The ideological world of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

The ideological world that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
created is slipping way from the fascist Republican Party.

January 22, 2007: Ronald Reagan is dead and Margaret Thatcher is in
her dotage. The ideological world that those two leaders created is
now slipping away with them.

From 1979 to 2004, the right won the battle of ideas in the western
world. Conservatives triumphed because they got the two big issues
of the era right: they were in favor of free markets and against
Communism. But now the right is in disarray because it has found
itself on the wrong side of the two dominating issues in
contemporary western politics: global warming and the Iraq war.

Most people's first reactions to new political issues are
instinctive. In 2003, the kind of people going on anti-war marches -
- or warning of impending climate doom -- looked to many right-
wingers like the same people who had been wrong about everything
else for the past 25 years. They were the people warning the world
was running out of oil in the 1970s; who opposed privatization in
the 1980s and marched against the first Gulf War in 1991. They were
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament crowd; the "East Germany has
solved the housing problem" crowd; the "we are all going to die of
mad-cow disease" crowd. They were earnest men in cardigans and
fierce women in sensible shoes.

The thought that these people could be right about anything was
frankly intolerable. But, in fact, they were right about two
things: global warming and Iraq.

Global warming poses a fundamental challenge to the right's faith in
markets. It is, as Gordon Brown, Britain's chancellor of the
exchequer, puts it "the world's biggest market failure."

Worse, most of the proposed remedies for global warming involve
things the right traditionally abhors. There is global governance
in the form of monster international accords such as the Kyoto
treaty. There are restrictions on individual liberty as the clamor
grows to tax people outof their cars and off their cheap flights.
There is a new emphasis on localism as opposed to globalization.
There is also a backlash against the idea that faster economic
growth is always desirable or sustainable.

The Iraq debacle also cuts away at the intellectual and moral
self-confidence of the right. The Reagan-Thatcher approach to the
world was founded on an unapologetic belief in military strength and
an unhesitant confidence in the moral superiority of Western
democracy. When the Cold War was won in 1989, the right embraced an
exuberant universalism. The cheering crowds in Prague and the
Baltic states -- and even the martyred students of Tiananmen Square -
- seemed like clinching evidence that all men do indeed desire the
same things, and that a Western formula for freedom and prosperity
is infinitely exportable.

It was the confidence born of victory in the Cold War that created
the confidence to invade Iraq. Failure there threatens to undermine
the moral certainty bequeathed to the right by Mrs. Thatcher and
Reagan, as well as the belief in the efficacy of military force and
the exportability of Western democracy.

The hallmark of a successful ideological revolution is that it
swiftly makes party political labels irrelevant. Reagan's and Mrs.
Thatcher's real triumphs came when their center-left heirs embraced
their ideas. Bill Clinton's most significant domestic policy
achievement was a welfare reform based on ideas first advanced by
conservative social critics. Tony Blair, U.K. prime minister,
refused to reverse the trade union reforms pushed through by Mrs.
Thatcher. His Iraq policy, with its unwavering adherence to
the "special relationship" with the U.S., is Thatcherite to the core.

Of course, there are diehards on the right who still argue that
global warming is hysteria and that Iraq will work out in the end.
Who knows, they may even be vindicated -- one day. But they have
already lost the political argument. They are now so far from the
conventional wisdom that even Britain's Conservatives and America's
Republicans -- the parties that gave birth to the Thatcher-Reagan
revolution -- are accepting "left wing" positions on climate change
and Iraq.

The process is further advanced in Britain than the U.S. David
Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, arranged a photo
opportunity in the Arctic, amid melting ice and barking huskies, to
underline his concern about global warming. He has also declared
that Britain should not have a "slavish" relationship with the U.S.

With George W. Bush still in the White House, this process of
right-wing ideological adaptation is much less advanced in the U.S.
The president's aides have moved to squish rumors that he will
announce a major change of tack on global warming in Tuesday's State
of the Union address. But the Bush era has less than two years to
run and much of the rest of the Republican party is already changing.

John McCain, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency, and
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the most important Republican governor, both
want tougher action on climate change. And the Republican party is
far from unanimous in backing Mr. Bush's new surge of troops into
Iraq. These trends within Republicanism are only likely to gather
strength if, as seems likely, alarm about global warming and Iraq
keeps growing.

All this makes it sound as if the only role left for the Anglo-
American right is to roll over and capitulate. But that is far too
gloomy. In this new ideological era, conservatives have two obvious
tasks -- one defensive and one offensive.

The defensive role is to guard against over-reaction to the emerging
consensus on global warming and Iraq. The right was not wrong to
spot its old anti-capitalist, anti-Western foes in the coalitions
that first latched on to these issues. There are radical voices
that will try to use global warming to create a world in which
nobody takes a cheap flight again -- and in which globalization is
put into reverse. It will be up to the right to show that growth
and greenery can be reconciled. Similarly, the Iraq catastrophe is
great news for anti-Americans in Europe and isolationists in the
U.S. Conservatives need to hold the line against both.

But the right can do a lot more than mere damage control. Many of
the most important ideas of the Reagan-Thatcher era --
privatization, trade union reform, the re-thinking of the welfare
state -- were developed in opposition to the intellectual consensus
of the 1960s and 1970s. After a long period of intellectual
hegemony, a period in ideological opposition might be just what the
Anglo-American right needs.

Financial Times (UK)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2ebaf5d0-aa55-11db-83b0-0000779e2340.html