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New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Mrs Thatcher's bastards
Illustration by André Carrilho The intellectual right increasingly resembles the student left, a quarrelsome delta of factions, feuds, tendencies and doctrines. But one thing can still bring it together: the idolisation of Margaret Thatcher. If nothing else, that was the achievement of the inaugural Margaret Thatcher Symposium, held on 7 July in this, her centenary year. We were in Churchill College, a scattering of modern buildings on the very north-west of Cambridge, from which the pinnacles of King's College Chapel are little more than golden candlesticks atop the treeline. The college is home to the Thatcher archive, chosen by the baroness, partially to be near Winston's, but also because her own university, Oxford, declined to award her an honorary doctorate during her premiership. The distance from the university was instructive. This was an event that aspired to be an academic conference but tended consistently towards a séance. These men (every single speaker was male, along with maybe 94 per cent of the audience; rather like Thatcher's cabinets, I suppose) regard Thatcher as a wronged deity. In good order, the jostling denominations put aside their differences and congregated to worship. Though they were dressed in the same uniform of pocket squares and lapel badges, you could divide them by sociology: anxious schoolteachers, free-thinking academics, minor politicians elevated to the peerage, and, of course, misfit sixth-formers with experimental moustaches. The ideological range was equally various. There were the washed-up free-marketeers recycling Ronnie Reagan jokes, and the defrosted Cold Warriors. There were old faces in new guises – Neil Hamilton pretending to be an elder statesman, and David Starkey, TV historian turned fanatical critic of the New Labour consensus. And then there were newer strains, including from Reform UK (as well as splinters within Reform UK – at lunch there was a Richard Tice fan at one end of the table, and a Ben Habib backer at the other). The bulk of the day passed in wearying discussion. Thatcher's supremacy was affirmed and reaffirmed, both in its own context and as inspiration for today. In a speech of self-satisfied alliteration, an assistant headmaster raved about the socialist infiltration of secondary education and the 'red threat in the classroom'. One eager-eyed young academic talked about Thatcher's longest-serving secretary of state for Wales; someone else talked about naval supply lines during the Falklands War. Old men traded erotic stories about meeting the 'lady': about the 'electric current' in the room, about how she 'flirted' and jabbed her finger in your chest. As speakers finished, a smooth convenor used that strange right-wing word of approbation, 'sound' – as in, 'I did say that was going to be sound,' after one talk, and, 'Really, very sound,' after another. To punctuate the tedium, we had to rely on a semi-seething audience, some of whom have not moved on since November 1990. At various points the cabinet members who deserted the lady were referred to as 'bastards' and 'invertebrates', while one woman asked what could have happened if the late Norman Tebbit had not been removed from front-line politics by his wife's injuries in the Brighton bombing. The implication was that he might have been free to stand in the 1990 leadership election. What could have happened, indeed. This is Thatcherism's emotional aftertaste, bitter and defeated. But its real legacy – physical and ideological – was to be found among several of the more high-profile speakers. Between the decrepit and the predictable, a new current did thrum, one modelling itself on Thatcher's 'new right' and posing as its equivalent today. By summoning her ghost, they believe they can recall her geist, and revivify not only the Conservative Party, but conservatism itself. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Neil Hamilton addressed the conference in the afternoon, and I was excited to see him – mainly because I wanted to know who the hell dug up this guy and invited him to pronounce, in his dunce cap of humiliation, on the future of British politics. For those who've forgotten, Hamilton was at the centre of the cash-for-questions scandal involving Mohamed al-Fayed in the mid 1990s. He later declared bankruptcy, and was last seen leading Ukip as it slipped into the far-right abyss. He has also appeared in several pantomimes, but declined to star in Celebrity Wife Swap. He may be one of Thatcherism's bastards, but that's no reason to name him its heir. He'd brought the Eighties with him, wearing a big double-breasted suit that looked like it has been mothballed since 1988. He proudly told us how he and his parliamentary faction, the 'No Turning Back Group', helped to promote the idea that the revenues from privatisation should be used for tax cuts, not for building new infrastructure. Thanks, Neil, a grateful nation writes, as its brooks run brown with sewage. He went on to tell us how he wished the market had been unleashed on state education, too, and the school vouchers scheme mooted under Thatcher adopted. If Neil Hamilton can be forgiven by conservatism, and if the lesson of the Eighties can be that we left the economy too rigidly controlled by the state, something fundamental in our history and our politics has been misunderstood. The wider direction of travel was indicated by the conference's star speaker, Starkey, whose journey from garlanded and wealthy Channel 4 presenter to renegade YouTuber is among the most fascinating in British intellectual life. Since Tebbit's death on 7 July, I've been wondering what he would have made of Starkey's presence. Were there homosexuals (or 'sodomites' as Tebbit called them) in cabinet in 1983? But Starkey quickly displayed his bona fides. The cancelled historian has become one of the most erudite exponents of a new theory of contemporary British history. We are living through our version of the 1970s, he told us, one in which Britain is not being strangled by the trade unions, but by a bureaucratic knot that tightens around politicians the more they struggle. The strings of this knot are the Blair government, the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, which between them subordinate Britain to international regulations and make it impossible for us to function as a nation-state. This is the spirit of Thatcherism revived, a project to 'undo', in Starkey's phrase, much as she 'undid' the socialist Britain built by Attlee. But, in Starkey's