This is CBS, I On the World. I'm John Batchel. It's a great pleasure to welcome Charlie Cook of the National Review Online. I've enjoyed Charlie's remarks with his colleagues for quite some time. And it is wit, I recommend to everyone.

The news these days can be grim and momentarily can be frightening,

given the tariff disputes. However, there is wit there to find, and years later you reflect,

what was I worried about? Charlie, a very good evening to you. Thank you for this. You've written

recently for the new Civitas Institute, Civitas Outlook, your

memories of being a child in Britain before and after Margaret Thatcher, you reach back to your

parents' experience before Margaret Thatcher and your experience after Margaret Thatcher.

The payoff here is that it was a bright, shining world, thanks to Margaret

Thatcher. But let's begin at the beginning. There was a moment that Britain, recovering from the

Great War in 1945, veered into what we now regard as cradle of the grave socialism.

What did that mean for your parents, who I believe met and married in the 1970s?

What was the world to them, what, almost 30 years after the war?

Good evening to you, Charlie.

Good evening.

Well, it's really a remarkable roller coaster of a story. My mother's father was born in 1918.

And at that point, the British Empire was larger than it had ever been or would ever be.

The zenith of the British Empire was between about 1918 and 1923.

And if you fast forward 50 years from then, you start to see a decline in the late 1960s into the 1970s,

in which Britain becomes known as the sick man of Europe.

And what that looks like is not just economic dysfunction,

which I think marked out much of the Western world.

The United States economy was poor in the 1970s as well.

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