Light On Dark Water

My Thatcher Memory

I can't pretend that I'm qualified to judge Margaret Thatcher's political career. I've never paid extremely close attention to politics, and almost none to British politics (though I've gotten more interested in recent years). I was aware in the 1980s that she was considered more or less the British Reagan, which I thought was probably not a bad thing. 

I don't know why this sticks in my mind, but during one of her runs for office I saw a picture in a magazine, probably Time or Newsweek, of two very sweet-looking, very English-looking old ladies at a campaign rally, smiling and holding up a sign that said 

MAGGIE IS OUR MAN

I loved that. Like I said, I don't really know, but I have the feeling that she represented something good about England that is now passing away, or perhaps already passed. Here is an interesting view of her religion, a classically decent Anglo-Protestantism. At any rate she seems to have been hated by many of those whose hatred is a compliment. 

 

Maclin Horton

60 responses to “My Thatcher Memory”

  1. Daniel Nichols

    She was, of course, also pro-abortion…

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  2. Daniel Nichols

    And my earlier comment seems to have disappeared…
    So I will reiterate: not to excuse bad behavior but she was also loathed by friends of labor. She was a union buster and was the Reagan of Britain in the sense that she, like he, initiated the reign of market fundamentalism that brought about a thirty year long concentration of wealth by the few, while the working and middle classes stagnated.

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  3. Janet

    All I know about Margaret Thatcher, other than the kind of things you mentioned, is what I learned in the movie Iron Lady which was a pretty good movie, but extremely sad.
    AMDG

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  4. Mac

    The “you” in Janet’s comment presumably refers to me, not Daniel, as Daniel’s comments were for some reason imprisoned by the spam catcher and weren’t freed till after Janet’s comment.

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  5. Grumpy

    The British middle classes are much better off financially than they were in the 1970s.

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  6. godescalc

    Thatcher is remembered without fondness by a fair few non-lefties as well, it has to be said. (E.g.) (Not that such non-lefties are celebrating her death, but it’s only a handful of Thatcher-haters doing that anyway; Ken Livingstone, one of her nemeses back in the early 80’s, condemned the street parties today.) I was born slightly after she took power, so my opinions of her are all a bit 2nd hand – she was part of the scenery when I was a kid, and stopped being so before I started to care about politics. She was elected because of the “Winter of Discontent”, where the unions crippled the country with strikes under a Labour government, and which she put a stop to. This led to her being very popular among people who liked e.g. having a steady electricity supply and city parks no longer being used as emergency rubbish dumps, which class of people probably includes those little old ladies you mention; but her approach to crushing the unions caused large chunks of the country to regard her with near-homicidal hatred.
    Anyway, RIP Thatcher, and Lord have mercy on her.

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  7. Mac

    Fixed your link, godescalc.
    Someone posted a link on Facebook to a decidedly unfriendly piece by Peter Hitchens as well.
    I only took time to skim that piece (My Mind is Unchanged) but at a glance it seems somewhat similar to the way some American conservatives felt about Reagan.

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  8. godescalc

    D’oh. Yeah, I can’t imagine Hitchens liking Thatcher much. Thatcher seems to have inspired a fair bit of confidence in the electorate (that bit that didn’t loathe her), and gave the impression of a tough leader who wasn’t to be messed with; it’s for this that a lot of people like her, as far as I can tell. But Peter Hitchens isn’t the kind to be impressed with a tough-leader schtick.
    (On the other hand, I heard Christopher Hitchens actually quietly approved of Thatcher, although didn’t talk about it much, that being a bit too close to political and social suicide for a British lefty. But I read this in a book dedicated to revising C. Hitchens’ reputation sharply downwards and haven’t checked it.)

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  9. Mac

    That sounds like an interesting book. What’s it called? I’m not sure I’d be interested enough to read it but I tend to agree about that reputation.

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  10. Grumpy

    I thought that piece by Peter Hitchens was nutty. He was blaming her for not preventing phenomena such as mass immigration which occurred decades after she left power. He blamed her for the present state of GB, but showed no causal connecting links between what happened under her government, what happened under Major, what happened under the Blair / Brown government and what is happening today under the Lib-Con government.
    Christopher Hitchens became a ‘neo-con’ some years ago. That may be the reason for his brother’s very bizarre piece on Thatcher.

