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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 hurt with Jimmy Carter. His crime? The implementation of the 55 mph speed limit on the country’s roads some four decades ago.
But attacking the 39th president of the US, who died on Sunday, was never just a conservative sport. He was a repeated shot inside The Simpsons also. That was harsh for a decent and often far-sighted man whose governing battles—with inflation, with Iran—were largely beyond his control. On the other hand, without that outrage, that historic rupture of public patience in the late 1970s, there would not have been the 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 in order to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on drastic reforms until their nation is in deep trouble. The chronic type is not enough. Reaganism was on offer before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a disruptor and fresh thinker in office. But the electorate was not fed up enough at that stage to have a total break with the post-war Keynesian consensus. There had to be more pain. The parallel with Britain in the same period is eerie: a bad air, a false start to reform, then a galvanizing humiliation (the 1976 IMF loan) that finally convinces voters to give Thatcher . Things had to get worse to get better.
Understand this and you understand a lot about contemporary Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck with flawed economic models because, after all, things aren’t that bad there. The status quo is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the initial costs of change. And so just cutting pensioner benefits or inheritance tax exemptions causes public outrage. Now contrast this with Southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has reformed its way to economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the punishment that was the Eurozone crisis around 2010. Essentialist arguments about “character” of the south, about his work ethic and so on, turned out to be meaningless. Forced to change, he did.
Of course, leaders can and should try to challenge the rule. They are forced to act before their nation’s plight becomes acute. But doesn’t this describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? And look at his ordeal. If France’s president had tried to pass his controversial budget in response to a sovereign debt crisis, instead of avoiding it, he would have required more hearings. If he had raised the retirement age in the middle of a crisis, so as not to hinder it, the protests would not have been so intense. There are no votes in preventive action. Few of us understand this when we call on governments to think long term, fix roofs while the sun is shining, and so on.
Once you see the Carter Rule in one place, you start seeing it everywhere. It is now clear that Europe could have weaned itself off Russian energy long ago. But it took a fight to force the issue. India had decades to shed the License Raj and other government rigidities. But it took the acute economic distress of 1991 to focus minds. (Including the sublime one of 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 for things to get worse, for them to get better. Well, to be clear, “burn it all” is an unconscious motto. In most cases, a crisis is just a crisis, not a prologue to reform. Otherwise, Argentina would have put its economic house in order decades ago. But if crisis is not a sufficient condition for change, I suggest that it has become necessary. This is even more true in high-income countries, where many voters have enough to lose that even small changes to the status quo are provocative.
And so in Britain. If any leader today should examine Carter’s life and times, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The prime minister has useful ideas, as did Carter. As with the “bad” speech, his gloom about the state of things at least shows that he understands how much needs to change. But as soon as he asks voters to put up with some short-term loss or disruption for greater gains, he finds himself alone. Like Carter, he is stuck in one of those pockets of history when the national belly for change is growing, but not at the right time for his administration. And why would he do that? Brexit is a drag on economic growth, but not such a disaster as to force an immediate review. The NHS is forever moving into the abyss without falling in at all. While some areas threaten to deteriorate (schools), something else improves to compensate (planning). Things are bad enough. And that’s not bad enough. Those who think Starmer is too cautious may be overestimating the role of individual agency. It is the public that decides when it is ready to make difficult compromises.
In politics, as in marriage, there is a world of difference between dissatisfaction and breaking point. A radical political program in the US in 1972 or 1976 would have dropped dead in print. Not long after, it aligned brilliantly with the public mood. Carter’s tragedy was one of timing, not talent. Britain now, like America in his day, is still some years away from that moment in the lives of nations when voters look around and say, finally, “Enough.”
janan.ganesh@ft.com
