Marathon Pundit: George Will salutes Margaret Thatcher

George Will honored the remarkable legacy of the great Margaret Thatcher in his column today.

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other "vigorous virtues." She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. ("Churchillian" denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.) When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.

And the Labor Party, shellacked three times, was ready for a post-socialist leader. Tony Blair was part of Thatcher’s legacy.

Time was, Labor considered itself the party of ideas and Tories preferred balancing interests to implementing political philosophy. But by the 1970s, Labor was a creature of a single interest group, the unions, and the Tories, who made Thatcher their leader in 1975, were becoming, as America’s Republicans were becoming, a party of ideas.

Britain has periodically been a laboratory for economic ideas — those of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, the socialism of postwar Labor. Before the ascendancy of Thatcher — a disciple of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — Tories tried to immunize Britain against socialism by administering prophylactic doses of the disease. But by 1979, Britain's fundamental political arrangements were at issue: Such was the extortionate power of the unions to paralyze the nation that the writ of Parliament often seemed to run not beyond a few acres along the Thames.