“For most of the past three decades my favourite American political speech has been Pat Buchanan’s keynote speech at the RNC in Houston in 1992.”
A good contender is Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” Speech, October 27, 1964. Clear and prophetic.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964
Yes.
And Eisenhower’s televised farewell address.
Reagan’s speech was good. But this speech was the BEST ever....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_State_of_the_Union_Address
Highlights include awarding Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom and a truly sickening moment when some bitch tore up this most excellent speech.
Quotes from Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech:
the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.”
A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.
The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment.
This is a man[Barry Goldwater] who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such,” and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he’d load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964
Quotes from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 RNC keynote speech:
the 1980s were not terrible years in America. They were great years. You know it, and I know it. And the only people who don’t know it are the carping critics who sat on the sidelines of history, jeering at one of the great statesmen of modern time, Ronald Reagan.
Out of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise, Ronald Reagan crafted the greatest peacetime economic recovery in history – 3 million new businesses, and 20 million new jobs.
It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down, and Europe was reunited. It was under our party that the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the captive nations broke free.
Under President George Bush, more human beings escaped from the prison house of tyranny to freedom than in any other four-year period in history.
Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.
Albert Gore said, the “central organizing principle” of governments everywhere must be the environment. Wrong, Albert! The central organizing principle of this republic is freedom. And from the ancient forests of Oregon and Washington, to the Inland Empire of California, America’s great middle class has got to start standing up to these environmental extremists who put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers, and jobs.
There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill, in Northern New Hampshire in a town called Groveton – tough, hearty men. None of them would say a word to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by one. They were under a threat of losing their jobs at Christmas. And as I moved down the line, one tough fellow about my age just looked up and said to me, “Save our jobs.” Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who came running up to me and said, “Mr. Buchanan, I’m going to vote for you.” And then she broke down weeping, and she said, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl. What am I going to do?”
There were the people of Hayfork, the tiny town up in California’s Trinity Alps, a town that is now under a sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside nine million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl, forgetting about the habitat of the men and women who live and work in Hayfork. And there were the brave people of Koreatown who took the worst of those LA riots, but still live the family values we treasure, and who still deeply believe in the American dream.
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture-war-speech-speech-text/