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  11. Mac

    There was something else I read…at least I think it was something else, not the P Hitchens piece…that was similar. Blamed her for, for instance, the fact that socialism remained in Scandinavia. Huh?!?
    A large part of my retrospective evaluation of a politician is based on “what was the alternative?” I certainly thought Reagan(ism) was better than the alternative in the U.S., and I suspect I would think the same about Thatcher.

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  12. Robert Gotcher

    I have trouble with either the deification (Hugo Chavez comes to mind, but I suppose Ronald Reagan fits the bill, too, for some people) or the demonization (Thatcher by those who hate her, Bush by some of my relatives)of political figures, unless they are really demonic (Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) Thatcher may have been wrong, but I doubt she was evil (which I heard one commentator call her on Facebook). I don’t even think Obama is EVIL, although I seriously SERIOUSLY disagree with what he is doing. He is also surpassing his constitutional authority, but that is part of a long tradition in both parties going back to even Lincoln, or at least FDR, from what I understand. I’m no great student of history.
    Also, I hate one-line, bumper-sticker characterizations (pro- or con) using buzz-words.

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  13. Mac

    Agreed on all points, especially the last. Most political discussions unfortunately are pretty much on that level, especially in venues like Facebook, so I generally don’t join in.

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  14. Art Deco

    She was a union buster and was the Reagan of Britain in the sense that she, like he, initiated the reign of market fundamentalism that brought about a thirty year long concentration of wealth by the few, while the working and middle classes stagnated.
    1. Britain had terrible industrial relations and the unions were run by the likes of Arthur Scargill.
    2. “Market fundamentalism” is a nonsense term. Mrs. Thatcher’s initiatives consisted of putting state enterprises and public housing on the auction bloc, some efforts at deregulation, and amendments to the tax code directed toward a broader tax base and lower marginal rates. (No less an authority than Bradford deLong has said that marginal rates in excess of 70% are self-defeating. Britain’s were 83% on wages and salaries and 98% on investment income).

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  15. Mac

    I am going to refrain from arguing specifics about what Mrs. T did, since I don’t have much to go on besides vaguely absorbed hearsay of a mostly conservative slant.
    However, to look at the cultural arena, I’ve always thought it a bit ironic and amusing that the British punks of the mid-to-late-’70s raged against the dreariness of a society that was run much more along the left-wing lines that they theoretically approved, and hated the people who made the country more prosperous, which they also theoretically approved.

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  16. godescalc

    The cultural scene in Britain went into rage overdrive with Thatcher, although this did result in some very good music. I particularly remember the Hazel O’Connor album “Broken Glass”, which I grew up listening to. There’s also a book waiting to be written about how Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to the British comics scene.
    The book on Hitchens was called “Unhitched”, written from a pretty left-wing perspective and generally interested in taking down his “left-wing as I always was but the Left deserted me” pose, which unsurprisingly enraged a lot of lefties.

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  17. Art Deco

    I will offer a hypothesis that the ‘cultural scene’ went into rage overdrive at Mrs. Thatcher because she was a self-confident petit bourgeois who did not defer to them. The art scene, the helping professions, the intelligentsia and dependents and hangers on expect others to listen to them; Mrs. Thatcher’s counter was that the productive people in Britain did not need the counsel of their posing social betters.

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  18. Mac

    “The cultural scene in Britain went into rage overdrive with Thatcher…”
    It was the same here with Reagan. For several decades now liberals have made a habit of complaining about current conservatives by saying they’re much more objectionable than their predecessors of 20 years ago, but it’s an absurd stance, because they frothed with rage at Reagan.

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  19. Mac

    “…because she was a self-confident petit bourgeois who did not defer to them.”
    A very plausible hypothesis.

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  20. Mac

    About Hitchens: I meant to say yesterday, in reply to Grumpy, that I really can’t see classifying him as a neo-con. He became an enthusiast for making war against Islamists (or jihadists, or whatever you want to call them), which allied him with the neo-cons, but in other respects he didn’t seem to have changed that much (left-wing critics to the contrary, as noted by godescalc).

