The one woman who singlehandedly started the destruction of the UK, a destruction which has been ongoing ever since she came into office. As the US has had an over 30 year run of conservatism, so has the UK, almost unique among Western countries. As Reagan was to America, so Thatcher was to the UK. A cancer. She imposed Reaganism on the UK the same way that Reagan imposed Thatcherism on the US.
So began a 30 year plus experiment with neoliberalism, which is still ongoing to predictable catastrophic results in most of the world. Even Clinton (“The era of Big Government is over”) and most certainly Obama (“Reagan is my hero”) are following in Reagan/Thatcher’s footsteps and are essentially both Reaganites/Thatcherites. That’s what I mean when I say there is no Democratic Party anymore.
What we have is two Reaganite Republican Parties:
The Liberal Republican Party (“Democrats”)
The Conservative Republican Party (“Republicans”)
This has been the case more or less since Reagan came into office, certainly after the rise of the nightmarish rightwing Democratic National Committee (DNC) around 1990 or so.
After Reagan showed up, “liberal” turned into a dirty word, where it never was before. Now even liberals don’t want to be called liberals, as if there is something shameful about it.
Even after Reaganite/Thatcherite neoliberalism has devastated the entire globe, killing tens of millions of people by massive cuts in social spending and recently crashing the economy of the whole world into the worst depression since the 1930′s, still Americans, the British and most of the political parties on Earth remain addicted to neoliberalism. In fact, not only are they addicted to the cancer that crashed the Earth’s economy, they are doubling down on the poison with massive austerity imposed the world over, a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
The fact is that neoliberalism is great for elites, and it is the elites who run the world. So the elites will never tire of neoliberalism and will always seek to make the world an even more neoliberal or hopefully libertarian place, since this benefits their economic position. Elite rule has become entrenched the world over since 1980, as the social contracts in the West and elsewhere in the world have been shredded by elites under a variety of excuses.
Prior to 1980, labor and consumers had a lot of power. Overtly socialist parties were in power in most of the West and certainly in the Third World. That’s all gone now. Only the rich and their allies in the upper middle class hold any power on most of the Earth. It’s the rule of the 20%. So the Top 20% are having a dictatorship over the bottom 80%. That’s neoliberalism in a nutshell. And there is seemingly no end to it.
And you can thank the Iron Lady and the Great Communicator for that. Very much.
