Britain's Thatcher An Unlikely Icon For American Conservatives
As an icon of the American conservative movement in the 1980s, it would have been difficult to find a more unlikely figure than Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday following a stroke.
Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, a full year and a half before Ronald Reagan became president. She hailed from a country seen as a hopeless bastion of socialism by conservatives, many of whom, like Reagan himself, were strongly invested in the idea of American exceptionalism.
At the end of the 1970s, "a lot of conservative intellectuals in the United States thought Europe is lost and that America is next," says Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Thatcher's voice came out of the wilderness and said, 'Freedom matters.' "
Her rise was equally improbable because of her gender. She was her country's first female prime minister, a possibility she publicly doubted just six years before occupying No. 10 Downing Street.
“ I think that it was a synergistic, wonderful coincidence that they were coming at the same set of ideas from arguably the two most important countries in the developed world.