One thing about Ronald Reagan that struck me time and again was his obvious,
visceral loathing of communism. For him it wasn’t just a difference of
opinion about economics or governance: he saw through the whole thing to
its essentially anti-human nature. And this was at a time, we all too
easily forget, when plenty of people in the West — I think a majority of
the intellectual classes even as late as the 1980s — didn’t mind communism
at all, thought in fact that it was just the ticket, if perhaps not for the
USA, at least for poor counties like Nicaragua. Reagan had the firmest,
clearest, truest moral compass of any modern President. May he rest in
peace.