typically vulpine manner, it was Thatcherism with not even the thinnest mask of beneficence. I don't think Margaret Thatcher would ever have said 'this country needs a nasty party', or compared the immigration that took place under Blair to Bertolt Brecht's line about dissolving the people and electing another. The best historiographical judgement on Thatcherism is a joke, an ironic gag, usually credited to the bohemian Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne. While Thatcher had set out to recreate the country of her father – sober, Methodist, Victorian – she ended up creating the country of her son, Mark Thatcher, 2nd baronet, international man of mystery. That is, a country run for arms dealers and bagmen. Even Thatcher started to see this by the end: after she died, the Labour MP Frank Field revealed she had once told him: 'I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society and we haven't.' If Thatcher's bastards have an elder son, it is Nigel Farage (no one I spoke to thought Kemi Badenoch would be leader of the Tories for long, though they had some kind words about Robert Jenrick). Thatcher is widely seen as the last titanic prime minister in British history, and even she could not pilot the winds she unleashed. Who knows what historical ironies we could be condemned to if her followers get their way. [See also: Morgan McSweeney's moment of truth] Related
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
FDR united Democrats under the banner of ‘liberalism' − but today's Democratic Party has nothing to put on its hat
If Donald Trump has taught Americans anything, it's that political parties can shift positions on any number of issues and retain strong support. Republicans had once been aggressive Cold Warriors, standing shoulder to shoulder with allies against Russia, but now they are isolationists. They once favored so-called 'free markets,' but now they support tariffs. And they once supported cutting budget deficits, but now they balloon those deficits with tax cuts. Same party, different policies. This accords with recent scholarship showing that American political parties don't have much ideological coherence around concepts such as 'freedom' or 'equality' but instead are more like social groups with strong communal bonds such as common sympathies and common enemies. It turns out that political parties are mostly just people rooting for their side, the way you might support a sports team. It doesn't matter whether your team changes tactics. You still root for them. People do switch allegiances, but it often takes a traumatic event to stop seeing fellow partisans as good, reasonable people. Republicans right now have strong tribal belonging that begins and ends with a single question: Do you support President Trump? They have a banner to march under: MAGA. And a song: 'God Bless the U.S.A.' They live, laugh and love to own the libs. Their signs and symbols are simple and amusing. And they are effective. The Democrats have nothing. No leader, no banner to march under, no signs and no symbols. They used to. In the past, Democrats had a word to describe their sensibility: 'liberal.' But now: RIP, liberal. No one, it seems, wants to be a liberal anymore. In my research on uses and abuses of the word liberal, I discovered that liberalism is a relatively new word in American politics, really starting only in 1932. That year, presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was searching for a way to fend off Republican accusations that his New Deal was 'socialism,' a word with radical connotations. Liberalism as a word predates FDR's usage, but he redefined it to signify the government regulation of capitalism and the use of the state to provide citizens with basic economic security. When in 1932 FDR accepted the nomination for president, he declared the Democratic Party 'the bearer of liberalism,' by which he meant undertaking 'planned action' while fighting for 'the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.' FDR pitted his liberalism against his opponents, whom he labeled 'conservatives.' The U.S. has had the liberal-conservative divide ever since. FDR's successor, Democrat Harry Truman, recognized the power of the term, extravagantly claiming, 'The liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans.' President John F. Kennedy gloried in the word, too, defining a liberal as 'someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people.' In 1960, philosopher Charles Frankel argued that liberalism as defined by FDR was a banner under which every Democrat marched, concluding that 'anyone who today identifies himself as an unmitigated opponent of liberalism … cannot aspire to influence on the national political scene.' Not for long. For one thing, in the 1950s the word shifted meaning to better accord with the times, as it had done several times in the past. During the post-World War II economic expansion, 'a large part of the New Deal public,' historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1954, 'have become home-owners, suburbanites and solid citizens.' Liberals therefore shifted liberalism. No longer were liberals solely about providing jobs and Social Security. They also demanded increased access to higher education, medical care and civil rights, and the elevation of popular culture. In 1956, future presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called this shift one from 'quantitative' to 'qualitative liberalism.' President Lyndon Johnson put this into effect in the mid-1960s. Johnson developed anti-poverty programs such as Head Start, but he also created cultural programs such as PBS, expanded civil rights and passed Medicare and Medicaid. 'We are a great and liberal and progressive democracy,' Johnson declared in 1966. But Johnson's qualitative liberalism came with costs. The programs expanded the federal bureaucracy, which by the late 1960s became noted for being ineffective and overly regulatory. Civil rights laws were perceived as threatening to the white working class. And Johnson's liberalism became wedded to the war in Vietnam, where by 1969 more than 500,000 Americans were fighting to protect liberalism from the supposedly creeping arms of communism. Soon, the knives were out for liberals. First, right-wing thinkers had already begun to portray liberals as little more than quasi-communists pushing for civil rights beyond most Americans' desires. In 1955, conservative impresario William F. Buckley Jr. founded the magazine National Review to create 'a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy.' He titled his 1959 book 'Up from Liberalism' and spent 217 of the book's 229 pages attacking liberals. Then leftist thinkers took their shot, imagining liberals as little more than beards for capitalism and foreign policy hawks. Left-wing novelist Norman Mailer summed up this sentiment in 1962, writing, 'I don't care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist or even a left conservative, but please don't ever call me a liberal.' Civil rights advocates took their turn, seeing liberals as halfway friends, unwilling to fully embrace equality. