A Clear Choice

One year.

366 Days.

A trip around Old Sol.

It will be a Tuesday. November 3, 2020.

Election Day in America.

It is a choice not for those of us who have woken up every morning since January 21, 2017 (or November 9, 2016, take your pick) and wondered ‘just what the fuck happened?’

Was this about race, sex, money and class that put us in the realm of Trump? Yes, it was, but it was also something much deeper, a darkness that was unleashed long ago in a forgotten patch of history, a speech given by a man who had just switched allegiances two years earlier, but was standing in the spotlight of which he had been in for nearly 25 years prior.

His name: Ronald Reagan. Who had been a Democrat his whole life until 1962, when he campaigned for Richard Nixon’s famously failed campaign for Governor of California. Four years later, Reagan would become governor of the same state. But it was his nominating speech at the 1964 GOP Convention, endorsing Barry Goldwater’s campaign and platform (over the strenuous objections of George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller and others), that was soundly rejected in November of that year, but set the stage for our modern politics of today.

Sixteen years later, the ‘movement conservatism’ started by Goldwater manifested itself in Reagan. After two terms as Governor of now the largest state in the nation and having barely missed out on upending Gerald Ford in 1976, Reagan pushed every button…