Twenty-Five Years After The Reagan Landslide

by Bruce Walker - November 3rd, 2009 - American Thinker

Reagan got into politics with "The Speech" endorsing Barry Goldwater. Here is what Reagan said in 1964:

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] man's old -- old-aged 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.

Reagan stayed with that theme, regardless of whether it cost him primary victories or elections.

In fact Reagan stayed with this theme even when conservatives begged him to abandon it to legislate "traditional values". Reagan always argued that the soul of conservatism was the libertarian values that emphasized freedom. We seem to have forgotten those views. They are the positive views of mankind that forged the positive view of the future of the ever optimistic Ronald Reagan.

Today, that optimism can rarely be found. We look at the victory of the would be dictator Barack Obama and we are motivated by the fear of tyranny. We see one new bureaucracy after another being created by the Democrats and feel our freedom and liberty slipping away.

How can a people who voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan have changed so quickly to a people who will vote for the greed and selfishness of Democrat fascism?