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Rethinking Margaret Thatcher

In the current issue of TAC, Peter Hitchens wonders if the Iron Lady was all that. Excerpt: I did not pause in those days to question the great myths by which she was surrounded. She possessed that unmistakable magic of authority and majesty that settles on some people and bypasses thought. The fact that she […]

In the current issue of TAC, Peter Hitchens wonders if the Iron Lady was all that. Excerpt:

I did not pause in those days to question the great myths by which she was surrounded. She possessed that unmistakable magic of authority and majesty that settles on some people and bypasses thought. The fact that she was a woman, and a very feminine woman, made that magic even more potent. You might admire her, as I mostly did, or hate her as the embodiment of all that was evil, as many British people also did. But you would never have missed the chance to be close by in the years of her greatness. Power crackled and flickered around her presence.

Much later it came to me that I, and plenty of other people, had been bewitched. I lived abroad, in Moscow and then in Washington D.C., and saw my country as others saw it. Quite often I found that foreigners had a completely misplaced admiration for Britain, which—to their puzzlement—made me sad. I knew the melancholy truth.

They thought we were still polite. They thought our schools were still good. They thought we were law-abiding and hard-working and patriotic. Educated Russians were particularly deluded about this. They longed for there to be a country completely unlike the USSR. The poor longed to be American. The intellectuals longed to be English.

And with this went an absurd, uncritical worship of Margaret Thatcher, which I came to call Thatcherolatry.

Hitchens’s intensely elegiac essay makes me try to imagine a similar conservative case against Reaganolatry. In Thatcher’s defense, however, I wonder what exactly she, as a politician, could have done to reverse the cultural decline that, in Hitchens’s view, has undone her achievements. I don’t care for Reagan-worship, not because I have anything against Reagan, but because the enthusiasms of his cult are usually a substitute for a lack of imagination and courage in facing the problems America has in 2012, not 1981. Still, it’s hard to imagine what Reagan could have realistically done in his era to have avoided or ameliorated the most difficult challenges we face today. Hitchens writes, of Thatcher:

But what is certainly true is that in all her years she did little or nothing to reverse the demoralization brought about in the 1960s, when she had the power to try.

What ought she have tried? I’m not asking rhetorically; I’d really like to know. It’s generally recognized that Reagan reversed the demoralization of the late 1960s and 1970s, but regaining a sense of national confidence and optimism is not the same thing as remoralization. Reagan did not remoralize America. But is it reasonable to expect any politician to achieve that sort of thing? Did Margaret Thatcher fail, or was she doomed to fail by deep cultural forces beyond her control?

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