Thatcher was correctly identified as a major force before her election

Evidence

The CCCS ’s collectively authored book Policing the Crisis (published in 1978; see chapter 12 of this volume) had identified race as a defining feature of the increasingly conservative form of authoritarian populism developed by Margaret Thatcher. Stuart then coined the term “Thatcherism” in a prescient article, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in Marxism Today (included in this collection, chapter 13 ) in January 1979, some months before Thatcher herself was elected. … Up until then, she had been patronized by many on the Left as an insignificant, shrill-sounding housewifely voice espousing an anachronistic form of old-fashioned domestic moralism. However, Stuart recognized her as a person who, in Hegel’s terms, constituted a historic individual—whose politics instantiated, in personal form, and served to crystalize much wider social and political forces that were already in play. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 40

Categorization

• XREF: Authoritarian populism and the moral-cultural basis of Thatcher’s appeal connect directly to Gramscian hegemony and articulation concepts discussed elsewhere in Hall’s corpus.
• SEED: An essay on how analysts repeatedly misread political figures of consequence (Thatcher, Trump) as shrill or insignificant because they evaluate by old frameworks rather than what Hegel called historic individuals.