I've been listening to audiobooks through hoopla, and from the library - the first seven of the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series - but I've also been reading quite a few actual books lately.
Most of them have been entertainment of varying degrees of lightheartedness, but some of them have given me to think - one of them about Dr. Who. Shall we continue over the orange decorative object?
For instance, the author (Philip Sandifer), while concentrating on the Dr. Who series, occasionally writes an essay, with the series title "Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea" and an individual subtitle for the subject he's writing about, such as this essay The Winter of Discontent in TARDIS Eruditorum #5. The "Pop Between Realities" essays cover things that were affecting the real world at the time the shows he's been critiquing were running. This particular one discusses some of what was going on that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, and some of what people thought of her - then and now.
It doesn't make pleasant reading, but it surely does sound familiar. It starts with a quote from Warren Ellis in Planetary #7 that compares the US and the UK in the 1980s - neither in favorable terms. It continues with a discussion of lots of what was going in in the UK at the time, musically, politically, socially, and mentions that the biggest mistake made was the failure of anybody at the time to realize that both sides, politically speaking, were buying into the idea that individual and corporate profit was a very good thing.
...[W]e can see the true revolution of Thatcherism. It is not the turn towards profit as the sole and absolute value of the world. Rather, it is the devastating practical refutation of what had previously been axiomatic: the idea that postmodernism was inherently leftist. This is at the heart of Thatcher’s peculiar notion of conservatism. It is visible in her hilarious claim that William Gladstone would be a Tory if he were alive in the 1980s, as though the statement that her party was very progressive by the standards of a century ago was in some way meaningful. Thatcher’s conservatism hinged on the willful confusion of what was with what is nostalgically remembered, seeking endlessly to mask further acceleration towards the culture of naked and unabashed greed she championed as a “return” to a past that, in truth, never was. Even her famed declaration that she was a politician of “conviction,” when scrutinized, collapses to little more than a moment of arch-relativism. Her worldview was valid not because it was based on the product of consensus or even evidence, but because it was based on fundamental and unshakable personal belief. Thatcherism, in this view, is little more than heavily armed relativism.
In this regard the position that really drops out of the mix is conservatism, at least in its classical sense of trying to maintain the current state of affairs or return to the past. Malcolm Hulke, of course, saw this as far back as 1974 in his rejection of the very idea of a “golden age.” But the point remains. This is in many ways a triumph of postmodernism. The past is a foreign country, accessible only through memory and reconstruction. So why not construct the future you want and pretend that it was the past? Throw in a patois of genuine social conservatism and you can hijack the rhetorical appeal of conservatism to serve a progress narrative towards whatever future you desire. Thus you have the gaudy and contradictory spectacle of the contemporary right’s belief that government shouldn’t interfere with business, only with how people have sex.
The real problem is that this tactic has proven appallingly difficult to counter. Once the right realized that postmodernist tactics could serve their purposes just as well as they could anyone else’s it became very, very difficult to outflank them. This sort of trick still describes the right-wing playbook in 2014. Language is just a social construct, so why not improperly use the word “socialism” to describe Barack Obama’s basically neoliberal economic policies? It’ll become what socialism means soon enough anyway.
For our purposes then, Thatcher provides a moment of genuine horror. ... We’ve been holding that the solution to the problem of alchemy is material social progress. But Thatcher provides an even simpler solution. After all, what better philosopher’s stone is there than money, a substance that truly can transmute any object into any other object? What is more mercurial than currency? What better represents the abstract and floating nature of the signifier than the coin, which truly can mean absolutely anything in the world?
Sandifer, Philip (2014-10-10). TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years. Eruditorum Press. Kindle Edition.
The above several paragraphs are very close to the end of the essay. I was a working adult during Reagan's presidency. His gutting of NIH funding was the cause of my only pink slip ever. And I'm afraid you'll have to read the essay to get why I think this is relevant - I've pushed the limits of fair use already (and thank whoever did the programming that the copy and paste automatically added in the citation).
There was something Mr. Sandifer said, somewhere else in this book (I thought it was at the end of this essay, but in re-reading it to write this post, I didn't find it here). He was again speaking of current "conservative" policies, and he said there was a built-in reason why people would - probably fairly soon - stop putting up with them: They aren't any fun.