Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation tells National Review Online readers why he believes American conservatives need another “Great Communicator.”

As Republican presidential hopefuls consider what to say and how to say it leading up to the 2016 election, they would do well to examine the speech that transformed Ronald Reagan into a national political leader overnight.

“A Time for Choosing” was Reagan’s work from beginning to end. He researched it, he wrote it, and he delivered it without a teleprompter or a manuscript, relying on a packet of 4-by-6-inch note cards on which he had written, in his own shorthand, key phrases, quotes, and statistics.

The “choice” before the American people, he began, is between two starkly different visions of America and the kind of government we should have. One side says “you never had it so good” and the nation is at peace. But, Reagan asked, do they really mean peace or do “they mean we just want to be left in peace”? There can be no real peace, he said, when “we’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

If we lose our freedom, history will record with the greatest astonishment that “those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.” He sharpened the differences between the two sides and the importance of the choice. It’s time, he said, to ask ourselves “if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.”

Those freedoms are based on one idea: “that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.” The choice before the people, Reagan stated, is simple: “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Any conservative, then or now, would be hard pressed to present a more concise argument against the progressive paradigm.