The Iron Lady Saves England

She was without question the most powerful and the most influential woman of her time: that's a fact. She was also someone who demonstrated virtue in a way which regenerated people in more than one nation: that is also a fact, not an opinion. She was Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of England from May 1979 to November 1990.

In early 1979, England was economically at the brink of total collapse. The nation's financial structure had been decimated by taxes, debt, deficits, government spending, and regulation of the markets. The results were inflation and unemployment. As George Will writes, it was "Margaret Thatcher who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance."

Like a bucket of cold water on a drowsy snoozer, Thatcher's introduction of radical economic freedom came at first as a shock to the system. At first briefly painful, as the vital signs of the economy were forced to hit bottom to jump-start a wave of entrepreneurial activity, Thatcher's leadership was invigorating and bracing in the long run. Her tactics foreshadowed the economic doctrine of 'shock therapy' which would deliver freedom a few years later to the nations of Eastern Europe as they emerged from the tyranny of Soviet communism.

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other “vigorous virtues.” She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. (“Churchillian” denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.) When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.

Earning for herself the reputation of being a woman of ideas, and earning for her Tory party the reputation of being the party of ideas, her intellect extended beyond domestic economics. Donald Rumsfeld, who was Special Envoy to the Middle East in January 1984, was working to see if any solution could be found to the bitter and complex civil war which was destroying the country of Lebanon, when he met with Margaret Thatcher. Although Thatcher was generally and often allied with the United States, she was not afraid to disagree: she pointed out to Rumsfeld that American diplomats were sending mixed messages. Rumsfeld writes:

When I met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she made it clear as only she could that when it came to U.S. policy on Lebanon, she was at best a reluctant team player. I had long been a fan of "the Iron Lady," as the Soviets called her. I found that her stern reputation masked a dispassionate realism - which was certainly visible in her approach to the Middle East. In our meeting, she bore to the heart of the issue with crisp, unforgiving precision. She was skeptical of Lebanese President Gemayel's ability to expand his coalition and, in a break from the American position, equally skeptical of Israel's role in the standoff. She believed that our coalition lacked a clear mandate. She did not favor taking a tough stance with Syria because she believed that we needed them for a successful Middle East peace effort. She noted that even when the United State challenged Syria, some American officials behaved in a way that signaled to the Syrians that we lacked the will or cohesion to actually follow through. A mixed message was the worst kind to send to an authoritarian regime, she noted. In that, as in many things, she was absolutely correct. If anyone left our meeting with an impression other than that the Prime Minister would be happy to be done with the whole business at the soonest possible opportunity, they hadn't been listening. In her public statements Thatcher was more diplomatic, offering words of solidarity with her political soul mate, President Reagan. But she also indicated what I knew well: our time was running out.

Later in that same year, Thatcher demonstrated courage in the face an attack on her life. Rumsfeld writes:

A month later, Prime Minister Thatcher barely escaped assassination by the Irish Republican Army. She was in her hotel room when a bomb exploded, destroying the bathroom she had been in only moments earlier. Her would-be assassins left Mrs. Thatcher a chilling note that I've reflected on many times since. "We have only to be lucky once," they wrote to her. "You will have to be lucky always."

As quick as she was to criticize American diplomatic efforts vis-a-vis Syria, so quick she was also to agree with America's desire to retain its own sovereignty. The issue arose in discussions surrounding the 'Law of the Sea Treaty' which, if enacted, would have each signatory nation surrender its sovereign control over its borders, and instead allow an international tribunal to decide matters over each nation's coasts, waterways, and maritime boundaries. In 1982, Rumsfeld visited England to discuss the matter with Thatcher. He recalls:

A few days later I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in London. I explained my mission and Reagan's concerns. Quite briskly, Mrs. Thatcher bore right into the heart of the matter.

"Mr. Ambassador, if I understand correctly, what this Law of the Sea Treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two thirds of the Earth's surface," she began. "And you know how I feel about nationalization."

"I do indeed, Prime Minister," I responded. Mrs. Thatcher had made transferring nationalized businesses, from utilities to mining companies, back to the private sector a hallmark of her premiership.

She smiled. "Tell Ronnie I'm with him."

About the first Iraq War (1990/1991), Thatcher also had strong opinions. She saw that, if Saddam Hussein were allowed to retain power in Iraq, the root causes of the war would not have been addressed. She foresaw that leaving him in power necessitated a second such Gulf War. She urged the United States to press on in the war. America's stated goal in the war had been to liberate the oppressed nation of Kuwait, which had been invaded by Saddam Hussein's forces. The United States planned to stop after liberating Kuwait, and not to continue the war until Saddam's government fell. Rumsfeld writes:

Others I respected had a different view. While still Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H.W. Bush not to "go wobbly" after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. "There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power," she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush's and hers, she noted, "There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?"

