From columnist Clarence Page, of the Chicago Tribune: Unlike her good friend President Ronald Reagan, whose folksy Irish storyteller's wit often smoothed ruffled feathers, Thatcher's stiff-upper-lip call for tough measures left many feathers quite ruffled.
Yet tough measures were needed. Britain in the late 1970s, where I briefly worked as a reporter, was flat on its back politically, economically and spiritually with postwar, postindustrial decline. Thatcher pushed tax cuts, privatization, union busting and tight-spending policies that brought relief to many but increased suffering to others.
“If you just set out to be liked,” she said in a 1989 speech, “you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and you would achieve nothing.”
A year later, however, her principled inflexibility led to her party removing her from power. It also paved the way to a new center-left “third way” politics that helped bring Tony Blair to power in England — and Bill Clinton-style Democrats in the U.S.
It is hard to know how much of Margaret Thatcher’s public toughness grew out of a need to overcome sexist stereotypes about women as leaders. But there’s no question she helped provide a model of leadership that crosses party and gender lines. In her fall from power, she also showed the hazards of refusing to compromise amid changing times.
Feminism isn’t what she was about
Hadley Freeman writes in the Guardian: Thatcher especially resented being defined by her gender. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. She wasn't a feminist icon and she wasn't an icon for women. Any attempts at revisionism do no favours to her, women or feminism. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. Seeing as women aren't a minor Brit-flick grateful for even a bad review, that truism doesn't quite hold true here. She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself.
She stood for individual fortitude
New York Times columnist David Brooks: Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn't. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.
She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.
In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline….
She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”
She was an enemy of socialism, not liberalism
Conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg: It's worth remembering that Thatcher did not destroy the British equivalent of what Americans call liberalism. She destroyed socialism, which was a thriving concern — at least intellectually — in Britain. When Labor decided to get serious about winning elections again, Tony Blair had to repudiate the party's century-long support for doctrinaire socialism and embrace the market. Soon, Bill Clinton followed suit, bending his party to Reagan's legacy. Suddenly, liberals were playing the "me-too" game. That's one reason the left still hates her and Reagan so much. Thatcher and Reagan didn't just force change on their societies, they forced change on their enemies, proving that the wave of the future is not so inevitable after all.
She was a disaster and a zealot
From Salon.com politics blogger Alex Pareene, in a piece called, "The Woman Who Wrecked Great Britain": Thatcher's (special armed forces) trained and armed the genocidal (but anti-Soviet) Khmer Rouge (in Cambodia) for years. And, yes, she called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. And there was her pointless war in the Falklands, in which hundreds of people died so that the British Empire could prove to itself that it could still win pointless wars.
Margaret Thatcher was a zealot, a friend to the worst mass murderers of the 1980s, a force for antisocial cruelty, and her violent means of ending the great British experiment in social democracy made the country a more brutal, less equal county. One of the most telling, and disturbing, of Thatcher’s catchphrases was “there is no alternative,” which was always invoked specifically to close off the possibility of considering the many extant alternatives to her top-down class warfare. At this point, the alternatives that might’ve produced a more equitable future are indeed long since gone, and the future — for England’s indebted, jobless youth and people the world over ground down by her philosophical comrades — looks about as grim as those horrid 1970s must’ve looked to the people who originally voted Thatcher into office. The world is better off without her, and it would’ve been much better off had she never existed in the first place.
She changed the conversation
From the Washington Post's George Will: She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other "vigorous virtues." She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.
She did what had to be done
The editorial view from the Telegraph newspaper in London: It was only to be expected that certain elements on the Left would respond to Lady Thatcher's death with mindless scorn and tasteless jubilation. What is more alarming is the hearing being given to a more subtle argument. It is that while Britain was indeed the sick man of Europe, Lady Thatcher botched the surgery: that her policies dealt more damage to Britain's manufacturing base than was necessary, scarring the industrial communities of the North for a generation – even paved the way, via the liberalisation of the financial sector, for the recent crash. Others argue that, given the global drift towards free markets during the Eighties, many of the changes she incarnated would have happened anyway, albeit in an ameliorated form. Lady Thatcher, they say, was not just divisive, but needlessly so: had she not been so, well, Thatcherite, Britain would be a comfortable social democracy, not to mention a better place.
All of this is utter poppycock. It is seductive poppycock, admittedly, but only because it speaks to the preference for an easy life that was shared even by many within Lady Thatcher’s Cabinet (and was largely responsible for precipitating her departure). In truth, it was her very abrasiveness that was her peculiar genius. She was not alone in her diagnosis of the ills of the economy. But no one else, not even within the Conservative Party, had the will to do what needed to be done.
She helped Reagan win the cold war
Columnist Richard V. Allen writes in the Guardian of London: Farewelling Baroness Margaret Thatcher in a proper fashion is a difficult task: she left such a deep imprint upon the world that assessing its importance demands volumes analyzing her beliefs and paying proper tribute.
… She knew very well that she was an important component of what is often attributed solely to (Ronald Reagan), and in the first instance “winning” the cold war. Unquestionably, a major component of what Reagan achieved was mirrored in what Baroness Thatcher herself achieved. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Reagan would often hasten to remind those paying tribute to his cold war strategy that it was, in the strictest sense of the term, a team effort…. Two especially forceful and committed leaders on the world stage at the same time: this was critical and key to ending the cold war, permitting the reunification of Germany, the consolidation of the EU and drawing our two nations together in a historic cooperation.
In the end, she was mostly right
Niall Ferguson writes in The Financial Times under the headline, "Margaret Thatcher: Right about nearly everything": It is still terribly hard for those who opposed her to admit it, but Margaret Thatcher was right about most things.
She was right that Britain’s trade unions had become much too powerful. She was right that nationalised industries had to be privatised. She was right that inflation has monetary causes.
She was also mostly right about foreign policy. She was right to drive the forces of Argentina’s junta out of the Falklands and she was right to exhort a “wobbly” George H.W. Bush to mete out the same treatment to Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait.
Though labelled the “Iron Lady” by a Soviet magazine, her hawkishness in the cold war did not blind her to the possibilities of doing business with Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Ronald Reagan, she was quick to see the opportunity offered by his policies of glasnost and perestroika….
Above all, however, Thatcher was right about Europe. She was right to push Europe in the direction of real free trade by backing and signing the Single European Act of 1986. Yet she was equally right to oppose the idea of a single European currency….
Like many great leaders, Margaret Thatcher has come to be more respected abroad than she ever was at home. Left-leaning Brits who opposed her during the 1980s find it especially hard to admit that she was mostly right and they were wrong.
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