{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-column-a-lesson-from-the-iron-lady/", "YOUNG COLUMN: A lesson from the Iron Lady", "2025-11-25", "2025", "2025-11", "Republican", "Senate", "IN", "Todd Young", "Y000064", "www.young.senate.gov", "toddyoung", "https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "The following column by U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) was published in the Washington Examiner on November 25, 2025.\n\nMargaret Thatcher\u2019s tenure as prime minister of the United Kingdom ended 35 years ago this month.\n\nIn her final week in office, during a debate in Parliament on inequality, she raised one hand high and the other low to illustrate the gap between rich and poor. Then, with a sharp motion, she thrust both hands upward, showing that, yes, the gap was widening, but everyone was moving up: a development preferable, she believed, to a leveling-down society where envy replaced aspiration.\n\nBaroness Thatcher\u2019s political career was, in large measure, defined by championing freedom and fighting against collectivism. Great Britain was struggling with stagflation after years of socialist-inspired Labour Party policies \u2014 nationalization of England\u2019s economy, the excessive empowerment of its trade unions, and high tax rates. She aspired to transform her country into a \u201cget-up-and-go instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it\u201d nation.\n\nWhat would Thatcher say today, as democratic socialism finds favor again, this time across the Atlantic? Americans are increasingly intrigued by statist policies as a means to make life more affordable.\n\nTo those in America who share her commitment to liberty and markets, she would perhaps recite her favorite line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe\u2019s Faust: \u201cThat which thy fathers bequeath thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.\u201d It was more than a line of poetry. For her, it was a governing philosophy.\n\nThatcher earned it anew with bold new approaches to unleash the full human potential of the British people \u2014 to steer her nation from lethargy and despondency back to a healthy, strong, self-confident nationalism. She cut taxes and red tape, reined in spending, tightened the money supply, privatized bloated state industries, and took on militant public-sector unions that paralyzed her nation.\n\nHer record was not flawless, but the results were undeniable: She showed the English-speaking world that conservatism need not mean inertia \u2014 that a movement rooted in tradition can also be an engine of reform.\n\nToday, on the American Right, our own engine of reform needs tuning. Earlier this month, New York City and Seattle offered possible previews of the consequences of ignoring this task.\n\nBoth cities elected socialist mayors who promised a slate of what Thatcher would describe as \u201csit-back-and-wait-for-it\u201d policies: free healthcare and transit on city buses, government-run grocery stores, and significant hikes to personal, property, and capital gains taxes.\n\nConservatives might be tempted to dismiss these elections as anomalies; after all, who should be surprised that far-left candidates won elections in deep blue metropolises? It is notable, though, that 75% of New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Here, again, skeptics have categorized these as downwardly mobile, highly educated elites.\n\nBut could a development beyond reflexive progressivism be driving the new popularity of socialist ideas? And could it spread to purplish districts?\n\nAfter all, citizens, especially those entering prime working age, who are looking for solutions, are likely to support candidates who present solutions, even ruinous ones. And doubts about mobility naturally breed envy of success and policies that punish it.\n\nOne of the defining statistics of the era is the current average age of new homeowners: 40. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, it was 28. Homeownership, often associated with the American dream and upward mobility, is increasingly out of reach for young Americans.\n\nIn America, as elsewhere, the last 35 years have brought tectonic structural changes to our economy through rapid globalization, automation, and urbanization. Creative destruction has delivered prosperity, but median real wages have stagnated, wealth inequality has risen, and rates of upward mobility have declined dramatically.\n\nAmericans are leveraged by debt, struggling to access mortgages, afford healthcare, and pay for groceries and electricity.\n\nMix in perceptions of entrenched institutional nepotism and special interest cronyism, and it is no wonder many working Americans think the system is rigged and they don\u2019t have a fair shot at success based on their abilities.\n\nBut just as New Yorkers may soon discover, though the problems socialists seek to address are real, the remedies they present are wrong. The only thing socialism equalizes is misery. Thatcher\u2019s hands, representing the haves and yet to haves, both moved upwards. Under socialism, the hands move closer together but not upwards.\n\nNo, America\u2019s destiny is not statism.\n\nPresident Donald Trump has given voice to a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class Americans who have grown frustrated by a leadership class regarded as insular, self-interested, and deficient in traditional standards of respect and character.\n\nThis movement has appealed to merit and begun the process of repairing the barnacle-encrusted ladders connecting ambition to opportunity. A process is begun, but we must go further to earn it anew. Until we do, a vacuum remains in which the appeal of socialism as an answer to these societal and economic troubles expands.\n\nA new \u201chands\u201d speech for our time would begin where Thatcher\u2019s ended \u2014 with faith in individual initiative. But it would extend that faith beyond its current trajectory to a shared national obligation: to keep opportunity open.\n\nIt would reject redistribution, while acknowledging that dynamism depends on opportunity \u2014 that markets thrive only when talent from every corner can grasp the same rungs of advancement, even if outcomes will always be unequal.\n\nIt would, in short, ensure that in America, merit is rewarded.\n\nSuch a message would not scold or promise handouts. It would reaffirm the moral case for earned success while recognizing that healthy capitalism requires maintenance: investments in education, fair competition, and the rule of law that keep markets open and merit meaningful.\n\nThatcher\u2019s two hands \u2014 one high, one low, both rising \u2014 symbolized a society lifting itself together. Our task now is to resume that lift, making sure no hand rises by weighing another down.\n\nThis must be the measuring stick for American democracy and for 21st-century conservative leadership. If the invisible hand of the market is to endure, it must once again be connected to the visible hands that work, build, and rise.\n\nAs Thatcher taught us, the work of conservatives is not to preserve the past unchanged, but to earn it anew.\n\nTodd Young is the senior U.S. senator from Indiana. He served as the student representative to Chairwoman Margaret Thatcher at the Institute of United States Studies in London from 2000 to 2001.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:52:45Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-column-a-lesson-from-the-iron-lady/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.26388918235898, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}