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choices were clear and morality was unambiguous. He looked back at his
country in the previous decade and saw the need for a new course, a way out
of the discords and disaffections that had plagued America since the 1960s.
With his election, voters seemed to be expressing a desire for their nation to
return to traditional values and to a simpler view of life.
By 1980, however, the cultural phenomenon of conspiracy theory had
become securely lodged in American popular culture. As such, it can be seen
as a symbol, or perhaps a symptom, of the confusing, ambiguous complexity
that Reagan wanted the nation to escape. After all, conspiracy theory in
American culture at this time often implied the entire American system was
suspect. Its central institutions from the health care system to industry to
the military to the government itself often appeared as the villains in popular
culture, particularly in the cinema. A restoration of the trust and righteousness
that Reagan and his fellow neoconservatives desired therefore seemed to imply
the opposite of everything the conspiracy theory worldview represented.
It would be a mistake to assume that Reagan and his followers were in-
terested only in serious public discourse and not in how the popular culture
represented American society. Reagan had been a successful Hollywood actor,
but that was not the main reason he understood the importance that expres-
sions of popular culture played in shaping and maintaining public perceptions.
114 Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics
A bigger reason was the emerging debate in American society that was later
called the culture wars. By the 1980s, the idea that popular culture
especially movies and television affected how people perceived and reacted
to life around them was a well-established proposition. (Indeed, had cultural
elites not feared the corrosive influence of popular culture, there previously
would not have been such an outcry against television, which some of its
critics often called the idiot box. )
Neoconservatives easily recognized the power of popular culture. Their
objection was not that it was influential, however. Rather, their complaint
was that it influenced with the wrong message. Thus, an underlying part
of Reagan s plan of attack in the 1980s was a consistent effort to argue
for different representations. It would seem that this would naturally have
involved an effort to undercut the appeal of conspiracy theory messages,
since conspiracy theory seemed now to represent a negative, critical stance
toward much of American life.
Yet, it was not quite that simple. Perhaps the most obvious example of
how thoroughly conspiracy theory thinking had infiltrated even the upper
echelons of American politics was found in the new way that Ronald Reagan
talked about the Vietnam War. It was a way of looking at things that argued
for a more straightforward, accepting role of American nobility, seemingly
the antithesis of what much conspiracy theory thinking implied at that time.
But his interpretation of how Americans had arrived at such negative feel-
ings about the Vietnam conflict may have inadvertently paved the way for an
even darker vision. Two examples of Reagan s rhetoric make this point. First,
there is the famous statement from his first inauguration speech of January
20, 1980, in which he said, Government is not a solution to our problem,
government is the problem. An assertion that the federal government was at
the root of the nation s malaise fits nicely with neoconservative doctrine, but
it also reinforced the more negative idea that America s institutions had failed.
And although Reagan clearly did not intend his words to be interpreted as
a broad indictment of the American system, this statement was inadvertently
congruent with a conspiracy theory mindset in which the system pervasively
intrudes into personal life.
At the time, however, the darker way of thinking about Reagan s iden-
tification of government with the problem received little consideration.
Throughout his presidency, Reagan s sincere and straightforward way of
speaking charmed the nation, and as a result, the ambiguities in his some
of his remarks tended to be overlooked. Of course, Reagan had separated the
government as an ideal from the government as practiced. He wanted to set
things straight, rescuing the practice of government, which he suggested was
an overgrown, lumbering behemoth that sometimes was not too trustworthy.
But while Reagan did not intend to undermine faith in American government
or the central institutions of free enterprise, his declaration that government
Vision and Re-Vision 115
is the problem, with its instant sound-bite nature, could be interpreted more
cynically than he meant it to be.
In addition to this general theme of government or big government,
anyway being a problem itself, a second, more specific theme, affirmed a
distrustful interpretation of American experience in the very recent past. This
was Reagan s new interpretation of the Vietnam War.
Like Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter before him, Reagan knew that the ill-
effects of the Vietnam War continued to dampen the national mood. Indeed,
the turmoil about the war seemed to have spilled over beyond the end of that
conflict, influencing the way Americans felt about their country in the years
after that war. It is true, of course, that Americans seemed anxious to forget
the war. But although peace had come, reconciliation among Americans who
had argued about the war had not. Moreover, with the war s unsettling end,
Americans now seemed reluctant to play a powerful role on the world stage.
Reagan called this malaise the Vietnam syndrome, and he wanted it to end.
One reason for his concern was the lessened influence that the United
States seemed to exert on the rest of the world. Surely the controversies of
the Vietnam War had not been confined to domestic American politics, but
the place of the United States at the helm of the free world was equally
damaged, in Reagan s view, by the fact that the nation seemed reluctant
to remain engaged in complex international affairs. There was no doubt in
Reagan s mind, then, that the Vietnam syndrome needed to be overturned
so that the United States could reassume the rightful role that Reagan and
others saw for it.
For Reagan, vanquishing the Vietnam syndrome meant a dramatic rethink-
ing of the entire American experience in the Vietnam War. For him, this meant
not seeing it as the war that America lost, but as a war our government was
afraid to let them [meaning the U.S. military] win, as he proclaimed in a
1980 campaign speech. Indeed, according to Reagan s interpretation, the
government had tied the American military s collective hands, refusing to
unleash the nation s awesome power and political will to finish the war with
another American victory, rather than an ignoble defeat.
Reagan was undeterred by his understanding of these past events, however.
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