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Selects: Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s, Part 1
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Reagan's Anti-Communism and the Reagan Doctrine
At 8:01 · chapter starts 4:25
With the '80s mood set, Josh begins the historical narrative at its natural starting point: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan's career arc — from B-list Hollywood actor to California governor to president — included a formative encounter with fashionable Hollywood communism that hardened into an absolute worldview. Reagan came to believe that capitalist democracy and communism were existential opposites; one had to win and one had to lose, and he intended to make sure capitalism won. That conviction crystallized into the Reagan Doctrine: the US would support any opposition to communist governments or revolutions, globally, through money, arms, training, and covert operations. Chuck and Josh agree this ideological certainty was the fuel that made everything that followed possible.
Reagan's worldview, forged in Cold War Hollywood, was binary: capitalist democracy and communism could not coexist on Earth. He believed it so deeply he was willing to break the law repeatedly to stamp communism out wherever it appeared, especially in America's own backyard.
