As I said earlier, I don’t know enough about UK politics to say much about Margaret Thatcher, but….I sometimes lament the fact that it’s usually only conservatives who write pieces that talk about how manners have gone to the dogs because of the shortcomings of our political leaders. Mind you, I think all such pieces are bullshit for a variety of reasons: people have always been assholes, our political leaders don’t influence people that much, etc. But it’s a potent rhetorical device that right-wingers have gotten a lot of mileage out of over the years, so I’m linking and blockquoting this:
Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head.
The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. What happened at the hands of this woman’s indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs. It led to riots that nobody needed. More insidiously, it fathered a mood of tolerated harshness. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Everything was justified as long as it made money – and this, too, is still with us.
Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. But the sense of community evaporated. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with.
Redshirt
Stepping upon stepping upon stepping.
Also: The UK is better for it.
gogol's wife
And they fine you every time you slam the door!
some guy
Thatcher was simply a premature Austerian.
? Martin
Not sure who is really more to blame here, Maggie Thatcher or Jeremy Clarkson.
some guy
her love affair with Pinochet was the real tell.
PeakVT
Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector.
Reagan didn’t succeed either. But he shifted a lot of it to defense and interest payments. Those are acceptable to big-government conservatives.
Dream On
Sound familiar?
Keep your hands away, big guvment!
El Cid
Thatcher & Reagan were Punch & Judy role models for many things, but among them was the performed modeling of a trope: Acting brave & stern as though one were a courageous hero while the context was attacking the poor & weak.
Ever since then, the majority view — including ‘centrist’ and mainstream discussion on most of our print & broadcast media — has been that ‘brave’ people ally themselves with the rich and greedy and sternly screw over the poor and middle classes.
This, this was their legacy, along with enthusiastically backing sub-fascism and apartheid neo-colonial slaughter of innocents throughout the 3rd world.
That’s a very important point, the happy, gleeful way that Thatcher & Reagan pushed the killing, the butchering, the machete-wielding-slashing of mothers, grandfathers, babies, around the world, and called it heroism, as do their followers, and as joined by such types as the New Republic and so forth.
El Cid
Thatcher knew that the NHS (National Health Service) was too popular to cut directly, so she and her turd-gurgling colleagues realized the best thing to do was to screw the NHS up, to slow them down, make them hated and ineffiicent, and then later, once successfully turned to a target rather than a hero, cut them down.
Dream On
Another reason to dislike
ronnie, I mean Thatcher.Her in a nutshell. Her critics are commies, et al.
Which is why – I like to think of it this way.
Keith
Her heyday (leaving the horse pun at the door) was a bit before my time (I was alive but in single digits), but if the Thatcher quotes being proudly brandied are true, her overriding theme was that women are better than men. Kinda depressing when a few days after Obama got excoriated for complimenting a woman’s looks, there are talking heads on TV jumping over themselves to say “MT said elect men to talk, but elect women to get things done” is right-on or a great statement. Reverse the parties and tell me that isn’t insulting as hell.
White Trash Liberal
Political leaders do have the power and opportunity to shape attitudes. Look no further than Dubya and the wonders his administration had on public discourse and attitudes in matters of war, patriotism, etc. He allowed for full-throated and vigorous displays of brute stupidity.
David Koch
Ding-Dong the Witch is dead!
Ding-Dong the Wicket Witch is dead!
Mr Stagger Lee
That British version of House Of Cards saw Francis Urquhardt trying one-up..One thing if Thatcher and Reagan was punch and Judy, was Bill Clinton and his neoliberal buddy Tony Blair the bobsey twins? Blair also was Bush’s good doggie rolling all over.
Schlemizel
WOW! That block quote is the distillation of the essence of what is wrong in the UK and the US. It really puts what Thacher and Reagan did in the simplest terms and explains the evil they left behind
Thanks for linking to it
J
Hugo Young was, by the way, about as temperate and level-headed an observer of the political scene as there ever was.
Maeve
Who brought more good into the world – Annette Funicello or Maggie Thatcher.
Discuss!!!
Comrade Dread
Yeah, reading history will disabuse you of the notion that ‘kids these days’ is anything other than the product of a mind that can no longer remember all of the fun it had in its youth.
That said, I do think the modern conservative era has brought about a negative sum change in our social consciousness.