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wished liberals 'a fond farewell' in 1964. In that same year, writer James Baldwin called white liberals an 'affliction.' With attacks coming from multiple sides, by the 1970s Democrats ran from the label. And without defenders, enemies redefined liberals, first as out-of-touch elitists, then as allies of corporations ignoring the demands of working people, and eventually, today, as woke snowflakes. In 2009, political scientists examining a hundred years of polling data found that, starting in the mid-1960s, decreasing numbers of Americans referred to themselves as liberal. And because partisanship is a social dynamic, when the club began to shrink, the researchers wrote, it turned into 'a spiral in which 'liberal' not only is unpopular, but becomes ever more so.' The researchers also found that most Americans still supported ''liberal' public policies' such as 'redistribution, intervention in the economy, and aggressive governmental action to solve social problems.' Americans, apparently, just hated the label. 'Owning the libs' has been the glue keeping together the Republican Party ever since. Democrats are now searching for a new label. What can replace liberalism? New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who writes for The Atlantic, have proposed 'abundance liberalism.' Other New York Times writers have also been busy envisioning this future. Reporter and editor David Leonhardt suggested 'democratic capitalism.' Columnist Thomas Friedman improbably went with 'Waymo Democrat,' referring to self-driving Waymo cars as a placeholder for an embrace of technological innovation. More realistically, political analyst E.J. Dionne and historian James Kloppenberg are writing a history of 'social democracy' as a potential rallying cry for Democrats, pointing to its use by the most popular politician in America, Bernie Sanders. Whatever emerges, it's helpful to remember that before 1932, hardly anyone in the U.S. used the word 'liberal' to describe any kind of politics. Now, without finding a new emblem to rally behind, Democrats may be doing little more than battling that other neologism: MAGA. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kevin M. Schultz, University of Illinois Chicago Read more: How liberals lost comedy − and helped Trump win Even judges appointed by Trump are ruling against him The difference between 'left' and 'liberal' – and why voters need to know Kevin M. Schultz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The West's enemies sense America's fundamental new weakness
This month, American conservatism lost one of its most eloquent defenders: Anthony R Dolan, chief speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan and adviser to numerous Republican political giants, died at the age of 76. Dolan was perhaps best known for encouraging Reagan to call out the USSR for what it was: an 'evil empire'. What set Dolan – and Reagan – apart from so many Cold Warriors was a keen awareness that, in the battle against freedom's enemies, ideas often matter more than missiles, bullets, tanks and soldiers. When Reagan chose to confront the Soviets in the court of public opinion, he ignored the advice of national security bureaucrats who told him to tread softly for fear of antagonising the West's existential adversary. Speaking to members of the British Parliament at the invitation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in June 1982, Reagan took clear aim at the murderous ideology that gripped the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, championing 'the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history'. Those were Dolan's words. Ideas, and the ability to communicate them through words and actions, were a cornerstone of the West's ability to stand firm in the face of Communism's onslaught against free nations and peoples across the world. Our ability to tell our story and display our generosity gave hope to billions of people struggling under the boots of tyrants. Yet freedom's victory has never been assured, and the West must now, as ever, make its case as it faces down threats from all sides. Russian propagandists continue to undermine free elections in Europe, and their troops are poised to swallow Ukraine, leaving Putin one step closer to Nato's doorstep. Communist China grows more aggressive with each day, seizing the opportunity to buy allies where US aid has dried up. Iran's theocratic thugs preach anti-democratic hate and remain dedicated to building a nuclear weapons capability and winning anti-Western allies in the Middle East. Which makes all the more troubling the news that the Trump Administration is shuttering critical organs of American soft power: Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, USAid, and many more. These initiatives and others have for decades brought hope and support to people standing up to the forces of tyranny, and they project Western ideals into parts of the world that are at risk of falling under the sway of our enemies. There is no doubt the American government bureaucracy could use substantial trimming. Countless programmes and departments spend far too much on meaningless initiatives driven by special interests. The Trump administration is right to root them out. Yet making the argument for our way of life is a critical mission. The West cannot hold back its adversaries by naively hoping that the case for freedom makes itself. It does not. Our victory in the Cold War did not guarantee perpetual peace and liberty the world over. Our enemies know that and sense this moment of our vulnerability. We must not be complacent. There is an old adage that, if you're not telling your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you may not like the way they tell it. Tony Dolan and Ronald Reagan knew that intuitively, yet many of the new generation of conservatives have forgotten the lesson and are ceding the battlefield. That pullback may well lead to our eventual defeat. Charley Cooper is a former senior advisor at the US Departments of Justice and Defence Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
