Wanted: Another Thatcher or Reagan

"Let me give you my vision: a man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master -- these are the British inheritance. ... We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery -- not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped. ... I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so. ...We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop and with a decisive act of will, we can say 'Enough.' "

-- Margaret Thatcher

It was called "the British disease," the dismal state of affairs Margaret Thatcher inherited in 1979 when she and her Conservative Party wrested control of Parliament from a leftist Labour Government. Throughout much of the 1960s and '70s, Labour had pursued a deliberate policy of subsidizing or nationalizing failing industries (automotive, aerospace, mining, rail, etc.). Britain's famously militant unions had demanded and received wage increases far above productivity and inflation. In Britain's 1978-79 "Winter of Discontent," wildcat strikes broke out all over the country. More than a million public employees joined trade union picket lines. Hospitals turned away the sick and suffering. Garbage piled up in the streets.

These were the conditions that propelled Britain's Conservative Party, by the narrowest of margins, to victory in elections held in May 1979. These were the challenges Margaret Thatcher faced when she became prime minister. These were the things a return to bedrock conservative principles reversed.

The 1960s and '70s were nearly equally threatening to the long-term survival and prosperity of the United States. American cities burned in the wake of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. The smell of tear gas permeated the nation's capital. Vietnam, America's longest and most divisive war, ended in humiliating disaster. President Richard Nixon was forced from office, irrevocably tarred by Watergate and a string of failed policies -- wage and price controls, abandonment of the gold standard, the deliberate cheapening of the dollar, expansion of the welfare state.

His successor, Gerald Ford, a decent man, chosen by Nixon to fill the office of vice president surrendered by the disgraced Spiro Agnew, won the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1976, after a very close and bitter contest with Ronald Reagan. He then lost his abbreviated and unelected presidency to Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, one time naval officer and peanut farmer.

Carter entered office promising to turn the country around, to drain the swamp of corrupt Washington politics. To some he was far too idealistic, too saintly in a world of cutthroat sinners, a world that demanded clear-eyed determination to defend vital national interests, to stare down enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Carter years were marked by stagflation, double-digit unemployment and inflation, sky-high interest rates, and a general feeling that U.S. power and standing in the world were in irreversible decline. Carter called it "malaise." In 1980, he lost his bid for a second term.

Ronald Reagan entered office facing problems little less severe than those Britain's Iron Lady had faced the year before. He pursued a conservative agenda similar to Thatcher's. He championed American exceptionalism, believing the country fate had given him to lead was a shining city on a hill, one destined to make the world a better and safer place. He would do this not by waging endless wars in far-off places, not by embracing the political pseudo-science of nation building, but by restoring America to its rightful place as the unchallenged military and economic power it recently had been. He called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and proved it to be not only evil, but hollow. He brought it to its knees and in the process freed its captive nations without firing a shot. This was the legacy this man, whose detractors had called an "amiable dunce," left his successors.

As is often the case in world history, men forget the simple truths that led to past greatness. America, seemingly in the blinking of an eye, has become the biggest debtor nation in the world. It fights, but does not win nor does it pay for, two wars in far-off places of which it knows but little. It recklessly expands the welfare state, ignoring the huge danger this implies for the Republic. It chooses to ignore the plain language of the Constitution that has served it so well for two and a quarter centuries.

Americans no longer seem to have confidence or take pride in their governing institutions, their schools, their churches and synagogues, their ability to right the listing ship we all are captive on. It is an old story, one written in the numerous financial panics of the 19th century, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the more recent chaos on Wall Street that has spread so devastatingly to Main Street.

We are like overly fed sheep who waddle to our own shearing. Where is the self-reliance, the indomitable spirit that once made us uniquely American? Where is our Thatcher or Reagan today who will free us from our malaise?

Where indeed? And when?