The revival of conservative political fortunes is one of the most striking aspects of contemporary American life. Law and society scholars have increasingly recognized the centrality of legal ideas and language, especially the discourse of individual rights, to the political vision that inspires conservative movement politics. However, relevant studies have been limited thus far to the discursive practices that motivate movement activism at the grass-roots level. By investigating Ronald Reagan's nationalism, which relied heavily upon a particular version of "rights talk," this article begins to fill a gap in scholarly understanding. I shall argue that rights talk was one of the primary methods through which Reagan's nationalistic discourse distinguished good, productive citizens from bad, parasitic ones. The use, and abuse, of rights, in fact, marked one's efforts as either heroic or subversive - as emblematic either of the "ordered freedom" that underlay America's greatness or of the license and disorder that threatened to plunge the nation into chaos and, perhaps, communism. Moreover, by accosting them for their allegedly un-American rights-claims, Reagan's nationalism further stigmatized members of already-marginal groups (such as the poor, women, racial minorities, and the young), but did so in language that was facially neutral and avoided traditional stereotypes and ascriptions. Ronald Reagan's political vision, which is a model for contemporary American conservatives, thus emerged at the intersection of rights and nation. And the rights-based inclusions and exclusions that it enacted remain, like Reagan himself, a lasting feature of American politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]