Reagan's Mythical America: Storytelling as Political Leadership. By JanHanska. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 256 pp.

Abstract

Reagan's Mythical America: Storytelling as Political Leadership. By Jan Hanska. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 256 pp. Ronald Reagan once remarked, think now and then to use an anecdote saves a lot of words and even illustrates what it is we're trying to do (Interview With Paul Duke of WETA-TV President's Relations With Congress, July 16, 1982, in Public Papers of Presidents of United States: Ronald Reagan, 1982, Book II [Washington, DC: GPO, 1983], 951). Reagan, master storyteller, dramatized, personified, evangelized, and mythologized America with Scheherazadian skill. But was he acting or arguing for policy based authentic values? Did his anecdotes constitute truths or falsehoods? What precisely were his storytelling politics trying to accomplish? Jan Hanska's exhaustively researched and erudite book shines profound light these mysteries. Reagan braided threads of smaller stories into a compelling metanarrative web. Hanska explicates how Reagan constructed stories using re-created, Americanonized (p. 146) myths such as American way of life and the (p. 123). These myths blurred factual and fictional, conflated sacred and profane, constituted dream as an object of belief, and blended mythical and religious into political. One tends to think of anecdotes as simple notices of human events. However, Hanska's work demonstrates that political narratives are an exceedingly complex form of action. They interweave culturally dominant ideologies, religious beliefs, and myths into powerfully persuasive frameworks for political leaders to deploy. The book's raison d'etre is to fill a lacuna in genre of such political narratives. As such, Reagan's Mythical America is a remarkable achievement and will be instructive for students of history, narratology, politics, presidential studies, and rhetoric. The book has numerous strengths, not least of which is its refreshing orientation. The claim that politics are illusory is not novel; however, modality employed by Hanska to study narrativized politics is. Methodologically, choice to revive narratology is audacious, given that many scholars have left it, as Reagan might put it, on ash-heap of history (Address to Members of British Parliament, June 8, 1982, in Public Papers of Presidents of United States: Ronald Reagan, 1982, Book I [Washington, DC: GPO, 1983], 747). But Hanska provides a compelling rationale that various conceptions of narrative theories are indeed appropriate lenses for examination. Those conceptions emerge from an impressive (and, at times, taxing) scope of critics, including Aristotle, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Robert N. Bellah, Jonathan Culler, Jacques Derrida, Emile Durkheim, Northrop Frye, Gerard Genette, Fredric Jameson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Vladimir Propp, and Alexis de Tocqueville--who all appear and reappear as if characters in A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Hanska's first chapter explains how Reagan's narratives supplant policy making. …