This Is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End

As the Democrat circular firing squad continues as results trickle in from New Hampshire, a lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks at the growing toxicity and ruthless nationalism of the right - all exemplified by the Trump?pence regime - and a virtual war on Enlightenment liberal values. Under this warped nationalism which would alarm Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, human rights are being diminished and the ability to see others as equally human is under relentless attack.   Indeed, democratic principles are being eroded with the right pushing for the supremacy of an oligarchy lead by a near autocrat as demonstrated by what is happening in Hungry where the press is being censored and universities are being taken over by the autocrat supporting central government.  One can only imagine how eager Trump is to remake America on this pattern, with Congressional Republicans only too happy to rubber stamp the steady erosion of rights so long as they get to remain in office.  Here are article highlights:

In an Italian hotel ballroom of spectacular opulence—on red velvet chairs, beneath glittering crystal chandeliers and a stained-glass ceiling—the conservative movement that once inspired people across Europe, built bridges across the Iron Curtain and helped to win the Cold War came, finally, to an end.

The occasion was a conference in Rome last week called “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations.”  . . . . . this event was co-organized by Chris DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute (in the era when it supported global capitalism and the Iraq War) and John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. . . . .  This was the successor to the National Conservatism Conference held in Washington, D.C., last year.

The purpose, at least at first, seemed a little more mysterious, too. If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony. John Paul II wanted Poland to join the European Union . . . . At least when she was still prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was also a proponent of this vision of the West. She was one of the driving forces behind the European single market, the continent-wide free-trade zone that also required a unified regulatory system—the same unified regulatory system that the British have now rejected—and had great faith in the importance of human rights. She said so explicitly: “The state is not, after all, merely a tribe. It is a legal entity,” . . . .

The new national conservatism, at least as articulated in Rome, is very different from Reaganism and Thatcherism. The starting point is that European integration and American hegemony are both evil, and that universal ideals like human rights are a dangerous ideology. These, in fact, are arguments made in Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, a work that synthesizes biblical history, the writings of John Locke, and contemporary politics into a caricature of a political philosophy for our times.He also attributes all of the good things about modern civilization to the nation and all of the bad things to what he calls “imperialism.” He puts countries and institutions he likes into the first box, and those he doesn’t like into the second. Thus it emerges that the Nazis, who specifically called themselves nationalists, were not nationalists but imperialists, as is the European Union, an organization created to prevent the resurgence of Nazism. Britain, Spain, and France, despite their long history as empires on land and sea, count as nations.

In this worldview, democracy is of no significance. International treaties and obligations do not matter either, not even if people want them. Although membership in the European Union is voluntary—Brexit has just proved that—and is supported by majorities in most countries, Hazony writes and speaks as if the EU were an occupying power.

Many bad books have had great influence. This one has been very lucky, having appeared just as the word nationalism was adopted by Donald Trump, who finds it a useful way of dressing up a set of foreign and domestic policies that are largely governed by the his whims and dictated by his self-interest. . . . . To put it differently: The arc of history once described by Martin Luther King and Barack Obama is now bending the other way, and a lot of people are leaping aboard.

[O]ther speakers in Rome also reflected an almost paranoid sense of persecution. The idea that “the nation” has been outlawed is clearly something that a certain breed of conservative now genuinely perceives to be true. The American Christian writer Rod Dreher solemnly described a world in which he felt repressed, just as people had been under totalitarian communism. . . . calling on audience members to think of themselves as Christians persecuted for their faith in the past.

What makes this view odder is that it also clashes with political reality. National conservatives cannot simultaneously be helpless victims of a totalitarian culture and also hold enormous political power, which some of them plainly do.

Marion Marechal, the French politician who has dropped the surname Le Pen but still belongs to the family that founded the French party now known as the National Rally, spoke at length.

Marechal, who is sometimes described as a candidate for the French presidency in 2022, made a well-crafted speech that, like Hazony’s, drew a sharp, polarizing contrast between conservatives and enlightenment rational liberals, whom she called “progressives.” The term seemed to include everybody from President Emanuel Macron to French Stalinists. Her words were evocative: “We are trying to connect the past to the future, the nation to the world, the family to the society … We represent realism; they are ideology. We believe in memory; they are amnesia.” But her remarks don’t reflect reality. Macron spoke explicitly and at length about history and memory in Krakow, and has done so on many other occasions too. To Marechal’s fans, that may not matter. Perhaps they feel themselves to be a persecuted minority, and she echoes that view. Perhaps they just prefer to hear about history from someone like her, the spokesman for an ethnic definition of France and Frenchness, instead of Macron.

