Monday, April 08, 2013

IF THERE'S EVER A NEW THATCHER, SHE'LL HAVE TO BE ON OUR SIDE

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.

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.
Whereas now, um, everything's just ducky? Well, no. Here's Juan Cole's portrait of the present day
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.

... 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! ...
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:
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.

1 comment:

Victor said...

I don't think we're at the point where the insanity can be reversed yet.

It's to deeply entrenched.
And the next week won't be any help, just as Reagan's death wasn't.

She, like Ronnie, will be memorialized by the MSM on both sides of the pond.

Whatever good came out of their brand of Conservativism, if any, will be lauded.
And all of the bad things that have resulted, will be swept under the rugs, and the people pointing those things out will be called DFH Liberal Communists who have no respect for the dead, and are the true sexist pigs, because they're attacking an accomplished woman.

If there's any reversal, if there's enough time and resources left afterwards to make corrections, it will either take another, probably even more serious, global economic catastrophe (which, since nothing much was done to curb the appetites of the greedy in the past 5 years, is more of question of when, and not if), or a series fo cataclismic environmental disasters which will make people realize that we are ALL, indeed, in this together.
Which will take some time for regular people to digest, since it was Ms. Thatcher, who'll be lauded by the Reich-wing from now on, like Reagan has been, as some world transforming figure, famously said 'that there is no such thing as "society" - that we are all individuals, out for our own self-interest.'
That, like Reagans words about government being the least likely source of any help, will take years to wash out of the brains of the MSM pundits, who've been steeped in hagiography in Conservatism, their whole lives - if it even can be.

Barring those two catastrophe's, I don't see sh*t changing.

And Andrew will keep wankin' his Wee Lil' Sully off to Ronnie and Maggie, because they're the ideal parents he'd have wanted to raise him, discipline and spank him, and to compliment him when he behaves - all done to teach him how to be a good, obedient, Conservative boy.

I've come the the conclusion that all Conservatives are either sociopaths, or psychopaths.
Neither one of which is desireable in people in perilous economic and environmental times like these. And especially if they're the leaders, or people reporting on the leaders. And yet, that's what we have.

You don't go to war with the economy and the environment with the Liberal army you want, you go to war with the greedy, unempathetic Conservative sociopaths you have.

Which mean, in the end, we're probably much, much closer to the end as a species, than we were to our 3+ century prime, which lasted from the dawn of the Enlightenment, until the dusk of Thatcher/Reagan and their De-evolutions - or, better yet, let me call it, "The Un-enlightenment."