There is No Alternative (51 page)

Begin with a broader question: What do political figures who matter have in common? Why, as I asked at the beginning of this book, do some of them become larger than life?

Here is my answer. The political figures who matter have two rare gifts. First, they are able to perceive the gathering of historical forces in a way their contemporaries are unable to do. What do I mean by “the gathering of historical forces”? I mean, they are able to
sense the big picture.
Lenin was able to discern a convergence of trends in Czarist Russia—the migration of the peasants, the rise of revolutionary consciousness, the weakness of the Czarist government, the debilitation inflicted upon Russia by the First World War—and to recognize what this convergence implied: The old order could now be toppled—not merely reformed, but destroyed
.
Czar Nicholas II could not perceive this. It is thus that Lenin now matters and Nicholas II does not.

Second, when promoted to power, those who matter are able to
master
these historical forces. Chiang understood perfectly that China was vulnerable to communism and understood as well precisely what communism in China would mean. He perceived the forces of history. But he was unable, for all his energy and efforts, to master them. And so, tragically, he does not matter.

Churchill perceived the forces of history and then mastered them. In 1933, Hitler was widely regarded outside of Germany as
no more than a buffoon. Churchill knew better. His assessment of Hitler was at the time astonishingly prescient and singular. He perceived the unique danger of Nazism when others could not see it or refused to believe it. He was steadfast in his warnings. When at last Churchill acquired power, he discharged his responsibilities in such a fashion as to gain him immortality.

When politicians matter, they matter because of these gifts.

Thatcher had these gifts. She perceived—as did many of her contemporaries—that Britain was in decline. She perceived that the effects of Marxist doctrine upon Britain had been pernicious. But unlike her contemporaries, she perceived that Britain's decline was not inevitable. And she perceived too that socialism was not—as widely believed—irreversible.

Simultaneously, she sensed a wider and related tide in history that no other leader in the Western world, apart from Reagan, sensed at all. She understood that the Soviet Union was far from the invulnerable colossus it was imagined to be. She sensed, in fact, that it was unable to satisfy the basic needs of its own population. It was corrupt, moribund, and doomed.

 

Having perceived the gathering of historical forces, she mastered them. She reversed the advance of socialism in Britain, proving both that a country can be ripped from a seemingly overdetermined trajectory and that it takes only a single figure with an exceptionally strong will to do so. She did not single-handedly cause the Soviet empire to crumble, but she landed some of the most devastating punches of the Cold War and, extraordinarily, emerged unbloodied from the fight.

There is an even larger sense in which Margaret Thatcher perceived and mastered the forces of history.

Since the eighteenth century, two views of political life have vied for dominance in the Western world. They are views about the hypothetical state of nature—the condition of mankind in the absence of government. The first view is that of Thomas Hobbes: The life of man in the state of nature, he wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The second is that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”

Hobbes wrote
Leviathan
during the English civil wars of the seventeenth century. Such horrors as he had seen, he believed, arose because of the absence of government, and in particular, the absence of a government powerful enough to overawe men who would otherwise be fractious and dominated by self-interest.

Leviathan
is a defense of a central and commanding power in political life. It is sometimes understood, for this reason, as an argument for totalitarianism. A close study of Hobbes suggests little to encourage this view. The form of this central power was to Hobbes largely a matter of indifference. He favored a monarchy, but this is not his key point. His key point is that there is a choice
between anarchy and a powerful state. And since, as he could plainly see, anarchy was awful, he chose a powerful state.

This powerful state is the Leviathan, and it is a Leviathan because it possesses—in theory, at least—a monopoly on violence.
Leviathan
to this day remains a critical justification for the existence and the primacy of the nation-state. This was a primacy Thatcher sought instinctively and ferociously to preserve.

It is perverse that Hobbes is widely seen as providing a defense of absolutism in political life, for the historical trail between his thought and the unspeakable evils of the twentieth century is almost impossible to map. Neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor Hitler, nor Mao thought in his terms; they did not justify their rule by an appeal to a state of nature in which men would find themselves enemies to one another.

These were men, instead, who had read Rousseau.

It is Rousseau's view of the state of nature, not Hobbes's, to which the great and awful events that began with the Terror and ended with the Gulag may be traced. In Rousseau's view, man is born both good and noble; if he finds himself in chains, it is because these chains have been imposed by government. A syllogism is implied. If these chains have been imposed by government, these chains must be snapped. If these chains must be snapped, violence must be employed—otherwise, men would free themselves. If violence must be employed, it must be employed without restraint. Every revolutionary movement from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first has seen the logic of this position. It is inexorable.

I do not believe Margaret Thatcher was a careful student of Hobbes—or of Rousseau, for that matter. To judge from her autobiography, she too misunderstood Hobbes's point. Raisa Gorbachev, apparently, displayed an interest in the copy of
Leviathan
on Thatcher's bookshelf during her visit to Chequers; Thatcher worried this might signify that Mrs. Gorbachev was a particularly hard-line communist. But while she did not properly understand
what Hobbes had written, she was, nonetheless, in instinctive agreement with his views. Political life, Thatcher believed, must be organized around nation-states. These states must possess a monopoly on violence. The authority of the nation-state must not be compromised from the outside, by transnational bodies such as the European Union, or from the inside, by groups such as the National Union of Mineworkers.

Thatcher's career may be viewed as a series of rebukes to those who would seek to diminish the authority of the nation-state and to reduce its monopoly on violence. She is thus not only one of the greatest enemies of socialism the world has known, but one of the greatest enemies of anarchy, as well. Again, she perceived the forces of history, and again, she mastered them.

If you need to be reminded why anarchy is awful, one word will suffice: Iraq.

That word brings me to my next point. Thatcher was enormously prescient. But she was not supernaturally prescient, and it is a mistake to assign to her the status of a secular saint. On some issues, she was simply wrong. Iraq was one of them. By “wrong,” I do not mean the invasion of Iraq was ultimately wrong. I don't know yet whether it was, and this is not the place for this debate. I mean that she did not weigh properly the real risk that invading Iraq would lead to anarchy, and she did not foresee what would be required to contain that anarchy. In this sense, she was wrong.
²⁷¹

On other issues—critical issues—she was bizarrely oblivious. This is often the case, even among the political figures who matter most. If some politicians are given the gift of seeing into the loom of time, they are rarely given the gift of seeing it whole. Churchill
saw with astonishing prescience the danger posed by the Nazi regime; in 1946, he saw with the same prescience the descent of the Iron Curtain. About India, however, he was blind, and he was blind again in thinking the call for social reform in postwar Britain could be ignored.

The world's attention now is focused on the conflict with radical Islam. Rightly so. But let us be frank: About this, Margaret Thatcher was blind. In this regard, she doesn't matter. I looked everywhere for evidence that she had even considered the issue carefully. I could not find it.

Who the hell had ever heard of Islamic extremism in 1979? I had, for one: I was only eleven years old, but I had seen newscasts about American hostages with hoods over their heads. Yet by all accounts, these images made a bigger impression on me than they did on Thatcher and those around her.