I think that progressive fusion of humanism and social Christianity that spawned a lot of the turn of the 20th century reform has given way to a meaner form of prosperity Christianity and amoral Objectivism.
zoot
not shifted, just added defense to the rich’s suckling trough. Thus the huge deficits – all military
pork barrelbudget caused.Chris
Here’s an equivalent from the other side of the English Channel…
… In the fifties and sixties French and Belgian comic books I inherited from my mother, one of the noticeable tropes even in “political” stories like military and spy fiction is that the bad guys are always people driven by greed (organized crime, mercenaries, crooked businessmen, even the spies are never actually working for a foreign country, just looking to sell secrets to the highest bidder).
You might think that was some kind of subversive political message. But actually, it was the opposite. There was a culture war going on at the time, the commissions controlling publications had ordered the comic industry to steer clear of politics, and “greed is bad and those driven by it are wrong” was one of the only moral “messages” that they felt was so basic and apolitical that even godless relativistic socialists and backwards reactionary Catholics could agree with it and not take offense.
That was fifty years ago. Nowadays, we have the Washington Consensus, Thatcher/Reaganomics, and “greed is good” established as worldwide consensus.
sm*t cl*de
Thatcher was adamant that her opponents should be destroyed, not listened to, and that everything wrong with pre-Thatcher England was due to the Conservative Party finding points of agreement with the Labour Party.
I suspect that a lot of the pundits idolising Thatcher and her Legacy are the same pundits who want Washington to adopt a new style of Consensus Government and Compromise, managing to forget that “consensus” was for her the worst kind of swear-word.
Ruckus
@? Martin:
maggie was very serious, clarkson is just a bit tongue in cheek. A very small bit but still.
Woody
Manchester derby in the Premiership – they declined to wear black armbands or have a minute of silence in memoriam. The Thatcher years are not fondly remembered in the industrial Midlands.
scav
A Wooden Stake for the Iron Lady.
Yup.
Still enjoying it.
mai naem
I heard that she had moved to the Ritz Hotel in London around Christmas. The woman had been living at the Ritz for over 3 months in London, no less. I have to believe that’s at least $500/night. Also, both her kids were travelling when she died. Kind of sad that her kids couldn’t even plan it so that one of them was in London at all times. Pretty pathetic. I saw a youtube video of Cameron hosting at Downing Street in 2010(???.) She looked pretty frail.
Redshift
From the coverage I’ve been hearing today on BBC World Service radio, I find that I’m glad Thatcher lived past the crash of 2008. Nearly every “regular person” they asked (as opposed to Conservative politicians) said she had made the country worse, turning it from a fairly egalitarian society to one of boom and bust, where some people got massively rich and most people did worse, and that the policies she initiated moved the country toward these busts and the Crash itself.
Though I think the Brits are a hell of a lot more honest about their dead leaders than we are, I still think less would have been laid at her doorstep if she’d died by 2007.
So I can honestly say, I’m glad Thatcher lived as long as she did.
Chris
@Keith:
Well if Hillary does run, we need to whack them over the head with that quote again and again and again. “Do it for Margaret Thatcher!”
@Comrade Dread:
Yeah, I agree.
As someone who was born after the Thatcher/Reagan arrival to power but still raised in that old religion… There’s a lot of reasons for falling away from Christianity, but that’s one of the big ones; I simply don’t fucking recognize it anymore. The old “you are your brother’s keeper” ethic’s been replaced by the sort of cold materialism that they always traditionally warned that atheism could lead to.
Granted, I’ve long since stopped believing that there was any casual connection between unbelief and materialism. But still… the residual Christian part of me looks at these televangelists preaching Ayn Rand with the same “who the fuck are you?” kind of attitude that social conservatives have towards pro-choice or pro-gay churches.
stryx
There was masters an’ servants an’ servants an’ dogs
They taught you how to touch your cap
But through strikes an’ famine an’ war an’ peace
England never closed this gap
Mark S.
Almost as bad as that anonymous commenter on Daily Kos:
Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow
opie_jeanne
“….Whether pushing each other off the road,..”
Yeesh. Having driven in England, we were shocked by their bad manners. The French, by comparison, are very polite on the road, more polite than we are by a long shot.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@opie_jeanne: try driving in Ireland sometime. Holy shit.
