Young Americans For Freedom: Governor Ronald Reagan (1975)

Source:YAF- Governor Ronald W. Reagan (Republican, California) addressing YAF in 1975.

"Ronald Reagan gives this address to Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at a 1975 meeting.  He talks about how to use bold banners, not pale pastels, when activists advance conservative ideas."

Source:Young Americans For Freedom

Back in this time period of 1974-75 just as then Governor Ronald Reagan was leaving the state house in California and looking into running for President in 1976, he described his politics as libertarian. His politics were very similar to Senator Barry Goldwater. These were both "get big government out of our wallets and bedrooms" Republicans and Barry Goldwater would probably be called a Libertarian today. 

Representative Ron Paul comes the closest to Goldwater-Reagan today. Foreign policy would be where they are different and both Goldwater and Reagan believed in at least some forms of taxation as well. And would be probably be (excuse the term, but this is how it is) shitting bricks if they were alive today and saw what had happened to the Republican Party. 

If Barry Goldwater and Ron Reagan were alive today, instead of seeing a party that they built a lot of it on themselves, a party that was around to fight big government. Instead Reagan and Goldwater they would see a party that was promoting big government. Thanks to the Christian-Right and Neoconservatives and all their new big government ideas, with their borrow and spend fiscal policy of the last decade. 

Ronald Reagan was talking about a new Conservative Republican Party that would be dominated by Classical Conservatives, Constitutional Conservatives, Federalists. That wouldn't make race, ethnicity, cultural, or gender, as issues in their party, but instead constitutional conservatism, that could appeal to Constitutional Conservatives of all racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, or economic backgrounds. That would take on the left-wing of the Democratic Party. And he accomplished a lot of what he was talking about in 1980, when the he won the presidency and the Republican Party finally won back the U.S. Senate and picked up 30 seats in the U.S. House.