There is No Alternative Read Free

financial and political integration. Her reforms led to the longest sustained period of British economic expansion of the postwar era. Nothing in the recent crisis detracts from this or suggests that these reforms were misguided—or that their lessons are no longer relevant.
    And nothing, surely, detracts from her insight that the sovereign nation-state is the only entity that has thus far in history proved capable of acting effectively to secure its citizens’ interests. This point, as much as the arguments she made about free markets, needs deep consideration.

    Yet the past several years have compelled me, at least, to meditate upon Thatcher’s failures, as I submit they would to anyone more interested in reality than defending a thesis. The great unanswered question, to my mind, is whether she permanently succeeded in reversing Britain’s decline. I believed when I wrote this book that she had probably succeeded, but I am not as persuaded now—for obvious reasons. If she failed, that lesson too is relevant. The current recession in Britain has been the longest since the First World War. (The second-longest, not incidentally, lasted from 1979 to1983—and took place under Margaret Thatcher.) Britain’s underclass is as degraded as it ever was; it is feral, as they say, and there is no doubt that crime is rising steadily.
    In reviewing the first edition of this book, Theodore Dalrymple suggested a criticism that I thought excessively pessimistic at the time, but I fear now may be correct:
    Unfortunately, [Mrs. Thatcher] did not so much restore a market economy as promote a consumer society, which is not quite the same thing. It was a society in which most of the really difficult aspects of existence in the modern world—education, health care, social security and many
others—remained in the hands of the state. This meant that consumer choice was largely limited to matters of pocket money: whether to ruin Ibiza by your behavior on holiday, or Crete. The resultant combination of consumer choice and deep irresponsibility was not an attractive one, to say the least. A large part of the population became selfish, egotistical, childish, petulant, demanding and whimsical.
    I am not as dour by nature as Dr. Dalrymple, but I am open to the possibility that he’s right. If so, it suggests to me a terrible question: Is this the inevitable trajectory of open societies and market economies?
    There is some evidence that it is: Every time I return to America, the culture seems to me more childish and self-absorbed. But then again, every time I return, I’m older. Honestly, I do not know, and neither does anyone: The future is hard to predict.
    But America’s inability to produce politicians who both speak to the electorate and speak like adults, particularly about foreign policy, is an alarming sign. In that regard, the difference between Thatcher and any politician now alive seems quite stark. By now many politicians are willing to make one of Thatcher’s key arguments: nothing is possible without economic growth; absent a vibrant economy, there can be no effective foreign policy. Nor, for that matter, can social welfare programs be preserved. But Thatcher never pretended to the electorate that one might just ignore the rest of the world without consequence. The retreat of the United States into an isolationism characterized by indifference certainly cannot be justified by anything Thatcher said, did, or believed.
    The isolationism is as profound among those who claim to reject it as it is among those who endorse it. It is illustrated by the lack of serious discussion about foreign and defense policy even among those who claim to be robust proponents of American leadership abroad. The first Republican candidate debate at Ames lasted for two hours. Of these, eight minutes—at the end of the
debate—concerned foreign policy; not one serious argument was made about it.
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