Reagan representing the generational response to post-war imperial liberalism, it took another generation for a post-Reagan liberalism to mature, on schedule with the economic exhaustion of imperial financialism, an ideology and system of decline and diminishing returns. So Obamaism as a negation of Reaganism is also its excrescence, as inevitably during the inherently uncertain and drawn-out transition between a macro-system (aka, financialize neo-liberalism) and its unnameable successor. The Republican candidates express the exhaustion and irrelevance of Reaganism in and to that context, except as the active expression of that exhaustion and irrelevance, in the familiar zombie format. None of which is to suggest that the electoral system, or we ourselves through the electoral system, are precluded from placing the exponent of an exhausted and irrelevant ideology as the placeholder, the empty spot, for a kind of slow-motion collective auto-decapitation.
We can perhaps discern most of the elements of the next phase, but its timing, its organization of pasts and futures, which each of us will tend to interpret differently, from each other and at different times, is a subject for struggle, as are the very forms of that struggle.
Well in the high concept sphere, yes painting Reagan, one of the most dynamic politicians as a Brezhevite, really doesn’t work, I really didn’t think the characters in Pynchon’s Vinland really existed:
http://moo-vfarm.com/2011/08/15/coriolianus-film-trailer/