Democrats have their Thatcher in Warren, if they dare

Margaret Thatcher’s description of herself as a “conviction politician” alarmed some Britons but delighted others because her convictions were incompatible with the flaccid centrist consensus that had produced their nation’s 1970s stagnation. In 1979, voters rolled the dice, sending her to Downing Street. In Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrats have their Thatcher, if they dare.

When elected leader of Britain’s Conservatives, Thatcher, disgusted by a colleague’s rhetorical mush about a glorious “middle way,” slammed onto a table Friedrich Hayek’s tome The Constitution of Liberty and exclaimed, “This is what we believe!” Today, with a forthrightness perhaps more bracing than prudent, Warren advocates a radical agenda that is approximately Thatcherism — capitalism invigorated — inverted. Furthermore, Warren bristles with a progressive’s version of Thatcher’s pugnacity that caused one of her Conservative colleagues to say that “she can’t look at a British institution without hitting it with her handbag.”