Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated how important the competition with the communists was in terms of aligning the interests of the political classes with

Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated how important the competition with the communists was in terms of aligning the interests of the political classes with society at large during the cold war. The population needed to feel that western society was superior to the communist alternative hypothesis in order to keep communism from getting a serious foothold in the west. Things didn't need to be perfect, but they needed to be much better than on the other side of the wall. That tension was very much load-bearing to the western democracy and with the gradual breakdown of the Soviet union in the late '80s, something just snapped.