Some of what Marechal says to the French, and some of what Baudet says to the Dutch, is indisputably true. Economies really have become more global, which makes small communities more vulnerable; older landscapes have been destroyed by modernity; people have drifted away from churches, probably for good; technology is moving very quickly, in ways that frighten people. The argument is over how to address the legitimate fears created by these changes. Among others, the European Union itself has come up with a set of solutions, including the donation of money to culture and architecture and the protection of European agriculture, and thus European landscapes, against competition.

[T]he EU remains the only entity large enough to speak up for Europe on the world stage. The Netherlands alone—even Britain alone—will not be able to do it.

But other possibilities exist too. One can use the electorate’s fears, for example—fan them, exploit them—in order to build a new political movement. And because national conservatism very much wants to be a new political movement, this is a prospect that interests many people.

When the final speaker entered, he won a standing ovation. This was Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, the man whose career probably best illustrates the distance that the conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher has traveled since 1989. Orbán, I realized, was the person that many in the room had really come to hear.

Famously, Orbán has gone one step further than many other European conservatives. For one, he has not been shy about using conspiratorial, sometimes hysterical nationalist language, echoing old anti-Semitic tropes, in order to exploit fear of the outside world. “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us,” he said in 2018.

More important, he has surpassed everyone else in Europe in his willingness to destroy the institutions that create the terrain that make democracy possible. Although conference participants in Rome spoke at length about oppressive left-wing ideology at universities, Hungary is the only European country to have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies (the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) under direct government control, and to have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party dislikes for political reasons. Although many said they feel repressed by left-wing media, Hungary is also the only European country that has used a combination of political and financial pressure to put most of the private and public media under ruling-party control too.

Orbán’s destruction of independent press and academia and his slow politicization of the Hungarian courts have served a purpose quite different from lofty ideas about national sovereignty or the beauty of landscapes. These machinations have enabled the prime minister’s family and his inner circle to camouflage the myriad ways in which they use state power to get rich. They have also helped him fiddle with electoral rules, gerrymander districts, and adjust the constitution in order to make sure he doesn’t lose.

His country is the best illustration of what happens when you dismiss universal values, repress journalists and academics who produce facts, undermine courts and the rule of law: When you get rid of all of those things, you are just a few short steps away from corruption and tyranny. This is the real face of the new “nationalism,” however carefully it is hidden behind an intellectual facade or dressed up as the successor of Reagan and John Paul II. You can see why it appeals to men like Netanyahu or Trump.

The world inhabited by Reagan and John Paul II is long past, and no one knows how they would react to so-called cancel culture and Twitter mobs, or the backlash against Western culture on American (but not Hungarian) college campuses, or some of the uglier strains of far-left thinking. But somehow I doubt their response would be the creation of a new, kleptocratic authoritarian right that chips away at the institutions preserving democracy. Nor do I believe they would have wanted to destroy the institutions that have long undergirded the West, as so many of these new “nationalists” want to do.

I don’t see why love of country and love of history would be incompatible with membership in broader Western communities. But in the political world we are now entering, they may soon become so.   

Seemingly, these conservatives learned nothing from the horrors that extreme nationalism and a disregard for human rights wrought on the world in the last century.

Did Senior Thatcher Era Politicans Rape and Murder Boys?

Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

With stories that sound like something out of the Vatican and Catholic priest circles, a victim and others are claiming that a pedophile abuse ring ran rampant during the Thatcher years and that powerful British politicians worked to keep the abuse and possible some murders covered up.  As most readers know, the Thatcher regime was anything but friendly to gays, yet if the stories are true, gay sex and the abuse of boys was a fixture with some in Thatcher's government.  Why is it that the loudest homophobes are always the ones desiring or engaging in abusive gay sex?  The Daily Beast looks at the sensational allegations.   Here are highlights:

Scotland Yard detectives believe that an organized pedophile ring at the heart of the British establishment was responsible for the murder of three young boys and the violent sexual abuse of dozens more.

A survivor, known as Nick, described regular “abuse parties” that were held at a luxury apartment block near Westminster during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. He said he watched a Conservative Member of Parliament strangle one boy to death, and witnessed another young boy brutally murdered in front of a Cabinet minister.

Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, who is leading an investigation of the alleged “VIP” abuse network said today: “I believe what Nick is saying to be credible and true.”

