Art credit: www.yaf.org
Here’s a message from Tea Party
Patriots National Support Team:
It’s easy to listen to Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing speech, delivered
October 27, 1964, and marvel at how prescient he was. What Reagan said
half a century ago is just as true today as it was then. Certainly, his
remarks were dated; they were delivered in support of Barry Goldwater’s
presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. But replace Kruschev with
Putin and warnings of Big Government with Obamacare or amnesty for those who
break the law to enter our nation and that speech could just as easily be delivered
today as it was 50 years ago.
But the remarkable clarity of Reagan’s speech lies not in his
ability to see into the future. It is because he fully understood the
destructive nature of modern statist liberalism; its demands on society and the
people within it are no different today than they were in earlier times.
Ronald Reagan knew at his core that the precepts of statism are
anathema to American constitutional liberty; that personal freedom must
be sacrificed in order for it to take hold and that its price is “chains and
slavery.” He understood that statist liberalism, “must use force and
coercion to achieve its purpose,” and that without force, no free people would
choose to live under it.
This is what Reagan understood. Times have changed as well as the
men and women who live in them but statism has not. As a political dogma,
it remains unchanged in its pursuit of subjugating people to the state.
It was this understanding of statist government that guided Reagan a generation
after his speech to rightly call the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and demand
that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” which separated East Berliners
from liberty.
The threats of statist liberalism have ebbed and flowed in the
half century since Reagan gave his speech but today, it is at a high-water mark
in America. The federal government is forcing Obamacare on an unwilling
public. The president is seeking the effective destruction of American
sovereignty by erasing our borders through executive amnesty for illegal
immigrants. The most prosperous free-market economy in the history of man
suffers under the yoke of government regulations and our growing debt poses an
existential threat to the republic.
Ronald Reagan articulated a choice for America 50 years ago;
whether its citizens would embrace, “the ultimate in individual freedom
consistent with law and order,” or succumb to the attractive lies of statism
that lead to totalitarianism.
In Liberty,
Tea Party Patriots National Support Team
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