TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051589/05158900.000

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 6.5 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 90

Thatcher for President


By Michael Kinsley


    The woman at the Wales Tourist Center in London could rent me
a car for three days but not for two days, doubted it was allowable
to pay for three days but return the car after two, and anyway
didn't have the right kind of vouchers, could I please come back
tomorrow. To any longtime American Anglophile, everything about
this episode -- the saleswoman's sweet, bovine unreason, the
infinite lack of rush, the commercial hopelessness of a Wales
Tourist Center seemingly intent on keeping you out of Wales --
dripped with nostalgia for a lost civilization: pre-Thatcher
Britain. Life isn't much like that anymore. Ten years after
Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, an episode far more
characteristic of the present moment, and also true, is seeing a
waiter from a fancy restaurant chasing up the street after a
pinstripe suit, waving a small object, shouting "Sir! Sir! You left
your telephone on the table."

    Is it hypocritical for an American liberal who never cared for
Ronald Reagan and thinks George Bush is a bad joke to admire
Margaret Thatcher? Her latest biographer dismisses the American
reaction to Thatcher as one of "drooling effusion."

    The British themselves are more divided. There are few outright
swooners. And the complaints resemble familiar complaints against
the Republican Administration that has ruled America during most
of the Thatcher era. She has created, say both the left and the
traditional right, a vulgar, selfish, money-obsessed society,
drained of more humane values. Her prosperity has been selective;
the gap between haves and have-nots has increased. She has ignored
the environment, allowed the public infrastructure to rot, starved
the universities and other worthy institutions and causes that
depend on public funds. For all her talk of freedom, she is an
authoritarian outside the economic sphere and has shown contempt
for civil liberties. The Thatcher boom itself, say some, is a
mirage, and they offer statistics to back themselves up.

    There is something in all of this. But even the most left-wing
journalist would have a hard time saying with a straight face that
he misses the days (just three or four years ago) when unions
forbade the use of computers at newspapers. Even the opposition
Labor Party isn't proposing to renationalize all the companies that
have been sold off to private shareholders or to take back the
formerly state-owned houses that have been sold to their tenants.
Even those put off by the glitz and the greed of Thatcherworld
wouldn't really like to return to the gloomy, hangdog "British
disease" atmosphere of the postwar period.

    Reagan never attempted a social transformation of America of
this magnitude. That is partly because it wasn't necessary, but
partly because he lacked Thatcher's principled determination.
Thatcher's biographer Hugo Young says her greatest gift is
"inspirational certainty." Reagan had inspirational certainty too,
but of a different sort. His inspirational certainty was oblivious
to reality, allowing him to call for a balanced budget through
eight consecutive years of failing to propose one. Her
inspirational certainty is oblivious to popularity, allowing her
to produce a government budget that's actually in large surplus.
Fiscal policy is one area of governance where the wrong principles
are often better than no principles at all. That is one good reason
even a Reagan-Bush skeptic can admire Mrs. T.

    For all the seeming parallels between the Conservative regime
in Britain during the 1980s and the Republican one in America, and
for all Thatcher's alleged admiration of Reagan, in an important
way the two societies have changed in opposite directions. Thatcher
has taught the British people self-discipline. Reagan and Bush have
taught Americans self-indulgence. After the past three American
presidential elections, it is unthinkable for an ambitious
politician to call on the citizenry -- or any sizable subset of it
-- to make the slightest sacrifice for the good of society or its
own future prosperity. Thatcher, by contrast, positively delights
in delivering bad news and stern sermons. "After almost any major
operation, you feel worse before you convalesce. But you do not
refuse the operation." That typical bit of Thatcher rhetoric is not
the kind of metaphor that comes out of the Peggy Noonan
poetical-presidential-puffery machine. Nor is it
sheep-in-wolf's-clothing mock toughness on the order of "Read my
lips, no new taxes." If leadership means leading people where they
don't at first want to go, Margaret Thatcher is a leader; Ronald
Reagan was not, nor is George Bush.

    Both Reagan and Thatcher nurtured their legends with small yet
symbolic military triumphs early in their tenures. But contrast
Reagan's famous victory in Grenada with Thatcher's in the
Falklands. Grenada was conquered before most Americans even knew
Grenada existed. But it was more than a month from the time the
British task force sailed to retake the Falklands from Argentina
to the time the war was won. Whatever the rights and wrongs of
either war, announcing the prospect of a battle is leadership;
announcing a victory is not. Whether America will actually defend
its freedom with blood and money when called upon is -- for all the
martial rhetoric and credit-card defense spending of the 1980s --
unproved.

    Even after ten years and three election victories, Margaret
Thatcher is not a beloved or even an especially liked figure in
Britain. She never has been. And yet -- despite a midterm slump in
the polls -- she would probably win a fourth election tomorrow, and
will probably win one two or three years from now. "Although a
populist," writes Young, Thatcher is "the ultimate argument against
the contention that a political leader needs, in her person, to be
popular." There are many explanations for Thatcher's successful
unpopularity that are specific to Britain: the parliamentary
system, the weakness of the opposition, the role of the Queen as
an alternative sump for public adulation, a cultural willingness
to be bullied (or, to use the preferred term, nannied).

    But surely even the coddled and petted American voter could
respond to a politician who did not go whoring after popularity,
who offered spinach instead of candy and who asked for respect
instead of love. Such a politician would not have to be a
conservative -- or even a woman.