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.