English Lessons
Kinsley, Michael
English Lessons For all her faults, Maggie Thatcher has done some good and revolutionary things for England. by Michael Kinsley The Washington Monthly has long championed the cause of honest...
...Young's most vicious thrust is reserved not for Thatcher but for her worst political enemy—who is not Labour leader Neil Kinnock but her Tory predecessor Edward Heath...
...But the differences are crucial...
...Even in describing the Falklands adventure, of *The Iron Lady...
...She would as soon go to bed with a fat government report...
...Certainly that is a concept you do not associate with Ronald Reagan...
...Britain was being destroyed by them...
...Compared with [Harold] Wilson she was an aesthete, compared with [James] Callaghan a personification of the higher sensibilities...
...Advanced democracies seem to have two characteristic political problems...
...To start, the Britain of the 1970s really was a stultified, dispirited nation in decline, and it really was transformed during the 1980s...
...Thatcher spent years trying to exclude from her cabinet...
...In particular it has mocked the practice of friends reviewing books by friends without revealing the connection...
...Callaghan and Wilson were her Labour predecessors...
...America, by contrast, grew faster in the 1970s than it did in the 1980s...
...which he is generally critical, Young writes, "Through the weeks of turbulence and political fear, Mrs...
...Extreme also in his fanatical insistence that no decent person could hold views he himself held for most of his life...
...Her problems also provide an illuminating contrast with Reagan...
...Johnson's review of The Iron Lady argued that the book is a typical example of left-wing snobbery toward Mrs...
...Mrs...
...He convinced the voters they were against "liberalism" and "big government" but didn't actually cut any government program that served the broad middle class...
...After more than 10 years, what Young calls her "familiar role of Amazonian scourge and moralist" is getting tiresome to more and more of those who didn't find it grating all along...
...Thatcher and Reagan were both enormously successful conservative politicians who dominated their societies during the 1980s...
...But Young's book is a poor illustration of the thesis since—as every other review has pointed out—the book (unlike the review) is scrupulously fair and, on balance, even reluctantly admiring...
...Hugo Young...
...Thatcher had all the important qualities of a highflying American business executive, being hard-working, single-minded, fascinated by detail, and a swift master of every brief . . . Reagan, by contrast, had most of the vices of a languid upper-class Englishman, of the type Mrs...
...Thatcher by "those who consider themselves her social and intellectual equals...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.00...
...The fate he brought on himself was to be patronised and insulted from his own backbenches, by [real] estate agents and car salesmen who were still at school when he was prime minister...
...Thatcher spent years trying to exclude from her cabinet...
...Johnson, a prominent British writer, is an extreme version of an American neoconservative...
...That's why, for people who don't share most of those principles—like Hugo Young and most readers of this magazine—reluctant admiration is just the right attitude to have...
...America has suffered from both these problems...
...Thatcher addressed both...
...Yet the most fantastically dishonest book review I have ever read, I think, appeared recently under this same man's byline in The Wall Street Journal...
...Shades of Michael Dukakis taking Swedish Land-Use Planning to the beach...
...What Young calls her "inspirational certainty" sometimes inspires her more than it inspires others and leads her to carry even her good ideas too far...
...One is special-interest gridlock: the ability of organized groups to serve their own interests at the expense of the general interest...
...This was the burden of Mancur Olson's influential book, The Rise and Decline of Nations...
...Michael Kinsley is a senior editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The result of buying off trouble," she characteristically lectured, is "simply decline on the installment plan...
...She was calm and . . . clear-sighted...
...But when Thatcher found her principles, she stuck to them...
...Thatcher behaved like the best kind of soldier...
...And Thatcher actually has balanced the British government budget—turned in a surplus, in fact...
...Thatcher had all the important qualities of a high-flying American business executive, being hard-working, singleminded, fascinated by detail and a swift master of every brief . . . . Reagan, by contrast, had most of the vices of a languid upper-class Englishman, of the type Mrs...
...One is her personality...
...Reagan's better half One of the best parts of the book, in fact, is Young's own discussion of Thatcher's intellect and of intellectuals' attitudes towards her...
...But reviewing by enemies, especially ideological enemies, can be just as corrupt...
...As Young notes, despite three election victories and a good line in populist rhetoric, she has never been personally popular...
...Thatcher's greater commitment to ideological principle is ironic since, as Young points out, she came to politics with little more than vague ambition and found her principles thereafter...
...Extreme in the speed of his political conversion (he dashed the same distance across the political spectrum during a couple of years in the mid-1970s that the leading American neocons traversed in a couple of leisurely decades...
...Of all postwar prime ministers," Young writes, "she both used intellectuals and exhibited a studied interest in political ideas to a greater extent than any other...
...You could read that line about "estate agents and car salesmen" as snobbish if you were determined to, though in context it is clearly mocking such snobbery...
...Reagan's history is the opposite...
...Reagan's damned amiability, by contrast, could smother even the most determined ideological opponent...
...Reagan never let conservative zeal stand in the way of his popularity...
...But hardly an example of left-wing intellectual snobbery...
...N]obody any longer cared what Heath had to say," Young writes about one of Heath's petulant speeches...
...The danger of cultural snobbery among liberals is another favorite theme of The Washington Monthly...
...Reagan never addressed either one...
...Young's only note of intellectual mockery about Thatcher is a comment that rather than read a novel, Mrs...
...A second problem goes by the name of "short-term time horizons" or what Richard Darman cloyingly calls "now-nowism": an unwillingness by everyone in society to sacrifice today for a payoff tomorrow...
...It's what it might be like to have Charlie Peters running the government...
...Whereas Thatcher might read a radical proposal from some think tank and then actually propose legislation to implement it, there was little danger that Reagan would ever do either of those things...
...The victim was The Iron Lady,* a biography of Margaret Thatcher by Hugo Young, the political correspondent of The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper...
...Thatcher's second problem is ideological hubris...
...In fact, she positively relished her role as disciplinarian...
...Of course interest-group members are members of society as a whole, too, and lose more from the gridlock than they gain from their specific group protection...
...Young identifies "good housekeeping . . . with its connotations of thrift, prudence, and balanced budgets" as one of the key values Thatcher came to stand for in her own mind and the public's...
...Principle differences Thatcher is in trouble in the polls these days, and many say that the end is in sight...
...The late 1970s certainly was a time of spiritual depression (or "malaise," as it was called) in the United States, but we never suffered the same degree of actual economic decay...
...by Michael Kinsley The Washington Monthly has long championed the cause of honest book reviewing...
...Or, of more direct interest to American readers, what about this comparison...
...Paul Johnson, who writes the press column in the British Spectator, made this point in a recent article...
...The hallmark of the Reagan administration was not ideological hubris but ideological hypocrisy...
...For example, having decided that privatization is a Good Thing, and having successfully privatized various nationalized industries such as steel, British Airways, and the telephone company, she is now busy privatizing the water system...
Vol. 22 • February 1990 • No. 1
