What We Can Learn From Margaret Thatcher Today
She proved the left did not control the trajectory of history.
Before reading this article, I recommend that you read Graham Cunningham’s article originally titled the ‘Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in Finchley’ when published in The Critic, and called ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Good Life’ on his Substack. The Substack one is free, though there is a little trick with Javascript, that I will let you Google yourself or look at r/Piracy.
The Critic editorial called ‘Legacy of Failure’ is also a good read at understanding Thatcher’s relevance to our time, as is the BBC documentary series ‘Thatcher: A Very British Revolution.’
Margaret Thatcher is not a popular future on the modern Dissident Right. It’s not difficult to see why. She is often seen across the Atlantic as simply Reagan’s British female counterpart, and as belonging to a failed neoliberal paradigm that did nothing to stop either the Woke ‘Long March Through the Institutions’ or mass replacement immigration.
Additionally, she is loathed by people up in the north and midlands for closing down industry, particularly the coal mines, which destroyed their communities, as well as greatly weakening the trade union movement.
The Miners Strike is often seen romantically as the ‘Last Stand of the Old Left’. When comparing the proud, masculine trade union movement of that era, to the modern depravity and sickness that constitutes the ‘left’ today, it is hard not to have sympathy for those strong union men. A comparison may be made to Japan’s Satsuma Rebellion, an ultimately doomed battle to preserve a traditional way of life against the tide of modernity, and romantically remembered as a heroic ‘Lost Cause’.
Therefore, it is easy to hate the woman who defeated the trade unions, and helped create our modern world. Her victory against the miners seeming to symbolise, in a way that she did not directly intend, the triumph of Wokeism to replace the Old Left.
I am also somewhat torn on Thatcher’s actual policy record. Some of the things she did in this country were necessary; a lot of industry was inefficient and uncompetitive, and unfortunately for the miners, the pits were going to have to be shut down eventually. Right to Buy was also a good policy in theory.
But there are policies I greatly dislike. Wasting our North Sea oil money instead of saving it like Norway did. Privatising utilities that were natural monopolies like water and electricity, often with the added humiliation of seeing those utilities owned by foreign state governments. And not using the proceeds of Right to Buy to fund the building of new social housing, so future generations could have the same opportunity, like Singapore does to this day.
However, even though on economics, my opinion on Thatcher is very mixed, there is one thing that is an absolute inspiration: she overturned 40 years of leftist advance, proving that nothing is ever ‘settled’, and with sufficient will, the left’s advances can be overturned.
The reason why the Woke Left loathe Thatcher to this day is simple: she proved their ‘right side of history’ taunts wrong, and if there is something the left can never forgive, it’s their smug sense of history moving in their direction being demonstrably disproved.
What Unites the Economic and Cultural (Woke) Left?
Sure, the enemy she was fighting was the economic left and the trade unions, not the cultural left.
But the left is the left. Even if there was a certain pride and dignity for the working man with the old economic left, it still believed in the state being a social leveller, restraining the naturally successful and innovative, in order to subsidise decline on the basis of egalitarianism.
These sentiments inevitably led to Wokeism, and ensured the white male worker would naturally be pushed aside by the movement he built, to cater to those materially, morally, and biologically beneath him. An orientation towards cultural destruction in the name of egalitarianism was in fact a feature of the socialist left, both revolutionary and reformist, from its modern beginnings in the late 19th century.
Indeed the decline of the industrial working-class, and the working-class children pushed to assimilate into a ‘new middle-class’ by going to university and working in white collar jobs, was the goal of the post-war (1945-1979) Labour governments, and always the trajectory of travel in that period no matter which party was in power.
The closure of grammar schools degrading the overall quality of education, the catastrophic expansion of university education creating elite overproduction, and the destruction of historic city centres, was something that happened under the post-war consensus, not the Conservatives under Thatcher.
Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins personified Labour in the 1960s, as a party committed to levelling class differences and pushing cultural leftism, abandoning the traditional working-class and erasing their proud culture, in favour of pushing the middle-class 1960s counterculture onto all of society.
The strong union men of the ‘Old Left’, many of whom were virtuous men of the highest calibre, were unfortunately simply unknowing foot soldiers in the cultural left’s ‘Long March Through the Institutions’.
And what do representatives of the working-class Old Left think today?
