gracchusdixit

Margaret Baroness Thatcher is dead, but her legacy lives on.  Indeed, that legacy now dominates the life of much of the world.

Thatcher and her political soul-mate, Ronald Reagan, spent their public lives pursuing their political and philosophical agenda with exceptional clarity and focus.  Both told us that government was “the problem.”  Both deified the so-called “free market.”  Both were determined to dismantle what they vilified as “the welfare state.”  Both saw the world as a Darwinian conflict between “takers and makers” or, as the British more colorfully put it, “skivers and strivers.”  And both were largely successful in imposing their views on the rest of us.

It is ironic, to an almost Shakespearean degree, that such seemingly clear-minded people should, in their final days, have descended into the dark murk of dementia.

But it is also fitting—for the vision these two people forced upon the world is itself dark, murky, and demented.

Baroness Thatcher will no doubt be sent on her way to the next world with the pomp and circumstance that only Great Britain any longer seems capable of producing.  How the British people will feel about it all is another matter.  For many of them, Margaret Thatcher was in no sense a visionary.  She was, instead, a ruthless instrument of the powerful, the privileged, and the rich, whose departure from the scene will not be lamented.

This is seldom recognized here, in the United States, where we still remember her political partner, Ronald Reagan, more for his genial charm than for his actual policies.   Americans tend to conflate the two:  both the people and the policies.  Since “Ronnie” was such a charmer, “Maggie” must have been too.  They view things a bit differently in the United Kingdom, and we would be better off if we did the same in the United States.

The world these two people built—the world of unfettered global capitalism—is a world in which a few are indeed much better off.  The bonuses paid on Wall Street, the salaries paid out in board rooms, the profits piled up by corporations and their share holders have made one percent of the country richer than they have been in one hundred years.  But the riches here are paltry compared with the money being made in the booming nations of Asia.  All that cheap labor, all those exported jobs, all those workers who have no protections or legal rights have allowed an infinitesimally small number of people to become unimaginably rich—rich enough to buy presidents and prime ministers, rich enough to buy governments, rich enough to buy whole nations.

The bill for all this has been paid not only by Americans but by the rest of mankind.  The American middle class is all but gone.  Unions and the hard-won protections they once provided to their members are all but dead.  The simple idea that all Americans deserve decent medical care and a modest retirement is now demonized as “entitlement,” a word that once signified a basic human right but now stands for indulgence and laziness.  Thanks to Ronnie and Maggie, the glimpse Americans once had of a decent life has all but disappeared.  Thanks to Ronnie and Maggie, millions of people around the world will never even glimpse that much.

It is therefore fitting, however sad, that these two people should have ended their lives in darkness.  Perhaps they will, in the next life, see the light.  We can only hope.