Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan functions in the book less as a biographical portrait than as a marker of a shift in political subjectivity. Set against Richard Nixon, he represents a post-Oedipal presidency: a different symbolic order in which guilt and the assumption of symbolic debt no longer organize political authority as they did for the earlier figure.

Identity and Political Framing

The account places Reagan within a theoretical contrast between desire and demand. Desire, in this framework, is bound to Law and its transgression; demand instead addresses an apparently omnipotent Other. The change in the dominant political leader therefore signals more than a difference in personal style: it indicates that politics is being organized in a new symbolic space.

Contrast with Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon is described as the last truly Oedipal politician. In Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, his final catastrophe culminates in an admission of guilt and the assumption of responsibility for acts he was not fully aware of committing. The point of the comparison is not simply to revive a conventional liberal condemnation of Nixon. The book notes that, measured by the share of national product devoted to education, health, and social care, Nixon could be called the most left-wing US president; it also notes that anti-Communists regarded his recognition of the People’s Republic of China as an ultimate offense. These complications make Nixon the foil for a structural argument about guilt and political responsibility, not merely a moral counterexample.

The Post-Oedipal Presidency

Against Nixon, Reagan is identified as the first post-Oedipal president. He occupies a political space that ignores the dimension of guilt and symbolic debt central to the Oedipal model. The contrast marks a change in how authority relates to responsibility: the older pattern requires a leader to acknowledge a debt and accept guilt, whereas Reagan stands for a form of politics in which those categories no longer have the same constitutive force.

Theoretical Significance

Reagan’s role in the argument is concise but consequential. His presidency serves as a sign of the transition from a politics structured by Law, desire, and acknowledged guilt toward one in which insistence on demand can displace desire. The book does not develop this into a personal psychological account of Reagan; it uses the contrast with Nixon to diagnose a wider transformation in political subjectivity and the symbolic conditions under which leaders act.