A strong sense of justice guided Thatcher, whether it was returning the ownership of utilities and mining companies back to the people, or defending the rights of a sovereign nation to defend its own territory. Prior to Thatcher, the British government had followed a trend of nationalization. All kinds of businesses, from airlines to car companies and from railroads to telephone companies, had been taken over by the government. Ordinary people were not allowed to own such companies, nor were ordinary citizens allowed to make decisions about how such companies would be operated. When Thatcher was undoing such nationalization, she was transferring both ownership and decision-making authority back to the common people. Likewise, she saw no great complexity in the decision to defend British soil when the Argentines attacked the Falkland Islands. In 1982, the Argentines invaded the islands, which were recognized by all parties as belonging to the English. As she would say, almost ten years later about a different war, "When good has to be upheld, when evil has to be overcome, then Britain will take up arms!"

Like many wars in the last half of the twentieth century, and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was an undeclared war. Neither the British Parliament nor the Argentine government officially declared war. Nonetheless, Thatcher was firm and decisive in her response to the unprovoked Argentine aggression. The British were somewhat disappointed that the United States did not eagerly and promptly join the English cause. Eventually, President Reagan did support the British war effort, but only after long deliberation. The Americans found the situation complex, given the Monroe Doctrine. But Argentina's attack was clearly a case of militaristic expansion and of firing on innocent and unaware civilians. George Will writes:

The Argentine junta learned of her decisiveness when it seized the Falklands. The British, too, learned. A Tory MP said, “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.”

Thus the same vigor which she unleashed at the Argentine attackers was the same vigor which she unleashed at the economic regulations which were impoverishing the Britons.

Britain has periodically been a laboratory for economic ideas — those of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, the socialism of postwar Labor. Before the ascendancy of Thatcher — a disciple of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — Tories tried to immunize Britain against socialism by administering prophylactic doses of the disease. But by 1979, Britain’s fundamental political arrangements were at issue: Such was the extortionate power of the unions to paralyze the nation that the writ of Parliament often seemed to run not beyond a few acres along the Thames.

Thatcher's first few months in office were bumpy. As she predicted, the transition to a free market, while bringing liberty and prosperity in the long run, would cause growth pains in the short run. Despite the short-term economic pains, the voters saw hope on the horizon, and reelected Thatcher.

In 1979, she won the most lopsided election since 1945, when there had not been an election for 10 years. In 1983, she became the first Tory since 1924 to win two consecutive elections. In 1987, she won a third. Her 12 consecutive years were an achievement without precedent since the 1832 Reform Act moved Britain, gingerly, toward mass democracy. The most consequential peacetime prime minister since Disraeli, by 1990 she had become the first prime minister to govern through an entire decade since the Earl of Liverpool from 1812 to 1827.

Having so many consecutive years in office, Thatcher was able to significantly change the course of England. The socialist habit of nationalizing industries, taxing people at continuously increasing rates, and taking economic decision-making away from ordinary citizens had been a British pattern in the decades after WWII. Thatcher would change that. Her goals were clear: reduce taxes, let people own businesses and operate them, and allow economic creativity to flourish unimpeded by governmental regulation. David Brooks writes:

Margaret Thatcher was a world historical figure for the obvious reasons. Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn’t. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.

She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.

The tectonic shift which Thatcher wrought in British politics was so powerful that after her time as prime minister, both her party and the opposing party would see her views as axiomatic. It was not one of Thatcher's Tories, but an opponent from the Labor Party, Tony Blair, who would in many ways carry on both her domestic and foreign policy legacies.

Her political legacy may be so enduring because it is so foundational. It has not to do with the intricacies of policy, but rather with the goals and justifications of policy. Pragmatism can be, in some cases, a virtue; but it is never by itself a virtue. Rather, pragmatism is a virtue only in the service of some higher cause, like justice or charity. Justice may demand an armed response to Argentine attackers; justice may demand deregulation to lift citizens out of poverty and give them a fair chance at entering the middle class. Pragmatism is the tactic to justice's strategy. Pragmatism may ensure that the efforts on behalf of justice are effective. But a clear vision of justice is necessary. David Brooks continues:

In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline.

The daughter of a small grocer, she led a fervent bourgeois Risorgimento. She was the voice of the ambitious middle class. She lionized the self-made striver. Loving tidiness, she checked to see if the space above the picture frames was properly dusted.

