1979: The year everything changed

On the 69th floor of one of the skyscrapers that dominate the Chinese city of Shenzhen—a fishing village 35 years ago that is now home to 14 million people—are life-sized wax figures of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, seated together with pots of tea before them. Most visitors view Communist China’s one-time “paramount leader” and the former British prime minister as polar opposites who managed to work out a peaceful resolution for the future of Hong Kong. But they are actually more like yin and yang figures, according to Christian Caryl, author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. “They had a lot in common,” says Caryl, a journalist and senior fellow at MIT. “Both demanded change, both tolerated inequality, both obsessed over the need to create wealth before it could be shared.” The Marxist and the Tory, in fact, “did more to promote market-driven globalization than just about anyone else.”

Thatcher and Deng were not the only history-changing figures to emerge in the revolutionary year of 1979. They were joined by two other titans, Pope John Paul II and the Ayatollah Khomeini, champions of the second of the twin forces that have shaped the world in which we live: markets and religion. And despite the seeming divides between them, all four were linked by more than chronology. Each was motivated by a hostile reaction, as much visceral as intellectual, to what seemed to most of their contemporaries to be unstoppable historical trends. Government control of the economy, even in the capitalist West (“We are all Keynesians now,” said Richard Nixon in 1971) would continue to swell; the Iron Curtain and the fossilized economies of Communist states were here to stay; and, most obvious of all, religion was a spent force throughout the world, relegated to the private sphere, if not to the dustbin.

But his quartet were not, Caryl ably argues, garden-variety conservatives, but actual counter-revolutionaries, and ruthlessly effective ones, at that. Thatcher didn’t block trade-union power in Britain, she shattered it; Khomeini didn’t restore Islam to its traditional place in a modernizing Iran, he established a contemporary theocracy; Deng pulled off something no Soviet reformer ever dreamt of, transforming his nation into a capitalist economic superpower under tight Communist Party control; John Paul II put a dagger through the U.S.S.R.’s claim to the moral and ideological high ground in Eastern Europe.

Caryl’s history-makers tapped into deep veins of national tradition that their opponents had thought passé and, although they had help—Ronald Reagan, the mujahedeen of Afghanistan and Mikhail Gorbachev prime among them—and rode winds of change that were not entirely of their making, each responded skilfully to opportunity.

And, as Thatcher’s career—the one most open to public scrutiny—demonstrates, they had the luck. Just as she was slashing taxes and state revenue, North Sea oil money came to the rescue of the Treasury. When the social upheavals of her first term threatened her re-election, Thatcher was saved by her enemies, first by Argentina’s feckless invasion of the Falklands, which enabled her to gain the aura of successful war leader, and then by the Labour Party’s sharp turn further left, with a heavily Marxist 1983 election manifesto described by one of its own MPs as “the world’s longest suicide note.” In the end, Thatcher stayed in power long enough to utterly remake Britain’s economy—and Britain’s way of thinking about its economy—to the extent that, in 2002, another Labour MP remarked, “We are all Thatcherites now.”

Now change is in the air again. “I think their era is drawing to a close,” says Caryl. “There’s a weariness with markets since 2008, though there is still no language to rally that unease.” The religious picture, too, is clouded. “The appeal of the Islamicist idea is still strong in Arab countries,” says Caryl. But so, too, is the reaction against it, the result of “the 30 years of experience Iran offers—it’s lost its luster among young Arabs alienated by the real-world fusion of Islam and government.” For now, the new social and economic trends remain just straws in the wind, awaiting new leaders to bring them to life.

There are only two viable economic strategies: a market system run well or a market system run poorly. All other systems are basically negative systems i.e. poverty creators/wealth destroyers. Having a poorly run market system does not mean a country is lost. But it will not do as well as one that allows for as much freedom as possible for its participants. Out current system is like a thoroughbred horse with a 500 lb weight, Obamanomics, sitting on top. Get rid of the dead weight, and the economy will boom again.

“...and then by the Labour Party’s sharp turn further left, with a heavily Marxist 1983 election manifesto described by one of its own MPs as “the world’s longest suicide note.””

What a crackup. I remember their leader, Michael Foote, and I remember the gist of the platform (i.e., total Communism and surrender to the Soviets)...but I don’t remember it being called “the world’s longest suicide note” - that is hysterical.

Here's a view from left field on the events of 1979

Wanted--Dead or Alive—The Manhattan Transfer (1981)

The rule of the tyrants decline
The year, 1979
From Uganda to Nicaragua
It's bombs and bullets all the time
So they're corrupt, so they're vile
So it's coup after coup all the while
Human rights they violate
They think they too damn great
So in disgrace now they live in exile

Gairy is a wanted man
Idi Amin is a wanted man
Shah of Iran tried so hard to survive
He too was wanted dead or alive

Strikes, demonstrations and wars
Injustice is always the cause
Politicians turn too soon from
Poor people into tycoons
Corruption must bring harass
South African Vorster resign in disgrace
Muzarewa take away Ian Smith place
The Uganda devil was easily cat straddled
Beaten up and chased, what a waste

Gairy is a wanted man
Bokassa is a wanted man
Ali Bhutto try so hard to survive
He too was wanted dead or alive

The Shah had a short time to live
Because the Ayatollah don't forgive
When you see church ruling state
With pure vengeance and hate

Situation must be explosive
General Somoza from Nicaragua
Thought it was easy with the Sandanistas
With the help of Venezuela, Panama and Cuba
They kick him straight to America

Gairy is a wanted man
Park Chung Hee was a wanted man
Acheampong tried so hard to survive
He too was wanted dead or alive

Gairy is a wanted man
Idi Amin is a wanted man
Shah of Iran tried so hard to survive
He too was wanted dead or alive

Bang! You're dead!

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