Margaret Thatcher is on the cover of Newsweek, or — the next best thing — Meryl Streep is on the cover as the former British prime minister in a new biopic.
Thatcher is a rich theme. If the types who expound on such things didn’t so hate her politics, she’d launch a thousand dissertations on those inexhaustible academic themes of class and gender. As the daughter of a grocer, she was looked down upon as the personification of, in the words of one highfalutin critic, “the worst of the lower-middle-class.” As a woman in a man’s world, she was venomously attacked by her opponents as a “bitch” or “the bag.”
At this moment in our history, though, it is Thatcher’s central purpose that is most important: her unyielding rejection of British decline. She rejected it with every bone in her middle-class body, even though sophisticates scoffed at such a naïve nationalism. She rejected it even though the grandees of her own party said it was inevitable. She rejected it even though she knew reversing it meant forcing a wrenching political and economic crisis.
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The acrid whiff of decline is in the air in America, in the enduringly weak employment picture, in the spiraling debt, in the persistent pessimism about our prospects, and in the intellectual preparation for a “post-American world.” Part of the volatility in the Republican presidential field is the unfulfilled hunger for a Thatcher-like figure. She had the urgency of an emergency-room surgeon, the rhetorical subtlety of a blowtorch, and the conviction of a desert monk. Tory MP John Biffen called her “a tigress surrounded by hamsters.” But she matched her fearlessness with sound judgment and a positively Prussian work ethic. Needless to say, Thatchers aren’t often on offer.
The country she wanted to save was, by the late 1970s, an embarrassing wreck. After World War II, Britain’s leaders had run the ship of state aground on the shoals of socialism. The country was broke and beset by maliciously powerful unions. Humiliatingly, it had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. In 1975, Henry Kissinger told President Ford, “Britain is a tragedy — it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.”
Claire Berlinski, author of the book-length study of Thatcher titled There Is No Alternative, quotes Michael Howard, a subsequent leader of the Tory party: “The air of defeatism which was the prevailing climate of the time was the economic and social equivalent of Munich.”
It took considerable moral courage for Thatcher to insist that practically everyone else was wrong — including the accommodationists in her own party — and that Britain could take an entirely different path. In 1979 she ran on a party manifesto that excoriated declinism. “She had been elected to reverse Britain’s decline,” writes John O’Sullivan, the former Thatcher aide and author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, “not to explain it smoothly away like virtually every other political leader.”
It wasn’t enough to rage against Britain’s fate without correctly diagnosing the source of its sickness. As Berlinski notes, Thatcher made an unsparing and comprehensive case against socialism. “In the end,” she thundered, “the real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”
Bold but never reckless, Thatcher as prime minister undertook a comprehensive free-market program to tame inflation, restrain spending, cut taxes, privatize industries, bring unions to heel, and deregulate the financial industry. At one point, her approval rating dipped to 23 percent, but her vindication was a sustained return to dynamism and growth. Her victory in the Falklands War represented a turning point in national pride. She was Ronald Reagan’s partner in defeating the Soviets. By the end of her career, she had accomplished what Britain’s consensus had once deemed impossible.
In today’s America, the circumstances are very different, but the basic challenge is profoundly the same. Thatcher’s lesson is that decline is inevitable only if its self-fulfilling prophets prevail.
Right on Mr. Lowry! Even though many, many problems confront us and many bad actors assault us we have it within our selves as a country to stop the decline and stay a great nation. There is no reason to give up and stop trying. We can win and reverse the tide it has happened before and can happen again. Britain was worse off then than we are now. We also have more going for us than Britain. If the Republican party is to be about anything it MUST be the party that stops the decline.
You say in America the circumstances are entirely different. Yes, I'd say they are worse. America is as Britain was not, the last hope for the world, and the socialist ideologues are, I think, much more firmly entrenched in every facet of public life, in the media, education, the political, judicial and regulatory elite.
