LONDON–People who confuse changing fashion with advancing wisdom are pleased that Margaret Thatcher is behind in the polls. But she has been there before, and has then won three elections. She probably will win a fourth, but not because of any factor as flimsy as affection. Most voters feel about her as a critic did about Hugh Walpole: “You are glad he lived, but very grateful that you didn’t know him.” Not since the younger Pitt in the 1790s–not, that is, in the democratic era–has a prime minister held office through an entire decade, as she did in the 1980s. She is in her 12th year as prime minister, the longest run since the 1832 reform bill began, gingerly, the democratic era. The secret of her success is, paradoxically, her annoyingness.
She set out to be a disruptive influence, to enlarge and energize the engine of social change in modern society, the middle class, that vessel of commercial values. As The Economist says, she is the only postwar prime minister who has tried to use her office for “Zeitgeist politics.” She has toiled to change the temper of the times by re-educating the public, to teach the virtues of striving and the vices of government intervention. Capitalism’s revolution came first to Britain but was never finished. It did not sweep away aristocratic lassitude or habits of deference, replacing them with a money-driven meritocracy. Thatcher is capitalism’s follow-through.
Columnist Peregrine Worsthorne says Britain in 1979 was a more compassionate society, just as a hospital, concerned with the sick, is more compassionate than a soccer team organized to win. For decades before Thatcher, people went into politics for the same reason people went into the Salvation Army, to help the helpless. But, writes Worsthorne, “while it is perfectly proper for a society to think about the unfortunate, it must never be encouraged to think like them.”
A decade, although a long electoral run in a democracy, is a blink in a nation’s life. Still, Thatcher has changed her party from one of hierarchy and paternalism to one of egalitarianism and meritocracy. And the experience of being shellacked by her three times has changed the Labor Party from socialism to sentimentalism, a misty middlingness. Intellectually the party accepts the rationality of markets, but regrets it, and thinks counting costs is “uncaring.”
The Salisbury Review, a conservative journal ambivalent about Thatcher, takes its name from the l9th-century prime minister whose greatness, says the Review, “consisted in doing as little as possible for as long as he could.” That does not describe Thatcher, whose energy arouses in the Review both “admiration for her will, and alarm at her determination to assert it.” As a Conservative M.P. has said, “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.”
She has a restless mind, voracious for information and constantly curious about how things work. But as regards ideas, she considers her pantry quite sufficiently stocked already, thank you. Her sergeant-major political style is an extension of her personal manner, and both arise from her stern doctrines. They have made her the most consequential peacetime prime minister since Disraeli and the only P.M. whose name denotes an “ism.” David Marquand calls Thatcherism a British Gaullism born out of a despair comparable to that which engulfed France’s Fourth Republic. Like de Gaulle, she is a charismatic conservative nationalist. Max Weber put into currency the word “charisma.” He said modern societies generate iron cages of bureaucracies that suffocate change until charismatic leaders emerge.
In the 1960s and 1970s governments’ hubris grew and competence shrank. While complacent Keynesianism made governments confident they could manage economies, new forces (in Britain, growing union power) were preventing that. Thatcher came to power just as the Carter presidency was giving rise to theories of government overload: democracies were becoming ungovernable because competing demands were producing gridlock.
Welfare states were embryonic in the 1880s. By the 1980s governments had to face the fact that entitlements expand more constantly and rapidly than do the economies on which they depend. In the 1980s the politics of wealth-creation at last took precedence over distribution. This sunburst of common sense has coincided with Thatcher’s tenure, which began in May 1979. In May 1981, Francois Mitterrand became president across the Channel and began keeping his socialist campaign promises–nationalizations, enriched entitlements, reflation to pay for it all. This was Europe’s first serious socialist program in a long time, and probably the last for at least as long. Reality forced Mitterrand to make a U-turn that eroded consent.
Postwar concensus: The lady is not for turning. She is called “confrontational” but Britain is less riven by conflict than it was when governed by socialists, who constantly speak of communitarian values. Socialism and Tory corporatism–two elements of the postwar consensus–produced what can be called the individualism of aggregates. Unions, bureaucracies and industries scrambled to capture the state, to bend public power to private purposes. Thatcherism, by expanding the sway of market forces, has reduced divisiveness by reducing the political dimension of the allocation of wealth and opportunity.
It has been said that for Americans time is linear, connoting advance and progress, whereas in Britain time is circular, a constant returning. A Cambridge don says, “America is total possibility. Britain is total remembrance.” Thatcher says: Forget it. The antecedent of the pronoun “it” is the postwar consensus. Intellectuals call her an outsider, but outside of what? From the center of power she has treated the intelligentsia as peripheral. She prefers the practical, energizing middle class that thinks concretely, as does she, the former chemistry student at Oxford. The cult of the amateur, with its disdain for science and commerce, has been rejected by the politician who has come closest to making a profession of being P.M.
She will not be there forever. She is mortal. She has much heart, but all hearts stop. However, she does resemble that gruff Englishman who, when he suffered palpitations, would thump his chest and bellow “Go on, go on!” until his heart obeyed. She intends to go on and on.