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  21. Grumpy

    I agree with Art Deco also. For some reason, the lower middle class is especially despised by Marxists. In Europe, petit bourgeois, which I suppose is the equivalent, is a term of abuse.

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  22. Mac

    I’ve noticed for a long time that in general the left really doesn’t like the masses. You’re right, it’s particularly true with respect to the lower middle class, and not just with Marxists, but more conventional liberals. They are utterly despised except when they can be made use of as victims of capitalism.

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  23. Art Deco

    It was the same here with Reagan. For several decades now liberals have made a habit of complaining about current conservatives by saying they’re much more objectionable than their predecessors of 20 years ago, but it’s an absurd stance, because they frothed with rage at Reagan.
    What was curious about the most recent manifestation of this is that its object (George W. Bush) is best described as a status quo politician with an unambitious policy agenda. The whole sequence of events after September 2001 was completely unexpected. The political opposition registered almost no objection to the Afghan war and a large fraction assented to the Iraq war as well. (The general re-armament undertaken after 2001 was proportionately less than a quarter the size of that undertaken in the ten years after the 2d World War. Shares of national product expended on Iraq and Afghanistan have been in the same range as those for Korea and VietNam, but the more recent wars were far less bloody for both American soldiers and local civilians alike).
    Antecedent to that, the liberal chatterati attempted to promote the idea that George Bush the Elder was peculiarly unscrupulous and vicious (a ‘kinder, gentler Jack-the-Ripper’ Michael Kinsley called him). He had taken some of Michael Dukakis’ more haughty and ill-advised public stances and hung them around the Brookline huckster’s neck like a rubber-chicken. No fair.
    Subsequent to that we have the treatment of Sarah Palin, a fairly ordinary municipal politician with a history of balancing budgets and a distaste for the cronyism of Alaska politics (as typified by her arch-rival, Sleaza Murkowski). Gov. Palin has performed a useful service in revealing that much of the Republican chatterati and krack kampaign konsultant krew have more affinity for the opposition than they do for their supposed constituency.

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  24. Rob G

    Phillip Blond has a good discussion of Mrs Thatcher in Red Tory. Basically, he says that while some of her economic reforms were quite necessary (he outlines these specifically) her government’s emphasis on markets over and above “society” did nothing to stem the ongoing moral collapse in England. Something similar could be said of Reagan, of course. For all the visibility of the Moral Majority, evangelical Christianity, etc., the culture’s coarsening continued unabated, due in part to the economic individualism that was vaunted during these times.

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  25. Mac

    I think that’s more or less true, but the notion that Reagan (or Thatcher) could or should have prevented the continuing moral decay of either country is a pet peeve of mine. That’s a cultural development of long standing and very deep roots, and it really was not (is not) reasonable for social conservatives (of which I’m one) to blame the chief executive for not reversing it. Such moral exhortation as Reagan did engage in (e.g. about abortion) had zero effect.

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  26. Rob G

    Yes, I agree, Mac. But I think that many contemporary conservatives tend to look back on the Reagan and Thatcher era as a sort of halcyon age for the Right, without really noting the fact that the cultural mayhem continued almost without impediment. We conservatives need to be realistic about the history of those times. The “morning in America,” etc. only went so far and we do well to remember that.

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  27. Art Deco

    due in part to the economic individualism that was vaunted during these times.
    You got a mechanism in mind, Rob G? (Other than the willingness of women to substitute child-support payments for that thing called a ‘husband’?)

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  28. Art Deco

    Instead of blaming ‘economic individualism’ (which is qualified in any society and particularly so since 1933 in our own) why not consider how every social organism in society is now potentially subject to the micromanaging supervision of the bar? Among the conduits for that is ‘anti-discrimination’ law, which is not a manifestation of economic individualism.

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  29. Mac

    I was going to remark on that, though I only have a moment: I think it’s more accurate to say that the economic individualism (as embodied in, for instance, the yuppie phenomenon of the ’80s and on) is part of the same moral trend as the sexual revolution etc. I see it as more effect than cause, although everything reinforces everything else in a cultural shift like this.

