For Project One I analyzed Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.” He chose voting Americans as his audience and his exigence was the progressive agenda of President Johnson. He saw those progressive principles as a threat, and he used emotional appeals and appeals to the patriotism of his audience to persuade them into seeing those progressive principles as being dangerous as well. The constraint was that he would not be able to reach every voting-aged American with his speech or his ideals, instead he needed to focus on the ones whose views were more in the middle and able to be shifted if he gave them the right nudges to believe that progressive ideas would be harmful to them.
I decided to do this project in the form of a speech transcript like the one I used of Reagan’s speech to analyze. At first I had wanted to do it in the form of a children’s book, but I felt like there was a lot more depth and analysis that needed to be done with Reagan’s speech than a children’s book would allow. The other reason I chose to do it in the form of a speech transcript is that it’s relevant to politics today. We really are at a time for choosing once again with the progressive agenda of Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate, on the rise while other politicians try to do the same thing that Reagan did in 1964: demonize and create fear around the effects of progressive policies.
My goal was to both look at how Reagan used his speech to manipulate his audience, but also the effects it had overtime as he became an economic idol to some political groups. In addition, I wanted to point out how the policies he pushed for in his speech would harm the average person in the idea of Hacker’s New Economy where the risk is taken from the employers and placed upon the employees. If there is no force keeping corporations regulated, they are going to minimize their own risks and maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else.
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