Her closest male match was Enoch Powell.
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Powell had left the Tory party and was sitting as an Ulster Unionist by the time Thatcher became leader of the party. The other candidates when she was elected as Tory leader were Edward Heath, Geoffrey Howe and Willie Whitelaw.
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Iām aware. Sheās more like him, though, in her radical political orientation. By match, I donāt think @DukeTrout necessarily meant direct contemporary.
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Of course you knew that. Cold war history is your thing, after all.
I guess I just donāt get @DukeTrout 's point. thereās no point in making individual comparisons if one is free to choose anyone as the point of comparison. Everybody can sound progressive that way, just find someone whoās more of a right-wing reactionary, declare them the point of comparison and case closed.
Quite the opposite. Of course you can find counter-examples. Because those are cherry-picked.
The study Iām referring to examined literally every woman the authors could find in a C-suite role in every public company in America and made an unbiased, data-driven best match to a corresponding man in a similar role, then measured their respective policies. It was a Herculean task. And the study found that, in aggregate, those women leaders made more progressive policy decisions than their male counterparts.
The point being, even if you hire a woman who has regressive tendencies, sheās likely to still be more progressive than her male counterpart. Now, if youāre just filling in slots because youāre forced to, or if youāre intentionally picking women who are more regressive when you would normally pick progressive men, then YMMV. But that doesnāt make much sense. What does make sense, based on the study Iām talking about, is that thereās a fundamental progressive shift, much like the blue shift of a celestial body approaching at high speed, when one chooses women in business leadership roles.
I donāt know if the same shift would occur in politics. I donāt make any claims that it does. But it makes me wonder.
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We should just clone Jacinda Arndern and Stacey Abrams, send out an army of them to run the world, and be done with itā¦
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Seriously, you men have had how many centuries to run this planet? How you all been doing in that regard?
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Shitty. Run the planet into the ground, if you ask me. Time for someone else to give it a try for a few centuries.
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D- at the midterm.
It would have been F, but the studentsā very modest success in the Nuclear War Avoidance class bumped up the grade. Even there, they seemed only to put forth the minimum effort.
Performance in Climate Change Studies has been so abysmal that the final grade is in doubt.
Also, we just donāt work and play well with others.
Your turn at the head of the class IMO.
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[Biden] also continues to build out his cabinet, moving more quickly than his predecessors, at least in part to reassure Americans that he will hit the ground running after a long period when the country has been rudderless. Today Biden announced that he has tapped retired General Lloyd Austin III for Secretary of Defense.
Austin, who is 67, is a 41-year veteran of the army and headed the U.S. Central Command before he retired in 2016. Biden explained that Austin shares his desire to turn the leadership of foreign policy over to diplomats and development experts, using the military only as a last resort. Austin also oversaw the drawdown of 150,000 troops from Iraq, giving him the kind of logistical experience needed to distribute the coronavirus vaccine effectively. If confirmed, Austin will be the nationās first African-American defense secretary.But the nomination will require a waiver from both houses of Congress to overrule a law requiring that a military officer be out of the service for seven years before taking the post of defense secretary. This law is designed to emphasize that civilians are in charge of our military. Congress overrode the rule in 2017 for Trumpās first Secretary of Defense James Mattis, but lawmakers made it clear they did not want to make waivers a habit.
Biden has set up an interesting political problem. He is asking Congress to do for him what it did for Trump in 2017. This seems reasonable as a general proposition, but the supremacy of the civilian over the soldier in our government goes all the way back to George Washington. If members refuse either to provide a waiver for Austin or to confirm him, they will be in the position of voting against a highly qualified Black man about to break a barrier. If that occurs, popular anger will likely add momentum to Bidenās next pick, who could well be someone senators like less than they like Austin.
With the pandemic, the failing economy, and the Republicansā unwillingness to recognize his presidency, Biden is facing an unprecedented crisis. But he definitely knows how Washington works.
Source:
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Iām not sure about her progressive policies, if they can actually be called progressive.
My issue is with the fact that a second-gen immigrant can take such a hard-right stance on other immigrants and retain a straight face.
Windrush was bad enough.
If I have missed the mark here, please put me right, I wonāt be offended.
IMO, if popular anger were a thing that moved Republicans, Merrick Garland would be sitting on the Supreme Court. Thereās nothing in the rule book that says they canāt just stymie Austin and whoever Biden nominates as a follow-up. And the next one, and the next oneā¦
Also Iām relatively certain that most of the Republican Senate would relish the opportunity to reject a well-qualified Black man.
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This is true. I might suggest (gingerly, being as I am in fact a male and commenting on this topic is not comfortable for me) that the lived experience of being a woman may well predispose one to a more progressive viewpoint on average, over a population. As usual with statistics, this says nothing about individuals, and the women you mention rose to power in a male dominated field that sort of requires any woman to be āmore catholic than the popeā to get anywhere. And by their very nature, the folks who are pathbreakers tend to violate averages more often than most.
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Just, FYI, in case some donāt understand what this means, it does not mean that all women everywhere have exactly the same political and cultural beliefs. 
Weirdly, like other people, we are not a monolith.
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Of course not, and I have never been a woman. I have known a few, and not known any who had not experienced shitty treatment from men at more than one point in their lives. Humans in groups are never monolithic, no matter how much we want to make things simple.
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I know you know this (and was not telling you this fact).
However others seem bound and determine to ignore general trends in favor of outliers and paint all of us as regressive monsters because women like Thatcher exist and that pointing out systemic misogyny is an example of ignoring other forms of oppression somehow.
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Itās not about individual examples. Itās about the aggregate effect.
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Granted, and good point.
But sheās not exactly a good example.
Adding to the aggregate rather than detracting from it.
