Who Was Worse, Reagan or Thatcher?

i recently stumbled on a youtube video where thatcher was responding to a woman who was pressing her about the opening of the falklands war. the sense of entitlement, condescension and bottled-up fury coming from thatcher was so strong that it was almost scary to watch. i half-expected her to scream 'off with her head!' at any moment.

the 'idea/legacy' of Reagan has been more damaging to the world than either of what these two actually did

she does have one of the best hatable politician voices in the era of recorded sound.

reagan's diplomacy with gorby does have to be balanced against his record on other foreign-policy matters: grenada, the iran-contra shit and the first-term massive arms escalation (admittedly started by carter), not to mention his awful record on civil liberties and executive powers (as i think i've noted before, he used more signing statements than any president until dubya). on the other hand, all of his bad qualities have been topped by most of his successors, so it's easier to see him in a better light now.

i guess to make a fair choice we'd have to wait until thatcher's gone and see how much her reputation gets blown up and idealized beyond belief.

i always found it kinda weird that 'california uber alles' was about jerry brown -- did ppl really find him that scary?

They re-recorded it about Reagan

i have to imagine it was either a joke about hippie-haters or jello biafra really was dumb enough to think that a.) reagan wasn't on the horizon or b.) jerry brown wouldn't get his ass handed to him by any number of other republicans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwdcmjBgNA

i suspect that thatcher did more harm to her own country during her own tenure that reagan did.

yet i think reagan's legacy -- not entirely fairly to him, perhaps -- has been worse and longer lasting than maggie's. do brits carry the torch for thatcher the way american republicans do for reagan (conveniently ignoring the times he raised taxes or negotiated with commies)?

i don't doubt that (american) taxes in the '70s were too high and that the government was wasteful and poorly run. but his "i'm from the government and i'm here to help" catchphrase has been turned into inviolable gospel for the (american) right, and bullshit supply-side economics took hold under him.

it is still kind of amazing that in a six-election span that included fucking *watergate*, the democrats only won the presidency once.

voting for reagan because i see his influence as both more international in its era and more dominant in contemporary politics. perhaps this view is a product of my american blinders, but so be it.

so much to be ashamed of in the reagan era: aids denial, indirect support for apartheid, CIA crimes & misdemeanors around the world, undeclared war on nicaragua, supply-side & "trickle down" economics, emergence and coddling of the radicalized evangelical right, initial moves to repeal glass-steagall & otherwise deregulate banking/lending, anti-intellectualism, etc.

otoh, his administration did work to limit nuclear weapons, raised taxes when appropriate and closed corporate loopholes, negotiated in good faith with the rooskies, inspired eastern europe, etc. and as alfred LS points out, as bad as he seemed to american liberals and progressives in his moment, he wasn't, as it turns out, all that much worse than the democrats who've succeeded him. ;_;

Put it this way, if they put a Reagan statue up in the USA, would it get attacked? Probably not.

whereas a Thatch statue would need a 24hour sentry guard with dogs and rifles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2580097.stm

Exactly. And he was just the first in the queue.

sort of sad that america lacks that kind of mad-dog liberal/progressive contingent. i mean, we have the oregon anarchists, but just a few of them, endangered species...

yeah but your lefty comedians are funnier, so there's that

in jello's defense, jerry brown has always been a bit of a grandstanding, opportunistic phony chameleon.

wake up every morning wishing the falklands were run by argentinian fascists... terrible woman

also, the dirty little secret about Ronnie Reagan is that he pretty much abandoned supply-side after the first two years or so (when he bowed to reality and raised taxes) and was always something of a stealth Keynesian (all of that defense pork that actually really started under Carter).

that would really suck!

xp

i'm impressed that 'stealth keynesiasm' is actually a 'thing'

when lord skidelsky is a proponent, it's probably not v. stealthy

also, the dirty little secret about Ronnie Reagan is that he pretty much abandoned supply-side after the first two years or so (when he bowed to reality and raised taxes) and was always something of a stealth Keynesian (all of that defense pork that actually really started under Carter).

It must be repeated that Reagan's favorite president, to the consternation of his WFB, Jr. type friends, was FDR; and it was his malevolent PR genius that kept rewriting FDR as a natural GOP whose legacy was misread by Dems.

Nixon's "stealth Keynesianism" took the form of things like ordering the Defense Department to order a five year's supply of toilet paper about a year before the 1972 election, so as to pump the maximum amount of money into the economy so it would be humming in time to trounce (as it turned out) George McGovern (who Nixon stealthily aided by playing dirty tricks on his Democratic opponents). But we were discussing two other villains...

... of whom I voted Thatcher, not for her lasting malign influence in the larger world (Ronnie's legacy was worse), but simply for her systematic hands-on demolition of every scrap of what the Labor party had ever accomplished, to the furthest extent she could reach and a bit more.

Reagan seemed to signify almost an *absence* of morality, ethics, political thought,

OTM. As an American, Thatcher just seems like a bog standard conservative to me. Reagan was something far more sinister. Starting from his role in putting mentally ill people onto the streets as governor of CA, to the October Surprise (actually a reverse october surprise), having a CIA agent as a vice president, Iran-Contra, CIA cocaine, and the overall rise of the religious right. To me this seems like pitting a kind of standard, privatizing, union-busting conservative against a much larger organized crime operation. You can't really look at Reagan in isolation without considering the entire effect of the Reagan/Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld operation. But then I don't know much about Thatcher.