Nick says children between the ages of seven and 16 were taken to the events, including regular Christmas parties, which were often held at Dolphin Square, an exclusive building on the River Thames that was popular with MPs who needed second homes in London close to the Houses of Parliament. He has described the partygoers as a cross-section of some of the most powerful men in Britain including Sir Peter Hayman, a long-time MI6 chief.

A Scotland Yard inquiry has been established to investigate whether the Metropolitan Police was guilty of overlooking the crimes of powerful figures, or whether some kind of cover-up operation was in place.

Over the years, several MPs have alleged cover-ups or suggested that investigations were shut down by senior security officials. In 1981, Sir Peter Hayman, a former diplomat and intelligence operative, was outed by Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, who used Parliamentary privilege to name him as a pedophile in the House of Commons. Dickens continued to investigate the pedophile ring, which he claimed included “big, big names,” and he passed a 40-page dossier of evidence to the Home Secretary in 1983.

Dickens claimed his name subsequently appeared on a hit-list and his house was broken into by burglars who scoured his office but never stole any possessions. “The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat on the Floor of the House. Honorable Members will understand that where big money is involved and as important names came into my possession so the threats began,” he told the House of Commons in 1985.
Current Labour MP John Mann has suffered no personal threats but says his investigation into allegations of a VIP pedophile network were also shut down by the authorities. As a local politician in Lambeth, South London, he said he became aware of allegations that young boys in care homes were being recruited as rent boys and taken to Dolphin Square.  “We were told this by several sources. It was very specific: there were sex parties there, and they involved Tory MPs,” he told the Daily Mail last month.

He passed the information to the police who came back to him after three months to apologize and say they had been instructed to stop looking into the abuse parties. “They'd been forced to drop it,” Mann said. “Pressure had come from on high in the police service.”

A former senior detective at the Metropolitan Police, Clive Driscoll, said earlier this year that he had been hastily removed from an investigation that had begun in Lambeth into child abuse when his superiors saw a list of suspects, which included several MPs, that he wanted to investigate.

The investigation into an alleged cover-up is just one of 18 strands of inquiry currently ongoing as part of Operation Fairbank, which was first set up in 2012 into allegations of a VIP pedophile ring. 

In total, officers said 600 emails or tip-offs had been received by more than 40 officers working on Operation Fairbank. Thus far, just five people have been arrested.

Margaret Thatcher "The Iron Lady" Dies at 87

Margaret Thatcher provoked strong reactions and opinions both in life and now in death.  Some worshiped her and others hated her.   That will not change now that she has died of a stroke at age 87.  I am not one to judge the dead, but Thatcher did some good things.  She also did some bad things and often she never apologized for her bad deeds even if she perhaps knew she was wrong.  Some like the singer Morrissey, of the 1980s band, The Smiths, has little good to say about her:

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.  .   .  .  .  the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

UK Gay rights activist Peter Tatchell is perhaps less harsh, but cannot forgive Thatcher for the passage of  Section 28 which was approved as part of the Local Government Act enacted in 1988 and which provided that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."  Here's a sampling of Tatchell's remarks:

“Margaret Thatcher was an extraordinary woman but she was extraordinary for mostly the wrong reasons. So many of her policies were wrong and heartless. Nevertheless, I don’t rejoice in her death. I commiserate, as I do with the death of any person. In contrast, she showed no empathy for the victims of her harsh, ruthless policy decisions,” said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

“In 1988, the Thatcher government legislated Britain’s first new anti-gay law in 100 years: Section 28. At the 1987 Conservative party conference she mocked people who defended the right to be gay, insinuating that there was no such right. During her rule, arrests and convictions for consenting same-sex behaviour rocketed, as did queer bashing violence and murder. Gay men were widely demonised and scapegoated for the AIDS pandemic and Thatcher did nothing to challenge this vilification.

A piece in The Daily Beast gives a more positive spin to Thatcher's legacy.  Here are excerpts:

Thatcher’s steely reputation as Britain’s first and only female prime minister, serving for more than 11 years from 1979 to 1990, was based on a succession of showdowns with labor unions, with the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army, with the Argentines in the Falklands War, and with many in the leadership of her own Conservative Party. She was also a devoted friend and counselor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his confrontations with the Soviets’ “Evil Empire.” (As recently as a year ago her face would brighten at mention of Reagan’s name, and the memories would flood back.) Thatcher had no problem with what she saw as moral absolutes.

