Here's how Britain looked to Andrew Sullivan in the dark moment before Margaret Thatcher, a woman he clearly still worships, took power:
Yes: the British left would prefer to keep everyone poorer if it meant preventing a few getting richer. And the massively powerful trade union movement worked every day to ensure that mediocrity was protected, individual achievement erased, and that all decisions were made collectively, i.e. with their veto. And so – to take the archetypal example – Britain's coal-workers fought to make sure they could work unprofitable mines for years of literally lung-destroying existence and to pass it on to their sons for yet another generation of black lung. This "right to work" was actually paid for by anyone able to make a living in a country where socialism had effectively choked off all viable avenues for prosperity. And if you suggested that the coal industry needed to be shut down in large part or reshaped into something commercial, you were called, of course, a class warrior, a snob, a Tory fascist, etc. So hard-working Brits trying to make a middle class living were taxed dry to keep the life-spans of powerful mine-workers short.Whereas now, um, everything's just ducky? Well, no. Here's Juan Cole's portrait of the present day
To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.
In some part because of Margaret Thatcher's policies, the share of British income of the top 1% had increased from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005. That is, the wealthiest 620,000 Britons take home twice as much of the national income every year as they did before Thatcher. The share of the working and middle classes plummeted in the same period.There can't be another Thatcher (or another Reagan) in our near future because Thatcherism/Reaganism is winning. As Cole says, "eople celebrating that she kept the British pound and declined to enter the Eurozone, thus saving Britain from the current continental malaise ignore that the adoption of Thatcher-like policies on the continent is what produced that malaise," and even Sullivan concedes the point:
... Half of the increase in income inequality at the top has gone to professionals in financial services, even though moving money around isn't all that helpful to the economy compared to actually making something of value, and even though the financial sector was enabled by deregulation to engage in vast fraud and unsound investment practices, destroying the world's economies in 2008.
... At the same time, tax rates on the wealthy have plummeted, which means that the government cannot mitigate the consequences of the inequality, and has been forced to cut services for the poor and middle classes.
... In 1980 14% of the UK was in poverty. Today some 33% suffer multiple forms of financial insecurity.
In 1980, five percent of households could not afford to heat the living areas of their homes. Last winter, 29 percent had to turn the heating down or heat only one or two rooms. Thatcherism has literally made them cold! ...
She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, money-making opportunist.We can't have another right-wing Thatcher or Reagan because we've lived in their economic and foreign policy world ever since their era. Matt Yglesias essentially has it right:
Listening to contemporary conservatives, you often get the sense that they want to just rerun the policy agenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But today the leading global problem is climate change, not Communism. That's not because Communism isn't bad, it's because the Cold War is over. Privatizing state-run industrial companies won't jump-start growth. That's not because state-ownership of industrial firms is a good idea, it's because we don't have any. Reducing the power of labor unions to curb cost-push inflation doesn't fix anything because labor unions aren't powerful anymore. When you triumph, you triumph. But history doesn't end, new issues come to the front of the stack. We have a crisis of inadequate demand. We have the problem of providing health care to an aging population. Trying to apply the "lessons of Munich" to Vietnam was a disaster. Trying to apply the economic policy solutions of a generation ago to the problems of today is equally inappropriate.And if there's anything "insane" about the governance of the West right now, it's Thatcherism/Reaganism applied to an economic downturn that needs just the opposite medicine. It's trying to continue applying "the lessons of Munich" to Islamicists using tactics that regularly kill civilians.
It's almost unimaginable that a Reagan or Thatcher of the left could ever rise up in America, Britain, or the Continent -- entrenched interests won't allow it -- but it's be our aside that will reverse insanity, if anyone will.
