Another thought:
As discussed before, for most government leaders in the U. S., denunciation of Communism and public hand-wringing over an international Communist conspiracy during the Cold War was mostly a mask for furthering competition against the Soviet Union for economic influence in underdeveloped countries. At the same time, however, there was a minority of politicians who sincerely believed that the U.S. was in dire threat of conquest by the Soviet Union.
One such politican, evidently, was Ronald Reagan. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that, particularly during his first administration, Reagan and his advisors believed that there was a strong possibility of a conventional ground war with the Soviet Union being fought on American soil in the near future.
One weird consequence of this paranoia was the growth of the numerous militia movements around the country. While it was little publicized at the time, and even less remembered today, the Reagan Administration undertook programs to arm and train volunteer militia groups. These efforts helped give birth to the largely anti-government militias which exist today.
Many members of such right-wing paramilitary groups believe that the U.S. is in eminent danger of its own government installing a dictatorial regime. Among the sources for this belief were the various more-or-less clandestine operations the Reagan Administration undertook to draw up plans and otherwise prepare U.S. troops for combat within the U.S., to plan for internment camps, etc. Oliver North even drafted a proposal to place dissidents in camps if opposition to government policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador became too great.
Our policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the 80s also serves as a good illustration of the largely bogus nature of the U.S.'s anti-Communist pose. It was claimed throughout the 80s that the Sandanista government in Nicaragua was a repressive Communist regime. While hardly an ideal model of democratic government, the Sandanistas permitted opposition newspapers and independent newspapers. The government in El Salvador, which we were shoring up at the same time, did not.
There was an incident in the mid-1980s where a newsprint shortage in Nicaragua effected the opposition newspapers in the country. The Reagan Amdinistration cited this as proof of the Communist nature of the government there, overlooking that the newsprint shortage was impacting pro-government newspapers as well, and that a Communist dictatorship would not have allowed opposition newspapers to operate openly in the first place. The fact that the El Salvador government forbade oppostion newspapers was, of course, also overlooked.
The Contra movement in Nicaragua which the Reagan Administration financed was composed in large part of people left over from the former Nicarguan government, which the Carter Administration had listed as a major abuser of human rights. In the end the Nicarguan people did not stick with the Sandanista government, but it did not go with the Contras either. Instead a broad coalition government succeeded the Sandanistas. There is a fine irony here, as that coalition included the actual Communist Party in Nicaragua. The U.S. was more comfortable with a coalition government from which it could extract favorable terms for doing business, even one with a minority Communist element, than it was with an agressively nationalist government which pursued the country’s general economic self-interest.
This is purely a personal interpretation, but I suspect that some of this fear of the Soviets and of Communism generally amounted to the expression of an inferiority complex. Many people with deep seated feelings of inferiority make continual, inflated assertions about their importance and accomplishments. It seems to me that some–but by no means all–conservatives do the same thing in continually boasting about the greatness of the U.S. and its system, continually defending it even in the absence of detractors. It is as though they are eassuring themselves that they shouldn’t have these feelings of inferiority about their nation which secretly plague them.
And there is plenty of reason for suspecting that Reagan and many of his closest advisors had a deep-rooted, unspoken fear that America and its system was actually inferior. Documents from the Reagan Administration have shown that the government had produced projections that the Soviet economy–which was actually about a sixth the size of the U.S. economy in terms of gross domestic product, and smaller than Japan’s–was growing so rapidly that it would rank ahead of the U.S. by the end of the 1990s. Similarly, the CIA estimated that East Germany, which was roughly a third the size of West Germany, was outproducing West Germany. After the two nations consolidated, it was found that the grossly inefficient East German economy was only about a quarter the size of West Germany’s.
The U.S. had a long history of making such inflated estimations of Communist nations and their accomplishments. In the years after World War II it was estimated by the U.S. government that the troops in East Germany outnumbered the ones in West Germany by two to one. In fact, they were about equal in number, and it was overlooked that the Western forces were vastly better equipped; the West German army was fully motorized at a time when roughly half of the East German army’s vehicles were drawn by horses.