While only a small number of us live to be 100, everyone ‘s birthday has a centenary date. For historians who seem mostly to be of the liberal persuasion and obituary writers (ditto) the way the 100th anniversary of a conservative’s birth usually results in one of the following: ignored, diminished with attachment of “right-wing” or “so-called,” and my personal favorite that is rarely attached to a liberal, “controversial.”
This year is the centenary of two towering individuals in the conservative movement, neither of whom received the respect they deserved among the ruling political, historical and media classes. I speak of William F. Buckley Jr. and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Before 2025 expires, I offer some reflections and admiration for these two.
Bill Buckley almost single-handedly held the conservative fort until reinforcements arrived. Far from being mean spirited, Buckley used his extensive vocabulary and rapier wit to disarm liberal opponents in ways they didn’t recognize until it was too late to respond. His line about preferring to “entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University” was a classic undermining of what we now call the “woke” agenda of that school of “higher learning.”
A questioner once asked Buckley, “On television you are always seated. Does this mean you can’t think on your feet?” Buckley’s immediate response: “It’s very, very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.” Coming from anyone else that might sound prideful, but the line had a considerable amount of truth in it and the audience laughed. He was incredibly smart and was his own encyclopedia. I once introduced him at a Washington event: “Bill, I don’t mind you writing a column, or being the author of many books, or piloting a yacht, but when you built a harpsichord from scratch and played it at Carnegie Hall, don’t you think that’s pouring it on a little too much?” Clearly, he went through the gift line more than once.
Margaret Thatcher was hated by the British Left because she almost single-handedly destroyed the socialist programs that had harmed much of the country’s social, economic and political infrastructure. Her political opponents would never admit they were wrong, despite the evidence.
Responding to the collectivism and overreliance on government in her day, Thatcher recalled a basic principle: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”
Another Thatcher line that should have been quoted during the race for New York City mayor, which was won by Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani: “The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
In an article for the periodical Modern Age: A Conservative Review titled “The Woman Who Made Britain Great Again,” Christopher Sandford writes: “In her first term alone, she oversaw measures that lowered inflation from an annual rate of 18 percent (and rising) to 5.5 percent (and falling). She introduced legislation to curb union militancy (and) privatize(d) inefficient state industries,” among many other reforms.
Sandford wraps up his summation of Thatcher’s remarkable life: “To her critics, Thatcher will always be the steely-eyed operator more concerned with advancing her essentially puritanical view of the world than with the consensus politics we seem to demand in the West today. For others, she remains the last recognizably great British prime minister, one who embodies the paradox of serving as her nation’s all-but-unchallenged leader for eleven years, while seeing herself as an outsider constantly beset by an inert political establishment.” Count me among the “others.”
Two great minds whose ideas and philosophies would still work should modern politicians again embrace them.
Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).
