famously contended with Britain’s John Maynard Keynes amid the Great Depression over whether government intervention would ease or prolong the economic turmoil. Hayek had extolled allowing the “free market” to correct itself over time. Arguing that “in the long run, we are all dead,” Keynes espoused ideas about the crucial role of government action which became the basis for much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The vanquished Hayek turned further to the right during World War II. In 1944’s Road to Serfdom, he argued that not only did government meddling injure the economy but, indeed, was bound to lead to tyranny. Aided by the publication of an abridged Reader’s Digest edition in 1945, the book found an audience in a slowly building right-wing movement, including with both Reagan and Thatcher.
By 1983 the two were no longer outsiders—they were rulers with immense power on the world stage. They brought this once obscure Austrian economist—and contemporary acolytes like Milton Friedman—into the mainstream. Both now stood at the pinnacle of their respective careers, seeking to dismantle the New Deal and Britain’s socialist-leaning “welfare state” postwar consensus.
If punk offered a bleak forecast in 1976, by 1983 that dark possibility was being made real. Virtually all the other early trailblazers had fallen away. Now the successful but conflicted Clash was one of the last gangs in town, standard-bearer for a vision that took the postwar dream for granted, and sought to push beyond.
As such, Strummer might be viewed as the nemesis of Reagan and Thatcher, for the two politicians sought not the fulfillment of that dream, but its death. Yet all three in their distinct ways sought to transcend the post-1945 consensus.
Punk rock had always been about more than simply music. Born largely as a reaction to the self-indulgent excesses and perceived failure of the rock-and-revolution 1960s, it offered a blistering critique of idealism sold out or gone bad.
Punk’s “ruthless criticism of everything existing” spared no one, and could slip toward nihilist extremes. That made the idea of harnessing music for radical change a perilous venture. Yet beneath noisy blasts of illusion-shattering negation still lurked an unbending belief in the power of music to transform.
The Clash was defined by this sense of mission. Dubbed “the only band that matters” by record company PR, the band helped crystallize an affirmative, activist vision for punk.
If the early Clash track “Hate & War” encapsulated the band’s dismissal of the sixties, the musicians nonetheless borrowed from certain currents of that era. Their jagged, relentless music, close-cropped hair, quasi-military garb, and fierce sense of purpose suggested a marriage of Detroit agit-rock legends MC5 with the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The Clash was fascinatingly—and sometimes infuriatingly—contradictory. They embodied punk’s “year zero” stance, dismissing the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley in “1977,” the B side of their debut single, “White Riot.” But if the incendiary songs warned of class war, they were made possible through the largesse of CBS Records, then one of the music industry’s behemoths.
“Punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS!” punk scribe Mark Perry famously declared in 1977. Although proved false by what followed, Perry’s words nonetheless suggested both The Clash’s immense meaning and contradiction: it wanted to be the biggest rock band in the world while somehow remaining “death or glory” heralds of revolution. If this paradox earned The Clash more than its share of criticism, it was also grounded in idealism that was real enough to cause anguish for the man at the center of the maelstrom: Joe Strummer.
Lead singer/lyricist Strummer was not only the elder member of The Clash, but also its soul. Rising out of the British squat scene, he was fascinated by American folk radical Woody Guthrie as well as the dwindling embers of late-1960s revolt. Active with a rising roots-rock band, the 101ers—named after the band’s ramshackle squat—Strummer was wrenched out of his backward-gazing by a blistering Sex Pistols show in April 1976.
Shortly thereafter, he was poached from the 101ers by guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon to front their nascent punk unit. This gifted pair had fallen under the spell of agitator Bernard Rhodes, the catalyst for assembling the band and encouraging them to write about urgent sociopolitical issues.
If Sex Pistols lit the fuse of punk’s explosion, The Clash sought to guide the movement’s subsequent momentum in a constructive direction, making the implicit affirmation behind “no future” rants more explicit and convincing. “We never came to destroy,” Strummer noted to Melody Maker in 1978, adding years later in a punk retrospective, “We had hope in a sea of hopelessness.”
After the collapse of sixties rock idealism, this was a tricky line to walk. Strummer’s ambivalence showed in a March 1977 interview with Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon. Asked how potent a band can be in making political change, he responded, “Completely useless! Rock doesn’t change anything. But after saying that—and I’m just saying that because I want you to know that I haven’t got any illusions about anything, right—having said that, I still want to try to change things.”
Although The Clash was careful never to accept a narrow ideological label, it stood on the revolutionary socialist left, as the frontman acknowledged elsewhere. Given this anticapitalist stance, Strummer admitted to Coon—who later would briefly manage the band after the ouster of Rhodes in late 1978—“Signing that contract [with CBS] did bother me a lot.”
Despite its underground roots, The Clash was not interested in being captured by a narrow subculture. If the Top 10 beckoned, it was in hopes of bringing a message of radical change to the broadest possible segment of the population.
In retrospect, The Clash’s signing to a major label like CBS seems preordained. Capitalism would provide the avenue for reaching the masses that then, in principle, could be mobilized to overturn that same system and build something better. CBS had been home to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other sixties counterculture icons, and even issued an ad claiming “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” in 1968. Already thinly disguised folderol at the time, by the midseventies, such rhetoric could sound dubious indeed. The Clash pressed on nonetheless.
Punks were not the only rebels who strode onto the world stage in the midseventies, however. At the very moment the Republican Party seemed eviscerated by the Watergate scandal, with the Keynesian postwar order appearing unassailable, grassroots insurgent Ronald Reagan was challenging Republican president Gerald Ford, and “strange rebel” Margaret Thatcher had just captured the leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK.
Reagan came to political prominence with his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the presidential candidacy of archconservative Barry Goldwater. While Lyndon Johnson won the contest in a landslide, Reagan used his notoriety as a springboard for a successful race for governor of California.
Reagan established himself as the deadly enemy of student radicals protesting the Vietnam War, famously proclaiming, “If there has to be a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with.” In 1976, Reagan’s upstart primary challenge to President Gerald Ford fell just short of victory. Four years later, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, who was wounded by inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan accomplished what his mentor Goldwater had failed to do nearly two decades earlier: bring a newly radicalized Republican Party into the White House.
Over the same period, Thatcher had gone from Parliament backbencher to minister of education in the middle-of-the-road Tory government of Edward Heath. She slashed milk subsidies to schoolchildren, and showed no remorse when protesters chanted, “Thatcher Thatcher, milk snatcher!”
