There is No Alternative (4 page)

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. The Warsaw Pact countries adopted broadly capitalist forms of government. By the end of the 1980s, more than fifty countries on every inhabited continent—Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Turkey—had set in motion privatization programs. Countries that remained nominally committed to socialism, such as China and Vietnam, discreetly reduced their public sector. Even the United States took its cues from Thatcher, embarking on schemes to denationalize public monopolies. In 2001, Peter Mandelson, a Labour MP closely associated with Tony Blair, famously said, “We are all Thatcherites now.” The current Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, once her sworn enemy, has recently decided that in fact he is a politician in her mold.
³

Thatcher's role in the great disenchantment was not limited to setting an example in Britain and encouraging others to follow suit. What she managed to do, more effectively than any other politician in history—including Ronald Reagan—was convey a very particular message about socialism. It was not only that socialism was an economically inefficient way to organize human societies. It was not only that communist regimes had in the twentieth century drenched the world in blood. It was that socialism itself—in all its incarnations, wherever and however it was applied—was morally corrupting. Socialism turned good citizens into bad ones; it turned strong nations into weak ones; it promoted vice and discouraged virtue; and even when it did not lead directly to the Gulags, it transformed formerly hardworking and self-reliant
men and women into whining, weak and flabby loafers. Socialism was not a fine idea that had been misapplied; it was an inherently
wicked
idea. This was Thatcher's signal contribution to the debate. It was a point she emphasized again and again: “In the end, the real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”
⁴

Now, this point had been made before and made by many. Of course it had. It has its intellectual origins in classical liberalism; among political philosophers it was most famously expressed by Friedrich von Hayek. But it had never before been made by a politician with Thatcher's skill at conveying
this aspect
of the case against socialism or by a politician with her dramatic presence and magnetism. Nor had it been made by a politician who was not American and whose message was not therefore inextricably conflated with what many imagined to be the American imperial project. Nor had it been made—most importantly—by a politician with her ability to project something unique onto the world stage: a radiant aura of unswerving moral certainty. Reagan shared her convictions about socialism, of course, and led a vastly more powerful nation. But Reagan's was a relaxed and genial personality; hers was an intense and wrathful one. He was thus unable to convey something she conveyed in full: a scorn and fury of Old Testament proportions with socialism and the moral corruption it wrought.

How much precisely did she contribute to the world's disenchantment with socialism? The answer to this question cannot be quantified, but roughly speaking,
a lot.
In doing so she affected the lives of billions, literally billions, of men and women.

Second,
she matters because she is widely perceived to have reversed the terminal decline of Britain. To understand the significance of this claim, it is necessary first to grasp what Britain once was: the rump of the greatest empire in history, the cradle of capitalism (in Max Weber's phrase), and from roughly 1815 to 1870 the world's only industrialized power. In 1870, Britain produced nearly a third of the globe's industrial output. In the words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm,

He is, by the way, not celebrating these circumstances; Hobsbawm is the world's greatest living Marxist historian, an unrepentant communist to this day. But about this he is quite right. Even America's dominance at the end of the Cold War pales by comparison. At the height of the Pax Britannica, a quarter of the world's population and land mass were under British rule. Let us not concern ourselves with the debate over whether this is a fact to be celebrated or lamented; important as this question may be, it is immaterial to the argument. The point is that for good or ill, Britain was by far the most powerful and influential nation on the globe. It was the world's undisputed premier naval power; it controlled the world's raw materials and markets; it had long been the world's leading scientific and intellectual power; it was the financial center of the world and the premier merchant carrier; it had invented the Common Law; it had invented modern parliamentary democracy. This list could be extended for pages; suffice to
say that for most of the nineteenth century, Britain excelled its fellow nation-states in virtually every category of economic, military, and political endeavor.

Although the process of decline was in evidence by the beginning of the twentieth century, until the close of the Second World War it could fairly be said that if Britain was no longer the greatest power on earth, it was at least a pivotal one. But in 1945, bankrupt, bled white, and exhausted after fighting two world wars, Britain retreated into itself. Undefeated by Hitler, Churchill was defeated in Britain. Clement Attlee, an earnest socialist who promised to reward the nation for its sacrifices by building in Britain a New Jerusalem, won the 1945 general election. His Labour government was by no means one of Bolshevik extremism, but it nonetheless radically changed the character of Britain, nationalizing major industries and public utilities and introducing both the welfare state and the culture to which such a state gives rise. This transformation—known as the postwar consensus—was accepted by Britain's Conservative Party and remained unchallenged until Thatcher's ascendancy.

