Maggie (More love for Thatcher, from Andrew O’Hagan)

[swag]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/maggie/?page=1

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She wasn’t fair and she didn’t know the meaning of the word. If she had, she would have helped, not opposed, Nelson Mandela in his fight against apartheid. She wouldn’t have personally ordered the sinking of the Argentinian warship General Belgrano even though it was outside the defined exclusion zone. (Three hundred and twenty-three men died that night.) She wasn’t fair and she wasn’t just, either, otherwise she would have seen—as many of her ministers did—that the Poll Tax would only make life harder for people who were already struggling.

None of her acolytes will grasp the irony of her political life: that, with Thatcherism, she set out to save the soul of the nation and ended up selling it off to the cheapest bidder. By the end of her reign people loathed her ideology and loathed her style; even the Conservative Party—by whom she was hung, drawn, and quartered in no time—came to see that her famous obstinacy was really a form of madness that would only lead to defeat.

Spite came to live in Britain during her time and we became partisan to the point of psychosis. Those who questioned the rise of get-rich-quick-ness as a responsible way to live and a decent way to support the population were treated as Communists. Speaking personally, I never particularly liked the manners and corruptions of a certain bullying group of trade unionists. But still, looked at with open eyes, one might argue that the excesses of those union men were a little smaller-scale, a little local, when compared with a good many of today’s bankers and oligarchs. To Thatcher’s metaphorical children there is no argument there: a free-market criminal is always preferable to a left-leaning one, even though, as we have discovered, both can be state-sponsored.

Mrs. Thatcher gave the modern world a new kind of distrust for liberal values whenever they came up against market demands. She thought people who didn’t agree with her revelations were “the enemy within.” People who didn’t agree with Mrs. Thatcher were just not “one of us,” they deserved no empathy, had to be beaten, and Britain for a while found her drama of certainty addictive. It was Maggie’s good luck to come along at a time when her brand of intimidation could appear like a refreshing change. Her ferocious talent entered the community like a wrecking ball and her lack of subtlety perfectly matched the spirit of the age.

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