Conservative MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson, as an ex-miner and previously lifelong Labour voter, personifies the values that the Old Labour Left represented. But because Labour abandoned men like him in order to capitulate to Woke, he switched to the Conservatives in 2019, and became a ‘Red Wall’ Tory MP.
Nobody better represented Boris Johnson’s 2019 ‘Realignment’ than Anderson. It is a tragedy that realignment was completely squandered, with the man almost certainly losing his seat this year.
At the National Conservatism Conference, he gave a rather moving speech about how the left betrayed the working-class, and that in our present age, more unites him and his former enemy, Margaret Thatcher, than himself and the modern Woke left. He is not alone in recognising this. The Woke extremists have murdered the party that used to belong to men like ‘30p Lee’ Anderson, and wear its skin like a trophy.
I was once an economic leftist, who was shunned and ostracised from my former political home for going against their extremist cultural positions. I reluctantly came to realise that, in our current era, this was at the core of what the left was, and whilst they would sell out to the globalists on economics in an instant, they would never budge an inch on their cultural left-wing extremism. Lee Anderson, a lifelong Labour activist and former miner, must have found the sense of betrayal far more crippling than I, only a teenager at the time, ever did.
But for a moment, ignore the important distinction between the economic left and the cultural left, and see both as belonging to the same sentiment of state-imposed egalitarianism and social levelling.
The post-war consensus within the Conservative Party was that certain things were irreversible; nationalised industry and an expansive welfare state funded by high taxation, were here to stay.
Whilst the specific area of focus, economics vs culture, is different, this is just like today; things like gay marriage and transgenderism are seen as ‘irreversible’ by weak-willed Conservatives who let the cultural left create a ‘ratchet effect’.
But we know that in the case of the economics, Thatcher, and the organised intellectual movement behind her, that spent decades fighting for a cause that most thought ‘lost’, did eventually triumph. They did launch a successful counter-revolution, and the left was forced to recognise that they did not own the trajectory of history.
Battle of Ideas and Cultural Hegemony
The path for neoliberalism emerging triumphant in the West was a long struggle. In Scholar’s Stage’s terrific essay Culture Wars Are Long Wars, he discusses how the Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek was a lonely, isolated individual after the end of the Second World War. The Great Depression and the war, alongside socialist domination over Eastern Europe and the number of socialist countries rapidly expanding globally, seemed to disprove everything he believed, and suggesting he was on the ‘wrong side of history’.
But he did not succumb to hopelessness. He actively promoted and fought for his ideas, helping found organizations like the Mont Perelin Society and the Institute for Economic Affairs, even in a period where it felt hopeless.
Hayek and a small, organised minority of people who shared his worldview, with funding from wealthy donors, published books, studies, pamphlets, journals, and organisations going against the dominant opinion of the time, even when shunned from mainstream academia.
Margaret Thatcher, an ambitious, hardworking, and very intelligent woman, was one of the people who was persuaded by his message, and used her discipline and organisational skill to go into politics, and push those ideas forward.
Sure, this was an economic ideology, intended to improve business freedom, and so would be expected to get more financial backing than the crusade against Wokeism today. But it is not as if established corporations gained nothing from the Keynesian post-war consensus; they got subsidies, and they felt it was in their best interest to keep organised labour on their side, because they were scared of what would happen if they crossed them. This is similar to how corporations today are dependent on ESG financing, and are scared of their Woke employees quitting and activist groups boycotting if they don’t submit to their every demand.
In a sense, economics and culture cannot be cleanly separated. Choices about economic policy are ultimately based on political values, which are themselves ultimately based on cultural values. And our movement, for all its weaknesses, does have the strength of numerous wealthy donors: what it lacks in personnel, it makes up for with capital. One could very much make the case, as the neoliberals did, that the prevailing left-wing consensus is hurting business interests and it would be better if they were smashed. Indeed, with figures like Elon Musk, it is clear that a large portion of the very wealthy dislike the Woke trajectory of society and wish it could be ‘put away’.
Building a network of parallel elites, like the neoliberals did, takes immense work and time, and many of us did not realise the strength of our enemy before the totalitarian character of the rainbow flag, flying over every establishment institution, was clear for everyone to see by the mid 2010s. With us in Britain about to see Woke turbocharged under a Keir Starmer Labour government, it is unfortunately safe to say that things will get worse before they get better.
But like the Neoliberals before us, and with the advantage of online technology, we must think in terms of decades, not years. The best time to start building a set of parallel elites was decades ago. The second best time is now.
