Thatcher, Reagan, and Decline

In an article on National Review Online published December 30, 2011, Rich Lowry reflects on Margaret Thatcher's Britain and what lessons we might glean from it. See the above link for the full article. The gist is Thatcher's unwillingness to accept the widely held argument at the time that her nation was in decline and that its best days were in the past. As prime minister, she proved this in her projection of British military power and in her economic policies, which sought to overturn the cradle-to-grave socialism that was so clearly undermining the British economy.

Lady Thatcher seemed to believe that her country's best days were ahead, and in the Falklands War she clearly demonstrated that she would not let the British Navy go quietly into the night. (One cannot help but notice that in locating Britain's best days in the future, she contradicted Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech.) President Ronald Reagan, even though he was of what Tom Brokaw obsequiously calls "the greatest generation," did not think that that superlative ought to be pronounced with such finality. He, too, believed and acted as if America's greatest days were ahead. His policies launched unparalleled prosperity and led to victory in the Cold War.

So, are Americans at a 1980 moment wherein we need only a leader who can restore confidence and draw down Behemoth? Few thinking individuals could find Newt Gingrich's platitudes-set-to-music about American Greatness to be anything other than fawning for voters who want to feel good about an idea that does not seem to match reality. Sadly, it is true like Lowry says that we have no Thatchers or Reagans available. Yet here's where the rubber of Great Man Theories of History hit the Road of Reality. To what degree are Great Men--and Thatcher and Reagan belong in this category-- shaped by their times and to what degree do they shape their times? For instance, Reagan might not have succeeded as well as he did had he been elected in 1976, for he would have faced different problems, different opponents, and different events. So we would do well to wonder whether even a Reagan or Thatcher could find a way through our current crises, keeping in mind all the Great Men who ruled over once great civilizations that are now gone.

Looking back, however, one could argue that Reagan and Thatcher were but the last gasp of Anglo-American greatness. The human and financial costs of World Wars I and II put the British Empire on the road to dissolution, whatever the damage done by socialism might have been. Likewise for the United States, the dividends that came with the winning of the Cold War were quickly spent, and there is little to show for it.

Even admitting that two or three decades is not sufficient historical distance with which to appraise the paths taken by the United States and Great Britain since the 1980s, one ought at least to ask whether Reagan and Thatcher were but anomalies in their respective country's long declines.