What would the Gettysburg Address be like, if given in 2011, and to the same level of honesty that Lincoln was used to?
“One Score and ten years ago Ronald Reagan transformed on this continent a new Order, conceived in Privilege and dedicated to the proposition that all real men are created wealthy. Now we are engaged in a great class struggle, testing whether that Order or any Order so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that Order might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, poor and lower-class who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the privileged rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored peons we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this Order under God shall have a new birth of riches, and that government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy shall not perish from the earth.”
