https://spectator.org/the-trump-revolution-3/
It was October 27, 1964. Ronald Reagan, then an actor and private citizen, had been asked to give a nationally televised addressed for the Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Reagan did so, the title of his speech being “A Time for Choosing.”
In his speech Reagan said the following:
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 to] man’s 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 was right. And that speech skyrocketed him two years later into the governorship of California and, in 1980 and 1984, to two landslide presidential victories. And in those eight years Reagan was relentless in driving home that message of freedom as he, against all odds and a chorus of naysayers, won the Cold War by defeating the “Evil Empire” (as he correctly called it) of the Communist Soviet Union. The latter eventually collapsing onto, again as Reagan said, “the ash heap of history.”
As America stands on the threshold of the 2020 election, Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” speech is precisely relevant today. The principles and concerns he expressed are in fact at the very core of what can easily be termed the Trump Revolution.