We do, however, have a groundswell of right-minded thought here, which will prevail if we can stop the liberals from maintaining their lying, stealing hold on power next year, This gives me hope.
Sir:
We needn’t be too concerned if the consensus is America in decline. Consensus is the weak-force of politics; pervasive but effete. Let Obama carry forward for four more years and watch meek consensus flee the strong-force of politics, the force which first freed us and which once again stirs in her robes and armor.
Here, Here, Mr. Lowry. We need a new Reagan, a new Thatcher. My first choices were Rubio and Christie, but I am liking Mitt more and more, could he be the one?
Your column reminded me of the quote attributed to Alexander the Great: Better an army of lambs led by a lion, than an army of lions led by a lamb. Reagan and Thatcher were the lions.
Willard is a lamb, he whined when Bret Baier asked him tough questions. There is no way he is in the class of Thatcher and Reagan. We will never see another pair of leaders like them.
Rubio has potential, it's a shame he just joined the Senate in 2010, we cannot wait for 2016, this election has so much on the line. Having Rubio in the Senate is important, he says he won't take a VP slot, only time will tell but he will be a player on the national scene.
"In today’s America, the circumstances are very different, but the basic challenge is profoundly the same."
I agree wholeheartedly. The United States, like Great Britain in the post-War era, is facing a period of relative decline vis-a-vis ascending world powers (China and India, in this case). Our challenge, like Britain's, is to sustain healthy economic growth and improve our standard of living. And yes, the circumstances of the countries' respective economic difficulties are very different. The United States is not beset by high inflation, high taxes, a massively-bloated public sector, or powerful unions more at home on the picket line than the assembly line. Our long-term prosperity is most threatened, instead, by an inadequately-educated workforce. Would conservatives acknowledge this fact, we might get relevant policy proposals rather than retreads of the Reagan/Thatcher agenda.
"Our long-term prosperity is most threatened, instead, by an inadequately-educated workforce."
That's laughable. Since the 1960s the education lobby - teachers, socialists, unions - has been tinkering with the education process that seems to benefit teachers, their unions and all the bureaucracy that has stemmed from the system more than students. Let me guess. You recommend throwing more money into our education system to reduce class size (more teachers), provide higher salaries ("to attract better teachers"), plus whatever other retread arguments have been used in the past 50 years, as long as more funding is provided. And, yes we do have "massively-bloated public sector, [and] powerful unions", and a government that promotes them. How powerful are the unions that contested Boeing? Who does the Labor Department favor? How powerful are public employees? Minnesota, anyone? We have a president who publicly supports unionization, attacks the private sector and bails out unionized GMC, whose workforce you claim is "inadequately-educated ". I would say GMC's workforce is educated enough to know which side their bread is buttered on. Ludicrous.
Just curious, is inadequately educated workforce due to our Dept of Education being too small or too big?
If true how would you correct? Today's average college grad maybe has the same education as a high school grad from 50 years ago. Is the fix at the secondary school level or college level or do you propose a separate trade school path?
I think our job creators and our tech workers have the right education to carry on. My worry is we are very weak in baseline cultural education to be an aware electorate. Thus the 'masses' are susceptible to political rhetoric to a much higher degree then in the past. This is our real weakness.
"The United States, like Great Britain in the post-War era, is facing a period of relative decline vis-a-vis ascending world powers (China and India, in this case). "
That's right.
But you'll notice that Margaret Thatcher, for all the good things she did to revive Britain, still could not restore the old British Empire. Once lost, the Empire could not be regained--not even by her. Once lost, superpower status cannot be regained.
If the U.S. slips into a position of the Number Two economy behind China's, if we lose our military bases and spheres of influence in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, not even a Ronald Reagan will be able to get them back.
Once lost, America's superpower status can't be regained.
Rich, you're blowing smoke. Your endorsement of the White RINO, Mittens Romney and you and the editorial staff of National Rebuke's sympathy for the chocolate eclair backbone of Huntsman, make your cred very strained. Too many cocktail parties with the likes of David Brooks, and David Frump?
