Reagan didn’t put the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history by launching wars of aggression or by mimicking Soviet central planning. He did it by helping America get back to being what it was always meant to be: prosperous, powerful, peaceful.

I watched Reagan help turn this country around. I delighted watching him do it with that good humor and sunny disposition that drove the Left nuts. I still do.

Long story short — too late, right? — Reagan fought communism with capitalism.

So of course, it worked.

Communism can only win by default when its victims are too brutalized or too uncaring or sometimes just too ignorant to resist. //

Our country over the last two decades or so has taken a dark turn into what we might call “soft Communism.”

No walls, no barbed wire, no minefields keeping us locked in, but something even more insidious.

Wokeness, cancel culture, domestic spying, and social-credit-type controls from Big Tech and even the banking system …

… these things are the communism of my adulthood, just like the military might and propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were the communism of my formative years. //

But you can’t fight communism, whatever form it takes, with nothing but good wishes and some personal perseverance. You’ve got to fight communism with capitalism, just like Reagan taught me all those years ago — and that means first and foremost having a sustainable business model.