A Time for Choosing

By Steve Buckstein

Did you choose between a left or right in last week’s election? If that phrase sounds familiar, perhaps you watched an emerging leader utter it 50 years ago last month.

In 1964 an actor named Ronald Reagan gave what has become known simply as “The Speech” on behalf of his ill-fated Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater.

The half-hour TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” wasn’t able to propel Goldwater to the Presidency, but it is credited with launching Reagan’s political career and his eventual landslide victory in 1980 against a sitting president, Jimmy Carter.

You can watch The Speech online. Here are two of my favorite lines:

“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.”

And…

“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 age-old dream—the ultimate individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

I didn’t fully appreciate these concepts then; I do now.

Steve Buckstein is Senior Policy Analyst and founder of Cascade Policy Institute.