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

Margart Thatcher was guided by ideas, not by personalities. She enjoyed an excellent friendship with American presidents and diplomats, and yet was not hesitant about dissenting from American policies when her sense of justice demanded it. She was disappointed by Reagan's lack of instant enthusiasm for her war against Argentina; she was not enthusiastic about Reagan's military liberation of Grenada. She advocated shifting Cold War strategies to include defense in addition to offense: she supported America's development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Likewise, she was not swayed by the leaders of her own political party, with whom she sometimes disagreed. Indeed, it was her own party which finally turned her out of office, a departure which she made with grace, giving a final memorable speech in Parliament.

A Samurai's Identity Crisis

The Japanese social class appearing under the title ‘samurai’ has a long and complex history. Originally a warrior class, it eventually became a social class. This transition provoked a long-term identity crisis. The samurai were no longer needed as warriors, having been replaced by other military structures. While samurai were not fully accepted as aristocrats or nobles, they were also something more than the commoners. One samurai left an extensive memoir, giving us an insider’s view into the life of a samurai who is wrestling with the fact that he is born into a social class whose place in the community is ambiguous, a social class not fully accepted by either those above it or those below it.

Katsu Kokichi’s autobiography, Musui’s Story, gives the reader a concrete example of a samurai during the Tokugawa era. Katsu manifests, up-close, the effects his social status has on his daily life – a social status that was rapidly becoming, if it had not already become, an anachronism.

The samurai arose as a social class during the Kamakura era (1180 – 1333), although the roots of a military class certainly go back to earlier years. The process that led to the formalization of the samurai class is unclear in its earliest years. Historians entertain at least three distinct hypotheses about this earliest phase of a military social class. Significant is the fact that already in its infancy, there is some ambiguity about this group. Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais write:

The samurai plays such a central role in Japanese history from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries that he appears almost timeless. Where he came from is a matter of debate.

If the origin of the group is ambiguous, its history is one of metamorphosis. Membership in this class was seen – by its own members and by the rest of society – as something being continually redesigned.

His connections with monarchy and court, and what it meant to be a samurai, changed over time. Historians once thought that the aristocracy reneged on its responsibility for maintaining peace early in the Heian period when it stopped executing criminals, allowed the conscript army to deteriorate, and permitted provincial governors to hire deputies rather than forsake the capital. By the tenth century, the countryside had fallen into disorder. Men in the provinces active in land reclamation projects armed themselves in local disputes and turned to warfare to protect their interests. A substantial warrior class arose, and in the twelfth century it turned on an effete and ineffectual monarchy.

A samurai’s self-concept was thus fraught with uncertainty. We see Musui wrestling to harmonize the inconsistent messages that he receives about his status. On the one hand, there is a Confucian sense about the necessity for honorable behavior, and the consequences for the lack of such honor: he reflects about “brave warriors who disregarded the laws of Heaven … and who came to grief.” On the other hand, the aristocracy views the samurai, who emerged from the lower classes, as not quite the equals of the nobles: internalizing the lower expectations placed on him, Musui recounts a drunken binge with no trace of shame, regret, or repentance. In such loutish behavior, Musui lives down to image projected by the upper classes onto the warrior class from which the samurai had emerged. As Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write about the samurai:

They dressed in iron armor and animal skins rather than silk, and many were illiterate. In the eyes of the Kyoto aristocrats, they were rustic boors, hardly more civilized than the Emishi they were called to fight.

Yet the samurai also saw themselves, and others saw them, as being above other social classes:

The verb samurau means to serve; the first samurai were warriors who held the sixth court rank along with scholars, scribes, and artisans. Other terms for fighting men did not carry the connotation of service to the court. By acquiring court rank and offices, such as guard at the left gate, samurai distinguished themselves from commoners. Warriors either sought rank themselves or accepted the leadership of someone who did. When royal scions or Fujiwara descendants moved to the provinces in search of careers that eluded them at court, their qualifications for rank based on their distinguished lineage helped them attract followers. In political terms, the need to have success at arms legitimized by court approbation, rank, and title always limited warrior autonomy.

Accordingly, as Musui recounts his activities as fundraiser for a temple, he speaks of recruiting ‘merchants’ and ‘peasants’ in way that indicates that they are not of the same class as ‘my fellow swordsmen.’

Given this equivocation about his niche in society, in Musui’s daily life, activities that hint of an aristocratic life of leisure, like practicing fencing in his spare time, alternate with more practical pursuits hinting of a more direct interest in sustenance. He writes:

I now had to earn pocket money. I tore around doing favors for people and racked my brain thinking up moneymaking schemes.

