May 31, 2023
On this date in 1988, Ronald Reagan told Soviet college students about freedom – and the future
Thirty-five years ago today, on May 31, 1988, Ronald Reagan, who was in the last year of his presidency and was in Moscow for the last of his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, delivered a landmark speech to an audience of students at Moscow State University, a hub of scientific and technical research.
The occasion was unprecedented, and the speech itself a masterstroke: with palpable enthusiasm, Reagan talked up the ongoing technological revolution that heralded a new information age, and urged the young Soviets to embrace freedom and peace so that they could be part of it.
Reagan outlined some of the many ways in which our lives were being – or were about to be – transformed, from weather forecasting to instant computer translations to the mapping of the human genome.
All of these developments, he underscored, were products not of government planning but of independent experimentation by individuals. And their achievements, he pointed out, would have been impossible without the gift of freedom.
Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace.
It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people.
It is the right to dream – to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer….
Indeed, to read Reagan’s speech now is to be hurtled back to a time of remarkable hopes – of hopes that, remarkably, came true, only to end in ashes. Reagan hailed “the winds of change that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China,” which was “getting its first taste of economic freedom.”
Would Reagan ever have imagined that thirty-five years later, China, while still a Communist dictatorship (and a genocidal one at that) would be an economic powerhouse rivaling the U.S., with the yuan on the verge of replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency?
Painting a sunny portrait of American freedom, Reagan boasted that, during election campaigns, America’s “1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and 1,700 daily newspapers – each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the Government – report[ed] on the candidates, grill[ed] them in interviews, and br[ought] them together for debates,” after which “the people…decide[d] who w[ould] be the next President.”
In 2023, who can read this without contemplating the endlessly repeated lies – e.g., about Trump’s Russian “collusion,” the January 6 “insurrection,” and the Hunter Biden laptop – that make today’s mainstream U.S. media look like the Soviet-era Pravda?
There was more. Reagan waxed sentimental about American schoolrooms in which children were “taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and so on.
Again: flash forward to the 1619 Project, Drag Queen Story Hour, and second-grade lessons in gender identity.
Also, Reagan celebrated the American justice system. “Go into any courtroom, and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power,” etc. Alvin Bragg (Donald Trump prosecution), anybody?
Reagan even had good words for American colleges, where you could witness “an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can be done to correct them.”
Alas, even during Reagan’s presidency the terms of these “discussions,” particularly at elite institutions, were almost entirely controlled by radical-left professors – and neither Reagan nor any of his ideological confrères imagined how young people indoctrinated by those profs would end up transforming America.
Reagan’s excitement about the information revolution was patently sincere. He was right to recognize that it would transform the world in ways that would enabIe oppressed people to resist tyranny.
What it’s also done is to provide to Americans – to those, that is, who are willing to see – a glimpse into the sinister recesses of the Deep State. In addition, it has put at everyone’s fingertips the entire history of the world, including a catalog of all the grisly facts about twentieth-century Communism – despite which millions of elite college grads prefer socialism to capitalism.
Alas, what Reagan didn’t count on was that, if the Soviet bloc did fall, something valuable to the West would be lost – namely, the moral clarity of standing for human freedom.
Reagan, the eternal optimist, foresaw a 21st century in which the information revolution would free all the oppressed peoples of the world and bring everyone into a peaceful, prosperous community of nations – led, of course, by the United States.
He didn’t foresee the online social media that would prove emotionally harmful for American kids and that would foster almost unprecedented political division among American adults.
And he didn’t foresee that the megacorporations founded by the Internet pioneers of Silicon Valley – who for him had been the very embodiments of American liberty – would end up financing socialism.