Rich Lowry: Thatcher vs. Decline

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Margaret Thatcher is on the cover of Newsweek, or — the next best thing — Meryl Streep is on the cover as the former British prime minister in a new biopic.

Thatcher is a rich theme. If the types who expound on such things didn’t so hate her politics, she’d launch a thousand dissertations on those inexhaustible academic themes of class and gender. As the daughter of a grocer, she was looked down upon as the personification of, in the words of one highfalutin critic, "the worst of the lower-middle-class." As a woman in a man’s world, she was venomously attacked by her opponents as a "bitch" or "the bag."

At this moment in our history, though, it is Thatcher’s central purpose that is most important: her unyielding rejection of British decline. She rejected it with every bone in her middle-class body, even though sophisticates scoffed at such a naïve nationalism. She rejected it even though the grandees of her own party said it was inevitable. She rejected it even though she knew reversing it meant forcing a wrenching political and economic crisis.

The acrid whiff of decline is in the air in America, in the enduringly weak employment picture, in the spiraling debt, in the persistent pessimism about our prospects, and in the intellectual preparation for a "post-American world." Part of the volatility in the Republican presidential field is the unfulfilled hunger for a Thatcher-like figure...