Photo: Reuters

When Margaret Thatcher met Ronald Reagan in April 1975, neither was in their first flush of youth. She was 50 and he 65. She was the leader of Britain’s opposition; he a former governor of California. It was by no means obvious that either would win power. They bonded instantly.

Although born almost a generation and an ocean and continent apart, they found they were completing each other’s sentences. Both instinctive politicians rather than taught ideologues, they discovered they had both found validation for their convictions in the works of Friedrich Hayek, at that time a long-forgotten theorist even among conservatives.

From that sure beginning began a working partnership, or political marriage, that solidified the alliance between the United States and Britain at a crucial time when the Soviet Union was facing collapse and the democratic forces in Eastern Europe were pressing to be freed. There have been other Anglo-American alliances. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill eventually became friends, though FDR never let the English bulldog forget that America had overtaken Britain as the world’s most powerful nation and that Churchill was a supplicant.

President Bill Clinton, then President George W. Bush, became Tony Blair’s best friend, but the relationships were at best that of elder to younger brother, or in the case of Blair-Bush more like man and spaniel.

In the case of Reagan and Thatcher, however, the friendship was between equals and as a result America was more powerfully and directly influenced by a foreign leader than any since the founding of the republic.

The bond was not merely personal – though that proved to be the glue that allowed the partnership to survive profound disagreements, including America’s initial foot-dragging over helping Britain recover the Falkland Islands from the invading Argentines and the almost comic American invasion of Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth. The alliance was above all ideological. Both believed conservatives had given too much ground to liberals and socialists and both determined to roll back the frontiers of the state.

In that Thatcher was more successful than Reagan, though she had more ground to cover. By the time she became prime minister, in 1979, Britain had lived for 40 years under the wartime then postwar bipartisan consensus that established a cradle-to-grave welfare state and a mixed economy with a large state sector. It is hard to believe today that until Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, British coal mines, steel mills, railways, road freight transport, telephones and communications, a large stake in British Petroleum (BP), even British Airways were in public ownership.

The Reagan-Thatcher friendship was also strategic. In international summits they worked together as a bulwark against the interventionist ideas of their European partners, who dismissed their free-market notions as “Anglo-Saxon economics.”

But it was in their shared attitude towards the already crumbling Soviet Union that their joint efforts bore most fruit. There have been a lot of extravagant claims about the role Thatcher and Reagan played in the demise of Soviet communism, which downplay the heroic acts of defiance by leaders on the front line such as Lech Walesa in Poland. They also overlook the brave opponents of Russian rule to be found over the years in Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere – as well as the myriad humble refuseniks who risked their lives escaping over barbed wire and booby-trapped borders.

Pope John Paul II, “the Polish pope,” also played a significant part in hastening the collapse of the rotten and corrupt Soviet system. By the time Reagan declared in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” the Soviet Union was already defunct.

But Reagan and Thatcher played a prominent role in easing Mikhail Gorbachev’s path in leading the Russian people out of serfdom. The end of 70 years of brutal communism would not have been as easy and obvious as it turned out had it not been for the friendly welcome Reagan and Thatcher, together and separately, offered to a tired and traumatized regime uncertain of which way to proceed. They offered encouraging words to those trapped behind the Iron Curtain and showed by example that state ownership was no substitute for the free market. In privatization, Thatcher offered a means to free-market forces.

They ensured that the awkward transformation out of communism was, for the most part, peaceful and ordered and was achieved without a shot being fired. As Thatcher said in her eulogy for Reagan at Washington Cathedral, “When a man of good will [Gorbachev] did emerge from the ruins, President Reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and offer sincere cooperation.”

The rapport between the two leaders was spontaneous and sincere. This was not the pragmatic, patrician Roosevelt/Churchill alliance, but one based on small courtesies and kind gestures. Both were isolated figures within their own administrations: She because she was a woman who had scaled the male bastion of the still overwhelmingly male dominated Conservative Party, he because he was so much older than everyone else around him.

They clung to each other in moments of crisis. From the earliest days they exchanged birthday and wedding anniversary greetings, jotting personal best wishes in the margins of official documents. They never forgot that there was frail flesh and blood behind the confident public image.

Like all marriages, they were so close they would often take each other for granted. But in moments of high tension or intense political pressure, they offered each other unwavering support. In the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal, Thatcher dropped a reassuring line to Reagan, reminding him “there is important work to be done and that you are going to do it. …If you would like to talk … call me.”

Both endured long and lingering demises that allowed assessments of their achievements to be both premature and hasty. Looking at those who stand on their shoulders, it is hard not to conclude that, for all their faults, they were in a different league. Each has been unfairly judged, dismissed because their policies were bold and seemingly uncompromising.

In fact both were eager to find common ground where it existed. Both were driven by conviction rather than polling. Both served to change the economic and social welfare policies of their opponents, Clinton and Blair.

Both were, despite their extreme positions, above all likeable, at least to their followers, and able to attract not just support but devotion. In her homage to Reagan, delivered on videotape at his funeral in Washington Cathedral, Thatcher offered a testament that could apply to them both. “Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles and I believe right ones. He expounded them clearly. He acted upon them decisively.” It is a lesson that conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic would do well to grasp.

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Nicholas Wapshott is a Reuters columnist.

