Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (14 page)

Thatcher’s successful challenge to the British consensus did not
satisfy her ambitions. Like de Gaulle she had come to see herself as embodying the nation. Unlike the General, she launched a wide-ranging assault on national institutions. She regarded local government with particular scorn, and prompted by the rightwing think tanks she adopted the ‘poll tax’, a flat-rate local levy that was deeply unpopular. The poll tax sowed deep doubts about Thatcher’s leadership in her own party and among the public, but her hostility to Europe may have been a more significant factor in the coup that brought about her downfall in 1990. It was the irrational extremity of her European policy that led Geoffrey Howe to resign as deputy prime minister and triggered a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine. It was hostility to Heseltine’s pro-European stance that led the Thatcherite wing of the party to mount the all-out effort to prevent him succeeding as leader, which resulted in the election of John Major. It was Major’s attempt to mend relations with Europe that led to his joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism at the wrong rate –a decision that rebounded when sterling was ejected from the mechanism on ‘Black Wednesday’ in September 1992. Major’s government never recovered, civil war broke out among Conservatives on Europe, and the Conservative party became an ungovernable rabble.

Thatcher’s successors struggled for nearly a decade to understand what made their party unelectable. Clearly a number of decisions and events had contributed to this result, including the coup that toppled Thatcher in 1990. But Conservative unpopularity had deeper causes, and it was only when David Cameron became leader that the party was forced to accept that the obstacle to electoral success was conservatism itself. Post-Thatcher Britain is a less cohesive society than the one she inherited, but it is also more tolerant – unbothered about ‘family values’, no longer pervasively homophobic, less deeply racist and (though markedly more unequal) not so fixated on issues of class. While he relegated Thatcher to the history books Cameron accepted the society she had, contrary to her intentions, helped create. By burying Thatcher while embracing post-Thatcher Britain he made his party once again a contender for power.

Though it was an episode in the microcosm of British politics, the destruction of conservatism that resulted from Thatcherite policies was part of a larger trend. The application of neo-liberal ideas has
provoked a backlash in many countries. In post-communist Poland and Hungary the triumph of the New Right has been followed by a resurgence of the Old Right, which while attacking the excesses of the free market has revived some of the worst features of the past. Integral cultural nationalism and the old poison of anti-Semitism have returned in much of post-communist Europe. In western Europe the far Right has undertaken a process of modernization as a result of which it has become a key player in democratic politics. Few European far-Right parties any longer hold to an interwar agenda of protectionism. In northern Italy and Switzerland they promote a high-tech economy linked with the rest of the world by global free trade but insulated from the world’s disorders by a ban on immigration. By fastening on immigration the far Right has been able to tap into the discontent of the casualties of globalization in rich countries –unskilled workers and middle managers whose work can be done more cheaply in emerging economies. By identifying itself with these groups the radical Right has been able to shape the political agenda in many countries, even where – as in France and Austria – it has declined in electoral terms. In countries with no tradition of far-Right politics new types of populism have developed. In Holland the ex-Marxist politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated by a crazed animal rights activist, embodied a combination of libertarianism on issues of personal morality with xenophobic hostility to immigrants (particularly Muslims). In America the Right has splintered between neo-conservative ideologues and paleo-conservative nativists. The common factor in these disparate currents is that conservatism has ceased to be a coherent political project. The links it requires with the past have been severed. Any attempt to revive them can only be atavistic, and when conservative parties resist the temptation of reaction they become vehicles for a progressive agenda that easily degenerates into utopianism.

Thatcher’s career illustrates this development. She never shared the belief that the fall of communism heralded an era of peace, and she ridiculed Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that history had ended. Yet by 1989 she accepted Fukuyama’s view that one type of government was the model for all the rest. Believing that contemporary America embodied the virtues of Britain in the past, she convinced herself that
the United States could become at the end of the twentieth century what she believed Britain had been in the late nineteenth century –the final guarantor of progress throughout the world. For Thatcher as for Fukuyama this meant that a version of American ‘democratic capitalism’ could be replicated everywhere. From being a reformer she had become an ideologue. This was partly hubris – the inordinate confidence in their own rectitude that is the occupational vice of leaders who have achieved success against the odds – but it also reflected her beliefs. Thatcher was always a firm believer in human progress, and if she had anything like a personal philosophy it was not Tory but Whig. The eighteenth-century Whigs viewed the emergence of English liberty as the result of providential design. It was a belief the Tory David Hume mocked in his
History of England
, where he showed the crucial role of chance events. This sceptical cast of mind was alien to Thatcher, and she came to view the mix of policies she had implemented as a cure for a specifically British disease as an all-purpose panacea. By the time she was ejected from Downing Street the loose set of attitudes and beliefs with which she had begun her career had hardened into a closed system.

The neo-liberal world-view that Thatcher accepted by the end of the 1980s was a successor-ideology to Marxism. Ideological thinking tends to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to society, and so it was at the end of the eighties, when the close of the Cold War gave neo-liberal ideas a catastrophic boost. Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet bloc that if they wanted prosperity they had to import the free market. The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficent results in the widely different countries of the former Soviet bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece with the mind-set in the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru. Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to post-communist lands carrying the same draft constitution in their briefcases. No matter how discrepant the countries they descended upon these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.

