1964: A Distant Mirror of Today’s Situation

American Greatness ^ | 19 Nov 2020 | Bruce Bawer

[Rummyfan]

As in 1964, the Republican candidate is right about virtually everything on which he and his opponent differ, while the Democrat, if put in the Oval Office, will surely soon lose his luster.

The other day, while puttering around the house, I was listening to the latest Steven Crowder program on YouTube. I was apparently not listening very attentively, because I failed to notice when Crowder’s show concluded and YouTube, in its inscrutable way, began playing another video.

It was Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing.”

It wasn’t my first encounter with the speech, which Reagan delivered on the NBC network in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. I’d read it a long time ago. But I’d never seen Reagan deliver it. So I sat down and watched.

It was magnificent. No wonder it had the immense impact that it did. Reagan would later say that it had drawn more fan mail than any performance he’d ever delivered in a Hollywood movie. It turned him overnight from an actor into the standard-bearer of the conservative movement and a leading prospect for high political office. Two years later he would be elected governor of California.

[Rummyfan]

If you’ve read Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography, you know that Johnson was a thug and vulgarian of the first order, at once crude and cruel, adept at stealing elections, at humiliating his subordinates, at crushing anyone who got in his way, and at parlaying political power into personal wealth. Goldwater, by contrast, was an authentic gentleman of uncommon decency. As Reagan said in his speech, “I’ve never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or a dishonorable thing.” At his own business, noted Reagan, Goldwater instituted profit-sharing, health-insurance, retirement, and day-care plans; at Christmastime during the Korean War, he ferried Arizona soldiers on leave back home from L.A. in his private plane. “This is not a man,” Reagan concluded, “who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war.”

And yet Goldwater was demonized as a warmonger. And we got the odious LBJ....

[brownsfan]

Too many differences:

The American public is much more liberal.
The Democrat party is further left, and anti American.
The media is openly biased.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

LBJ was the worst president of my lifetime. Got us into Vietnam with no goal and no idea how to get us out. But he got Reagan’s Time For Choosing speech out and that lead to one of the most consequential presidencies in American history. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

[Rummyfan]

LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and Obama. They have all been disastrous in their own ways. It is like the time after the Civil War.... But how long can The Republic survive a run of damaging presidents?

[cgbg]

The media is openly biased.

In 1964 the media was total hate towards Goldwater--complete scorched Earth.

Here is a typical New York Slimes article of the period:

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/19/archives/republican-mayor-says-goldwater-is-a-fascist.html

There were thousands more just like it.