For most of my life, Ronald Reagan has been THE iconic hero of the Conservative Party. For disaffected conservatives weighing their options today, I present The Great Communicator’s own reflections.
Two generations later, they are as relevant today as they were when he first said them.
None of these quotes will come as especially surprising or new to most people. They serve only to sharpen our thinking about what REALLY is being decided, both when he was elected, and now with a generation that has long since forgotten his contribution to American history.
The first was from 1961, in an address to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
We have a party openly flirting with ripping the American system of government down to the studs and rebuilding it in a way that rigs the game, not so the people can continue the experiment in self government, but so that nobody will be able to run against the Democrats and win, ever again. If we are going to preserve those freedoms we now take for granted, we will need to put the authoritarians who have been ascendent on the left back in their box.
The second is the correct framing of the left’s horrifying instinct to grow and grow and grow the government so that it’s big enough to tie up every aspect of our lives in spools of red tape:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.
Remember how well that worked out in the COVID years, when Biden’s people were working with Silicon Valley to silence political dissent? Yeah sure. We can trust them THIS time. Honest.
The last is for a situation Reagan might not have seen coming. Or maybe he would. After all, he did say that he originally didn’t leave the Dems, the Dems left him. And history tells us that the ‘Lion of the Senate’ Ted Kennedy (who once had AOC as an intern) was back-channeling with the SOVIETS in 1984 in an effort to defeat Reagan’s re-election bid.
Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”
Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.” — Forbes
Democrats are no longer just calling themselves ‘Progressives’. They’ve owned the term ‘socialists’ and are even running open communists in their party.
Reagan’s strategy when facing Soviets was pretty simply stated. It happens to be the same strategy GOP could use for today’s crop of communists.