“She was completely uncompromising,” says Lord Peter Palumbo, a close friend and associate for many years. “She had a very, very definite view. She had vision, which politicians, really, all over the world don’t share today. She was one of those people, like Winston Churchill, who gave the country hope. She came in at a very low ebb and singlehandedly turned it around. She felt that, on the whole, the country had 1,000 years of rather glorious history, and everything good that was British should be celebrated. She was unflinching in that view.”

Thatcher had to crash through countless glass ceilings not only of gender but of class. “The Tories played a very risky card in selecting her,” says Palumbo. “They knew it was risky. And having won the election both as leader of the party and as prime minister, I think they rather turned up their nose about a woman who was the daughter of a grocer in Grantham, and I think she took a very hard line because it was survival time. She would have been just run over by the grandees of the party, but she ran over them.”

That pattern was repeated over and over again when anyone underestimated Thatcher. In 1981, Irish prisoners staged a much-publicized hunger strike to protest British rule over Ulster and the conditions under which they were incarcerated. Ten starved themselves to death. “I don’t think any other prime minister would have allowed the hunger strikers to kill themselves as she did,” says Harris.

Andrew Sullivan gushes:

Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir preceded her; but Thatcher’s three election victories, the longest prime ministership since the 1820s, her alliance with the US in defeating the Soviet Union, and her liberation of the British economy place her above their achievements. What inspires me still is the thought of a young woman in a chemistry lab at Oxford daring to believe that she could one day be prime minister – and not just any prime minister, but the defining public figure in British post-war political history.

That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Thatcher and Thatcherism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.

It should be noted that in the 1960s, Thatcher went against traditional Tories by voting in favor of a law that would legalize homosexuality.  I will let others reach their own evaluation of Thatcher.  She seems to have been multifaceted and not easily pigeon holed.  I know one thing for certain, however: I would NOT have wanted to debate her.  She could give back better than she got.

British Parliament Poised to Vote Today on Marriage Equality

As the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases await oral argument next month before the U. S. Supreme Court, America's longest standing ally prepares to vote on marriage equality at 7:00 PM this evening London time.  Meanwhile, over the weekend, France, the American ally that helped win the America war for independence likewise took a huge step towards marriage equality.  One can only wonder whether America will join the movement toward modernity or whether it instead will show it's promise of liberty and religious freedom is all form and no substance.  In the United Kingdom, the conservative government - that's right, its the conservative Tory government leading the marriage equality charge - is pulling out the stops to garner votes for marriage equality.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Daily Telegraph authored by George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary William Hague and Home Secretary Theresa May (pictured above):

SIR – Today the Commons will vote on the Bill to allow same-sex marriage.

Civil partnerships for gay couples were a great step forward, but the question now is whether it is any longer acceptable to exclude people from marriage simply because they love someone of the same sex.

Marriage has evolved over time. We believe that opening it up to same-sex couples will strengthen, not weaken, the institution. As David Cameron has said, we should support gay marriage not in spite of being Conservatives, but because we are Conservatives. 

Our party also has a strong belief in religious freedom, a vital element of a free society. The Bill ensures that no faith group will be forced to conduct same-sex marriages. The legal advice is clear that these protections for religious groups cannot be overturned by the courts.

Religious freedom works both ways. Why should faith groups, such as the Quakers, that wish to conduct gay marriages be forbidden from doing so? This Bill will enhance religious freedom, not restrict it.

Attitudes towards gay people have changed. A substantial majority of the public now favour allowing same-sex couples to marry, and support has increased rapidly. This is the right thing to do at the right time. We will be among the Conservative MPs voting for this Bill today. 

William Hague MP (Con)
George Osborne MP (Con)
Theresa May MP (Con)

Needless to say, the Britsh equivalents of American Christofascists and the child rapist protectors of the Roman Catholic Church are howling.  They have no regard for real religious freedom for all.  They merely seek to force their beliefs on all Britons.  As a piece in The Guardian notes, supporters of marriage equality are also citing Margaret Thatcher as a model for conservative MP's:

The chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary made their case as other Tory supporters of equal marriage made an eleventh-hour plea to fellow Conservative MPs to vote in favour of reform by invoking the record of Margaret Thatcher, who supported the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s.

Amid fears in No 10 that David Cameron may struggle to win the support of a majority of his MPs in a free vote in the Commons on Tuesday, reformers are pointing out that Thatcher set herself apart from Tory traditionalists who described the bill legalising homosexuality as a "dirty measure".

The surprise intervention of the cabinet's heaviest hitters suggested the bill was in line with Conservative values and strengthened both marriage and religious freedom.