The election of 1980 was not just a vote — it was a repudiation: of Carter and Carterism, of weakness, of decline. A few years later, I led the Reagan side of my sixth-grade presidential debate. The Mondale camp was led by a good friend of mine (who remains a Mondale man to this day, well into the age at which one should know better). If I had understood politics a little better, that would not have surprised me: His parents (lovely people) were college professors, their household a little island of back-east liberalism in a political environment that had in 1978 judged George W. Bush insufficiently conservative to be sent to Congress. What surprised me was not so much that this particular friend was on the other side, but that anybody was on the other side. With the memory of the Carter years fresh in my mind, I fully expected the 1984 election to be unanimous. (And it nearly was: Recount Minnesota!) As I understood things, Ronald Reagan had simply saved the country.

I imagine that certain Britons of my generation felt the same way about Margaret Thatcher. She certainly made an enormous impression on me: this marvelous, brilliant, principled woman who was doing in Great Britain what Reagan was doing here, and taking very little guff in the course of doing so.

And she seemed to be having so much fun. That, I think, is what they never forgave her for. Thatcher laughed at them, mocked them, outwitted and out-debated them. That infuriated the Left: Conservatives aren’t supposed to mock, they are supposed to be mocked. They might be allowed to win a few elections, but they could never be allowed to win the argument, much less to scoff at liberals’ public pieties.