Familiar Themes
Margaret Thatcher, and her intellectual predecessor Keith Joseph, had the conviction to say ‘no’ to the prevailing left-wing consensus, and actively sought to overturn it, no matter how much elite university professors said they were fighting a losing battle
This interview with Margaret Thatcher and William F. Buckley in 1976, before she came to power, is extremely interesting. They are talking about the rise of socialism, and the economic left consensus that defined their age, both of which are now behind us.
But whilst their enemy was primarily the economic left and ours is the cultural left, keep the audio and maybe modernise the accents, and recognise how eerily familiar it all sounds.
Thatcher eloquently describes what she sees as the problems affecting the Anglosphere: the absolute ruthlessness of the left at imposing their hegemony, the crippling lack of freedom in society, the sense that her and Buckley’s side was swimming desperately against the tide of history, and that the majority of people were willing to simply conform and comply, in order for the well-organised, hyper-political left to be able to always get their way.
She also talks about the vital importance of having conviction, even if it is unpopular, and even when it brings personal and social costs. That one with conviction seeks to persuade others to their point of view, even if they lose; instead of constantly conforming to a consensus controlled by, and only ever seeming to move in the direction of, the left. And that it is the duty of the intelligent to resist this totalitarianism, pointing out that in the Soviet Union, it is the scientists, the most intelligent strata of Soviet society, that are most likely to question and dissent from the dogma of the totalitarian left.
We can look back at that interview, and even though it’s not the exact same enemy that we’re fighting today, it might as well be. The loathsome sense of moral superiority and smug self-righteousness shows that the two phenomena, economic leftism and cultural leftism, are genetically and sentimentally related.
The Victory of the Right
But all of these familiar talking points in Buckley’s interview can give us hope: because Thatcher won. The people who for so long dismissed her ideological kin as cranks, extremists, and on the ‘wrong side of history’, day in and day out, were forced to watch as Thatcher completely dismantled what they had established for almost half a century as the ‘consensus’.
And she was not alone. 20 years after her interview with Buckley, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and socialism discredited as a political force. New Eastern European leaders saw Thatcher as a hero, as somebody who inspired them to take a stand against state socialism and collectivism, and who inspired the economic policies they would take in their own countries.
As Yuri Bezmenov (Substacker) talks about, demoralisation by constant proclamations of the left’s triumph being inevitable is a deliberate propaganda tool, to make resistance seem futile, and therefore preventing it from emerging. But if they were truly convinced of that, why would they need to pump millions into propaganda and censor social media?
The neoliberal counter-revolution against Keynesian social democracy, that Thatcher personified, shows that everything the left taunts as being beyond any debate, is in fact debatable and is in fact reversible.
If it hadn’t been for Thatcher proving that the tide of history could be turned, that trade unions which, like the Woke activists of today, had a sense that they were above the law and could hold the majority to ransom, could be brought to heel, neoliberalism would never have taken off as the dominant ideology in the West. Policymakers would have been too terrified to cross the unions and target social programmes.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight, after Thatcher had proven it, that people dared to dream that the economic left was beatable. One could make the argument that she contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And what is it about the cultural left that makes it so different? In many ways, taking on the economic left was probably harder. It was a matter of people being able to feed themselves and their families. Would Woke activists really have the same level of determination as the miners did, when their concerns are on a far higher level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
Why is say, repealing gay marriage, considered so difficult compared to restricting the power of the trade unions to strike and closing down inefficient coal mines? It’s only considered to be because it hasn’t been done before, there has been no national leader who has had the grit and determination of Margaret Thatcher, to finally say ‘no’ to the LGBT activists like she said ‘no’ to the unions. If they protest and riot, as they of course will do, simply say ‘you’re going to be out for a very long time’, and don’t budge one inch. When there is absolutely no hope of you changing your position, you may be surprised at how easily their energy can be expended.
Whilst Thatcher did not defeat leftism, and in fact, by not doing anything to stop the expansion of university education and by depriving the left of their other base, blue collar workers, may have unintentionally have assisted Wokeism, she was not an accomplice in our current cultural ills.
She believed in the primacy of family life, traditional values, and Victorian morality. She loved Britain and would vigorously defend it against the kind of degenerates that occupy the ‘Blob’ today, not indulging their destructive idiocy for a single moment.