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  30. Mac

    Rob: “many contemporary conservatives tend to look back on the Reagan and Thatcher era as a sort of halcyon age for the Right”
    Very true, and it’s a very misguided view, in my opinion. I can say that’s one mistake I’ve never made.

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  31. Mac

    Decent response to MT’s death from an unexpected source.

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  32. Rob G

    “…the economic individualism (as embodied in, for instance, the yuppie phenomenon of the ’80s and on) is part of the same moral trend as the sexual revolution etc. I see it as more effect than cause, although everything reinforces everything else in a cultural shift like this.”
    Exactly. The things feed off one another.
    “I can say that’s one mistake I’ve never made.”
    Myself, I kinda leaned that way until about 7 or 8 years ago.

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  33. Mac

    I was inoculated by having fallen for leftism in my youth.

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  34. Art Deco

    I was going to remark on that, though I only have a moment: I think it’s more accurate to say that the economic individualism (as embodied in, for instance, the yuppie phenomenon of the ’80s and on) is part of the same moral trend as the sexual revolution etc. I see it as more effect than cause, although everything reinforces everything else in a cultural shift like this.
    I will assert the ‘yuppie’ phenomenon was more about a particular sort of domestic division of labor, parent-child relations, and consumer tastes. The yuppie archetype was no more economically individualistic than affluent people of previous generations and likely less so because more likely to be a salaried employee than a proprietor. The following distinguished the ‘yuppie’ of 1984 from the bourgeois of 1955:
    1. Dual careers. It was very common in 1955 for wives to have workaday jobs (about a third of the labor force was female), but working wives tended to be wage earners supplementing the income of an otherwise impecunious family. The archetypical yuppie wife was a salaried corporation apparatchik like the fictional Sally Forth. There were schoolteachers and nurses and what not in 1955, but it was as a rule quite unusual for bourgeois wives to have workaday jobs. The lady college teachers my mother had ca. 1950 generally had one thing in common: they were vocational spinsters.
    2. Low fertility. Three or four children was standard in 1955. The fictional Sally Forth had one child, age 11 or thereabouts.
    3. Implicit political backstory. The Big Chill was about a mess of affluent people who had had an association with the Students for a Democratic Society. That would have been odd for the 1948 cohort, but not incredible. For the 1919 cohort, a political backstory might have been found among Jews who grew up in New York or perhaps Chicago (think of Irving Peress or Julius Rosenberg or Seymour Martin Lipset), but rare with regard to anyone else.
    4. Absence of military service. If you look at the history of men born during the years running from 1930 to 1938, 64% had some sort of military service (and most of the remainder were disqualified absolutely or contingently). For the cohorts a few years older, the proportion was higher. If you are looking at the cohorts running from 1939 to around 1952, the proportion is around 45%. For the post-1952 cohort, 10 or 12%. Charles Peters offered the opinion many years ago that his own contemporaries (he was born in 1927) had much less patience with social snobbery than people a generation younger due to the experience of military service. He may have been right.

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  35. Marianne

    The two most vivid memories I have of Margaret Thatcher from the 1980s are those I picked up from movies at the time. One was that she took milk away from school children and the other that she broke the back of the miners’ union.
    I really don’t know how factual either of those are, but talk about bad PR. Maybe especially with regard to the miners because that job has always seemed to embody the underside of the industrial revolution.

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  36. Daniel Nichols

    Wade through the intemperate remarks at the beginning, and ignore the ritually impure source to see why many think her rule was a disaster:
    http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/the_woman_who_wrecked_great_britain/

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  37. Art Deco

    The ‘many’ in question would be one Alex Pareene, former house pederast at the FrumForum. You will notice all his meagre data sources were cribbed from a newspaper (The Guardian) and then goes on a whinge about Augusto Pinochet, for whose wrongdoing (exaggerated by Pareene) Mrs. Thatcher bore no responsibility.

