Sunny Jim: The Genial Demagoguery of Ronald Reagan

No body of work has proven more prophetic about the shifting currents of the national character than Herman Melville's fiction of the 1850s. In a series of darkly satirical stories, he kept sketching the portrait of an apparently likeable, upbeat fellow whose innocence, upon further inspection, was shown to be an artifact of willful ignorance. For Melville, the process of modernization on American shores was inseparable from what he wryly called the progress of genialization, and his list of genialized professions has proven all too predictive of today's mainstream scene. Here, Bosworth examines the presidency of Ronald Reagan as reflected in Melville's dark vision of a nation bent on genial self-delusion that has proven all too true. He shares that Reagan's character was a true reflection of that immediately likeable but ultimately dangerous authority figure, one who strives by ignoring the symptoms, to get rid of the malady.