Crucial to her propaganda effort is the ethos that her book manages to build: the image of Noonan as a modern, embattled Reagan Democrat with whom ordinary readers are encouraged to identify. Noonan also translates her ideology in easily understandable vignettes by making the political personal and using anecdotal evidence. Noonan’s views are always defined in a them versus us Manichean dichotomy which pits conservatives against traditional Republicans, patriots against liberal peaceniks, hard-working citizens against the undeserving poor. In order to understand her success, I propose first to look at her way of polarizing political debates. What distinguishes Noonan from other more strident conservative activists like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh is the way she manages to blend the two conservative traditions by translating an uncompromising right-wing agenda for the benefit of the mainstream “silent majority”. Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter, whose best-selling book What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era and other writings I propose to look into in this paper, is a member of this new generation of conservative pundits, newspaper columnists and talk show hosts. With the “Reagan revolution”, it seemed that a new, more aggressive, and therefore more visible, brand of conservatism emerged. Before the 1980s, conservatism was often synonymous with a defense of the status quo which avoided strong ideological connections and relied instead on common sense and the views of what Nixon famously called “the silent majority”, hence its relative invisibility. However, the ebb and flow of political fortunes and academic interests is not the only reason which may account for the relative neglect of the conservative revival: one also has to take into account the change in the very nature of conservatism. As Todd Gitlin acknowledges at the end of his 1992 preface to his book on the Sixties, he had “said too little about the growth of the American right in the sixties”. In the wake of the 1960s, radical political movements attracted a lot of attention, because of the surge in radical activism which swept the US in the 1960s and 70s and also because many of the books on the period were written by former radicals who had become academics. 1The steady decline of liberal and radical ideas and the impressive vitality of conservatism in the last 30 years has led analysts to look more closely at the current conservative revival in the United States.
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