Farewell, Mrs. Thatcher

For a kid growing up in the 1980s in a very politically conservative family and in a very conservative region of the country, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, formed for me a kind of Holy Trinity of leadership. All three stood against the results of Progressivism and sought in their own way to roll back the excesses of the 1960s and the malaise of the 1970s.

With the passing of Mrs. Thatcher Monday, the conservative troika has now passed into history.

Her passing has been voluminously covered by both friends and enemies over the past few days, and I won’t aim to summarize what is readily available elsewhere; however, it is interesting to see the reactions of those folks who were too young to remember what came before Mrs. Thatcher, as well as those my own age who do, or should, remember the 1970s.

One thing that I learned from my 15 years in New York City is that there will always be a contingent of people with what I call “a longing for the gutter,” that is, a kind of nostalgia for misery. If unlucky enough to pass youth’s formative years in a dysfunctional pigsty, it is of no consequence for the nostalgist, who often demonstrates a surprising capacity to romanticize squalor and disrepair, if that be necessary to capturing – or recapturing – one’s youth.

So it is with many New Yorkers who still maintain that Abe Beame’s City surpassed all, despite its rampant crime, fiscal ruin, public-service woes, and scenes borrowed from a Hollywood disaster movie. So, too, do many Britons wax poetically about pre-Thatcher Britain. I guess that’s why I found Ian McEwan’s piece on The Iron Lady in The Guardian so refreshing. Most of the things I’ve read from the left about Thatcher’s passing have downplayed the state of Britain prior to Thatcher’s stint as prime minister and focused instead on the policies they so loathed. So kudos to Mr. McEwan for at least describing the country that Thatcher sought to change:

“But if today’s Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow’s TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Your local electricity “board” could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of “privatization” and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted.

“We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy.” 

While Mr. McEwan and I would surely disagree about undoing Thatcher’s legacy, I find myself agreeing with the more cosmetic criticisms of the contemporary period ushered in by late-20th century conservative politics. For instance, when walking through the winding streets of New York’s SoHo neighborhood, it is difficult to feel any sense of accomplishment in having turned SoHo into an outdoor mall lined with the signage of luxury consumer goods. Nor is it pleasing to consider the proliferation of residential skyscrapers and luxury condos that threaten to turn all of Manhattan into a playground for the rich and famous. I’m sure long-time Londoners have many of the same complaints.

Perhaps the mistake is in thinking that the poles of recent history are our only choices – are we fated to choose between the apocalyptic wretchedness of the 1970s and the bland consumerism of today? I admired Mrs. Thatcher because she labored ceaselessly to increase the freedoms we enjoy: the freedom to enter into (or avoid) business relationships, the freedom to deploy our capital in our own manner, and the freedom to remake or demolish parts of the state that simply don’t work. What we do with that freedom, however, is quite another matter.