Reflections/Maggie's Magic
Gingrich, Newt
REFLECTIONS MAGGIE'S MAGIC by Newt Gingrich D o ideas matter to politicians? Do words mean anything to them? Do speeches change history? The Washingtonian answers are No, No, and No. The...
...the Thatcherite efforts to replace it...
...On her watch, trade-union membership fell from 13 million to 8 million, and days lost to strikes from 30 million to 3 million...
...But on smaller issues Mrs...
...For all her courage andcommitment, Margaret Thatcher was first and foremost an elected politician...
...It is a measure of the contraction in union power that, in the 1987 elections, 40 percent of skilled manual workers voted Tory, only 36 percent Labour...
...She learned the art of winning elections in the Oxford Union, in the House of Commons, in party leadership elections...
...American conservatism must replace the welfare bureaucracy with an opportunity society based on American values—from the school board to the White House, from the private business to the voluntary association...
...The goal should be within our grasp, for, compared with Britain, the United States is a remarkably decentralized and voluntaristic country...
...Thatcher has already been well served by two biographies...
...Second, do conservatives have the courage to support political allies when they are right and oppose them when they are wrong...
...While this is a more complicated, frustrating, and confusing assignment than conservatives are used to, it may be the only path toward replacing the welfare state in the next decade...
...Peter Jenkins's Mrs Thatcher's Revolution puts her within the framework of British history, charting the collapse of the welfare state as a model and Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) is Minority Whip in the US...
...To support President Bush, for example, on Iraq, quotas, and the right to life, while opposing him just as rigorously on taxes...
...If we invent policies that excite citizens, the White House will have to learn to reach out to citizens...
...Thatcher's story provides several lessons for American conservatives...
...Can American conservatives manage a center-right coalition in which we will be often frustrated and rarely entirely satisfied...
...Thatcher was a far more cautious risk-taker than most realize...
...Conservatives are comfortable extolling allies (e.g., Reagan) and assaulting opponents (e.g., Carter), but the future will involve making alliances on specific policies with leaders we oppose on others...
...Young, Jenkins, and other observers of the prime minister have admired her decisiveness, her courage, and her dogged persistence even in the face of the most frustrating opposition...
...She made Britain a country of home-owners (70 percent, compared to 57 percent when she took power) and shareholders (20 percent, up from 7 percent...
...Finally, can conservatives recruit enough activists willing to learn the art of politics...
...Ultimately, mastery of elective politics was the foundation of the house that Thatcher built...
...If we can invent policies that help people live better lives, voters will eventually insist that politicians pass them...
...When she does so in the name of values American conservatives hold dear, she deserves study...
...For the conservative revolution that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 changed Great Britain radically, and in her success story words mattered very much and ideas explained a great deal...
...In fifteen years of party leadership and eleven as prime minister,she never succeeded in creating an ideological monolith...
...She used a divided opposition and an unaccountable left wing to serve the longest continuous term as prime minister in the twentieth century...
...While she could take enormous gambles with great courage—deflationary monetary policies, the Falklands, stonewalling striking coal miners, the poll tax—she often procrastinated and avoided lesser ones...
...Like Reagan, too, she won large victories that overwhelm her small failures...
...We need five to ten more such efforts that rouse citizens to pressure politicians...
...Like Reagan, she was vaguer and more cautious than many of her allies would have wished...
...Thatcher transformed the Conservatives into a work-oriented, business-promoting, meritocratic party...
...School choice, individual savings accounts, tenant ownership, and other ideas have to leave the laboratories of Heritage, Cato, Hudson, and the Manhattan Institute and enter the practical world of elective politics...
...When a leader dominates government for eleven years, resuscitating her country and her party, she deserves attention...
...Third, can conservatives return to keythemes...
...Fourth, can American conservatives be as flexible as Mrs...
...Mothers Against Drunk Driving was the most powerful conservatizing grass-roots effort of the 1980s...
...A typical Briton might think otherwise...
...House of Representatives...
...Ffirst, are we prepared to be decisive and positive...
...After a decade of theorizing, there are remarkTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 25 ably few "empowerment" proposals explained in a form—brochure, audio-tape, videotape—that galvanizes citizens to demand they be implemented as policy...
...Thatcher was on lesser issues...
...The Iron Lady, by political reporter Hugo Young, describes Thatcher as an operative within the political system, rather than as a revolutionary...
...The politics-as-gossip tone of American political debate rejects the notion that words and ideas are important...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
