ABSTRACT

The issue of identity which underpinned both Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom claimed to offer a remedy against the dissolution of any sense of real ideology. By reactivating a rhetoric of ideology and pumping it through the dry veins of the power system, these conservative revolutions awoke the latter’s dormant inner strength, reaffirming values associated with tradition, and implicitly offering a different aesthetic to an exhausted, redundant modernism, already drained of its last drop of expression.