    Daniel, you seem to have forgotten that what was once a political and economic colossus was forced to apply for a loan to the International Monetary Fund in 1976. The country had godawful industrial relations and by 1974 the dynamic which attended between the unions and the politicians was such that (in the words of Shirley Williams) an elected government could be destroyed by an industrial action. About a tenth of the available factors of production were tied up in hopeless state-enterprises organized by monopoly unions and about a quarter of the urban housing units were owned by municipal governments. The underlying dysfunction of the labor markets was masked and the chronic public sector deficits financed via continuous application of monetary stimulus with manifest results: escalating inflation for a dozen years prior to Mrs. Thatcher taking office. The whole mess was topped off with a massive series of strikes in the winter of 1978/79. (Did I mention the political violence in Ulster?) If Alex Pareene fancies Mrs. Thatcher ‘wrecked’ Britain, Alex Pareene in conceding he knows little about anything going on outside his perverted head.

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  38. Mac

    Daniel, I’m sure at least some of what your Salon guy says is true. I’m just as sure it’s not the whole truth. I’m also sure that income inequality and the difficulties of the working class in the U.S., and no doubt in Britain as well, are very complex phenomena, not reducible to “Reagan/Thatcher (or their parties) did it.”

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  39. Rob G

    “The yuppie archetype was no more economically individualistic than affluent people of previous generations and likely less so because more likely to be a salaried employee than a proprietor.”
    No, because 80’s market-worship gave the green light to avarice among the less-than-affluent. Now it was okay for you, the salesman, not just the wealthy upper management type, to be a selfish, grasping s.o.b.

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  40. Mac

    Art, I think sheer acquisitiveness, is probably a better word than “economic individualism” to apply to the yuppie spirit. Whether they had more of this by nature than their parents’ generation I doubt. What they did have is opportunity and means of exercising it, which I think is at least part of what you said.
    I don’t think I’ve ever really deeply loathed a movie as much as I did The Big Chill.
    It’s interesting, too, that what we called “yuppie” in the 1980s is still very much with us, having pretty much blended into the landscape.

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  41. Mac

    Cross-posted with you, Rob.
    “80’s market-worship gave the green light to avarice”
    Now, this is where we disagree at least partially. I don’t think the cause-and-effect relationship really worked that way. You could also say that avarice gave the green light to market-worship. And one thing that gets overlooked in evaluating that phenomenon is that it also had roots in the hippie philosophy of self-indulgence. By sometime in the mid ’70s or so rock musicians were partying with Hugh Hefner. There’s a lot of symbolism in that. If I remember correctly “yuppie”, early on, carried a suggestion of “former hippie” with it, as in The Big Chill (though those people were not really hippies). It wasn’t just that the hippies were replaced by yuppies and businessmen; frequently they were the same people, and there was a lot of cross-pollination, so to speak (Richard Branson!).

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  42. Daniel Nichols

    “And one thing that gets overlooked in evaluating that phenomenon is that it also had roots in the hippie philosophy of self-indulgence.”
    There was no “hippie philosophy”. Hippies were all over the place, from communalists to individualists and from atheists to various kinds of theists and pantheists. Really, blaming the hippies for whatever is wrong with society today is an easy substitute for real analysis.
    And apart from Jerry Rubin, who I thought a nasty little shit even when I was a Yippie, I never knew a hippie who became a yuppie.
    And while blaming Reagan and Thatcher for every excess in their wake may be an overstatement, I don’t see how anyone can deny that there is a direct link from their policies to the unparalleled economic disparity that has taken place in the last thirty years.
    And don’t even get me started on Thatcher and Ulster!

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  43. Art Deco

    No, because 80’s market-worship gave the green light to avarice among the less-than-affluent. Now it was okay for you, the salesman, not just the wealthy upper management type, to be a selfish, grasping s.o.b.
    Rob G, a piece of advice from Elaine Morgan (author of The Descent of Woman): when you find yourself making characterizations like this, replace abstractions like ‘wealthy upper management type’ with the name of a real person and see if it still makes sense. (One of the two individuals I went to school with who landed in ‘upper management’ slings the hash in his spare time, making meals for shut-ins. By his high school yearbook photo was a quotation from Nelson Bunker Hunt).
    By the way, here is an actual empirical assessment of collective behavior between 1980 and 1990.
    http://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/was-it-a-decade-of-greed

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  44. Grumpy

    I always miss Art Deco when he goes away

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  45. Art Deco

    Art, I think sheer acquisitiveness, is probably a better word than “economic individualism” to apply to the yuppie spirit. Whether they had more of this by nature than their parents’ generation I doubt. What they did have is opportunity and means of exercising it, which I think is at least part of what you said.
    The bourgeois of 1955 were certainly less affluent than their counterparts thirty years later. Also, having lived much of their life in circumstances of intense material and or personal insecurity, they likely had a different take on the pleasures of personal consumption than did their counterparts thirty years later. My mother described the general atmosphere of 1946 as follows: “all we wanted was normality”.

