There they go again: invoking the < Reagan > ideograph

Abstract

Tracking all mentions of Ronald Reagan during presidential primary and general election debates from 1988 to 2016, we suggest that < Reagan > has emerged as a complex ideograph in contemporary political discourse. Demonstrating what we call the “personified ideograph,” this essay tracks the reverence toward Reagan that indicates the name’s status as a god term, and suggests the historic meaning of the ideograph is linked to secondary terms like “principled,” “peace through strength,” and “prosperity.” We further contend that such a calcified memory of Reagan has led to a schism in the GOP, and we describe the alternative understanding of < Reagan > as linked to such terms as “bipartisanship” and “change.”

Keywords:

• Ronald Reagan
• ideograph
• presidential debates
• public memory
• conservatism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Lisa Corrigan and Matt Spialek for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our texts were limited to debates for which either transcripts or videos were accessible. We relied on transcripts provided by The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, and where necessary we transcribed comments from debates available from the C-SPAN video library.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Neville-Shepard

Ryan Neville-Shepard (Ph.D., Kansas) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas.

Skye de Saint Felix

Skye de Saint Felix is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland. She received her M.A. from the University of Arkansas.