Thatcherism won popular consent through a new historical bloc built in a discursive vacuum

Evidence

His point was that, rather than representing a short-term change of political fortunes, in which power simply shifted from Labour to Conservative, the emergence of “Thatcherism” (as he named it) represented a structural change of long-term consequence. What he identified was the specificity of the new historical bloc (in Gramsci’s terminology) that Thatcher had succeeded in constructing—and for which she had been able to win a great deal of active popular consent—in a moment when the old discourses of both the traditional Labour and Conservative parties were coming to be seen to be incapable of addressing the problems of the new era. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 972

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘historical bloc’ and how Thatcherism differs from ordinary party alternation.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony theory and to Miliband/Poulantzas debates about the capitalist state.