ABSTRACT
Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulrooney in Canada, and the Kohl government in Germany spawned a period of conservative hegemony throughout the Western capitalist world. During this era, conservatives attacked the welfare state, abortion rights, civil liberties, freedom in the arts, the liberalization of education, and attempted to impose a rightist and traditionalist agenda on the public. Yet this offensive of the right never really triumphed in the realm of culture, and culture itself has been a fiercely contested terrain for the past decades.4