Betsy
Aww! This is so sad. Now Sarah Palin will never get to meet her!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2011/jun/07/margaretthatcher-sarahpalin
mclaren
This last is what really strikes me about Little Miss Pol-Pot-wannabe. She exulted in viciousness — but she didn’t have the brains or the imagination to think really big, like Genghis Khan, so she had to settle for kicking the crutches out from under cripples and starving babies. She truly enjoyed destroying people, like a mafia don. Ever see the 1945 Hitchcock film LIFEBOAT? Margaret Thatcher was the guy in the lifeboat who threw the people to the sharks, one by one, as they ran out of water.
Margaret Thatcher oversaw the degradation of Britain into a Mad Max thunderdome of a country, a mean country, a hillbilly-hick penny-pinching sadistic country whose idea of the way to spend public monies is to snoop on welfare moms and make sure they’re not buying lottery tickets with their dole money. England in the 1970s and 1980s could have aspired to the stars; instead, under Thatcher, England became the country that rejoiced in hurling striking coal miners out of work and firing public servants who did “useless” things like process payments to single mothers to keep their heating on.
I sincerely hope Margaret Thatcher’s grave becomes a public urinal. Many thousands should defecate on her headstone. With any luck, her corpse will be dug up and publicly defiled.
Chuck Butcher
So Maggie and St Ronnie are once again joined. Well, that’s about a half century too late for the good of their respective countries…
One day we may get to forget you, but we’ll never miss you.
Chris
@mclaren:
As did America during the same time, arguably even more so given the vast wealth and resources in this country. That’s the tragedy of the whole thing. We really could’ve had it all, but we decided we’d rather dismantle the society we had piece by piece and have been at it ever since. Even if we ever manage to reverse all the damage done since we started down the Thatcher/Reagan path, that’ll still be decades of lost opportunities and all the damage that was done to people’s lives during that time can never be undone.
Mandalay
@Keith:
Far be it from me to defend Thatcher, but having lived in Britain for a couple of years while she was running the show, I completely disagree with that assertion, and have never read it anywhere else.
She would sometimes joke about getting a woman if you wanted to get things done, but those were obviously tongue in cheek references to herself, and made in the context of a society that was otherwise completely dominated by rich white upper class males.
I suspect that she would have sincerely believed that women were just as capable as men, but even so her cabinet was still stuffed full of those rich white upper class males.
If anything, her overriding themes were that government needed to be dismantled, and was not there to help the disadvantaged. She was wildly successful on both counts.
Kay
I think it’s so great she told the writer to “get a real job.”
So they’re the same everywhere, then?
Petorado
The musings on Thatcher’s death from the British press seem to be pointing to the ultimate irony of conservatism: that all they hold as virtuous will ultimately be our undoing. Their idea that selfishness will lead to prosperity is bankrupting the masses. Their idea that more guns will keep us safer is killing us. Their “family values” set off blood feuds. The party of “pro-life” is the most aggressively pro-war. The list goes on …
If conservatives don’t want their exalted leaders to be jeered upon their deaths, maybe they shouldn’t praise politicians that disparage their constituents so much.
Petorado
@Mark S.:
The Brits in that article sure have a way with words:
Guns of Brixton indeed.
Mandalay
@Petorado:
They sure do. Thatcher’s legacy…
PanurgeATL
@Chris:
“Hear, hear” on that, but in order to turn things around we have to come to terms with what made their message palatable enough to win, and that means coming to terms with people’s state of mind in the ’70s (which is another way of saying “after the ’60s”). Plainly people back then could not see a way to the stars, though they might’ve aspired to reach them. The Labour and Democratic Parties tried to do that, but (as is often the case) they wound up simply offering a moderated version of what they were supposedly opposing, so that work is not just unfinished, it’s hardly begun.
I’ve long held that the Oligarchy started turning the screws with Thatcher/Reagan because they found out that if you let The Masses be prosperous and free too long you get HIPPIEZ!! and they don’t want that. The problem is that liberals have decided they don’t like HIPPIEZ!! either–whether genuinely or as a defensive gesture I don’t know. But liberals have to come to terms with that, too.
Phil Perspective
@Woody: You do realize that even Sir Alex Ferguson can’t stand Maggie, right? Part of it being he’s from Scotland and they hate Thatcher up there even more than the lower parts of the U.K.
Mnemosyne
@Petorado:
Elvis Costello wrote a whole song about waiting for Thatcher to die. (Video starts with an interview about his writing and recording of the song.)
You do not want to anger that man enough to inspire him to write a song about you.
Petorado
@Mnemosyne:
It seems to be a common theme among musicians from the UK:
Morrissey – Margaret on the Guillotine
Hefner – The Day That Thatcher Dies
bjacques
@mai naem: Not surprising. Mark and Carol are the children she deserved. Maggie said there was no such thing as society. Fittingly, for her, there was no such thing as family.
