A new feature-length film profiling former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher prompts Newsweek to examine the Iron Lady’s record. You might be surprised to read some praise amid the ambivalence:
She lambasted ambitious bureaucrats; the artificial Utopian megastate you want to build, she told them, will be a “tower of Babel” dominated by Germany and riven by economic crises. Though she was ousted in 1990 over her refusal to join the monetary union, her skepticism seems to be vindicated with every euro crisis. December 2011 is very much Maggie’s moment, …
… [S]he would win three general elections as a conservative revolutionary at home and a world leader, transforming (along with Ronald Reagan) the ideological terrain of the Anglo-American world while bringing the Cold War to an emphatic end. …
… Equivocation enraged her. When as leader of the party she thought some Tories were showing deviationist liberal tendencies—“wets,” she called them—she marched into the headquarters of the Conservative Party clutching a book by Friedrich Hayek and proclaimed: “This is what we believe.” …
… More important, perhaps—and this may be her ultimate triumph—she is still relevant for her ideas, not for her having been a feminist pioneer, which she certainly was, even if this truth goes unacknowledged.
