The electorate believed Reaganism’s promise and sunny optimism, but it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically. Gramsci famously remarked that in the “interregnum” when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born … a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Such an interregnum, he believed, would also provide an opening for “violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”
