As the nation celebrates Ronald Reagan’s birthday on Feb. 6, it is worth reflecting on his wisdom to illuminate how to face our nation’s present crises. Known as The Great Communicator, one particular speech from Ronald Reagan offers a blueprint on how to dismantle the woke ideological agenda that is stifling our country: the “Evil Empire” speech.
President Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, was a powerful indictment of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime and its threat to the free world. In the speech, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and a “focus of evil in the modern world.” He also spoke about the importance of freedom, morality, and justice, and the need to oppose secularism, abortion, infanticide, and communism.
The Soviet Union reacted to Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech with outrage and condemnation. Soviet officials saw the speech as a direct attack on their country and its ideology, and they accused Reagan of being a warmonger and a threat to world peace.
The Evil Empire speech was important because it directly challenged the Soviet Union’s moral legitimacy. In America’s preceding relationship with the Soviet Union, the Washington political class treated the Soviets as an equal superpower upon which we shared duties in governing world affairs. This was true particularly in the aftermath of World War II when the Allies established the post-war international order.
But in calling the USSR an “evil empire,” President Reagan rejected this paradigm. The Soviet Union was not a moral equal to the United States and they had no illegitimacy to govern eastern Europe. As such, once the façade of legitimacy collapsed, the Soviets was exposed as a tyrannical and illegitimate regime. The reclamation of moral superiority over the Soviets inspired dissidents behind the Iron Curtain to stand up to the totalitarian state, setting the stage for a series of pro-democracy movements that would ultimately win the Cold War.
Today, America faces a new threat to its freedom and values: the “woke” ideology that has taken root in American media, academia, and business. This ideology is a new kind of evil empire that seeks to divide Americans on the basis of race, gender, and sexual preference, and to impose its own values on the rest of the country. It seeks to silence dissenting voices, to punish those who do not conform to its dogma, and to impose its own version of truth on the rest of us.
Woke ideology is morally illegitimate because it is antithetical to the core Judeo-Christian values that America was founded upon: liberty, equality, and rule of law. Like Reagan did to the Soviet Union, conservatives must pierce its moral claim to rule by declaring it evil.
Much like the Soviets, the woke left will respond with virulent indignation. Their ability to impose their political will rests on an illusion that they own moral authority to rule. But an unapologetic proclamation that the woke ruling class is an evil empire will puncture the myth they’ve created that their credentials entitle them to assume positions of power across society’s elite institutions.
By upholding fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, conservatives are the heirs of the Founding Era and the successive generations who fought to preserve America in the proceeding centuries. Our current generation is tasked with continuing adherence to our constitutional system; thus, conservatives must rebuke the woke ruling class’s hostility to American founding principles.
Though woke ideology permeates the American ruling class, conservatives must reject its claim to rule. The institutional elites that propagate wokeness are doing so against our nation’s constitutional design, consequently forfeiting their moral legitimacy. As such, conservatives should heed Ronald Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union and explicitly repudiate the moral illegitimacy of the woke governing agenda.
Brian Hawkins is a James Madison Fellow with Hillsdale College in Washington D.C.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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