Reagan named the Soviet enemy as those who "preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the Earth."
"They are the focus of evil in the modern world," he said.
Quoting C.S. Lewis, he warned that the greatest evil "is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."
That is the struggle now before us.
We do not fight men with nuclear missiles or red armies of freezing conscripts waiting to march through Europe. Instead we fight against an evil empire that has arisen in our cities and its red army of front groups that insinuate their ideas into every institution they take control of.
Conservatives have lost the ability to lay out the stakes in the clear and simple language of a Churchill or a Reagan, to let the people know that they are not choosing between politicians, but choosing whether they will be able to have the car of their choice, the doctor of their choice, the meal of their choice and the book of their choice.
Choice, the word that once used to define the American experience, has been relegated to a debate over whether mothers have the right to kill their children. That choice is still the focus of a national debate. But the billion other choices that millions of people make have been taken off the table.
The conflict is simple and straightforward. It is the struggle over whether America will be an open system or a closed system.
In an open system, you choose the life you live. In a closed system, your life is mandated for you. An open system believes in the genius of the individual while the closed system believes in the genius of the visionaries of the ideology and the moral purity of the bureaucrats who implement it.
The open system is a door that you can choose to lock or leave open. The closed system is a cell door with wardens and guards who will let you out when they choose to.
In the open system you are in control. In the closed system you are being controlled for your own good, for the greater good, for the good of the state and the five-year-plan and the policy paper and the sub-paragraph of the regulation of page 50,261 as reinterpreted by a Federal judge in a court ruling that you never even heard of.
In the open system, you are a free man or woman standing at an open door. In the closed system, you are one of countless numbers in a book and a database. A number has been given to you at birth and your life is an interaction with other numbers that rate your behavior and your potential until your death when you are given your final number-- the sum total of your property that will be claimed by the state.
It is such an epic struggle and it is so very late in the day.
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