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I once met a sweet old couple in West Texas who were sick of Jimmy Carter. His crime? enforcement 55 miles per hour Speed limits on the nation’s roads four decades ago.
It wasn’t a conservative sport to fire the 39th president of the United States, who died on Sunday. He was a frequent punchline inside. The Simpsons as well as. This was hard on an out-of-control gentleman and often short-sighted in management struggles – with inflation, with Iran. On the other hand, without that anger, that historic public impatience of the late 1970s, there would be no commensurate appetite for new ideas. No anger, no Reagan.
I’m more convinced of what we call the Carter Rule: rich democracies need a crisis to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on radical reform until their people are in dire straits. Chronic type is not enough. Reaganism came before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a control and hot thinker in the office. But the electorate was not content at that stage to entertain a total breakdown in the post-war Keynesian consensus. There should be more pain. At the same time, the parallel with Britain is grim: an air of pain, a false start or two on reform, then a humiliating humiliation (the 1976 IMF loan) that finally convinced voters to give Thatcher carte blanche. Things had to get worse to get better.
Understand this, and understand a lot about the current state of Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck with the wrong economic models because, in the end, things aren’t that bad there. The current situation is inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as the previous costs of change. And so mere concessions to pensioners’ benefits or exemptions from inheritance tax would cause public outrage. Now compare this to Southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has improved its path to economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high unemployment (Portugal) due to the collapse of the Eurozone crisis around 2010. Major arguments about Southern “character,” its work ethic, and so on, have become futile. He was forced to change, he did.
Of course, leaders can and should try to overcome the norm. They deserve credit for taking action before their country’s problems became apparent. But doesn’t this describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? See also the test. If the French president had tried to use his budget as a response to the sovereign debt crisis, he would have held more hearings, not to avoid one. The opposition would not have been so strong if it had not been for raising the state pension age during the crisis, to thwart one. There are no votes in defensive measures. Many of us are asking governments to think long-term, fix roofs when the sun shines, and so on.
Once you see Carter’s Law in one place, you start seeing it everywhere. It is now clear that Europe can free itself from Russian power long ago. But it took a war to force the issue. India had decades to get rid of license raj and other government tyranny. But to gather the mind He took the severe economic crisis of 1991. (Including the great man Manmohan Singh, the finance minister and later prime minister, who died three days before Carter.)
The problem with this argument is closely related to a systematic failure: the active desire to make things worse, not better. Well, to be clear, “burn them all” is an unthinkable slogan. In most cases, a crisis is just a crisis, not a prelude to reform. Otherwise, Argentina would have had its economic house in order decades ago. But I suggest that if crisis is not a sufficient condition for change, it has proved necessary. And this is even truer in high-income countries, where even small changes in the conditions of a large enough electorate are provocative.
The same goes for Britain. If any leader today examines Carter’s life and times, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The prime minister has important ideas, as did Carter. Like his “malaise” speech, his bleakness about the state of things shows that he at least understands how much needs to change. But as he asked voters to bear temporary losses or disruptions for the greater good, he found himself alone. Like Carter, he stuck in one of these pockets of history as the national appetite for change grew, but not in time for his administration. And why would it be? Brexit is a drag on economic growth, but it’s not a catastrophe that will force an immediate revision. The NHS has entered the abyss without falling completely into the abyss. As some areas become threatened (schools), something else is improved to compensate (planning). Things are tolerably bad. And that’s not bad enough. Those who think Starmer is too cautious may add to the role of individual agency. It is the people who decide when they are ready to make a difficult trade.
In politics, as in marriage, there is a difference between being dissatisfied and breaking up. In the year By 1972 or 1976, the radical policy agenda in America would have dropped dead from the press. It soon aligned well with public sentiment. Carter’s tragedy was one of timing, not talent. Britain now, like America then, is still a few years away from that moment in the lives of nations when voters look around and finally say, “Enough.”
