The Myths That Bind Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Thatcher and Obama are symbols for causes bigger than themselves, icons to venerate, characters to mourn—ambassadors from a lost age.
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At the heart of Obama’s memoirs and Thatcher’s depiction in The Crown are profiles of leadership. The qualities Obama champions are moral as much as anything—decency, optimism, hope—whereas for Thatcher, they are fortitude, consistency, seriousness.
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Dig deeper, and a more profound vision of leadership emerges that binds the two leaders: They are, in effect, prophets who came to embody their countries’ stories and, crucially, changed those stories
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They are the chosen people who bent history to their will by holding up their visions of the future.
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The Crown’s portrayal of Thatcher evokes a form of nostalgia for the certainty of the past that she has come to represent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that on some big calls, she was right: on remaking Britain’s moribund economy, for example, and retaking the Falkland Islands
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Today we see her as a leader who saw what needed to be done to get to where she wanted to go. And in one sense that designation is evidently true. Thatcher was a political titan of iron will and intellectual vigor who did change Britain—for good or ill, depending on your view.
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Wouldn’t the country, like so many of its neighbors, have eventually grasped its way to some kind of economic reform and ended up, roughly, where it is today?
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In other words, Trump’s election does not undermine Obama’s victories or vision, because circumstances beyond his control subsequently changed for the worse.
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Obama’s memoir seems to grapple with this inconvenient problem, but the former president cannot stop believing in his own myth. How does he explain Donald Trump’s election, for example? In his interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama says Trump’s rise is partly a reaction to his own success, and partly the consequence of a changing media landscape
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Does the story we tell about Thatcher, then, not reveal more about us than it does about her? Is the point, in fact, that we need the myth of Thatcher—the visionary and transformational leader—to affirm to ourselves that we too can make a difference and change the world
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It was not, fundamentally, because of anything Obama had done wrong, or any of his own character flaws. Crucially, it was also not because his promise of a better America was wrong.
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The argument that policy failures, character flaws, personal weakness, or legitimate public distaste was the real reason leaders or their philosophies were rejected is rarely countenanced.
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it is possible to discern something of an iron rule for former political leaders: Nothing can ever happen after power has been relinquished that in any fundamental way proves their central political analysis wrong
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Politicians have long understood that their ability to forecast the future—to be on the right side of history—is central to their legitimacy as decision makers
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a leader leads by anticipating the future using their understanding of how the past led to the present. For any statesman to admit that he failed to foresee the future is to admit that he failed as a statesman.
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Obama—like almost all political leaders—feels vindicated by events, even as they drift further and further away from the path he foresaw.
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“I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world,”
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they must persist in arguing that however far from the path the world has veered since their departure, the destination remains the same: that the arc bends just as they prophesied.