Why Political Leaders Are Never to Blame
At first glance, Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama share little in common, whether in their politics or their legacies. Thatcher remains a figure of extraordinary divisiveness: a heroine to some, a caricatural witch to others. Though Obama’s time in office was marked by vitriol, his popularity afterwards has been durable, and right-wing hatred now seems concentrated elsewhere.
But as I watched the latest season of The Crown, in which Thatcher is portrayed by Gillian Anderson, and consumed excerpts of A Promised Land, the first volume of Obama’s memoirs, I noticed a thread that unites them. Thatcher and Obama are symbols for causes bigger than themselves, icons to venerate, characters to mourn—ambassadors from a lost age.
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. In both narratives, these strengths are portrayed as obviously lacking today.
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, those stories. They are the chosen people who bent history to their will by holding up their visions of the future.
