The Anatomy of Thatcherism. - book reviews

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Kenneth Minogue

The essence of conservatism is conveyed by the story of the Irishman who, asked for directions, replied: "If I wanted to go there, I wouldn't start from here." Liberals think they know where they're going, but they don't know where they've come from. As every conservative knows, the past is reality. It tells us what we really are.

This is why conservatives disdain grand theory. It leaves out what makes us what we are. Liberals see people as bones animated by abstractions such as rights, welfare, justice, advantage and disadvantage, utility, needs, etc. You can plan a society for abstractions, but real people won't fit into it.

Today, however, conservatism is out of fashion. The triumphant Reagan-Thatcher double act of the 1980s has given way to muddle in Britain and Democrats in America.

Worst of all: conservative ideas seem to have vanished like yesterday's dream. Can it only be yesterday that political scientists could write, as Kenneth Hoover and Raymond Plant did in 1989, "The agenda for both the Right and the Left is set by the terms of free-market doctrines that have displaced Keynesian and socialist conceptions in the discourse of modern political economy"? Four years later, the talk in Europe is all of "industrial strategies," and President Clinton is masterfully taking charge of the American economy. Economic and political nostrums are clearly as volatile as women's skirt lengths.

In these dire times, conservatives must return to their base in the world of ideas, and some recent responses to the fall of Margaret Thatcher are a promising start.

In his book Modern Conservatism, David Willets, for example, anchors conservatism in a balancing act between community and markets. Against the socialist and the liberal with their passion for replacing markets by administration, the conservative affirms the value of choice. Against libertarians, the conservative insists on a strong moral and legal framework protecting families and established institutions. Willets thus counterattacks the critics who think it a contradiction to support both economic freedom and moral restraint.

Such critics include Hoover and Plant, who argue in their Conservative Capitalism in Britain and the United States: A Critical Appraisal, "Conservative capitalism is a hybrid of two tendencies: the one oriented to the market-place and laissez-faire, and the other to institutions that constrain personal freedom in the name of order." This is an interesting confusion, because buying and selling is a central element of personal freedom, and such freedom cannot be enjoyed without a framework of legal order. Nor will legal frameworks work without a moral order, and that is why the family is so important. Indeed, some conservatives (myself among them) think that a free society needs not only law and morality, but also good manners. And nothing in this package constrains freedom.

Freedom under law is impossible except for a civil population firmly guided by appropriate moral beliefs. This point is more than just a bit of conservative dogma--it is the secret of modern life, so much envied by those in the Third World. Who can best teach these people the secret of freedom? All that liberals know is the principle of freedom itself, which seems to mean that anything goes. That way lies anarchy and corruption, and the end of the road is despotism. It is by no means a paradox to say that real freedom rests upon self-discipline, and this is the basic virtue which only stable families seem able to provide.

Marriage, for example, is an institution commonly supported by conservatives because it is an act of moral seriousness. The fact that the more casual cohabitations of contemporary life commonly fail to generate self-reliance in their children is recognized by conservatives as probably the most alarming problem of our time.

So it is a false paradox to charge conservatives with inconsistency when they insist on linking personal freedom with the moral order. The great enemy of this false paradox was Margaret Thatcher, whose dominance of British politics throughout the Eighties awoke Britain from its postwar slumbers. She was attacked as libertarian and "authoritarian" at the same time, and those who hated her could only explain her policies in terms of selfishness. One established philosopher indeed, Ted Honderich, was so enraged by this complex position that he attempted to identify the entire conservative tradition with nothing else but the human vice of selfishness. He was not alone.

Is it vice, however, to link rewards to how people perform? Has not the collapse of Communism taught a useful lesson about the fate of economies detached from incentives? Indeed, is it selfish to work for the things one wants for oneself and others? It would only be selfish if modern production were a zero-sum game, in which what I achieved meant that much less for you. Such a view is contradicted by the history of modern economic growth.

Margaret Thatcher gave her name an "-ism." But what was Thatcherism? The question is important because it may help to explain why conservatism triumphed in the Eighties and has fallen on evil days in the Nineties.