blogging on this and that…

Peter Hitchens has written a compelling piece for The American Conservative regarding The Myth of Margaret Thatcher.  I have tried to catch everything he writes since being so impressed with his book The Rage Against God.  It’s not just that I am sympathetic to his viewpoint; it is that he is also a terrific writer.  He demonstrates this most clearly in his recent article when he describes the state of Great Britain just one generation after Thatcher left office.

Her economic achievements look thin in an age where it is generally recognized that manufacturing industry is still important after all. She closed a lot of subsidized coal mines, steelworks, shipyards, and car factories. But at least they provided work for male heads of families.

Britain today still has a vast state-employment sector, but it consists of hospitals, local government, and education establishments. There are legions of homophobia monitors and contraceptive outreach workers—not wholly frivolous examples of real posts, often with large salaries, sustained by public money. Just beneath that is a gigantic welfare state that absorbs the entire annual product of the national income tax. Currently the country is convulsed in debate as to whether it is right or just to set an upper limit on welfare payments of roughly $40,000 a year per household, the equivalent of rather more than $50,000 a year in taxable earned income.

Meanwhile in the areas where the coalminers and steelworkers once toiled, gaunt young men who have never worked and never will work smoke marijuana or inject heroin untroubled by an emasculated police force, and their sisters have babies outside wedlock, adding to the enormous number of fatherless families dependent on state handouts for their narrow lives.

British state education, based on the principle that social equality is much more important than knowledge, annually turns out tens of thousands of some of the most ignorant and unemployable teenagers in the industrialized world. Uncounted numbers of Poles, Romanians, and citizens of the Baltic Republics are granted free access to Britain thanks to the European Union’s merging of all its nationalities. They do the low-paid essential jobs that British teenagers spurn—or the jobs which British employers prefer to give to foreign workers, and not just because they are cheaper. In small country towns in agricultural areas, Latvian Polish shops and cafes flourish, and Russian is spoken commonly in the streets.

It is strange to think that, having supposedly won the Cold War, we have so spectacularly lost control of our borders to a foreign power and can no longer even decide who is allowed to live on our national territory. What sort of victory was this, if it was one?

Political correctness is written into national law, in the form of an Equalities Act that mandates its provisions throughout the public sector, and to anyone who has any contracts with that public sector—which in practice means almost everyone. One of its principal “equalities” is an insistence that Christianity shall have no more status than any other religious faith. In practice, it often has a lesser status, as a prevailing multiculturalism generally makes the authorities afraid of upsetting Muslims.

His very good question seems to be, how far reaching must a leader’s influence be and how long should their influence be felt in order for them to be considered great?  Peter argues that the present state of Great Britain is enough for one to grow suspicious of Thatcher’s greatness.  More so, it may not be that she was ineffective as a leader but that she ignored the root of the problems she tried to address.  This is repeatedly a chief flaw of conservative leaders and an excellent observation, indeed.  Such questions are worth considering when we think of her counterpart in America, President Ronald Reagan.  I posited in a recent post that we cannot expect any single leader to change the character of a nation.  That is a choice nations make, as a whole, over the course of an entire generation.  We can, however, expect our leaders to lead by taking the first true step.  Peter’s argument is compelling, but so far I stand by my original statement. 

Also worth mentioning is the difficulty in comparing the lasting influence between liberal leaders and conservative leaders.  Liberal leaders tend in practice to create a legacy with longer influence due to their willingness to codify their views in some new government program or bureaucracy.  We can think of President Franklin Roosevelt and Social Security.  We can think of President Lyndon Johnson and Medicare.  Often nations wanting, perhaps even needing, to escape such legacies even two or three generations later find it nearly impossible.  Genuinely conservative leaders, of which there are seemingly few, tend to instead spend their efforts trying to reduce the scope of the existing Leviathan and fight against the establishment of new generational programs, entitlements, and bureaucracies.  This makes it far easier for nations to turn away from and forget those leaders, thus halting their influence. 

On the one hand, Peter is probably correct, certainly reasonable, to be suspicious.  He is certainly correct to remind us that leaders – even good ones – are merely human and repeatedly fall short of what was truly needed.  On the other hand, is there a better compliment for a conservative leader than to say they did not bind a nation, needing to address new and different problems two and three generations later, to their legacy?