From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

Demos is one of the Think Tanks that the left have established in recent years to reproduce for their side the successes of Thatcherism. Thatcherism had lots of think tanks, and it did well for itself, so now the left has constructed its own think tanks. But what made these Thatcherite think tanks successful was a constellation of extremely important, wise and true ideas (by no means all of them "Thatcherite", see below). People were having these important, wise and true ideas, and then they set up think tanks to spread the ideas. You don't get hold of important, wise and true ideas just by setting up a think tank and then waiting for importance, wisdom and truth to walk in through the door. So in practice these left wing think tanks have served as a cavalry of Trojan horses within the citadel of leftism. The intellectual agenda is served up in a left wing manner, laced with left wing cliches and verbal gestures, but underneath all that the agenda is very nearly identical to that of the Thatcherites. It is the very willingness of the intellectuals of the left to embrace the wisdoms of their oppponents and to dump so many of the foolishnesses of themselves and of their immediate predecessors which is making the post-Thatcherite "left" so electable. They too have become Thatcherites.

It would, however, be humiliating for these lefties to phrase their newly acquired opinions in the form of an admission that for the last century or so their opponents (named, footnoted and discussed at appropriate length) have been absolutely right about everything, and that they and their numerous friends and forebears had been absolutely wrong about everything (named, footnoted and discussed with appropriate brevity). Instead, they proclaim vast chunks of the Thatcherite agenda as if it had only recently been discovered, by their own brilliant, unaided selves.

The American sociologist Amitai Etzioni, for example, was recently on British television, saying (and it was no mere casual suggestion; it was his principle policy recommendation, about which he had clearly thought carefully, or as carefully as he is capable of thinking) that we ought to start a great debate about welfare policy, about the bad upbringing and behaviour of delinquent teenagers, about the incidence and harmfulness of fatherless families and about the desirability of reestablishing criticism from the immediate community as a means of correcting socially harmful behaviour, and so on. What planet has this man been living on? This debate has been in full swing for at least a decade, on both sides of the Atlantic. The American Charles Murray's Losing Ground was published in 1984, for goodness' sake, and his opinions about Britain were serialised seveal years ago in The Sunday Times. He also appeared on exactly the same British TV show (BBC2's The Battle of Ideas) as Dr Etzioni himself had been on.

Etzioni's opinions about parenthood are easy enough to summarise. Parenting, he says, is a good thing. Parents should not neglect their children, but should, on the contrary, lavish time upon them, and "bond" with them. They shouldn't go flat out for twin careers interspersed with occasional bouts of "quality time"; they should be with their children for long periods, for only thus can good experiences occur. Children's homes are nothing like as good for children to grow up in as regular parent-run homes. Quicky divorces are regrettable, as are quicky marriages; both divorce and marriage should be made harder. Children from divorce-ridden families are far more likely to behave badly. And, reveals Dr Etzioni, all of these astonishing revelations turn out to be confirmed by a lot of recently acquired academic evidence. Actually I quite enjoyed reading all this stuff. It is all well enough written, wise, humane and well motivated. One expects such malignant and perverse drivel from any clutch of ideas being aimed at the Labour Party - the best you can usually hope for is vacuous waffle - that it really was, in circumstances such as these, a pleasure to read something definitely decent and sensible.

Another reason for liking what Dr Etzioni says is that it is actually rather nicer - if vaguer - than a lot of Thatcherism, Reaganism, etc. I do not use these words "Thatcherism" and "Thatcherite" casually, as a thoughtless synonym for "libertarianism". Thatcherism was a cocktail of several propositions. It was not merely the claim that the free market is a good thing, and that state welfare should be curtailed severely. It was not only libertarianism, although that was definitely part of the story. Thatcherism was also the claim that conventional middle class morality is a fine thing, and Thatcherism was an alliance of people, some of whom said that middle class morality should be reestablished by abolishing state welfare and others of whom said that it should be reestablished by being made compulsory. One lot of Thatcher- ites said that sixtyist moral degeneracy should merely be discouraged by not any longer being subsidised by the government. The other lot said that it should be illegal.

Few libertarians of the sort who subscribe to the Libertarian Alliance would assume that economic liberty will take us straight back to pre-sixties moral rectitude. My own opinion is that libertarianism will to some extent re-establish old fashioned decency, but that quite a lot of drug-taking and hell-raising will probably still go on, paid for by the drug-takers and the hell-raisers, if only because libertarianism makes people rich and able to afford such costly delights.

As I say, my main objection to Dr Etzioni is that he writes as if unaware that anyone else had ever thought such things. Discussion of what those nasty right wingers were thinking about during the eighties only obtrudes into this little paper in the form of the claim that "rampant individualism", pleasure seeking, selfishness, etc., are not sufficient foundations for society, as indeed they are not. However, "rampant individualism" is almost entirely an anti-Thatcherite, anti-Reaganite clich‚, rather than a recommendation actually made by the Thatcherites themselves. Dr Etzioni ignores the far more characteristically Thatcherite opinion that much of the moral chaos of recent years has been caused by the imposition of perverse moral incentives by the apparatus of the state. Etzioni assumes the existence and benignity of a large interventionist state, and merely says that it should enforce different things. He proposes, among other tweaks to state power, tougher marriage laws, a switch in the welfare system away from supporting the single life towards supporting married life, and he says that employers should be compelled to contribute hugely more to the costs of their employees bringing up their children than is the case now.

Dr Etzioni is very keen on people being subjected to "counselling" about their duties as parents, many of these counsellors, we deduce, being state officials. Yet it is these same damn counselling types who have created just the moral catastrophe that he is complaining about. They - the socially libertarian, post-Marxist or sub-Marx-ist left of the sixties - were the ones pushing "rampant individualism", not the "Thatcherites", and they worked for decades to establish the state welfare apparatus that has bribed regular folks into running their lives as if they too were living in travelling rock groups of the more deranged, drug ridden and doomed variety. They were the ones rubbishing "social conditioning" and "middle class morality", and all the stuff which Etzioni is now recommending be reestablished.

The sense in which Dr Etzioni is an unreconstructed lefty is that he regularly announces that he is absolutely not recommending things that unreconstructed lefties don't like. He does not favour "stigmatizing" people. Not at all. Absolutely not. He does, however, favour according more social approval to people who do Thatcherite things like devote two decades of their lives to bringing up their children. He disapproves of divorce. But on the other hand, he wouldn't want people who are divorced to think that he ... er ... disapproves of them. The bits where he recommends stigma and disapproval flow logically from his description of all that has gone wrong. His feeble, politically correct protestations that he is not recommending stigma and dispproval - that he is not saying what he is saying - are, by comparison, of no consequence. Their only importance is that lots of stupid people who oppose stigma and disapproval will have been suckered into reading all about how wrong they are.

Not all lefties are complete fools, and many of them have complained about this damned fellow swanning across the Atlantic and upsetting all their applecarts, and doing it in their magazines and think tanks. Dr Etzioni's lefty critics - bless them - have been explaining very clearly that this man is objectively Thatcherite, so to speak, and unlike him, they have named some Thatcherite names. Dr Etzioni ignores Charles Murray, but the leftist critics of Dr Etzioni haven't.

Brian Micklethwait