This book takes another look at politics and popular culture. The author has tried to explain the politics of popular culture as part of historical and cultural processes, helping the reader understand not only how popular culture has affected our politics, but also where it is taking us.

By looking at Reagan as a nostalgic representation, we then gain insight into our desire to link the American past with the present and understand more fully what the mythic past, and its current political representation, means to us. Reagan meant something deeper to us as a people than merely a political ideology and an agenda, and it is the burden of this book to attempt illumination of that meaning. If the reader can take away from it deeper understanding of both Reagan and the America he proclaimed, then she or he can gain access to the warp and woof of popular knowledge, the true subject of the book, and the real source of Reagan's appeal. The book ranges over the images and institutions of Reagan country: the town, the family, the business, the church, and throughout the personality who represented these nostalgic formations to us.