Rhetorical Outbursts

Name that speech:

[W]e must never forget that no government schemes are going to perfect man. We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.

There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back. There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country.

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But whatever sad episodes exist in our past, any objective observer must hold a positive view of American history, a history that has been the story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality. Especially in this [the 20th] century, America has kept alight the torch of freedom, but not just for ourselves but for millions of others around the world.

Will we keep that torch alight in the 21st century? I wish we still had leaders who spoke like this. It’s from Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech on March 8, 1983. I saw Wynton Hall quote from it this morning on C-Span. It’s one of the speeches in his latest book, Right Words.

What struck me is how he spoke of what was right with the American way, not just about what was wrong with the Soviet way. We need national leaders of Reagan’s stature to speak with this kind of clarity and optimism about this century’s struggle with totalitarianism — the Global War on Terror.

Fred Thompson? Listen and decide.