Peggy Noonan gives a rave review to the Margaret Thatcher movie today, then asks this:
The left in America has largely thrown in the towel on Ronald Reagan, but in Britain Thatcher-hatred remains fresh. Why?
While you’re debating the truth of that, I’ll tell you that she ascribes it to sexism:
Because she was a woman. Because women in politics are always by definition seen as presumptuous: They presume to lead men. When they are as bright as the men they’re disliked by the men, and when they’re brighter and more serious they’re hated. Mrs Thatcher’s very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left’s insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for. On the other hand, some of the Tory men around her had been smacked on the head by her purse often enough to wish for revenge. What better revenge than to fail to fully stand up for her to posterity?
The lefty part of that is conservatism’s “liberals are the real sexists” boilerplate, the nonsense that was the right’s excuse for pretending to warm to Hillary Clinton in early 2008. (We allegedly hated Hillary, but she got 18 million votes from all us sexists. Hey, how’s that Michele Bachmann campaign working out for you righties?)
The implication here is that we on the left would be much angrier at Ronald Reagan if he’d been a woman.
Nahhh. If our anger has faded, it’s for one simple reason: the bastards who’ve followed him have been so much worse. The Gingrich Congress? The teabag House? And, in between, Bush and Cheney? In retrospect, Reagan seems like a beta version of these lunatics. His presidency seems like an out-of-town tryout of the full-blown craziness to come.
Really, Peg, it’s simple. Don’t overthink it.
(By the way, here’s Steve M.’s Rule: Who’s the worst president in American history? Answer: the next Republican president.)
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
Thr Tories in the UK didn’t continue galloping rightward as fast as they could manage until they lost all contact with reality. This isn’t to say they don’t fucking suck, because they do, but they suck in exactly the way that the Very Serious People of the American press corps do. Ironically, They’ve actually been able to do a lot damage to the UK because the austerity fever that grips them is so frustratingly mainstream, but they don’t howl at the moon the way contemporary Republicans do.
That being said, [b]fuck[/b] Ronald Reagan. I understand the urge to give him a pass because he was pragmatic and compromising enough to govern effectively, but he did at least as much as Nixon to make naked bigotry part of the GOP mainstream, he popularized any number of zombie delusions that feast on the brains of American voters to this day, and his Administration was characterized with a mix of fanaticism, hatred and corruption every bit as Bush’s.
If Noonan were being totally honest, she would admit that there really is more hatred of Reagan on the right then the left, despite what is professed to be hero worship from that direction.
After all, Reagan responded to terrorism by retreating. He realized deficits did matter even under a Republican administration, and raised taxes several times. (For some reason the right only remembers the first tax cuts he instituted and the rest has disappeared from their collective mind set.) He strengthend Social Security.
Don’t get me wrong. There is little doubt that his administration was the start of the end of the middle class and his administration should go down in history as laying the foundation for the ultimate destruction of our society.
The reason Thatcher is still villified in Britain is that even the conservative party there realizes that she was wrong on many points.
I particularly like how right wing Republicans like to accuse one another of supporting amnesty for illegal aliens, all the while ignoring the fact that it was Ronald Reagan who pushed for amnesty, not some liberal Democrat.
I have not given up on Reagan-hating, and many that I know hate him as much as ever. However, the lunacy and sheer insanity on the reich-wing has delivered to us MANY more targets of hate – Bush I, Bush II, Perry, Palin, Romney, Paul, and on and on and on. So, Reagan-hatred is diluted.
THere are few pieces of crap in the UK as odious as Thatcher. Thus, the hatred of her is more concentrated.
We’ve thrown in the towel on Reagan, yet Ed Miliband had this to say:
What is she talking about? Seems the opposite to me. Thatcher is still largely a divisive figure, but I’d say less so than Reagan. I mean, the state is just about ready to give her a state funeral — something that hasn’t happened since Winston Churchill’s death.
When did Miliband say that? No wonder Labour sucks as much as the Democrats here. The only thing Miliband is right about is council houses, whatever they are. The rest, he is just a corporate tool on. Maybe people gave up on Ray-gun because the SOB is dead. where as Maggie isn’t yet.
Forgive Thatcher? First I’d have to find some redeeming qualities that would overshadow the sheer horror of watching her directives to ignore the Irish activists day after agonizing day as they followed through with their acts of starvation. The media gleefully gave us updates as they one by one lost their fight for freedom. No one has managed to match her since.
But yes, with Reagan, he was indeed just our Right’s beta version. Through Reagan his followers seem to think they can lead us toward Thatcher’s worst moments so that they will someday be ours.
For sure, the major reason the US “left” seems to have walked away from Reagan-hate is the advent of Bush et al since. But there’s another factor, too: the UK has a left media that can give an opposing view on Thatcher.
With Reagan, and especially when he died, critical voices in the US – and there are still plenty of us – were entirely shut out of mainstream discourse. His list of sins is long and, in the Village, almost entirely forgotten – Iran/Contra, Central American death squads, ignoring the AIDS pandemic, and the endemic corruption of his administration, to name four big ones. A lot of us haven’t forgotten, but any consideration of Reagan these days seems to start and end with the utter myth that he dismantled the Berlin Wall with his bare hands.
Has Peggy Noonan ever met a leftist? Because I’m kind of one, and most of my friends are too, but I don’t know anybody who thinks the way she claims we do. Strange.
Personally I’ve always seen Thatcher’s career as a great stride forward for women, because she was cordially despised by millions of people for reasons that had nothing to do with her sex. Leftists really do judge her on the content of her character, which happens to be loathsome. This is someone who was willing to defend Pinochet, for God’s sake. You don’t have to be a sexist to find that repulsive.