When Reagan was a neocon
What would Reagan say about the dilemmas facing us today? Actually, we kinda know what Reagan would say, because he kinda said it already.
I was listening for the first time to a well-known speech Reagan gave back in Goldwater times (to a particularly bookish group, or was this before contact lenses became popular? Note how many people in the audience are wearing glasses as compared to today. And of course, they’re all white! Racist Tea Partiers!!!)
The following quotes from Reagan’s speech have only become more relevant with the passage of over fifty years:
“The more the plans fail the more the planners plan.”
“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
And note also, starting around 13:35, his remarks on opposition claims about Social Security—very familiar to those who’ve followed the shifting “It’s a tax! No, it’s a fine!” argument about the individual HCR mandate.
Ah, what a dunce.
[HAT TIP: commenter “texexec”]
Thanks for the Hat Tip, Neo. How does that speech compare to whiney Obama’s? (Especially recently).
I’ve read many of Reagan’s speeches that he delivered between ’64 and ’88. While he is often thought of as a conservative, I don’t think that is an accurate characterization. At least in the rhetoric he used in his speeches, as opposed to how he actually governed, I think he sounds much more like a libertarian than a conservative. (Which, by the way, I think is true of Goldwater as well). You will be hard pressed to find a speech where Reagan did not champion the cause for individual freedom and liberty — often mentioning those words multiple times in a single speech. Two words rarely uttered by Obama.
The part of the speech you’ve embedded that I think is most appropriate for the current elections follows (I’m such a dork, I have it copied in a file:
“…If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self government, or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite, in a far distant capitol, can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well, I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down. Up is man’s age old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.”
If Reagan’s teleprompter had a glitch, you’d probably never know it as he wouldn’t miss a beat. 🙂
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great article linked @last post sentence, too
wow, Scott. Great quote. THAT is what this election is about Mr. Obama, not hard-wired fear-induced masses.
Mechanical and hellish despotism doesnt come from jack boots and military thugs.
It comes from delegated powers to administrators, and they never stop administrating or thinking taht new rules will fix old rules we don’t remove, but just pile on.
Philip Dru Administrator
Mandell House
Jacob Schiff
Wobblies…
They have bearing…
and when you read things you wont think that wobbly was always about the surface your standing on…
Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.
If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here.
We did all that could be done. October 27, 1964 (from “The Speech”)
October 27, 1964 (from his nationally televised speech, which he called “A Time for Choosing” but was later simply referred to as “The Speech,” in support of candidate Barry Goldwater)
“If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what’s at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.
There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States.
Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.”
From his RESTORE AMERICA SPEECH
“No one who lived through the Great Depression can ever look upon an unemployed person with anything but compassion.
To me, there is no greater tragedy than a breadwinner willing to work, with a job skill but unable to find a market for that job skill.
Back in those dark depression days I saw my father on a Christmas eve open what he thought was a Christmas greeting from his boss.
Instead, it was the pink slip telling him he no longer had a job.
The memory of him sitting there holding that slip of paper and then saying in a half whisper, ‘That’s quite a Christmas present,’ it will stay with me as long as I live.”
November 5, 1994 (from his letter to the American people revealing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis)
“In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president.
When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future.
I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.
I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
Reagan may well have been a libertarian. That may be why I like him so much. I call myself a “pragmatic libertarian” ( a libertarian who admits that there are a FEW things the government should do…but damned few.).
Just as an aside: Reagan’s remark about “what our liberal friends don’t know” is a riff on a joke from Will Rogers about Herbert Hoover. “What he don’t know don’t bother me, it’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so…”
One of Reagan’s most effective tropes was his ability to incorporate phrases that would evoke a visceral response in an audience that knew he was lifting from Rogers, or would recognize the FDR allusion in the “rendezvous with destiny” phrase, or, my personal favorite, his great use of the “I paid for this microphone” line (from the Tracy/Hepburn movie whose title slips my mind).
Reagan was no cynic. He clearly meant what he said, but he also meant touch a sense of a shared culture and American identity, and present himself as the embodiment of that tradition. It is clear that millions of Americans agree with that self-assessment.
THE SPEECH.
It’s as though he speaks directly to us from beyond the grave, isn’t it?
How many other presidents do we reflect upon so greatly, Democrat or Republican?
For me, this was a huge turning point. As a young man, barely 18, unable to vote, this speech made so much sense that I became a Conservative. It stuck. I try to thank that great man every time I think about it.
The memory of the man, what he did and what he stood for, and his remarkable grace under the assault, she unending barrages of insults from the Elites, is almost enough to bring tears of gratitude and pride to my eyes.
But when he died, the same Elites, ever worms, showed their compassion by fawning over his funeral. Celebrating his demise without being overt about it, trying to demonstrate some class.
If we go down, we must go down swinging.
“”If we go down, we must go down swinging.””
Tom
We’re not going down. American exceptionalism is in need of a good replenishment and these commie control freaks have put the perfect scenario right in our laps. We shouldn’t waste the opportunity at such a potential source of pride and accomplishment. Plus we know we’re eventually going to win this battle of our times because losing is absolutely not an option.
The two Reagan quotes remind me of what the left has learned since then…. to better hide and deny who they are, what they want, and how they intend to get there…
I wonder what percentage of partisan democrats don’t actually believe the healthcare bill was a defacto take over of the healthcare system, not a step towards single payer (by design the current plan will fail to set up felling the next domino), and that forced equality (and/or taking money out of how healthcare is ‘rationed’) is not the final goal (via central planning).
It’s not an insignificant number… ‘its just reform to better regulate insurance’… ummm, yeah… sure.
Scott Says:
“At least in the rhetoric he used in his speeches, as opposed to how he actually governed, I think he sounds much more like a libertarian than a conservative.”
While I’ll consider that part of it could be regional (I grew up in the western US)… I tend to think the whole libertarian / conservative divide is new and phony. The left pushes the meme to divide us. Some libertarians push it when conservative, as a label, takes a beating (and becomes uncool).
I’ve never seen a serious libertarian / conservative difference… and/or like with Reagan;s thought, the western conservatism has always been hard to tell apart from libertarianism.
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I envy Roman, who was changed by Reagan’s speech into a conservative. I watched the speech again the other day, and shook my head over the person I was at that time, a smug, ever-so-smart liberal. Reagan’s statements were so simplistic, I thought then, how could anyone be taken in by that?
Thankfully, some years ago I too left the fold, but this past year and a half have been desperately concerned that we — and the world — were about to lose “the last best hope of man on earth”. With today’s election, I am more hopeful, but grimly aware that this is to be an ongoing struggle.
I was 31 and still relatively apolitical at the time. However, this speech got me to thinking about the differences in political philosphies. I had always been anti-Communist, but had not understood how the Democrats were sympathetic to many things that led to socialism and then communism. It would be a few more years of serving in combat in Vietnam and then as a recruiter at northern California colleges before the truth of his philosophy became clear to me. When Reagan began his run for President, I still remembered that speech as one that influenced me greatly.
Reagan also said, in that same speech, that the French socialized medicine system was bankrupt, and it was “…the end of the road”. The French socialized medicine system is still functioning.
There are some other howlers in that speech, as well.
However, it was delivered brilliantly, and should be studied and re-studied by all politicians.