One Great Woman of History

Margaret Thatcher (10/13/1925 - 4/8/2013), the greengrocer's daughter, refused to bow to her betters in the boys' club. When the state ran everything and its problems seemed ever more intractable, her eloquence and energy reversed Great Britain's seemingly irreversible decline.

But it wasn't only her actions that made her memorable. David Brooks:

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it. [snip]

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

The lady gave as good as she got, but, after 11 years of political conflict, as David Brooks wrote, "Thatcher had exhausted the country."

The calming salves of distance and time allow us, two decades later, to appreciate her leadership even more. R.I.P. © 2013 Stephen Yuen