(In memory of Dame Thatcher — the aptly titled “Iron Lady”—I re-print this lesson, originally published in 2002.  Maggie Thatcher, R.I.P.)

In the long history of Great Britain’s monarchy, men ruled almost constantly, yet the two most memorable reigns were by women, Elizabeth I and Victoria.  Something of the same could be said about the nation’s prime ministers. They have all been men, except for one of the most memorable, Margaret “Maggie” Thatcher, who became head of Britain’s Conservative Party this week (Feb 11) in 1975.  “The Iron Lady,” as she was called, subsequently became the only British Prime Minister of the 20^th Century to be elected to three consecutive terms in office.

As PM, Thatcher’s top priority was to end Britain’s flirtation with Socialism by privatizing as many state-owned industries as possible, while at the same time reducing the power of Britain’s trade unions, which Thatcher believed had prevented Britain from modernizing its economy. She also fought to reduce taxes, cut bureaucratic red tape and encourage home ownership. And last but not least, Thatcher — the daughter of a grocer — worked to hammer the final nail in the coffin of the British class system, which she was convinced stifled the entrepreneurial spirit and prevented talented people, regardless of birth origin, from achieving success.

Thatcher had detractors, especially as unemployment rose in the wake of her privatization plans, and it is probably true that what saved her from being defeated for re-election was Britain’s victory in the Falklands War in 1982 — a war in which Thatcher sent British warships to oust Argentine troops from the tiny Falkland Islands that both Britain and Argentina claimed.  However, by the end of her second term the British economy had responded to her initiatives, and the British middle class had rallied to her cause.  She was overwhelmingly elected to a third term in 1987.

Maggie Thatcher was (like her soul mate, Ronald Reagan) that rarest of political animals, a conviction politician, and, love her or hate her, her unflinching belief in capitalism and democratic government helped her change Britain in truly fundamental ways. Indeed, it says something about Thatcher that, next to the trade unions and other members of the far Left, the group that fought her the hardest during her time in office was the elitist Tory gentry on the far Right (elements of that Tory elite helped oust her from party leadership in 1990).  Both groups preferred the status quo, and Thatcher would have none of it.

Today, of all the honors that a still active Maggie Thatcher has accrued, including the title of Baroness, perhaps the one dearest to her heart is the honor of seeing her name attached to an ideology.  To this day, “Thatcherism” affects the national life of Great Britain, and it surely will for years to come.

This week (March 11) in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).  His six-year reign as Soviet leader was a fascinating high-wire act in which he precariously balanced between triumph and failure, reform and reaction, and liberalization and retrenchment — all under the guise of economic, political and social experimentation.  Yet in the end, he came crashing down, not only losing his job, but also an empire and nation.  When he resigned in 1991, the Soviet Union’s control over the Communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe had ended, as had the Soviet Union itself.

Right from the start Gorbachev was a stark contrast to his predecessors. Younger, more vigorous, modern and liberal, he had not — as had the others — gained power through Stalin’s military ranks or the KGB network.  This afforded him unparalleled freedom to initiate change.

He also rightly sensed that the Soviet Union’s position in the world was growing increasingly perilous.  A rotting political system based on fear and repression, and a stagnant, state-run, command-and-control economy had brought his country to the brink of ruin.

To combat this Gorbachev instituted two reforms that quickly became familiar words in America — glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).  Through glasnost, Gorbachev loosened government control of the media, allowed unprecedented freedom within the various party organizations, and even called for demokratizatsiia (democratization) in which free elections would be held.  Through perestroika he tried to reform the economy by mixing socialist principles with limited amounts of private enterprise and property ownership.

In foreign policy, Gorbachev sought closer cooperation with the America and Western Europe.  He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, loosened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, and signed agreements with both President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush prescribing reductions in the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals.  Continue reading →

It isn’t every junior Republican senator from Wisconsin who is accorded an “ism” after his name, but such was the case with Joe McCarthy, who ushered in “McCarthyism” this week (Feb. 9) in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia. There, McCarthy gave a speech in which he claimed that 205 members of the Communist Party worked in the State Department.  With that statement, “Tail Gunner Joe” (a nickname he gave himself while serving as an airman in WW II) took off on a flight that — when it crash landed four years later with McCarthy’s condemnation by the U.S. Senate — left a lot of human debris in its fiery wake. During the McCarthy era he and his acolytes accused hundreds of innocent people of being Communists, which in many cases ruined their careers and destroyed their lives.

And McCarthyism was basically an accident.  Having spent an undistinguished four years in the Senate, McCarthy had been looking for an issue to run for re-election on in 1952, and anti-Communism seemed as good as any. But when McCarthy began accusing Democrats of being “soft on Communism,” and “harboring Communists” within the government, he never dreamed he would give voice to a widely shared fear that in the uncertain post-war world America faced a grave threat from “the enemy within” — a phalanx of subversives sympathetic to, if not controlled by, the Communist Party.  It mattered little that McCarthy never proved his accusations, or that the number (and names) of these so-called Communist subversives changed almost daily.  What mattered was that Republicans had an issue with which to regain power, and to the extent that there actually were Communists in the government (and there were — lots of them, in fact), so much the better.

Which in a sense helped ensure McCarthy’s downfall. McCarthyism certainly helped Republicans regain control of both the White House and Congress in the 1952 elections, but McCarthy — both drunk with power and (a serious alcoholic) often just plain drunk — somehow failed to notice. He kept up his attacks on “Communists in government,” even though his own party now controlled that government.  Thus did Republican President Eisenhower join with the Democrats to bring McCarthy’s wild ride to an end. Outraged that McCarthy was even accusing the U.S. Army of harboring Communists, Eisenhower encouraged Congress to investigate McCarthy, which it did in April of 1954.  When the Army-McCarthy hearings ended in June, McCarthy was shown to be a demagogue and a bully. He never recovered and died of alcoholism three years later.

But his memory lived on. Indeed, for the next half-century, the fear of being branded “soft on Communism” shaped the foreign policy, for good or ill, of every subsequent American president — Democrat and Republican.