Whilst I may have my disagreements with Thatcher on economics, I would agree with her on core moral values. Lee Anderson is not alone in recognising that today, more unites him and Margaret Thatcher than him and the other side of the culture war. In the 2020s, economics is simply a pragmatic endeavour, it is culture that is the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. ‘No War But the Culture War’, and in that regard, Thatcher was a ‘friend’.
A ‘Margaret Thatcher for Culture’
Britain needs a ‘Culture War Thatcher’, who beats the cultural left like she beat the economic left.
Every law regarding social and cultural issues from the last 40 years should be repealed. A sledgehammer should be brought to the ‘Blob’, closing down the universities and HR departments like Thatcher closed down the mines, in order to destroy the base of support for the ideology at its absolute structural root.
If this happened, it would inspire the globe. A new generation of leaders the world over would be inspired to push for a militant, unapologetic social conservatism, completely renouncing every value of the 1960s.
Just like the spread of communist red across the map, the spread of Woke rainbow can not only be halted: it can be overturned. It should be our core goal to make sure the rainbow flag falls just like the red flag did. We shall work to change the soul of Western societies, to prevent the cancer of Wokeism from ever emerging again.
Conclusion
Margaret Thatcher knew how much people hated her. But she had no concern about being liked. A great line of hers is that ‘If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at anytime, and would achieve nothing.’ That is absolutely true. Do we really care about the approval of people who hate us, people who mutilate children and laugh about how we’re powerless to stop them?
One can feel sorry for the miners and industrial workers that suffered under Thatcher’s misguided economic policies and overly confrontational approach, as I do. Their sense of masculine pride, and their communities governed by traditional values, were destroyed. The fact that ‘New Labour’ was Thatcher’s greatest achievement, and with Blair going on to steal the party that the working man built and fought for, in order to gift it to the lowest dregs of humanity, makes it even more heart-breaking.
But when I hear about the ‘creatives’ and academia that Graham Cunningham talked about, the ‘trendy left’, ‘counter-culture’, and proto-Woke elements who hated her just as much if not even more, ‘coping and seething’, it fills my heart with happiness. That these smug, vindictive parasites, who now occupy every institution, control our speech, indoctrinate and mutilate kids with impunity, and taunt about how they never lose, had to cope with, for once, LOSING.
It is a tantalising prospect to imagine the Woke cultural left having to come to terms with the failure and total discrediting of their odious, evil project, just like socialists did by the 1990s.
If that day ever comes, there is not one cultural left ‘victory’ that should be spared. Everything is up for debate, and nothing is safe. Gay marriage, transgenderism, affirmative action, state multiculturalism, and feminism will be torn apart, brick by brick, root by root. Not until every person involved in experimenting on and mutilating kids in the name of transgenderism is, at the very least, behind bars for life, will we have decisively defeated this social plague that has poisoned our once great nation.
We will, like the Woke do today, push young people to support our ideas, showing them the horrors of transgenderism in schools like the Holocaust is shown in our current age, and teaching them to believe that Woke is the personification of evil. We will, as they do to us today, smugly flaunt social attitude surveys in their faces, taunting them that the future belongs to us, and that there is nothing they can do to prevent the future trajectory of society, as we have the youth on our side. One hopes they feel broken, hopeless, and demoralised.
We will be the masters and the winners. The people totally undeserving of their ‘pride’ laughed at, ostracised, and forced to bow and scrape, correctly restored to their rightful place at the margins of society.
The legacy of the 1960s counter-culture, and the ‘civil rights regime’ that affects not only America, but the entire Anglosphere, must be destroyed forever. It must be seen by the average person as diabolically evil, and totally beyond the pale of political and public discourse.
The left doesn’t always win. Whilst days ahead may be dark, going against what is considered the ‘tide of history’ and engaging in ‘fruitless exercises’, may one day lead to victory.
Margaret Thatcher won; and so shall we.
Another banger. I appreciate the passion on the mutilation of kids by 'the gender agenda', but slightly surprised by the prioritisation of repealing gay marriage (which appears twice, once as an example, and once as start of a to-do list). Is it such an issue for us? It is certainly the most 'settled' of the 'victories' you identify, so for pragmatic reasons surely not a priority? Even Thatcher was politic enough to leave some economic sacred cows lie; no doubt we would have to too in the cultural sphere.
Even morally, I am unsure that it is a bad thing, if it opens up the benefits of stable monogamy (and child-rearing) to more people, who are willing anyway. Also if I'm not mistaken you are not religious so why the focus on SSM?