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  46. Mac

    Don’t have time to comment further now, but I agree.

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  47. Rob G

    “What they did have is opportunity and means of exercising it, which I think is at least part of what [Art] said.”
    Right, but there was also a greater tolerance/approval of it in certain quarters whereby sheer acquisitiveness came to be accepted and even seen as a good. This is what I meant by giving it a green light — not so much a cause, but a stamp of approval.
    “I don’t think the cause-and-effect relationship really worked that way. You could also say that avarice gave the green light to market-worship. And one thing that gets overlooked in evaluating that phenomenon is that it also had roots in the hippie philosophy of self-indulgence.”
    Absolutely, which was one of Lasch’s points, and which did not endear him to the New Left. Self-indulgence was in the air — sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll,etc. — it was only a matter of time until it manifested in the economic sphere.

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  48. Art Deco

    Right, but there was also a greater tolerance/approval of it in certain quarters whereby sheer acquisitiveness came to be accepted and even seen as a good. This is what I meant by giving it a green light — not so much a cause, but a stamp of approval.
    I think you are mistaking the public utterances of a few politicians (Mr. Reagan among them), and a boardroom and high finance culture that comprehended a few hundred thousand people, for the general run of social attitudes. Brobdignagian executive compensation did have its origins in that particular era, but executives occupying a position so senior they can loot the company in this way are few – typically the CEO and a small palace guard. Bulge bracket securities firms and the capital markets side of the top universal banks also employ in sum a few hundred thousand people (a great many of them wage-earners performing clerical tasks).

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  49. Mac

    “not so much a cause, but a stamp of approval.”
    That I agree with.
    As for the broad social effect and movement, I guess I’m somewhere between the two of you (Rob and Art). There was definitely a sort of pop culture movement, including both what Art describes and fashion, favoring acquisitiveness (“Material Girl”!). But I’m not sure how far that extended into the general population. I have never bought the “decade of greed” version of events–certainly if one is going to apply that to the 1980s it should apply to the 1990s as well. That this term, and the idea that the 1990s were different, remain a staple of pop journalism, taken for granted as fact, is mainly a result of there having been a Democrat in the White House through most of the 1990s.
    One factor in all this that was definitely very widespread was an impatience with the socialist-tending developments of roughly 1965-1980–the resentment of big govt and high taxes that was a big factor in Reagan’s victory and popularity.

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  50. Mac

    Daniel said (in a comment that spent the night in the spam catcher, for unknown reasons): “Really, blaming the hippies for whatever is wrong with society today is an easy substitute for real analysis.”
    Good grief, that’s hardly what I was doing. To say that a specific cultural trend “also had roots” in the hippie/counterculture phenomenon is not even remotely equivalent to “blaming the hippies for whatever is wrong with society.”
    If you want to believe that the h/c thing had no particular effect on the culture at large, or perhaps that any effects it had were positive, or that it didn’t have broadly defining characteristics that included a general attitude of self-indulgence…well, what can I say? Argument seems superfluous.

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  51. Art Deco

    I don’t see how anyone can deny that there is a direct link from their policies to the unparalleled economic disparity that has taken place in the last thirty years.
    Unparalleled where? The United States and Britain were and are very unlike Brazil and Mexico. There is variation over time in income and asset distribution. There was a generally egalitarian trend from about 1929 to 1969 and an inegalitarian trend from 1969 forward. Changes in the tax code contribute to that, but that is just one of the factors which influence income distribution (and effects on income distribution are just one of the considerations to take into account in assessing policy).
    And don’t even get me started on Thatcher and Ulster!
    Anyone observing has noticed that in any political dispute, you invariably break out your pom-poms for the grossest and ugliest characters participating.

