Lacanian psychoanalysis holds that the declihe of the symbolic leads to a powerful alliance of the imaginary with the Real. Such an alliance is dearly at work in the Reagan presidency. Fantasy images of Reagan as a cowboy and explicit acknowledgments of his work as an actor accompany the ontological evil he identifies in the nature of things.48 The realism of Reagan's political wil, in other words, is supported by fantasies of figures of strength. Reagan played these roles and, indeed, gestured to them by repeating lines from his movies, perhaps most memorably "Win one for the Gipper:'
American presidents have long found political inspiration in religious language. Twentieth-century presidents have, like those who came before them, used the term evil. But the term. means diferent things in diferent settings-and sometimes it doesn't mean anything at all. Sometimes it points to the wil of the one who speaks it, not the object to which it is applied. The discursive environme<sup>h</sup>t supplied by Reagan's speeches difers significantly from that of his immediate predecessors-J(ennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Superficially, it resembles Eisenhower's, but this resemblance is misleading. Eisenhower refers to his inaugural prayer as "private" and refrains from attempting to convert the Soviets from their atheism. He also treats the forces of good and evil as elements within the symbolic order of the Cold War: freedom is good and totalitarian slavery is evil. Eisenhower invokes a symbolically consistent moral world, one where the ambiguities and tensions always subverting attributions of good and evil are repressed, contained. In that moment of history when the world faces a choice between good and evil, America must not give way on its faith in human freedom and dignity. These inalienable rights are gifts of the Creator; the struggle to secure them takes place in the presence of the Creator, and America turns to the Creator for guidance in these times. But Eisenhower does not say that he or America is an instrument of the Creator. He does not say that God has instructed the United States to fight His battle against the forces of evil. In short, Eisenhower's language works within the symbolic order of the Cold War as it presents Americans as subjects with choices and responsibilities. Reagan depicts evil as Real and says that God commands us to fight against it.
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