Britain retreated from the world stage. The United States and the Soviet Union now dominated the world. The Empire commenced inexorably to dissolve. In 1956, the humiliation at Suez made it clear that Britain was no longer even a great power, no less a superpower. It is not an accident that British literature of this century is known for such titles as
Decline and Fall,
not
Rise and Shine.

By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded—choose your favorite cliché—as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable, and a living warning to Americans that the wages of imperial sin is death. “Britain,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remarked to President Gerald Ford in 1975, “is a tragedy—it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.” It was “a scrounger.” “A disgrace.”
⁶

In the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun once rose and set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labor unrest shut down public services, paralyzing the nation for months on end. At the height of the crisis, Thatcher, as leader of the Opposition, delivered an acrid speech to the House of Commons. Although obviously partisan, it is also accurate in every particular:

Britain had recently become the first country in the OECD to supplicate for a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
⁸
This was an almost unimaginable indignity, hinting that Britain was now in the category of nations to which UNICEF donates mosquito nets.

Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses.
⁹
The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don't want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you're always on strike, you never deliver.”
¹⁰

This was what had become of the world's greatest trading power.

Sometime in this period—the date is unclear and varies according to the source, but the story is almost certainly true—a gray, timorous functionary delivered a paper on economic policy to a gathering of British Conservatives. Britain, he argued, must take a pragmatic middle path. In the middle of his speech, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Opposition, interrupted. She stood up. She reached into her handbag, extracted a copy of Hayek's
Constitution of Liberty,
held it up before the audience, then slammed it on the table. “
This,
” she said, “is what
we
believe!”

Britain is now the richest country in Europe, and London once again the world's financial capital. Thatcher is widely perceived to be the reason for this.

I use the word “perceived” for a reason. I do not propose that anyone accept at face value the claim that Thatcher single-handedly reversed Britain's trajectory. The story of Britain's economic and geopolitical decline is exceptionally complex; it is not sure that it has been permanently reversed; and even if it has been, it would be, as Chou En-lai said of the French Revolution, too soon to tell. My own view is that the claim is at least partially true, and this is enough to ensure Thatcher's place in history. But I do not need to prove this beyond all doubt. The widespread perception that it is true is also a critical element of this story. Given the grip Thatcher retains over the world's collective political imagination, this legend matters because contemporary leaders—including yours—hope to emulate her example and appropriate her prestige.

This point is connected to my first. Without saying so explicitly, Thatcher conveyed through her words and actions a thesis: Britain's decline was not an inevitable fate, but a punishment
.
It was not, as many believed, a punishment for the sin of imperialism. It was a punishment for the sin of socialism. Thatcher proposed that in 1945 the good and gifted men and women of Britain had chosen a wicked path. They had ceased to be great because they had ceased to be virtuous. In ridding Britain of socialism, she intimated, she would restore it to virtue. She would make it once again worthy of greatness.

To a Western world preoccupied with guilt, decline and decay, Thatcher's message has a particularly significant resonance. It is hardly a secret that many of us are still wondering whether capitalism is the right path. It is the
only
right path, says Thatcher, and the only one men and women of virtue—not greed, but
virtue
—should take.

Third,
she matters because she is a woman. She achieved things that no woman before her had achieved, and she did so in a remarkable fashion, simultaneously exploiting every politically useful
aspect of her femininity and turning every conventional expectation of women upside down. In doing so, she refuted several millennia's worth of assumptions about women, power, and women
in
power. She is for this reason not only an important figure, but an immensely interesting one, so much so that she has passed into mythological status even before her death. And this point is related to the two before: The myth she created of herself is what enabled her so completely to capture the world's imagination and present her case to such transformative effect.

No other living politician can claim these achievements, and none enjoys this stature.

This
is why the hopefuls are visiting her, even if she is not quite sure who they are.

To place the rest of this book in context, we must take a biographical detour. Don't skim this part! You must understand where she came from to understand what she accomplished.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, above her father's grocery shop. If you look at a map of England, Grantham is about a third of the way between London and the Scottish border, slightly to the east of Britain's midline. Isaac Newton, too, was raised in Grantham, and in between, nothing of note happened there. Grantham was twice voted Britain's most boring city in national polls. It is known for its production of
diesel engines and road rollers. I was on a train that stopped there once. It is a flat, featureless town of red-brick houses, all roughly alike. As the train idled in the station, I wondered for a moment if I should get out to take a closer look. I peered from the rain-streaked window at the dreary expanse of low-slung brick buildings. In the distance lay a food-processing plant. I looked up at the slate-colored sky. I stayed in my seat.