Photo: Reuters

There are few better ways of grasping how far the Republicans have abandoned the middle ground, where they used to win elections, than the way their leaders have become agents of the gun industry. Conservatives used to consider themselves law-abiding citizens who put great store by the permanence of institutions, by the rule of law, and by the traditional caution and common sense of the sensible majority. Such devotion to stability, continuation, and moderation explains why so many conservatives were alarmed when the social revolution of the Sixties erupted. Suddenly, it seemed, everything was on the move. Children no longer believed in the wisdom of their elders, nor obeyed the unwritten rules that had guided every previous generation. The days of everyone knowing their place and remaining in it were overthrown and it appeared that anarchy had broken out in America.

Nowhere was this more evident to traditional conservatives than in the way African-Americans responded to the civil rights legislation enacted by Lyndon Johnson. Instead of being grateful for the overdue democratic changes wrested from reluctant Southern lawmakers, a significant number of African-Americans demanded more profound change. There were riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other major cities which were met by calls from conservatives for tighter gun controls. The Black Panthers, dressed as soldiers and carrying guns, as was their right under the Second Amendment, demanded that African-Americans be allowed to live in a separate self-governing state. In May 1967, 30 Panthers took loaded rifles, shotguns, and pistols into the California State Capitol to protest against new gun control laws. The California governor, Ronald Reagan, declared: “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

After John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Johnson joined with conservatives to pass the federal Gun Control Act that stipulated a minimum age for gun buyers, restricted traffic across state lines to federally registered gun dealers, limited the sale of certain destructive bullets, required guns to carry serial numbers, and added drug addicts and the insane to those, like felons, who were already forbidden to own guns. When it transpired that Lee Harvey Oswald had bought the rifle that killed the president mail order from the pages of the National Rifle Association magazine, the NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth backed an end to mail-order sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” he said.

In the mid-Seventies, the NRA switched from being a moderate organization backing moderate gun controls into a radical body that promulgated an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment with a new motto: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It was this originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment that led Warren Burger, the conservative, constructionist chief justice appointed by Richard Nixon to declare on PBS in 1991 that the NRA had perpetrated “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. … [the NRA has] misled the American people and they, I regret to say, they have had far too much influence on the Congress of the United States than as a citizen I would like to see. And I am a gun man.”

Today the Republican Party remains in hock to the NRA leadership and through them to their paymasters in the gun-making industry. The NRA runs an official list, like the old Communist Party, of preferred candidates and grades them according to their adherence to the strict constructionist interpretation of the Second Amendment. If a candidate fails to offer total support for absolutist gun rights, the NRA funds a campaign in the next party primary to unseat them. Polls suggest, however, that the NRA leadership no longer represents the wishes of its members towards moderate gun controls, and since the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren, the extremism of NRA leaders like Wayne LaPierre, whose tin-eared response to the shootings so jarred voters in all parties, suggests the existence at the top of the organization of a self-serving, superannuated elite that no longer commands the confidence of its rank and file.

Gun rights activism is just one strand of Republican extremism out of kilter with moderate Republicans and middle ground independent voters who decide elections. In the mid-Seventies, while Second Amendment fundamentalists were starting to blacklist GOP candidates who would not support their hard line, the party was also transformed by the rise of radical Christian fundamentalists, whose literal reading of scripture led them to adopt social conservative positions on abortion, race, and homosexuality. These changes coincided with the arrival of neo-conservatism, a body of theory that saw America as not just the world’s policeman but the harbinger of democracy everywhere with a particular brief to counter radical Islam. Until then it could be argued, citing two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, that the Democrats were the war party and the Republicans the party that put America first. Since the neo-cons that notion has been turned on its head by the persecution of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were to be abandoned after an inconclusive outcome.

Around the same time, economic notions that had ensured unprecedented prosperity under Eisenhower and Nixon gave way in the GOP to fiscal conservatism – absolutist ideas about the money supply and reducing public spending that George H. W. Bush derided as “voodoo economics.” Since 2009, libertarian insurgents that in the GOP primaries last year accounted for about 10 per cent of party activists have extrapolated careful budgeting into demands for minimal government. Since Tea Party protestors entered the GOP in numbers in 2009, they have instituted further restrictive demands upon Republican candidates, diminishing the discretion of elected officials by directing them to obey pledges not to raise taxes.

Once a moderate party protecting old fashioned values, since the mid-Seventies the Republicans have adopted extreme positions that are alien to the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Sr. A party proud of its pragmatism is being driven by dogmatic theories imported by unbending ideologues such as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. On guns, abortion, immigration, women’s health, homosexual rights, home schooling, and a host of other issues, the once inclusive Republican Party has lost its one-nation tradition and supplanted it with a hotchpotch of sectarian interests policed by a coalition of narrow, theory-driven mavericks, curmudgeons, libertarians, radicals, and eccentrics.

The GOP is deeply divided, a split that conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer attribute to fast footwork by President Obama. Other conservatives, such as Bill O’Reilly, think the party will find it hard to put itself back together by the time of the next presidential election, never mind the mid-terms in two years. Citing the way Obama and Bill Clinton arrived from nowhere to save the Democrats from an unpopular ideological stance, Krauthammer believes the Republicans will be saved by an as-yet unknown savior. Four years is, indeed, a long time in politics, but it may take far longer than that to purge the party of its popular perception as a redoubt for gun-toting, women-loathing, gay-hating, xenophobic, war-mongering anarchists.

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Nicholas Wapshott is a Reuters columnist.