Starting from his role in putting mentally ill people onto the streets as governor of CA

'Care in the community' began under Thatcher.

She was also responsible for the vile poll tax, and punishing Scotland for not voting for her by introducing it there early.

'Care in the community' began under Thatcher.

What was the immediate result? At least people still received some sort of care through the NHS right? Is homelessness really as big of a problem in the UK as it is in the US? Or particularly in California?

She was also responsible for the vile poll tax, and punishing Scotland for not voting for her by introducing it there early.

A poll tax is wrong but just seems like another example of old fashioned conservatism. It's not exactly "dirty tricks", is it? She must have engaged in some of those kind of shenanigans though right? Are there any allegations about Thatcher actually subverting the democratic process in a potentially illegal way?

reagan was nothing compared to 'the iron lady'. a great woman, and a great leader. let's hope the spirit of thatcher can help the latest tory government make britain 'great' again

her systematic hands-on demolition of every scrap of what the Labor party had ever accomplished, to the furthest extent she could reach and a bit more.

― Aimless, Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:41 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

im pretty sure we still have an nhs, state arts funding, a comparatively lavish benefits system, etc. she enacted important anti-union laws and pulled a bunch of other shit but she did not enact the systematic demolition of 'every scrap' of what labour achieved.

his tory mayne

wake up every morning wishing the falklands were run by argentinian fascists... terrible woman

― would s*m*a*s*h 1994 (history mayne), Saturday, 9 July 2011 00:29

wonder wtf this is supposed to mean

i guess im saying that retaiking the falklands wasn't some great crime against humanity, and that its collateral effect in argentina was good. obviously that wasn't anticipated, and there is a backstory of government incompetence in handling the falklands situation prior to the invasion, which is why a large part of the british right opposed the war.

i guess im saying that retaiking the falklands wasn't some great crime against humanity,

Agreed, personally I wouldn't have mentioned it in the original post, she's got so many other crimes worth considering.

i suppose there are the lingering suspicions that Thatcher in some sense escalated the stand-off over the Falklands when a show of intent might've been enough. i don't know that we'll ever discover the truth about that. Argentinian fascists are v. bad but so is left-over scraps of British imperialism imo. Don't believe the death toll (and empowerment of the Thatcher government) was justified by the liberation.

worth remembering that Falklands adventure was green-lighted by the Reagan govt.

but not before Al Haig (the self-described "Vicar of American foreign policy") attempted shuttle diplomacy.

Thatcher was a synonym for satan in my house when i was growing up, can't really not vote for her.

worth remembering that it's a nonsense that las malvinas are brit territory in the first place and that hundreds of mainly young, mainly conscripted men died in the war.

as detailed on another thread, thatcher's personal friend pinochet indirectly ordered the execution of my father, which luckily didn't happen. so i'll have to go for her.

Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House roof and appointed James Watt ("After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back" was a plausible quote) as Secretary of the Interior.

Thatcher created the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, one of the premier CC research institutions, out of concern with greenhouse emissions.

im pretty sure we still have an nhs, state arts funding, a comparatively lavish benefits system, etc. she enacted important anti-union laws and pulled a bunch of other shit but she did not enact the systematic demolition of 'every scrap' of what labour achieved.

― would s*m*a*s*h 1994 (history mayne), Saturday, 9 July 2011 07:59 (Yesterday) Bookmark

So she didn't get to finish the job, but can you doubt her intentions?

Don't look at intentions. Study her eye shadow and hair.

If you're going to base your vote on eyeshadow, you have to imagine Reagan with the same eyeshadow, to be fair.

I voted Thatch, anyway, based more on visceral hatred than cool examination of facts, legacy, hair or eyeshadow, sorry Kate.

As an Australian, I feel kind of removed from both, but Regan = nuclear war to my 14 year old mind ("we begin bombing in 5 minutes lol!" and so on). I was aware of the dire straits the UK was in at the time with the miners strikes and riots and so on, but it wasnt as visceral an impact as the boogeyman of nuclear annihalation that felt like it was all Regan's fault.

so are you saying That Was Then, This is Now?

ill say this for thatch, 80s tv was much better in england than in the US

especially on that very special episode of "Family Ties" in which the Keating family visited.

everyone on about Reagan's legacy = otm. Seems like the damage Reagan done is somewhat quaint compared to the run of Clinton/W/Obama...

I mean I know a lot of Britishers hate Blair and Brown, but it didn't seem like they were so bad for so long that it made Thatcher seem not really all that bad?

As facile as this sounds, I'm a hundred times more willing to condemn erstwhile, nominal opponents of Reaganism and Thatcherism like Blair, Clinton, and Obama than Reagan and Thatcher themselves.

TS: john major vs george h. w. bush.

Bush is far worse! During his House faces in the late sixties he opposed the Civil Rights Act cuz that's what Texas demanded. He remained a Nixon lapdog until his position was, as they say, no longer tenable (Nixon himself on Bush: "He's not a leader; he's a man you appoint to things"). As CIA director he authorized the creation of Team B, a collection of US foreign policy satraps whose purpose was to ignore the CIA and use its own intelligence.

He also the dirtiest prez campaign of my lifetime in '88.

I have warmer memories about Bush pere than I did in '93, but this is a man who always -- always -- got history wrong.