popc and Reaganism

There will be, in this book, the tremendous pull to do a history/evolution of Reaganism as a political movement. This would push me into looking at a significant chunk of time before the eighties, and falling into a "history of the rise of conservatism" that I just do not want to do. My topic is huge enough without going back to the fifties.

Reaganism, for this project, is operating as a formed entity (I will not say fully formed, because it has evolved and will continue to do so). I am not really tracing how Reaganism came to be or changed. What I am instead focusing upon is how it interacts with popular culture. I have to be very specific about how I state this.

In the nostalgia (and this is why this is interesting and will be used), there was/is either a direct conflict between the popular culture and Reaganism (hip hop, NY and LA punk), or there was a weird conflation/synchronicity. I am focusing on and deconstructing the latter. Not only did these relationships exist in the nostalgia, however, it also exists in most of the 80s scholarship...Seeing Through the Eighties conflated television and Reaganism, and there are many examples. When I do include the lit review, this is how I have to spin it.

The popular culture, however, shows that the aforementioned conflation is incorrect, that a complex relationship existed between the two. The different forms interacted in different ways, but there is always a ration of at odds/in line with Reaganism at work in the cultural texts I analyze, and, when added up, they tend to undo the ideological strands of Reaganism.