1979: The Great Backlash

Thatcher sought to overturn all that, and did. But you might not have guessed it as her term in office began. Her 1979 election manifesto remains a monument to vagueness, and she was outnumbered within her own first cabinet by Tory moderates. Few at the time would have predicted that she was about to become the defining figure of post-war British politics by breaking with the vision that had ruled for the previous 30 years. Yet within a few years she would be cutting tax rates, selling off the state-owned jewels of the economy to private investors, and staring down the all-powerful trade unions.

As with Deng, many commentators did not know quite what to make of Thatcher’s ambitions. After her first year in office, British journalist Hugh Stephenson wrote: "Her rhetoric is radical, even reckless. But from the start her deeds have shown a politician's instinctive caution." Stephenson was right, but he and other onlookers didn't reckon with the intensity of the sentiment behind that rhetoric, namely Thatcher's deeply held conviction that Britain desperately needed not just economic but also moral renewal. This became clearer during her brutal battle with the coal miners' union and her anything-but-tactical embrace of "privatization" (a once obscure word seized upon as a rallying cry by her think-tanker-in-chief, Keith Joseph). The appeal of Thatcher's counterrevolution became clearer still when Ronald Reagan, who was already campaigning against Jimmy Carter's presidency the year she was elected, won his own mandate in 1980 armed with a similar passion to replace the Great Society with "Morning in America."

Although the United States never quite embraced the mixed-economy consensus that prevailed in Britain, pre-1979 America was a radically different place than it is today. The political cosmos was inhabited by now-extinct species like moderate East Coast Republicans and power-brokering labor leaders. During the 1970s, as David Frum notes in How We Got Here, his provocative take on that decade, the private ownership of gold was a criminal offense, consumers had only one telephone company, and airline travel was largely a perk of the upper class. The tone was set by huge, faceless corporations. With the personal computer still in its nascent state (Bill Gates moved his fledgling firm Microsoft home to Seattle on January 1, 1979), technology of the era promoted uniformity and anonymity. When Republican President Richard Nixon decreed wage and price controls in 1971, it was received as an understandable acknowledgment of the reigning orthodoxy. Not a few thinkers, most memorably the hugely influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith, were able to imagine the "convergence" of Western corporatism and Soviet socialism in some in-determinate future. After all, didn't both depend on bureaucratic elites and the wisdom of planners?

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