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The Cynically Shifting Shape of an “Evil Empire”
Republican President Ronald Reagan gave his legendary “evil empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983, when the Soviet premier was the soon to be deceased Yuri Andropov, the first of two very short reigns after the death of Leonid Brezhnev. The other was Konstantin Chernenko, who would be succeeded just over a year later by Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked to reform and ultimately dissolve the Soviet Union.
The point of all this context is that the empire Reagan dealt with was hardly running on the same full tank of evil that the people from East Berlin to Birobidzhan had to deal with. Meanwhile, there was a young and ambitious KGB officer in Leningrad named Vladimir Putin hard at work monitoring consular officials and other foreigners as Reagan delivered his speech at Orlando in 1983.
Today, all too many of those Evangelicals who applauded Reagan’s evil empire speech, and their ideological descendants, believe Vladimir Putin to be a valuable conservative leader against liberal secular humanism and a culture warrior against broadening acceptance of civil rights, including for women and minority, immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities.
For continuity’s sake, former Nixon speechwriter and Reagan White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan published this argument…