Thatcherism was further entrenched by Tony Blair’s “New” Labor Party (1997-2007) and David Cameron’s Conservative “modernizers” (2010-16). Blair sought, with some help from Bill Clinton’s triangulations, to put a human face on selfish individualism. Government, he suggested, was not the problem — or not entirely. Its main task was to help individuals help themselves in the universal competition opened up by globalized markets. Individual wealth creation remained the goal: As Peter Mandelson, a theoretician of New Labor, put it, “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” During the long reign of New Labor, inequality grew in Britain, and Thatcher-style deregulation and privatization proceeded, often by stealth through public-private partnerships. David Cameron, who proudly claimed to be Blair’s “true heir,” mounted a radical assault on the welfare state that revealed how deeply Thatcherism shaped a whole generation of British politicians (and journalists).

An influential part of the British media — from the respectable Economist to the jingoistic Daily Mail — presumed, along with the bipartisan Thatcherites, that “there is no alternative” to market forces. May, however, confirmed that not only is there an alternative (an interventionist state) but also that the right is eager — in Britain as much as in the United States — to appropriate this increasingly popular remedy of the left. Her party’s manifesto was almost communistic in its assertion that the government’s “power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people.” May even co-opted the Labor Party’s old promise, originally denounced as “Marxist” by the Conservative Party, to cap energy prices.

Such ideological cross-pollination angered and baffled those still faithful to the memory of Reagan and Thatcher. The Economist denounced May’s leftish program as “perverse” and “risky.” George Osborne, a former chancellor of the Exchequer in Cameron’s government, accused May of following Jeremy Corbyn in a terrible “retreat” from globalization.

May broke many ideological taboos in her eagerness to turn angry disaffection with Thatcher’s long revolution into electoral gains. She still failed to persuade a clear majority of the British electorate of her credentials as a savior of the working people. The Conservative Party’s savage cuts to spending on public services belied her redistributionist rhetoric — which seemed more authentic when it came from Corbyn, who has promised to renationalize the railways and abolish tuition fees. For many British people, especially the young, the unabashedly socialist Corbyn seems more committed to reimposing the tax and regulatory regimes that force the rich to rediscover their social obligations.

Confronted with the nearly impossible tasks of Brexit and a struggling economy, May and her successors are doomed to failure with their impersonation of the left, let alone their rightist fantasy of restored greatness. As economic growth slows and inflation rises on the heels of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, the “hard” Brexit that May advocated looks even more like an imperial fantasy of self-sufficiency. It is most likely to be abandoned. In any case, the interventionist British state that could presumably heal the open wounds of inequality no longer exists. It has been hollowed out by decades of outsourcing and marketization. The Conservatives may cling to power by forming an alliance with an ultraright Northern Irish party. But increasingly forced to own their economic failures, they will struggle to rebrand themselves as partisans of an economy that “works for everyone.”

A new economic consensus is quickly replacing the neoliberal one to which Blair and Clinton, as well as Thatcher and Reagan, subscribed; politicians are scrambling to articulate it, often blatantly breaking with their own history. Certainly, May’s frantic left-wing posturing against inequality and social division confirmed that the Anglo-American revolution of the 1980s — built around a strong prejudice against government and for free markets — is over. At least in Britain. May, the conservative daughter of a country vicar, will probably be best remembered for advancing, inadvertently, a counterrevolution of the left.