Got to feeling isolated and tired of being called names by the Progressives and Faux Conservatives? Like O-Reilly, maybe the marketing people said you could increase market share by "not being so extreme".
Ben Shapiro-new editorial on Townhall-writes an editorial that puts you putzes to shame.
Sorry folks, but Lowry's just whistling past the graveyard. The battle is lost, for the same reason it has been lost in Britain:
Most people, including a majority of Americans, don't want to be free.
Oh sure, they'll tell you they do. They'll mouth the platitudes, choke up at the appropriate patriotic cues, put 'Don't tread on me' bumper stickers on their cars. But run a few stories about old folks who've come across hard times, young mothers who are facing difficulties, and the majority of folks will scream for Big Daddy government to "do *something*!" in a heartbeat.
The impetuts to individual action has been lost. The understanding that freedom means freedom to *fail*, and a willingness to take the hard consequences of failure, has been lost.
We've become risk averse. We've become - small. And our institutions, particularly the public/private educational complex, reinforce the entitlement society at every turn (insert snort of laughter here at *RPMcMurphy's post above, characterizing our difficulties as due to educational inadequacy. Yeah, that's it - far too few M.A. degrees in sociology or art history, that'll fix us up fast).
The Thatcher interregnum was real, but brief. Assuming a Republican wins next year, ours will be the same (and if Romney, more a slowing down than any attempt at reversal).
As usual at NRO, the historically and Biblically illiterate denizens remain blind to the underlying condition rather being a spiritual one, as the Founders warned and promised us. For all Thantcher's accomplishments, her failure to address that more fundamental issue insured her reforms would be as short-lived as they proved to be, not founded on the rock of God and His Word, but on the sinking sands of vain, vapid and foolish political and economic philosophies. As our Founders warned us, only God can save us, and our proven forgetting of Him insures our destruction. God save us all.
We live in a secular nation, not a theocracy. As true as it is that God is the foundation of our salvation, the truth is based on individual, not collective, salvation. Encouraging individuals to follow traditional Judeo-Christian ethics and morality is good and valid. Maybe that's what you mean. But suggesting that a nation's politics should be based on any particular religious message is both misguided and dangerous.
You'd never know about Thatcher's accomplishments if you got your info from the BBC. I have NEVER heard a reference to her on any commentary or entertainment program that was not negative, rude, and/or condescending.
It saddens me that one of Britain’s greatest democratically elected leaders is so distained.
Is this just the BBC? I know it leans liberal but you would expect at least respect from a national network.
How does the general population feel? Do they hold her in higher esteem, if so why do they allow the BBC to get away with it. Do they share the BBCs distain or are they ambivalent and just neglect the legacy of one of their finest?
Mrs Thatcher continues to be a highly divisive character here and attracts sharply partisan views from the British people. Many, particularly in the North, continue to hate her and ascribe most of the country's present problems to 'Thatcher's Children'. When she eventually dies they will hold a great big party.
Sorry, can't let you lionize as a hero a woman who was a ferocious defender of abortion and cemented a bipartisan consensus in Britain for it's legality
She was fundamentally (in the european sense) a liberal, albeit a nationalist one. Hard for me to see much of any difference between her and as PM and Bill Clinton as president.
I was in Britain in the mid-late 70s, and things were a LOT worse there than they are today in the U.S. They were rationing coal and natural gas. The people almost all looked as poor as church mice, and most of the rest of Northern Europe pitied them, and were puzzled by their haplessness.
Today we are on that road, to be sure, but not as far along. Their advanced state of decline was the reason that people finally started listening to Mrs. Thatcher. Most Brits were embarrassed and appalled by their circumstances. When things get bad enough here in the U.S. -- and they will -- I am confident that our own Thatcher will emerge. It may be a woman or a "person of color" who is totally outside the "in" crowd who charges in, and it may be someone who speaks completely out of type, but we have Thatcher-quality leaders in this country. We just aren't yet hospitable to them.
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