El Cid
@bjacques: And was there ever so much worship for any other ontological triviality as there was for “no such thing as society”?
(I.e., “oh, pardon me, but, if ‘society’ is defined as a collective noun referring to a multitude of individuals with various characteristics in common, then isn’t there such a thing as society by definition”? “SHUT UP YOU COLLECTIVIST!”)
OmerosPeanut
And yet she never hung a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner to celebrate her victory over the forces of society that bind us all together.
WereBear
“Don’t speak ill of the dead” came from a time when people feared their ghost was still lurking about, and could cause trouble.
Perhaps we are moving away from that, at last. And it might show how long these things take.
brantl
Thatcher wasn’t the “Iron Lady” she was the self-centered, cold-hearted bitch, who shucked her roots as fast as she could get away from them.
Barry
@mai naem: ” I have to believe that’s at least $500/night. ”
In London? Wouldn’t $500 be an appropriate *tip* for a week’s stay there?
I’m still surprised at just how much money falls into the hands of politicians who’ve served the elites well.
Barry
@Redshift: “From the coverage I’ve been hearing today on BBC World Service radio, I find that I’m glad Thatcher lived past the crash of 2008. Nearly every “regular person” they asked (as opposed to Conservative politicians) said she had made the country worse, turning it from a fairly egalitarian society to one of boom and bust, where some people got massively rich and most people did worse, and that the policies she initiated moved the country toward these busts and the Crash itself.”
One of the things I’ve wondered is if after the crash is factored in, whether or not her reforms were a net positive, even on her scale (which would be average wealth/income, with the distribution either not mattering one whit, or the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer being a ‘good thing’).
The direct losses in the crash had to have been a massive % of the UK’s GDP, the malinvestement huge, the (probably two or three) decades of depression even larger, and at least one generation totally f*cked.
Barry
@Kay: “I think it’s so great she told the writer to “get a real job.”
So they’re the same everywhere, then? ”
I have a feeling that a lot of politicians and CEO’s only hire writers for BS; they don’t have much respect, and it’s probably not that hard a job to cough up quick BS and lie packets. Facts don’t matter, nor does analysis, and persuasion is much easier when you have money to pay to have the message spammed over all channels.
Barry
@PanurgeATL: “I’ve long held that the Oligarchy started turning the screws with Thatcher/Reagan because they found out that if you let The Masses be prosperous and free too long you get HIPPIEZ!! and they don’t want that. The problem is that liberals have decided they don’t like HIPPIEZ!! either–whether genuinely or as a defensive gesture I don’t know. But liberals have to come to terms with that, too. ”
I agree. The only thing I’d quibble with is that I think that it took the establishment a good long generation or so for the cohort scarred and scared by the Depression and New Deal to die off, and for them to realize their full power.
Hunter
Sounds suspiciously like Reaganism. I wonder why. . . .
Cacti
I think the greatest commentary on Thatcher’s character was that she considered Augusto Pinochet a personal friend.
One of her last public acts before the cheese slid off her cracker, was helping him escape justice when he was taken into custody in London.
The woman’s heart was black as midnight.
Tone in DC
I enjoyed the Costello song. He’s a great lyricist.
Still, I’ll take a less nuanced delivery of such a tune as that. Like Joe Jackson or John Hiatt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkzb656WVuQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWNVr_WEJjk
MBunge
Boy, the things you learn everyday. I had no idea that 1970s Britain and America were such amazing utopias where there was no problem that wasn’t instantly and completely solved by the liberal policies of the day. Man, it make you wonder how Reagan and Thatcher managed to, you know, win so many electoral victories. Well, I guess 1970s Brits and Yanks were just too dumb to know how good they had it.
Mike
PanurgeATL
@MBunge:
Margaret Thatcher worked in a political system with three major parties.
Ronald Reagan won a bare majority of the popular vote his first time out, and when the world didn’t explode the U.S. re-elected him in a landslide against Walter Mondale, the least inspiring Presidential candidate in our lifetimes. People in both the U.S. and U.K. didn’t like being in the ’70s not because things were necessarily so terrible, but because they’d expected them to be even better, and that left them in a position to be persuaded to abandon their own dreams for their society.
Czar Chasm
Relevant:
Morrissey’s released statement on Thatcher’s passing