In the 1960s and early-1970s, Victorian morality and old-time religion were particularly threatened by Supreme Court decisions legalizing birth control and abortion, the civil rights, gay rights, feminist and countercultural movements, the Social Gospel of Martin Luther King, and the anti-Vietnam War protests. All over the world, "young people imagined a new, more democratic, more socially responsible order," although predictably all of these generated a huge Right-wing backlash that lasted for decades (Morone 435). A cyclical theory like Morone's is indeed one of the best theoretical frameworks at explaining the pendulum-like swings between reform and conservative periods in U.S. history, and why change in this country so often appears to be a matter of two steps forward and one step back. It would seem counter-intuitive to progressives and liberals, at least until they reflect on history and realize that they often end up fighting the same battles against conservatives and reactionaries in every generation. Indeed, the same pattern is repeating itself right at this moment, with Barack Obama having passed certain reforms, and the political and cultural Right attempting to block these and turn back the clock on many issues. This has been a familiar pattern in American history for two hundred years or longer.

Michael Rogin's Ronald Reagan, the Movie (1987) actually covered much broader ground than simply that particular president and his faulty memories and political fantasies based on his career in Hollywood. His chapter on westward expansion and Indian removal in the early republic and antebellum period (1790-1860) contains a great deal of information that is well-known to historians. Nothing is easier than finding quotes from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and many other white leaders that described the Indians as savage, primitive, backward, living in a child-like state of nature, or standing in way of American progress and civilization. For the U.S. government, and indeed most of the white population, the main policy choice was either to exterminate them or confine them on reservations that turned out to be little better than prisons and ghettoes. Even liberal reformer like Horace Greeley proclaimed "these people must die out -- there is no help for them," and indeed most of them did end up dead, one way or the other (Rogin 144).

None of this is particularly new or surprising to anyone who has even a slight familiarity with American history although for some reason Rogin also felt the need to add a Freudian gloss and theoretical framework to this well-known history. It is not clear whether that nation and all its leaders were fearful of regressing into some kind of oral stage of primitive, magical thinking, violence, savagery and cannibalism, although whites commonly projected all these traits on Indians. Even so, all of this imperialist history can be explained just as well without any reference to concepts like the Indians were regarded as "a pre-oedipal, aggressive threat to the mother-child relationship" (Rogin 151).