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  52. Art Deco

    One factor in all this that was definitely very widespread was an impatience with the socialist-tending developments of roughly 1965-1980–the resentment of big govt and high taxes that was a big factor in Reagan’s victory and popularity.
    That was an aspect of things (Jarvis-Gann in California, &c.). I think the general sense of entropy manifested in inflation, escalating crime rates, disorder and decay of performance standards in schools, gas lines, foreign policy debacles, and ever-expanding welfare rolls tended to discredit the dominant element and strain of discourse among the political class.
    You picked up the newspapers and there was always some article about how a part of the world was falling to pieces and we needed to make a large investment which invariably meant hiring more apparatchiks and social workers but that this would just scratch the surface of the problem but it was imperative we do it anyway. Or that we just had to accept some problem because there were no easy answers blah blah. Few politicians flouted these mindsets with more self-confidence than Ronald Reagan.

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  53. Mac

    Yes, that was exactly the tenor of the times.

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  54. Rob G

    Not sure who Art is, but he “debates” in a way that reminds me of a certain person who used to show up a lot on Touchstone’s ‘Mere Comments.’ There’s this sort of ongoing expansion of the minutiae of whatever the topic at hand might be, which makes responding difficult unless one has a lot of time to do so, and the overall subject then gets lost in the details.

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  55. Art Deco

    Rob G, I was a participant at Mere Comments when it was an active forum, so either you remember me by handle or you are remembering someone else. (Btw, the someone else in question would be Stuart Koehl, with whom I have little in common).

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  56. Rob G

    Yes, it was definitely SK I had in mind. And I do vaguely remember your handle from elsewhere.

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  57. Daniel Nichols

    I was probably reacting more to the idea that there was “a” hippie philosophy. There was really not a single phenomenon called the “counterculture”. That was a term used to describe everyone who rejected mainstream society. It was a bunch of people that seemed to be in the same place, but were embarking in radically different directions. To cite just one example, the “counterculture” included neo-luddites as well as the precursors to the digital revolution.
    And self-indulgence was hardly the monopoly of the hippies: Hugh Hefner was no hippie, and Playboy’s first issue came out in 1953. Or think of James Bond, Elvis, and JFK…It was in the air, and in many ways an understandable (over)reaction.
    Now, let’s see if this gets past your anti-left filters. :^)

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  58. Mac

    I think your desire to defend the movement, or whatever we want to call it–I tend to fall back on “phenomenon”–has you in a position similar to that of conservatives who want to dissociate themselves from certain other conservatives: “those aren’t real conservatives.” When the group doesn’t have a defined set of beliefs and a formal membership, this is kind of inevitable.
    It’s true enough that The Phenomenon was very diverse, but also in my view undeniably showed a number of pretty consistent characteristics, self-indulgence being one of them, though obviously they/we wouldn’t have used that term, preferring “liberation” etc.
    It’s also true that self-indulgence was not invented by or confined to The Phenomenon. I said that in a comment you may have missed in this long thread, specifically referring to Hefner: no, he was no hippie, but he had a fair amount of common ground with the movement, and the two trends came together in the 1970s when counterculture heroes like the Rolling Stones frequented the Playboy Mansion, and Rolling Stone became a consumer/fashion magazine.

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  59. Louise

    Well, I’m very sorry to hear she was pro-choice.
    I watched “Iron Lady” on the plane the other day to honour her memory.
    I have no firm opinion of Mrs Thather or her policies.
    I didn’t like the constant flashbacks in the movie, nor the whole Alzheimeresque slant on her later life. I’m not sure how much the movie reflected the real life of M thatcher, but I didn’t like her any less b/c of it. I liked her rather the more I think.

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  60. Mac

    I haven’t seen the movie, but a review I read somewhere was of the opinion that it spent too much time on the Alzheimer’s aspect, and didn’t portray her career very well. Also, I ran across Meryl Streep’s comment on Thatcher’s death and about the way she (Streep) had attempted to portray her on the screen, and it was very classy, no snark at all. Raised Ms. Streep a notch in my eyes.

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