How I’ll remember Ronald Reagan

I’m a Republican because of Ronald Reagan, but not for purely ideological reasons. Reagan demonstrated to America that, with the courage of one’s convictions, unyielding action can change the course of history. In my mind, one of the Gipper's greatest virtues was his Manichaean position on communism. To Reagan, communism was not a matter of debate, it was not a philosophy to be reasoned with or nuanced. Communism was evil and those who promoted the Marxism system were keeping people in chains. So when Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and later demanded the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it wasn’t some kind of political ploy. It was the genuine sentiment of a man who wanted to see people free.

There’s no better commentary on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the legacy of Reagan than P.J. O’Rourke’s essay “The Death of Communism” from his 1992 book “Give War a Chance” (faithfully re-typed here). Here’s the setup for the conclusion: it’s November 1989 and P.J.’s watching everybody dismantle the Wall with ball-peen hammers when an East German security guard sticks his hand through a hole, asking for a piece as a souvenir:

The hand of that border guard – that disembodied, palm-up, begging hand…I looked at that and I began to cry.

I really didn’t understand before that moment, I didn’t realize until just then – we won. The Free World won the Cold War. The fight against life-hating, soul-denying, slavish communism – which has shaped the world’s politics this whole wretched century – was over.

The tears of victory ran down my face – and the snot of victory did too because it was a pretty cold day. I was blubbering like a lottery winner.

All the people who had been sent to gulags, who’d been crushed in the streets of Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, the soldiers who’d died in Korea and my friends and classmates who had been killed in Vietnam – it meant something now. All the treasure that we in America had poured into guns, planes, Star Wars and all the terrifying A-bombs we’d had to build and keep – it wasn’t for nothing.

.....

And the best thing about our victory is the way we did it – not just with ICBMs and Green Berets and aid to the contras. Those things were important, but in the end we beat them with Levis 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. They may have had the soldiers and the warheads and the fine-sounding ideology that suckered the college students and the nitwit Third Worlders, but we had all the fun. Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.

It made me want to do a little sack dance right there in the Cold War’s end zone. We’re the best! We’re the greatest! The only undefeated socio-economic system in the league! I wanted to get up on the Wall and really rub it in: “Taste the ash-heap of history, you Bolshie nose-wipes!” But there was nobody to jeer at. Everyone over there was in West Berlin watching Paula Abdul videos.

God bless you Ronald Reagan.