Words like “distinguished,” “honorable,” “influential” and “powerful” are used to describe politicians at all levels of government and varying degrees of accomplishment. Most usages range from undeserved to overwrought.
In the case of Margaret Thatcher, they are wholly inadequate.
Thatcher, Britain’s “Iron Lady” who died of a stroke Monday morning, was at a minimum one of the most consequential leaders, in a positive sense, from any country in the 20th century. Period.
As prime minister, Thatcher changed the direction of a nation that had gradually become paralyzed by socialism. With Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she helped change the direction of the world by speaking against the moral failures of communism until its economic failures led to its collapse. Reformers of Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere took their inspiration and their economic blueprints from Thatcher, and millions of people are better off for it.
Today’s U.S. Republicans would do well to learn from the years before Thatcher entered No. 10 Downing Street. The Iron Lady could not transform her country and the world without first working on her own party. Here are a few takeaways from her time in the minority.
Popular belief in Britain at the time held that the Conservative Party had to move to the left if it was to win power. Sound familiar?
Yet Thatcher held firm. She early on “attacked socialism as the arch enemy of freedom and presented a principled conservatism rooted in private property, markets, liberty, smaller government, choice, and the rule of law,” according to John Blundell in his book “Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady.”
Thatcher, Blundell writes, had “three problems with the middle of the road. First, you get run over by traffic from both sides. Second, as the Labour Party moved to the left, so the middle moved with it. Third, Labour tended to introduce new entitlements which were hard to unpick, so there was a ratchet moving the political scenery ever closer to the left. …”
Republicans who have nominated two successive moderate presidential candidates, only to fall to the most left-wing Democratic candidate in a generation, ought to recognize those problems here. Do they?
If many do not, they are like many Tories of Thatcher's era. She won over most of the holdouts, and ultimately the electorate, by being willing to make the argument. And she could do that not only because she was a conviction politician who knew her own mind, but because she spent her time in the minority deepening her understanding of policy and political philosophy. She knew why she held those beliefs.
That understanding not only allowed her, once in office, to pursue incremental reforms that moved the country ever closer to her bigger-picture goals. It also informed her ability to form policies that, as Blundell puts it, “went with rather than against the grain of human nature.”
Had Thatcher merely trotted out the same old ideas, regurgitated talking points or made overly broad statements — the “47 percent,” anyone? — she still might have become the leader of Great Britain. But she probably wouldn’t have led Britain to greatness.
While in the minority, Thatcher also had the advantage of working in a parliamentary system. In it, the minority party fields a “shadow cabinet” of legislators who each work a particular subject area (Treasury, health, etc.) as if they were in power. That gave Thatcher and her shadow ministers a chance to stack up directly against the leaders of the government they hoped to replace.
That’s not the way our federal government works. What our system does offer, however, is a union of states led by governors who can experiment with policies and demonstrate their executive chops. The GOP’s large number of innovative, increasingly experienced governors bodes well for its chances of producing a strong candidate next time.
Any of those governors who follows Thatcher’s model to victory can then try to live out the lessons the Iron Lady taught while in power.
