Thursday, April 18, 2013

Liberal, Not Conservative: The Tragedy of Margaret Thatcher

For the past seven days, the newspapers of the world have been plastered with photographs of Margaret Thatcher.

In a way, this alone is testimony to her achievements and import. It is hard to think of any politician anywhere - let alone a British Prime Minister - who exerted greater global influence over the last fifty year than did Mrs Thatcher.

But Mrs Thatcher's national and indeed international importance lies not so much in her deeds, as in the way that she personified an ideology that purported to be universal - and to all intents and purposes succeeded in being just that.
She led through ideas, and insofar as she came to embody those ideas, they gave her a reach beyond the normal span of a successful political life. That complex of ideas (now commonly termed "neoliberal") were so totally defined by their association with Mrs Thatcher that they have hence become known as Thatcherism.

Whereas her fellow traveller Ronald Regan understood this new approach intuitively, Mrs Thatcher grasped them conceptually and repeated them as such with great success - for it is concepts, not intuitions, that transcend time-zones, languages and nations. So what are these ideas that constitute Thatcherism?

Most fundamentally:
* an extreme, almost religious, individualism;
* a critique of the state and of state-collectivism, derived almost in its entirety from Hayek; and
* an unabashed and wholly uncritical adherence to free-market liberalism, along with the privatisation programs it advocated as its proxy.

Her unique fusion of these three ideas comprises, to my mind, the ongoing global legacy of Thatcherism.

Domestically, this complex of ideas was allied to a rigorous British nationalism, a contempt for European social democracy, and a deep loathing of communism, trade unionism and any other form of institution captured (in her mind) by socialists - local government being, perhaps, the best example.

Moreover, the sheer ideological consistency of Thatcherism was bolstered by an almost preternatural determination to carry out her vision and policies.
There is little doubt that when the entire post-war capitalist system in the West collapsed in the 1970s, Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues were among the first politicians in the developed world to recognise the crisis and respond.

Chosen as the first female leader of the Conservative party in 1975, and then elected as the first female British Prime Minister in 1979, Mrs Thatcher faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Since the early 1960s, Britain had been a basket case, paralysed by falling productivity, rampant inflation, a wage-price spiral and unprecedented trade union militancy. The growth rate in Britain trailed far behind its European neighbours, and many Britons feared being relegated to the status of a second- or third-class nation.

It is thus part of her enduring legacy that by the end of Mrs Thatcher's term in office, Britain had recovered its place at one of the world's leading powers and the most influential country in Europe.

It was the perceived success of the economic rescue job that Mrs Thatcher performed on the UK that gave her international cachet - from Chile to China, her advocacy of market-based solutions to social problems became the dominant political orthodoxy.

The British turnaround did indeed look remarkable, as the Economist recently eulogised: the UK's "inflation rate fell from a high of 27 per cent to 2.4 per cent in 1986, the number of working days lost to strikes fell from 29 million in 1979 to two million in 1986."

Thus, its leader concluded, "what the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less."

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