theme in American urban action films throughout the 1980s. Susan Jeffords subsequently argued that Hollywood's ‘hard bodied’ male action heroes of the period were reflective of the social and political thematics that distinguished Ronald Reagan's tenure as America's President (1994, p. 22). But while Jeffords' arguments are convincing, they overlook contemporaneous films featuring female and ‘soft’ bodied urban action heroes.

The Angel trilogy (Angel, 1984; Avenging Angel, 1985; and Angel III: The Final Chapter, 1988) features three such understudied examples. Indeed, the films' diverse and atypical range of action heroes demand that they are interrogated in terms of their protagonists' gender, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices and age. Featuring narratives about the prostitutes and street folk who frequent Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, the films' key characters are a teenage prostitute and her guardians: a transvestite prostitute, a lesbian hotelier and an elderly cowboy. All three films feature narratives that revolve around acts of vengeance and vigilantism.

This chapter will critically discuss the striking ways in which the films' ‘soft’ bodied and atypical protagonists are presented as convincing action heroes who subvert contemporaneous ‘hard’ bodied norms. It will also consider to what extent their subversive rewriting of typical urban action film narratives and character relations might be understood to critique and deconstruct the themes and concerns that usually characterized such films during the Reagan era.

The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

We address here how the U.S. neoliberal policy regime developed and how its reconstructed vision of modernization, which culminated, under the rubric of globalization, was neutralized by 9/11 and neoconservative geopolitics. We analyze the phases in the rise of neoliberalism, and provide a detailed map of its vision of global modernization at its high tide under Clinton. We also address how the Bush Doctrine's unilateral, preemptive polices and the consequent War on Terror and Iraq War eroded U.S. legitimacy as the globalization system's hegmon and shifted the discourse from globalization to empire. Cold War modernization theorists, neoliberal globalization advocates, and Bush doctrine neoconservatives all drew on an American exceptionalist tradition that portrays the U.S. as modernity's “lead society,” attaches universal significance to its values, policies, and institutions, and urges their worldwide diffusion. All three traditions ignore or diminish the importance of substantive equality and social justice. We suggest that consequent U.S. policy problems might be averted by recovery of a suppressed side of the American tradition that stresses social justice and holds that democracy must start at home and be spread by example rather than by exhortation or force. Overall, we explore the contradictory U.S. role in an emergent post-Cold War world.

This article argues that the financial crisis has brought to the surface a series of dilemmas that have their origins in the declining affluence of the U.S. economy in the late 1960s and 1970s. When growth faltered beginning in the late 1960s, policymakers confronted difficult political choices about how to allocate scarce resources between competing social priorities. Inflation offered a means of avoiding these trade-offs for a time, disguising distributional conflicts and financing an expansive state. But the “solutions” that inflation offered to the end of growth became increasingly dysfunctional over the course of the 1970s, setting the stage for the turn to finance in the U.S. economy. Paradoxically, the turn to finance operated as the functional equivalent of inflation, similarly allowing policymakers to avoid difficult political choices as limits on the nation's prosperity became more constraining. But the turn to finance no more resolved these underlying issues than did inflation, and as a result the recent financial crisis likely augurs the return of distributional politics to center stage in American political and social life.

Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.