in its values and an optimism in its historical vision’ – echoing Abraham Lincoln’s description of liberty as ‘the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere’.
His conservative critics warned that by forcing right-wing despots to civilise themselves he was effectively hastening their downfall, to be followed by the installation of revolutionary dictatorships instead. The argument was summarised most bluntly by an obscure academic, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her 1979 article ‘Dictators and Double Standards’, published in the neo-conservative magazine Commentary. ‘Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking’, she wrote, ‘prevent intelligent men of good will from perceiving the fact that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalisation, and that they are more compatible with US interests.’
Although Kirkpatrick was in fact a Democrat, her article found an admiring audience among gung-ho Republicans as they prepared for the 1980 presidential campaign. ‘I’m going to borrow some of her elegant phraseology,’ Reagan told a friend after reading Commentary. ‘Who is she?’ He found out soon enough: by 1981 he had appointed Jeane Kirkpatrick as his ambassador to the United Nations, and was using her distinction between jackbooted ‘authoritarians’ and Stalinist ‘totalitarians’ to justify sending arms to the bloodstained regime in El Salvador. Even when three American nuns and a lay worker were murdered by the Salvadorean junta, Kirkpatrick expressed no sympathy at all for the victims but continued to recite her glib theory of autocracy. ‘It bothered no one in the administration that she had never been to El Salvador,’ the Washington Post observed, ‘and that one of the authorities she cited for her view of the strife there was Thomas Hobbes, an Englishman who had been dead for three centuries.’
Kirkpatrick shamelessly applied double standards of her own. Whereas right-wing tyrannies might take ‘decades, if not centuries’ to mature into democracies, she said, there was no example ever of a left-wing dictatorship making such a transformation. Hardly surprising, given that the world’s first Marxist state was only sixty-three years old at the time; had she waited another decade or so, examples galore would have refuted the argument. Nor did the Iranian revolution bear out her thesis that it was better for the United States to prop up tottering autocrats than to back reformers. As Professor Stanley Hoffman pointed out in the New York Times, postponement of democratic reform ‘prepares the excesses, sometimes the horrors, of the successor regimes’.
It has been said that opposition parties do not win elections: governments lose them. The rule applies in autocracies, too: hatred of the Shah, rather than universal Iranian longing for medieval theocracy, prompted the national rejoicing at the Ayatollah’s coup. Three months later, in Britain, Margaret Thatcher won the votes of millions of electors who probably had little enthusiasm for (or indeed understanding of) monetarism and the other arcane creeds to which she subscribed. All they wanted was the removal of an etiolated, exhausted government which had no raison d’être beyond the retention of office. Jim Callaghan’s administration had been limping heavily since 1976, when it was forced to beg for alms from the International Monetary Fund, and later that year he had formally repudiated the Keynesian theories of demand management that were accepted by all post-war governments, both Labour and Tory. In 1956 the Labour politician Anthony Crosland confidently declared that ‘the voters, now convinced that full employment, generous welfare services and social stability can quite well be preserved, will certainly not relinquish them. Any government which tampered with the basic structure of the full-employment Welfare State would meet with a sharp reverse at the polls.’ Twenty years later, following the onset of stagflation and the end of the long post-war boom, Callaghan informed the Labour Party conference that the game was up:
What is the cause of high unemployment? Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce. There are no scapegoats. That is as true in a mixed economy under a Labour government as it is under capitalism or communism. It is an absolute fact of life which no government, be it left or right, can alter … We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. But I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step. Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment. We have just escaped from the highest rate of inflation this country has known; we have not yet escaped from the consequences: high unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.
Callaghan’s regretful message soon became Thatcher’s triumphant catchphrase, and was later adopted as the mantra of American evangelists for untrammelled global capitalism: there is no alternative.
At first, the new Tory prime minister proceeded with caution. There were plenty of old-style Tory gents in her Cabinet, and few people guessed what she would do to sabotage the post-war consensus – not least Thatcher herself. It was often remarked that, even when she had taken up residence in 10 Downing Street, the new prime minister continued to sound like a politician from the opposition benches, or even an impotent street-corner orator. When she censured her own employment secretary on the BBC’s Panorama programme, the Economist complained that ‘it is doing no good to the cause of party morale for the Cabinet’s most strident critic to seem to be the prime minister, especially on the highly public platform of a television interview’. Help was at hand, however, as neo-liberal soulmates cheered her on from across the Atlantic: in the same editorial, the Economist reported ‘the arrival of the ideological cavalry’ from the United States to rally the troops and stiffen the sinews.
‘The importance of Margaret Thatcher stems not from the fact that she is a woman and one who is both an attorney and the first-ever British Prime Minister with a science degree,’ Kenneth Watkins wrote in Policy Review, journal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Her importance stems from the fact that she has a profound conviction, based on her birth, family upbringing and experience, that a successful free enterprise economy is the only secure basis for individual freedom for even the humblest citizen … If Margaret Thatcher fails, the door in Britain will be open for the headlong plunge to disaster in the form of the irreversible socialist state. If she wins, and win she can, she will have made a major contribution to the restoration of Britain’s fortunes and, in so doing, will inscribe her name in the history books as one who will have led the way not only for her own country but for the entire Western world.
Another conservative Washington think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, despatched Professor Herbert Stein, who had chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, to spend three weeks in Britain during the summer of 1979. He returned in high spirits. ‘The regime is dedicated to restoring the work ethic, initiative, personal responsibility, and freedom,’ he wrote in Fortune magazine.
It stresses these values not only as spurs to GNP growth but also as ends in themselves – quite simply the right way to live … The government wants to correct what it regards as the intellectual errors that have dominated British thinking for the past forty years. It finds the Socialist and Keynesian doctrines by which Britain has been governed since World War II to be intellectually uncongenial and economically self-defeating. To replace these obnoxious doctrines, it is resolved to preach what it holds to be economic truth and sense.
Even more gratifyingly, she won the approval of the two economists she most revered, both of them Nobel laureates. Milton Friedman, founder of the ‘Chicago school’ of monetarism and free-market theory, wrote an ecstatic column for Newsweek (‘Hooray for Margaret Thatcher’) urging American politicians to heed the British example. ‘What happens in Britain is of great importance to us. Ever since the founding of the colonies in the New World, Britain has been a major source of our economic and political thought. In the past few decades, we have been moving in the same direction as Britain and many other countries, though at a slower pace. If Britain’s change of direction succeeds, it will surely reinforce the pressures in the United States to cut our own government down to size.’ Three months after Friedman’s rousing hurrah, Forbes magazine sought a verdict from the other