BY MONA CHAREN
President
Obama’s statement honoring Margaret Thatcher was an example of the
chameleon-like nature of liberalism. Rewriting history is a liberal specialty.
Just as the anti–Cold War liberals were miraculously transformed into cold
warriors after the war had been won, yesterday’s anti-Thatcherites are today
morphing into something else.
The president’s statement praises
Thatcher as one of the “great champions of freedom and liberty” and goes on to
observe that “she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass
ceiling that can’t be shattered.”
So today we all celebrate Margaret
Thatcher as a feminist icon? This is revisionism of a high order.
Of course, she ought to have been a
feminist heroine. Thatcher was one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century
and the greatest female leader of modern times. A woman of rare brilliance,
grit, accomplishment, and determination, she won three national elections,
helped to dismantle the Soviet empire, and transformed her nation and the world
for the better.
But no, the feminists loathed her. During
her first campaign for national office in 1979, the more polite noseholders
said, “We want women’s rights, not a right-wing woman.” The less subtle
circulated the slogan “Ditch the B****.” Following the release of the
movie The Iron Lady, a feminist wailed on the Huffington
Post that Thatcher was “the embodiment of everything that feminism is not:
selfish, rigid, and intolerant.”
Ah, yes, the tolerant feminists! Thatcher
understood them well enough, remarking, “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” Young
women, we were told, required female role models. Thatcher’s hero was Winston
Churchill. While at Oxford, the grocer’s daughter who grew up in a flat without
running hot water majored in chemistry, not women’s studies (a curriculum that
didn’t yet exist, but that she would definitely have despised). Her tutor, as it
happens, was a female pioneer of X-ray crystallography, who had the effrontery
to win a Nobel Prize before the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems of the world
had supposedly paved the way.
Eschewing the usual female ghettos of
health, education, and welfare policy, Thatcher the politician focused on
economics and international affairs. At a Conservative-party congress, she
responded to a fellow Tory’s temporizing about policy by pulling a volume from
one of her famous handbags. Thumping her copy of F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty
on the table, she declared, “This is what we believe.”
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who rode to power
on her husband’s coattails, or world leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Indira
Gandhi, whose powerful fathers blazed the trail, Thatcher was completely
self-made. She never once complained, as Clinton has more than once, that she
was unfairly treated because she was a woman. Many a male MP tangled with her to
his cost. She never asked for a vote in the name of women’s empowerment. She had
no use for such trivialities. She had a country to save.
The magnitude of Thatcher’s
accomplishments as prime minister cannot be understood without reference to the
depths into which Britain had fallen by 1979. Successive Labour (and spineless
Tory) governments had delivered an economy close to collapse. During the “winter
of discontent” in 1978– 79,
strikes by public employees had crippled public services. Pickets blocked the
entrances to hospitals, and only those suffering emergencies were permitted
entry. Railway workers and truck drivers disrupted transportation. Trash
accumulated on the streets as sanitation workers walked off the job. Bodies
accumulated in morgues as gravediggers joined the strikes, prompting officials
to discuss burial at sea for the mounting piles of corpses.
Thatcher’s victory ushered in a period of
difficult but necessary free-market reforms. As in the U.S. under Reagan,
Britain endured a tough recession as Thatcher wrestled inflation down. But the
economy then rebounded and grew dramatically. She privatized state-owned
industries, cut taxes on investments, radically reduced the power of trade
unions, and reduced government spending. “The trouble with socialism,” she said,
“is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Britain’s economy grew, confidence was
restored, and the Labour party was forced to abandon its soft Marxism and become
“New Labour” under Tony Blair.
Contra President Obama, perhaps the least
interesting fact about Margaret Thatcher is that she was a woman. Far more
important were her dedication to liberty (economic, as well as political), her
fierce opposition to tyranny of all sorts, her indomitable spirit, and this
above all — that she was proven right. As she said, “The facts of life are
conservative.”
— Mona Charen is
a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 Creators
Syndicate, Inc.
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