While the fall of the Soviet Union was an advance for human freedom, its impact on peace was always going to be mixed. War and
ethnic cleansing have gone with the transition from dictatorship in many countries. Though the communist collapse itself occurred with remarkably little violence, there was never any reason to think the post-communist world would depart from this pattern. More sober western policies might have mitigated the dangers, but in the triumphal climate of the time there was no taste for realism. Instead a utopian outlook came to be accepted by mainstream political parties.

Utopian thinking is most dangerous when it is least recognized. The emergence in the 1990s of a centrist version of utopianism illustrates this fact. First with neo-liberal economic policies in Russia and then with humanitarian military intervention in the Balkans, western governments embarked on courses of action that had no prospect of success. They were unprepared when the spread of democracy triggered ethnic nationalism in former Yugoslavia, separatism in Chechnya and Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia. Democracy and free markets were supposed to bring peace in their wake, not crime and violence.

Without realizing the fact, western governments had absorbed a utopian outlook. Governments of Left and Right believed that resurgent nationalism and ethnic and religious conflicts were passing local difficulties in the universal advance towards a new world order. Realistic thought was disabled by the return to power of an ideology that had been discarded over a century before.

By the end of the 1980s a doctrinaire form of liberalism had conquered the Conservative party. In the nineties it extended its influence
to Labour. Blair accepted not only the new framework of policy that Thatcher had imposed in place of the post-war settlement but also the neo-liberal style of thinking that had grown up around it.

New Labour’s embrace of neo-liberalism was first of all a response to Thatcher’s political success. When Blair became Labour leader in 1994 his party had been out of power for a decade and a half. He swallowed Thatcher’s faith in the market as an elixir that would revivify the party and bring it back to power. The infusion seemed to have the desired effect, and Blair – along with Gordon Brown, Labour Chancellor and his rival for the leadership – accepted neo-liberal economics. Yet Blair was always closer to neo-conservative thinking, and after the 9/11 attacks he shifted decisively to neo-conservatism.

Versions of neo-liberal ideas have shaped policy in Britain and many other countries from the late eighties to the present day. Neo-liberalism encompasses several schools of thinking, but they have some key beliefs in common. Neo-liberals believe that the most important condition of individual liberty is the free market. The scope of government must be strictly limited. Democracy may be desirable but it must be limited to protect market freedoms. The free market is the most productive economic system and therefore tends to be emulated throughout the world. Free markets are not only the most efficient way of organizing the economy but also the most peaceful. As they expand, the sources of human conflict are reduced. In a global free market war and tyranny will disappear. Humanity will advance to unprecedented heights.

With minor variations F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and a host of lesser lights all subscribed to these beliefs. All were exponents of a late twentieth-century Enlightenment ideology whose basic tenets –despite being advanced as the results of scientific inquiry – are rooted in religious faith. Neo-liberals aimed to recover the lost purity of liberalism before its pollution by collectivist thinking, and like all fundamentalists they ended up with a caricature of the tradition they seek to revive. Neo-liberalism was a late twentieth-century parody of classical political economy. The classical economists of the eighteenth century believed all societies pass through definite stages of development leading to a single destination – a commercial civilization based on market exchange – but they had a clear understanding of the flaws
of market societies. Lacking this insight, neo-liberals turned classical economics into a utopian ideology.

The classical economists themselves had serious doubts about the commercial society they saw coming into being around them. For Adam Smith commercial society was the best kind of human association, but it was highly imperfect. At times he refers to the market –or the ‘system of natural liberty’, as he often calls it – as being a Utopia; but he means that it is the best achievable system, not that it is without serious flaws. While he was impressed by the productivity of free markets, Adam Smith feared their moral hazards. Workers did not need to be well educated to perform the simple repetitive tasks required of them in the factories that were being set up in the north of England, while the anonymous cities that were springing up around the factories did not encourage virtue. In the long run this posed a risk to commercial civilization. Smith’s anxieties echoed those of earlier thinkers in a civic republican tradition and influenced later critics of capitalism. Marx’s theory of the alienating effects of wage-labour owes a good deal to Smith’s insights into the flaws of commercial societies. Caricatured by twentieth-century ideologues as a market missionary, Smith was in fact an early theorist of the cultural contradictions of capitalism.
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Smith’s Utopia is ‘…an imperfect utopia, or, differently put, a utopia suited for imperfect creatures’.
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Imperfect as it may be, the system of natural liberty is not easily achieved. Unlike neo-liberals in the late twentieth century, Smith was sceptical of schemes of market reform. Such hopes as he had for his Utopia being realized rested on his religious beliefs.

Smith had little in common with secular evangelists for the free market like Hayek and Friedman. He viewed the emergence of commercial society as the work of divine providence. His conception of the ‘invisible hand’ – a system of hidden adjustments whereby the miscellaneous exchanges of the market promote the common good –was spelt out in unequivocally theistic terms. The invisible hand was God working through the medium of human sentiments, and human reason played a small role in this process. The market did not develop because human beings understood its advantages. It emerged as a by-product of instincts God had implanted in them. Like other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith understood that human
behaviour is governed by emotion and convention far more than by reason, and like them he was suspicious of the intellect when it operated without regard for sentiment. The American economic historian Jacob Viner has summarized Smith’s standpoint: