Ovedue Revision
Finally someone has said it. It may be a bit over the top. Here it is,
Nor did the Thatcher government represent as much of a break with Macmillanism as her admirers and detractors both claim. The things she attacked were not the core of Labour's achievements. The welfare state, comprehensive education and the bizarre worship of the NHS as a state religion all survived her. So did the state-sponsored war against the married family and the abandonment of principles of responsibility and punishment in criminal justice. Serious social conservatives should concede that her rule was damaging to traditional Britai [bold mine - MBD] Serious leftists should admit that while she demolished the tottering nationalised industries, she retained an enormous state sector in the NHS, the education service, quangos and local government. - Peter Hitchens
Reagan too has faced some much needed revision recently. Read Daniel McCarthy's excellent review of John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History
Conservatives, especially social conservatives need badly to get over their hero-worship - as if electing one person in the political arena could reverse deep cultural changes. I'd like someone out there to list for me the conservative cultural accomplishments that can be credited to electing Thatcher and Reagan. I can't think of any. In fact, we may soon find more conservatives arguing that the type of market reforms initiated by these regimes did much to erode traditional norms and expectations. I doubt many on the right will defend the managerial economies of the 60s and 70s. But did the reforms of the 80s do anything to enhance the economic independence of the average family? Or did these reforms just enhance Wall Street profits while at the same time discouraged what we now call "family formation"? Is integrating more families into the investor class a solution?
These questions may make for a boring series of articles that will have difficulty finding a place to be published - but the person who sets about this work will certainly change the way conservatives think about themselves and their mission in the next few decades.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics
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