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The Thatcher Era in Perspective
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15181 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
5,242 Words |
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Alfred Sherman
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As Reagan's term of office comes to a close, his tenure will be subjected to critical review by opponents and supporters alike, the latter the more critical precisely because they had hoped for so much more and because the discrepancies between the ideal and the performance give them no rest. Because President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher were so closely identified in the public mind as defenders of private enterprise no assessment of the political fruits of the postwar capitalist renaissance can avoid equating Reagan's eight years and Mrs. Thatcher's first ten.
It study of the similarities is to explain more than it obscures, the differences need prior delineation. The standpoint from which the era is to be assessed needs to be made explicit if presuppositions are not to be smuggled in, however inadvertently. For example, I eschew the words success and failure because they suggest the possibility of success, if only one starts with the right policies.
In many catastrophic situations, however, there may be no right policies and little hope of success. The modern West is currently in crisis and there is no reason to take its continued existence as a given. It seems to suffer serious spiritual maladies, which are reproduced in its politics, economics, and behavior. The Marxists have by and large set the agenda for our discussion of social issues. Crime, drug-addiction, rape, child abuse, and all other ills are treated as though they were offshoots of economic and social "deprivation"--unemployment, bad housing, and so forth--and amenable to cure by government measures affecting institutions and material circumstances. This approach, however, is not thought through. If it were, the poverty of the materialist explanation would become apparent. Today's policy conservatives have yet to break free from the bonds of a social democratic consensus that is rooted in the Enlightenment, that age of rationalism that gave us the still powerful ideal of perfectible man, one who is simply waiting to be freed from those institutional trammels that are supported by the Christian faith.
So though I believe the post-1979 British conservative government (and its 1975-79 opposition, which preempted so many subsequent options) could have done substantially more, just as Reagan could, there is no certainty that they would have succeeded in reversing the tide of the last few generations. Should we dub Marcus Aurelius a failure for not having put the Roman Empire back on course?
Readers may ask, why, then, we "neoconservatives" or "radical reformers," or "Thatcherites," as we are variously called, tried so hard when we could never be certain that victory was really in the cards. And how do we explain the paradox that budget-cutting ideologues who backed Reagan and Thatcher--for example, David Stockman and Sir Keith Joseph--had grave doubts about achieving a conservative success, while at the same time, the complacent majority of conservatives--who were hostile or at best lukewarm supporters of Reagan and Thatcher and who doubted whether the ship of state could be turned around--could nevertheless now rally round faithfully and expect Reagan and Thatcher to succeed?
My explanation can only be subjective. Radical anti-Socialists, like others of the Right, have a sense of history, which makes us well aware that contemporary perspectives can turn out to have been misleading. Our roots are in stoicism; we are motivated to carry on
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