The Facebook newsfeed has the strange effect of making history seem passé within a few hours of it actually occurring. With Thatcher’s death, even more so, since we’d all been rehearsing what we were going to say for years anyway. Enter stage left, right on cue, the Left! Ding dong, the witch is dead! And here come the Right! You pathetic jealous mediocrities, she was a saviour! And then come the hand-wringing “non-partisan” types, who fret that we should really just let the family mourn, have a little class, will ya. And then there’s the enthusiastically apathetic, who will jump at the chance to proclaim they don’t care one way or the other. A thousand threads featuring unnecessarily long comments sprout and grow out into loud, pompous oblivion. And within five hours of the news, I’m already fed up of the whole conversation.

As the Daily Mash cuttingly pointed out with its headline “People with no idea who Thatcher was 'ecstatic' that she's dead”, this whole discussion amongst us Millennials is a little odd. I was born 22 days after the woman resigned. Most people reading this, later. What the hell are we actually talking about when we discuss Thatcher? Well, we’re probably talking about our parents, for one thing. The hatred (and love) Thatcher engendered in the eighties was of the kind found in Greek tragedy – far too big to be contained within a single family generation. No, it was the sort to be passed on to the son and daughter, a blood feud that will hold her culpable for her sin down the ages. Already in parts of the North, an understandable loathing of Thatcher has passed on from one generation to the next, to the point where it has become integral to the mythology of Northerness itself. Our parents never resolved the divisions of Thatcher’s Britain, so we must keep refighting them, even if we have no idea what we’re talking about.

But that doesn’t quite explain my visceral reaction to the thought of Thatcher.  Why every time today that her face has reared up or her words quoted I have helplessly yelled like a wounded beast. I never knew Britain under her leadership, yet I have found myself unconsciously muttering “I hate her I hate I hate I hate her” under my breath, even as I post a Facebook status urging people to cool off with the resentment a bit. Why is she, even from beyond the grave, provoking this strange, unsourced rage in me?

I think it’s because she killed the future. By which I mean she killed off our idealism about the future. I have written before that I never really fancied being a Marxist. But in the seventies at least, there were different ideas about how the future might look, whether Keynesian, or big state Marxist, environmentalist, or Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful” theories – but there was still space for big romantic ideas, ones that elevated human dignity, and they shared, even with One Nation Toryism, the idea of society as a noble thing.

Thatcher arrived, took the creaking, rusting edifice of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, and took it straight to the other extreme. Andrew Marr described the history of modern Britain as a series of ideas repeatedly defeated by the overwhelming British desire to do more shopping. Thatcher may have had the intention of making us a moralistic Victorian nation again, but all she achieved was a nation of shoppers, too busy to partake in communities, empowered by their new easy credit not to change the world but to change their brand of shoe. And the inevitable logic of such a cynical, me-first world is that there is no alternative, as the coalition keeps telling us. “What are you going to do”, says the cackling devil on the progressive’s shoulder, “Appeal to people’s better instincts?”

And that self-doubt of the modern progressive is perhaps the deepest source of loathing for Thatcher. She won. She won on a grand, historical scale. And inside every idealist, there is that tiny, poisonous, doubting voice: What if she was right? What else were we going to do about the overbearing unions and the endless strikes and the rest of the debris of seventies Britain? I have asked many left wingers for their ideal solutions to the problems of that decade, and not one has convinced me as a realistic alternative to what happened. And so Thatcher has stolen even my ability to conceive an alternative, fairer Britain. George Monbiot, spokesman for what passes for a radical left in the UK, recently wrote an article entitled “Communism, welfare state -what’s the next big idea?”. His boldest successors to these revolutions? A new land value tax and a basic income. Break out the barricades!

This is her legacy. A land without alternatives. A country bereft of any ideas, with a supine Labour Party stuffed full of career politicians with the collective charisma of a used tissue.  A nation in which I can’t even be bothered to watch my friends debate on Facebook, because I already know what everyone is going to say.