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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 felt bad for Jimmy Carter. His fault? To enforce the 55 mph speed limit on the country's roads four decades ago.
Hitting the 39th president of the US, who died on Sunday, was not just a conservative game, however. He was a recurring punchline The Simpsons as well. This was harsh for a man of dignity who often saw that his struggles to manage – with inflation, and Iran – were largely outside his control. On the other hand, without that anger, that is the history of public tolerance in the late 1970s, there would be no corresponding interest in new ideas. No anger, no Reagan.
I'm more convinced of what we might call Carter's Law: wealthy democracies need a crisis to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on radical reform until their nation is in deep trouble. Endless type is not enough. Reaganism existed before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and reformer in office. But the electorate was not fed enough at that stage to see the full explosion and Keynesian consensus after the war. There had to be more pain. The parallels with Britain at the same time are striking: an atmosphere of malaise, a false start or two in reform, then a galvanizing downturn (the IMF loan of 1976) that finally convinced the electorate to give carte blanche to Thatcher. Things had to get worse to get better.
Understand this, and you understand a lot about modern Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck in flawed economic models because, in the end, things aren't that bad there. The current situation is not comfortable, but it is not as unpleasant as the previous costs of change. And then the biggest cuts to pensioners' benefits or exemptions from inheritance tax bring public anger. Now compare this to southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has changed its approach to economic growth (Spain), financial health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the brush with doom that plagued the Eurozone around 2010. Essentialist arguments about the “character” of the lower class, about its work ethic and so on, turned out to be absurd. It had to change, it did.
Of course, leaders can and should try to enforce this law. They have the right to take action before their country's situation worsens. But does this not describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? And look at his suffering. If the French president had tried to pass his controversial budget in response to a major debt, rather than avoid one, he would have ordered more hearings. If he had raised the state pension age during the crisis, if he had not stopped, the protests would not have been so serious. There is no vote on a restraining order. Few of us say that when we urge governments to think long term, fix the roof while the sun shines, etc.
Once you see the Carter Rule in one place, you start seeing it everywhere. It is now clear that Europe could have freed itself from Russian power long ago. But it took a war to force the issue. India had decades to dismantle the License Raj and other strictures of the government. But it took the severe economic depression of 1991 to set the mood. (Including the best 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 closely related to a form of strategic defeatism: the active desire for things to get worse, in order to improve. Well, to be clear, “burn everything” is a silly slogan. In most cases, depression is just a disaster, not a prelude to reform. Otherwise, Argentina would have put its economic house in order decades ago. But if the problem is not a sufficient condition for change, I suggest that it be necessary. This is especially true in high-income countries, where enough voters have enough to lose that small tweaks to the status quo are stimulating.
And so it is in Britain. If any leader today should be looking at the life and times of Carter, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The prime minister has useful ideas, as did Carter. As in the saying “malaise”, his bleakness about the state of things at least shows that he understands how things need to change. But as soon as he asks voters to bear a near loss or inconvenience for a big gain, he finds himself alone. Like Carter, he is stuck in one of those pockets of history when the nation's stomach for change grew, but not during his administration. And why? Brexit is a drag on economic growth, but not such a disaster as to force an immediate reform. The NHS is always floundering in the abyss and getting nowhere. As some areas threaten to worsen (schools), there is another improvement to compensate (the plan). Things are very bad. And that's not good enough. Those who think Starmer is too cautious may overestimate the role of a human agent. It is the community that decides when it is ready to make a difficult trade.
In politics, as in marriage, there is a world of difference between dissatisfaction and disintegration. A radical political program in the US in 1972 or 1976 would have been stillborn from the press. Soon after, it met perfectly with the public spirit. Carter's tragedy was one of timing, not talent. Britain now, like America in its day, is still a few years away from that moment in the lives of nations when voters look around and say, finally, “Enough is enough.”