In the 1960s, 70s and 80s Ronald Reagan, with the daily encouragement and support of the growing conservative movement, led a worldwide counterrevolution to roll back
Communism. In that successful struggle he had the support of many coalition partners who were traditional supporters of the Democratic Party.
Your grandfather’s Democrats once branded themselves as the party of the working guy: Pro-union, pro-American manufacturing, pro-infrastructure, and Anti-Communist. However, today’s New Democratic Party looks nothing like the Anti-Communist party of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and labor leaders Lane Kirkland and George Meany.
With Ronald Reagan’s leadership, support, and encouragement American unions, with Lane Kirkland at their head, provided Poland’s Anti-Communist Solidarity movement with material, political, and moral support throughout its decade-long struggle, including for the election campaign that brought Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to power. This contribution was in keeping with a long tradition of assistance to the cause of free labor around the world, including in the communist world.
Ronald Reagan and his allies sent copy machines, broadcasts on radio and TV, pamphlets and more to help break the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact and free Eastern and Central Europe.
However, as Communism was being defeated in Eastern and Central Europe, with the help of the Democratic Party’s traditional allies in the American labor movement, Capitol Hill Democrats, led by Joe Biden, were doing everything they could to impede President Reagan’s plans to defeat Communism in our own hemisphere – particularly in Central America.
As Peter Wehner pointed out in Sept. 4, 2008, article for the Wall Street Journal:
In the early 1980s, the U.S. was engaged in a debate over funding the Contras, a group of Nicaraguan freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the Communist regime of Daniel Ortega. Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of President Ronald Reagan's efforts to fund the Contras. He also opposed Reagan's efforts to send military assistance to the pro-American government in El Salvador, which at the time was battling the FMLN, a Soviet-supported Marxist group.
In fact, wrote Mr. Wehner, decade after decade and on important issue after important issue, Mr. Biden's judgment has been deeply flawed.
And Joe Biden’s judgement (along with the judgement of his then-Boss Barack Obama) has been equally as bad on supporting the freedom movement in Iran.
Mariam Memarsadeghi explained in an article for Tablet Magazine:
The irony of the free world’s post-Trump reality is that those who were motivated to safeguard freedom in America now have in Biden a president following a progressive playbook that treats democracy as just one political system among others. Dressed up as “realism,” the strange union of postmodern leftist ideology with Western corporate interests accepts at face value the sovereignty and legitimacy of the world’s most brutal and anti-American regimes, even when they commit genocide. The fable of American guilt is used to actualize undergraduate cultural relativism, which is in turn used as a tool to gain advantage by partisan political alignments. It is identity politics on the world stage, the prioritization of one Khashoggi killed by Saudi Arabia over 1,500 protesters killed by the Islamic Republic or 1 million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps.
For the Iranian people, Biden’s repeat of Obama’s betrayals is made all the worse because of the open failures of the Iran deal—which the new administration is choosing to repeat nonetheless. Appeasement 2.0 is being led by the same Obama team that traded the aspirations for freedom of the Green Movement in Iran and later the people’s uprising against the dictator Bashar Assad in Syria for the phony “peace” of kicking the can of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program down the road for a few years under U.S. protection.
Joe Biden might make the right noises about right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression in Cuba, but his record over decades is that he will not support America doing anything that might actualize those aspirations. Indeed, where Ronald Reagan was an unabashed opponent of Communism and proponent of pro-democracy movements everywhere, Joe Biden has been more likely to stand in the way than help when others seek our assistance to achieve the liberties guaranteed in our Constitution and actualized through our Declaration of Independence and revolution.
Ronald Reagan
Poland solidarity movement
Cold War
anti-communism
Cuba protests
Warsaw Pact
Contras funding
Iran freedom movement