Reading Dinesh D'Souza, a former Reagan speechwriter who also wrote a very good biography, is a reminder that Reagan was interested in ideas, and aware of the importance of ideology. He cast the anti-communist struggle in clear ideological terms--something Bush still has not done vis-a-vis the threat of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism--and offered a countervailing set of principles. That was why so many "Mensheviks" became Reaganites in the end--anti-communist socialists were part of the Reagan consitutency, hard as that seems to believe for those outside. Many of the "Scoop Jackson Democrats" who became neoconservatives shared these intellectual origins.
One other point, to add to D'Souza's analysis. Reagan realized the significance of the fact that communism was a slave system and the Soviet Union a slave society. He worked with American labor unions to organize in Eastern Europe. He had a very good relationship with the AFL-CIO, which did the groundbreaking work with Solidarity in Poland, the crack that brought down the Iron Curtain. Rationale: workers in the Soviet Union were not paid as well as workers in the west, remember the joke, "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work?" There was a mutual interest for labor unions and the USA to organize labor behind the iron curtain. Workers were actually better off in a free society than a communist one, and would respond.
The ideological basis for communism, the welfare of working people, would be shown to be mistaken. The workers in the workers state would become American allies. They would bring down the slave system from within.
It worked.
