Marketplace of Ideas Blog

On Oct. 27, 1964, actor Ronald Reagan gave this speech as part of a nationwide TV program on behalf of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency.

History records that Goldwater was waxed in the presidential election. And yet, 16 years later, Reagan became president, Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate, and American politics was changed. It all started with this speech, which includes:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. 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 capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. …

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. …