Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
I once met a sweet old couple in West Texas who were still hurting from Jimmy Carter. His crime? Enforcement 55 mph speed limit on national roads some four decades ago.
Shooting the 39th US president, who died on Sunday, was never just a conservative sport, though. He was always the key point The Simpsons also. It was harsh for a decent and often far-sighted man whose governing struggles — with inflation, with Iran — were largely beyond his control. On the other hand, without that anger, that historic burst of public patience at the end of the 1970s, there would not have been a corresponding appetite for new ideas. No anger, no Reagan.
I am increasingly convinced of something we might call Carter’s rule: rich democracies need a crisis to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on drastic reforms until their nation is in acute distress. The chronic type is not enough. Reaganism was on offer before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and a fresh thinker in power. But the electorate at that stage was not fed up enough to accept a complete break with the post-war Keynesian consensus. There had to be more pain. The parallel with Britain in the same period is chilling: an air of uneasiness, a false start or two in reform, then a spurring humiliation (an IMF loan in 1976) that eventually convinced voters to give Thatcher carte blanche. Things had to get worse to get better.
Understand this and you will understand a lot about contemporary Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck with the wrong economic models because, in the end, things aren’t that bad there. The status quo is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the initial costs of change. Therefore, even the slightest reduction in pensioner benefits or exemptions from inheritance tax provokes public anger. Compare this with southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has reformed its path towards economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the collapse that was the Eurozone crisis around 2010. Essentialist arguments about the “character” of the South, about its work ethic and so on, have turned out to be nonsense. Forced to change, he succeeded.
Of course, leaders can and should try to break the rule. They are obliged to act with honor before their nation’s plight becomes acute. But doesn’t that describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? And look at his torment. If the French president had tried to pass his controversial budget in response to the sovereign debt crash, rather than avoid it, it would have required more hearings. If he had raised the state pension age in the middle of the crisis, rather than to prevent it, the protests would not have been so fierce. There are no votes in preventive action. Few of us are serious when we encourage governments to think long-term, to fix roofs while the sun shines, and so on.
Once you see Carter’s rule in one place, you start seeing it everywhere. It is now clear that Europe could have weaned itself off Russian energy a long time ago. But it took a war to force the issue. India has had decades to end the License Raj and other government rigidities. But it took the acute economic distress of 1991 to concentrate minds. (Including the sublime Manmohan Singh, the finance minister and later prime minister who died three days before Carter.)
The problem with this argument is that it is close to a kind of strategic defeatism: an active desire to make things worse, to make them better. Well, to be clear, “burn it all” is an unconscionable motto. In most cases, a crisis is just a crisis, not a prelude to reform. Otherwise, Argentina would have put its economic house in order several decades ago. But if the crisis is not a sufficient condition for change, I believe that it has become necessary. This is even more true in high-income countries, where enough voters have enough to lose that even small changes to the status quo are provocative.
And so to Britain. If any leader should be studying Carter’s life and times today, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister has useful ideas, as did Carter. As with the “weak” talk, his gloom about the state of affairs at least shows that he understands how much needs to change. But as soon as he asks voters to bear some short-term loss or inconvenience for a greater gain, he finds himself alone. Like Carter, he is stuck in one of those pockets of history when the national appetite for change grows, but not in time for his administration. And why would you? Brexit is holding back economic growth, but it is not such a disaster that it requires an urgent review. The National Health Service is forever teetering on the brink without falling. While some areas threaten to deteriorate (schools), something else is improving to compensate (planning). Things are tolerably bad. And that’s not bad enough. Those who think Starmer is being too cautious may be overestimating the role of the individual agency. It is the public that decides when it is ready to make difficult compromises.
In politics, as in marriage, there is a big difference between dissatisfaction and breaking point. A radical political program in the US in 1972 or 1976 would have been stillborn from the press. Not long after, it perfectly coincided with the mood of the public. The tragedy of Carter was timing, not talent. Britain now, like America in his day, is still a few years away from that moment in the lives of nations when voters look around and finally say, “Enough.”
