The Words of the Law: How Reagan's Welfare Discourse Produced the Family Support Act of 1988

This thesis examines how political rhetoric becomes law, tracing how the ideological framework deployed in Reagan's State of the Union addresses of 1981, 1986, and 1988 produced the conditions under which the Family Support Act of 1988 became politically possible and legible as common sense. Drawing on Melinda Cooper's theory of the neoliberal-neoconservative convergence, this thesis argues that Reagan's welfare rhetoric not only reflected a pre-existing ideology but actively constructed it, fused by the market discipline and family moral order into a single governing vision that the FSA subsequently institutionalized in statutory law through what this thesis calls a rhetoric-to-law pipeline. Through a qualitative discourse analysis of both the speech corpus and the enrolled bill text, the analysis demonstrates how Reagan's rhetorical categories – 'family responsibility,' 'worthy and unworthy poor,' 'self-sufficiency' – reappear in the legislative language of Public Law 100-485 as legal obligations, administrative mechanisms, and conditions of eligibility. The FSA is, at its legislative core, a disciplinary apparatus in which the theme of CONTROL accounts for 47.1% of all coded segments on MAXQDA and the bill's highest co-occurrence falls between CONTROL and WORTHY POOR. It also institutionalizes a selective form of neoliberalism this thesis calls disciplinary federalism, where power is devolved to the state government while federal surveillance is retained. Lastly, the analysis reveals that gender is not absent from the FSA but encoded structurally. The bill's formally universal categories – 'recipients,' 'participants,' 'parents' – target an overwhelmingly female population without naming them, a displacement that is itself the expression of Cooper's convergence. The neoliberal-neoconservative fusion around "the family" is necessarily a gendered project, one that privatizes the economic burdens of single motherhood while rendering that privatization invisible in statutory language. Together, these findings offer an empirical, text-level demonstration of Cooper's convergence thesis, including its gendered architecture.