Rich Lowry
The NY Post
12/30/2011
…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 naive 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…
…Bold but never reckless, as prime minister Thatcher 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, and the basic challenge is profoundly the same. Thatcher’s lesson is that decline is inevitable only if its self-fulfilling prophets prevail.
Read the complete article at The NY Post.
Also at the Post, No way to treat a lady: Why do feminists reject their ultimate icon, Margaret Thatcher?
Related: via The Federalist Papers on Facebook:
The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom.
Margaret Thatcher, Speech in Perth, Scotland (May 13, 1983), quoted in New York Times (May 14, 1983) “British Vote Campaign Gets Off to Angry Start”
