One of the first things the Republicans are going to do after today’s election is mount a search for Ronald Reagan. This is going to be an important expedition in the two years before the next presidential election. The search is signaled in Commentary Magazine, which just put in the mail a November issue with a look-him-in-the-eyes cover photograph of the Gipper. The headline is: “If Ronald Reagan Were Alive Today, He Would Be 103 Years Old.”

Commentary’s authors, Henry Olsen and Peter Wehner, reprise the fealty so many Republicans are paying to Reagan and explore how to “move beyond” the 40th president. Bret Stephens, in the Journal, is out with a piece saying “Reagan was not God.” No doubt about it, but Reagan had the jump on the Father of All Mercies when it comes to the Free Trade Union Movement. This is the element to the Reagan story that, for my money, has the most to offer the current crop of Republicans.

Today’s GOP stars, after all, are fluent in free market economics. They are warming to sound money. They oppose high taxes. They’re onto constitutional fundamentals. But the wisdom of the anti-communist labor unions, not so much. Reagan had this down to the ground. He’d been president of the Screen Actors Guild in the years the communists tried to take over Hollywood. Reagan beat them. And he used the experience when, as president, he went up directly against Soviet Russia.

Anti-communist labor operated through an organization called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Its founder, Jay Lovestone, sent to Europe after World War II an organizer called Irving Brown. Brown was in effect the commanding general for our side in the battle to organize labor in liberated Europe. He got Marshall Plan aid past the communist dockworkers. In 1968 his labor unions helped defeat the communist students’ attempt to topple the French Fifth Republic.

It was Reagan who eventually gave Irving Brown the Medal of Freedom. President Kennedy understood the import of the Free Trade Union movement, too. When JFK went to Berlin in 1963, his first stop was at a meeting of anti-communist labor. He met with Lovestone and the AFLCIO’s George Meany. Lovestone suggested that when JFK went to the Rathausplatz, he should tell the crowds “Ich bein ein Berliner.” Kennedy took the advice, and the rest is history.

It was with Lovestone’s labor confederation that there eventually affiliated a little known union in Gdansk, Poland, called Solidarity, which cracked Soviet rule in the East Bloc and drove through the heart of international communism the stake of free labor. Anti-communist labor leaders — epitomized by Meany and his successor, Lane Kirkland — were experienced, savvy men and women. They were no Republicans. But they were master negotiators. They warned against dickering with our enemies.

How we could use labor leaders like that now. I made this point when President Obama went to Berlin in 2008 during his first presidential campaign. His entourage was without the kind of savvy that Meany and Lovestone brought and that Reagan had imbibed at the Screen Actors Guild. By the time Reagan was president, of course, he was no longer a Democrat. The Democrats, he often said, left him. Those that stayed with him came to be called Reagan Democrats.

Who is going to fill that part of the big tent for the Republican? It’s not going to be an easy search. Senator Rand Paul is reaching out to minorities in a game effort. Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Paul Ryan are leading on immigration. That’s all terrific. The only leader in the GOP who has made an overt effort to reach out to Big Labor is Sarah Palin, who had held a union card and whose husband was, at one point, a union official. She sought openly to woo labor to the GOP cause, without, through no fault of her own, much success.

It may be a vain quest in an era when the dominant sector of the labor movement is public employees. They see their future as extracting ever more money from the taxpayers. The fact is, though, that if the search is on for Ronald Reagan, one of the places to find his spirit is in labor. It was his unwavering partner in his victory over an ideological foe of everything for which America stood, a point these columns like to keep alive. Particularly at a time when our country is at war. It’s hard to imagine that Reagan would have forgotten, even at 103.