Musui is living in a social structure that emerged centuries earlier. Between the Kamakura era in which the samurai were first clearly categorized as a class distinct from warriors in general, and the Tokugawa era in which Musui lives, Japanese society continued to modify the social status of the samurai. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write that, in 1588, Hideyoshi

tried to insist on a rigid status distinction between samurai and commoners by forbidding all but samurai from wearing two swords, one long and one short. Thereafter, commoners might own swords, but they could not put them on display. Hideyoshi issued a series of decrees prohibiting samurai from leaving their lord’s service to become merchants or cultivators and preventing farmers from deserting their fields to become city folk. Although it proved impossible to make clear distinctions between various statuses and some domains such as Satsuma or Tosa continued to recognize rustic samurai (goshi), Hideyoshi’s intent remained the law of the land until 1871.

Although this move was intended to elevate the social status of samurai, and seems to have done so to some extent, it also left it with its original ambiguity, and added a second layer of ambiguity because the very fact of social change creates ambiguity. This uncertainty would affect both the values which the samurai internalized, and the values which they exemplified to those around them – i.e., the values which society at large imputed to them.

So we see Musui remind his brother, in a heated moment in which they nearly come to blows, that he, too, is “an honorable retainer of the shogun.” What is Musui’s concept of ‘honor’ – what are his values? Again, with no remorse or chagrin, he reports that he spent his “days carousing to” his heart’s content, and that

I had some bills at the brothels, but instead of paying them, I got hold of six ryo and invited Masanosuke and one of his father’s retainers to the Yoshiwara.

Even if the reader makes allowances for the possibility of different sexual ethics – although Musui’s behavior might be vulgar even by those standards – his choice to squander money in the ‘red light district’ when he has financial obligations still violates the sense of honor which we can reasonably attribute to the Tokugawa society. Musui has, then, a nominal honor by virtue of his birth into the samurai class, but he visibly fails to embody the ethics associated with this honor.

The larger Tokugawa culture, in which Musui and his fellow samurai of the 1800’s found themselves, was characterized largely by consumerism and advancing education.

Consumerism typifies especially the urban areas – Musui’s Edo is modern Tokyo. The city had large shopping districts, a wide variety of products available, and specialization in professions (e.g., an emerging class of lawyers). A “fixed price system for cash” began to be more common, and commercials were incorporated into theatrical plays. Celebrities endorsed products, and enterprising showmen developed products named after themselves, engineering product placements in their own stage dramas, and featuring them in woodblock prints – an early form of junk mail. Edo hosted a high degree of commercialization and consumerist culture – all by the year 1800, before Musui was born.

Tokugawa’s popular culture enjoyed a high literacy rate. A strong educational system was in place, allowing for study of Confucian and Buddhist classics for the aristocrats; but for the masses, the chief significance of this educational boom was the ability to read, along with abilities in mathematics. Written materials fueled the front end of this consumer society – the ‘user interface’ – and calculation powered the other side, both in terms of financial accounting and ‘product design.’ The fact that we can use these startlingly anachronistic terms reveals exactly how modern Tokugawa society had become – and with that modernization, how far removed the medieval origins of the samurai class appeared to that society. The samurai seemed like something that didn’t quite belong.

Musui found a way to adapt. He engages in the Edo economy: he “went about learning to appraise swords.” Appraisal is recognized as a specific and distinct professional skill, a sign of a developed economy. Later applying this skill, Musui enters into the world of entrepreneurship and the startup of a small business:

I also had to make ends meet, so I tried my hand at dealing in swords and other military accoutrements. In the beginning I lost money – fifty or sixty ryo the first month and a half – but I got used to the business little by little, and by attending the second-hand goods market every night, I found I could really bring in profits.

Musui has become integrated into the commercialized Tokugawa urban culture. Likewise, he is a product of its higher levels of education. Reading and writing letters is a regular feature of the narrative, and the business transactions into which he enters require proficiency in calculation.

Musui’s life in the context of the larger Tokugawa culture is colored by an ambivalence about his place in society as a samurai. This equivocation manifests itself in his everyday life: a mixture of aristocratic leisure and middle class concerns for income. It manifests itself in his self-contradictory values and ethics, which have added aristocratic rhetoric about honor as a veneer over the original coarse behavior of the warrior class. And it makes the entire samurai class, this inconsistent mix of oafish soldiers with titled airs, an anachronism as its individual members try to navigate their way in the waters of an educated consumerist society.