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Two things first, by way of preparation and explanation. The first is personal and visceral, the second more philosophical.
First, all my political energy has been a reaction to Margaret Thatcher. I hated and continue to hate Thatcherism with a passion that remains undimmed, even after all these years. There have been moments when I wondered if I should have gotten over it by now. But I can’t. It is too deeply and furiously embedded in my psyche.
In the name of the free market, she trashed the long established infrastructure of care and civility that held us together as a country. Not since the Dissolution of the Monasteries has a whole pattern of social care been so thoroughly and successfully wiped away. In particular, she eviscerated northern working class towns, held together by mining and heavy industry, that were the heart of this country.
Second, my philosophical point: Mrs Thatcher wasn’t really a Conservative at all. She was a turbo-charged classical liberal who believed that the freedom of the individual, and most especially the economic freedom of the individual, trumped all other moral considerations. Setting people free from the state, setting people free to pursue their individual economic interests, this was her guiding idea. And so she took a sledgehammer to all those patterns of community living that held the individual back. To express her mistake philosophically, she confused ‘freedom from’ (any external constrains) with ‘freedom to’ (something that requires a whole social architecture of discipline and solidarity to enable people to flourish and live out their fullest lives).
Get “on your bike” was the message of one of her fiercest lieutenants to those whose communities had been trashed. Freedom of movement and freedom of capital, deregulated markets and the privatisation of public services – with all these, the world was transformed. Under the influence of people such as Keith Joseph and the free market philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, social problems were all imagined to have market solutions.
But far from setting ordinary people free, this turned into a revolution for financial opportunists feasting on the corpse of traditional manufacturing and the way of life it sustained. By destroying the power of the Trade Unions, Thatcher paved the way for the reign of the money men from the City. Very little was conserved. That is why Mrs Thatcher should be considered a cuckoo in the nest of traditional conservatism.
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SubscribeThe Left abandoned the working man.
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn detailed how fundamental socialist doctrines were translated into legislation and then transformed into ongoing genocide, apologists in the West for socialism changed horses to Marcuse from Marx.
Instead of agitating on the part of the working class, they switched and started talking about group identity. It was a sleight of hand, and the surface nomenclature was changed to make it attractive. Still, the underlying philosophy was the same: give up one’s identity to assume a universal identity that judges the diversity of identities only you transcend. These secular high priests are pure figures with universal morality. They speak for victims; their enemies, enemies of victims, have no right to defend themselves. They thus become the same sort of pure figures of brutal power Solzhenitsyn described.
If the working man was off-limits, new victims were provided by Herbert Marcuse, who claimed that liberating tolerance could be achieved by a subversive majority formed from gender and racial minorities whose organized repression opened the way for undemocratic mean: “They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, promotions of the white race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.,” he famously wrote in 1965. The academic elite, fueled by Foucault, declared all we need is willpower to make it so.
Maybe, on the one hand, Thatcherism reflects decadent modernism, just as Hegel, Marcuse, Marx, Foucault, etc., reflect decadent modernism on the other hand. But they are all on smooth ice; victims of their tautologies they are unable to see the realities in plain sight, e.g., the sufferings of the working man and the communities they support.
Giles Fraser sees the suffering, and it seems like we need to start describing our communities. We cannot go backward against the stream of time to an age when Marxism elevated the working man, nor is it desirable. An inability to bid farewell seems as feeble as an inability to embrace current reality. Doing the hard work of understanding the needs of our communities looks like the place to start. Return to the Parish and listen. Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching.