in 1972 and 1974. Led by rising Marxist firebrand Arthur Scargill, squads of “flying pickets”—unionists dispatched to blockade strategic locations—not only shut down the UK power grid but also brought down the Conservative Party–led government.
While Thatcher absorbed lessons from the lost battles, she was also there to claim the leadership of the party in 1975 in their aftermath. It was a lucky moment to ascend, for the Labour Party would squander its own turn in power amid economic stagnation and social turmoil. Unemployment and inflation rose, mounds of garbage piled up, and transportation was paralyzed by a series of strikes. “Labour Isn’t Working” was Thatcher’s catchiest campaign slogan.
Thatcher’s most resonant 1979 ad, by Saatchi & Saatchi.
A different take on Margaret Thatcher by an anonymous artist.
Capitalizing on the ennui, Thatcher became prime minister on May 4, 1979. She promised healing, quoting the soothing words of St. Francis of Assisi as protesters confronted the police massed outside the compound. Her radical agenda, however, would create divisions not seen in the UK since the 1600s.
Thatcher came to power determined to complete a mission. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had approvingly quoted anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin’s dictum, “The destructive urge is also a creative urge,” during the heady days of punk’s birth. With Thatcher and Reagan’s rise, another form of “creative destruction” had now arrived: the “free market.”
Ironically, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had derived the term from the work of Karl Marx. For Marx, “creative destruction” meant that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own downfall. But the phrase became used within “neoliberal” (a.k.a. “free market”) circles to describe actions like slashing jobs at a company in order to increase its efficiency and, in principle, also that of the larger economy.
This process had been at the heart of the wrenching transformation generated by the Industrial Revolution, and was central to capitalism. If essential for economic growth and progress, the cost in human terms could be immense.
This conservative surge provided the backdrop for The Clash’s rise. The tension between the band’s aims and its means led to new groups such as anarchist trailblazer Crass. While inspired by The Clash, these bands were hostile to their compromises, with Crass cofounder Penny Rimbaud noting that “CBS promotes The Clash—but it ain’t for revolution, it’s just for cash.” Strummer countered by calling Crass “a storm in a teacup,” deeming their do-it-yourself stance as “self-defeating, ’cos you’ve got to be heard.”
The Clash’s third album, London Calling, challenged a version of punk that could seem ever more narrow. As Strummer groused, “I don’t want to see punk as preplanned and pre-thought-out for you to slip into comfortably like mod or hippie music or Teddy Boy rock and roll. In ’76 it was all individual. There was a common ground, it was punk, but everything was okay. Punk’s now become ‘he’s shouting in Cockney making no attempt to sing from the heart and the guitarist is deliberately playing monotonously and they’re all playing as fast as possible so this is punk’ . . . God help us, have we done all that to get here?”
To Strummer, punk was a spirit, an approach to life, not a set of clothes, a haircut, or even a style of music. This was possibly convenient for the band’s commercial aims, but his critique rang true. Soon many of The Clash’s hard-core underground punk critics would find themselves striving to transcend self-made straitjackets.
With London Calling—released only six months after Thatcher’s election—The Clash began to stake its claim on the broader arena of mainstream rock and roll. The musicians abandoned their early disavowal of prepunk sounds for a fervent embrace of the many forms and faces of rebel music. Spurred on by a catchy but lyrically lightweight hit single, “Train in Vain,” the album rose almost into the American Top 20, an unprecedented level of success for a left-wing punk band.
The band’s ambitious vision was made even clearer by the following triple-album set, Sandinista! It sought to articulate—with wildly varying degrees of success—a world music that spanned jazz, salsa, reggae, funk, rap, folk, steel drum, disco, and rock, united only by a common grassroots focus and radical politics.
The latter was announced by the album’s title, an approving nod to Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). Popularly known as the Sandinistas, they were Marxist revolutionaries who had overthrown a US-backed military dictatorship in a popular insurrection in 1979.
Strummer first learned about the Sandinistas from an old friend, Vietnam veteran/activist Moe Armstrong. Later he recalled, “Moe [gave us] info that was quite hard to find out. A bunch of teenage Marxists oust your favorite dictator? The establishment don’t want to know!” Impressed by the quasi-punk spirit of the youthful revolutionaries, as well as initiatives like a mass literacy campaign and health care advances, Strummer and the band took up their cause.
The song “Washington Bullets” provided the album’s title, rebuking the US—as well as the UK—for supporting dictatorships. It was no simple anti-American screed, for it also celebrated Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights that had led the US not to intervene to stop the Sandinistas’ victory. Articulating a consistent anti-imperialist stance, Strummer also skewered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chinese occupation of Tibet over a bubbling salsa beat.
Augusto César Sandino, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua, 1927–33.
Massive crowd in the main square of Managua, Nicaragua, after the Sandinista victory, July 20, 1979.
By the time Sandinista! was released in the US in January 1981, however, the Carter administration and its human rights policy were on its way out. In its place was the newly elected Reagan administration, whose more muscular approach was driven by a rabid anticommunism that viewed conflicts around the world through the prism of superpower competition with the Soviet Union.
“Dictatorships and Double Standards,” an essay by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat turned neoconservative hawk, informed Reagan’s Central American policy. Kirkpatrick argued that Carter’s human rights emphasis was fatally misguided. By abandoning authoritarian allies like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua or the shah of Iran, the US was naively opening the way for the expansion of Soviet-backed totalitarianism, and thus not only injuring our strategic interests but also, ultimately, the cause of human rights and democracy.
Reagan’s decision to make Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations—an institution that she largely held in contempt—sent a clear message that human rights was no longer a priority for US foreign policy.
While the Sandinistas had ample reason to worry about this shift, an ugly preview of bloodbaths to come first materialized in neighboring El Salvador. Kirkpatrick had already identified that country—which bordered Nicaragua, and was in the throes of its own nascent civil war, with Marxist-led guerrilla groups fighting a military-backed regime—as the next battlefront in a global war against Soviet communism. With Reagan’s 1980 victory, his spokespeople made it clear that there would be no hands-off approach in El Salvador as with Carter in Nicaragua.
According to Robert White, Carter’s ambassador in El Salvador,
