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I once met a nice old couple in West Texas who were still hurting from Jimmy Carter. His crime? Enforcement 55 mph speed limits on national roads four decades earlier.
But bashing America's 39th president, who died Sunday, was never just a conservative sport. He was a recurring punch line The Simpsons too. That was harsh for a decent and often far-sighted man whose government struggles — with inflation, with Iran — were largely beyond his control. On the other hand, if it weren't for this anger, that historic burst of public patience at the end of the 1970s, there wouldn't be a corresponding appetite for new ideas. No rage, no Reagan.
I am increasingly convinced of something we might call the Carter Rule: rich democracies need a crisis to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on drastic reforms until their nation is in dire straits. The chronic kind is not enough. Reaganism was offered before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and fresh thinker in office. But the electorate at that stage did not have enough for 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 malaise, a false start or two reforms, then an encouraging humiliation (the 1976 IMF loan) that finally convinces the electorate to give Thatcher a free hand. Things had to get worse to get better.
Understand this and you will understand much about contemporary Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck in flawed economic models because things aren't so bad there after all. The current state is unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as the initial cost of the change. And so the mere cut to pension benefits or exemptions from inheritance tax provokes public anger. Now compare that to Southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has reformed its path to economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the debacle that was the Eurozone crisis around 2010. Essentialist arguments about the “character” of the South, its work ethic and so on have been shown to be nonsense. Forced to change it happened.
Of course, leaders can and should try to break this rule. They are obliged to act before their nation's predicament becomes acute. But doesn't that describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? And look at his suffering. If the French president tried to pass his controversial budget in response to the sovereign debt crisis, rather than avoiding it, it would require more hearings. If he had raised the state pension age during the crisis so as not to avert it, the protests would not have been so intense. There is no voting in the preventive action. Few of us are serious when we call on governments to think long term, 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 abolish the License Raj and other government rigidities. But a focus of mind was required by acute economic difficulties in 1991. (Including the noble Manmohan Singh, finance minister and later prime minister, who died three days before Carter.)
The problem with this argument is that it is akin to a kind of strategic defeatism: an active desire to make things worse in order to get better. To be clear, “burn it all” is an unreasonable 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 of high-income countries, where enough voters have enough to lose that even small adjustments to the status quo are provocative.
And so to Britain. If any leader today should examine Carter's life and times, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister has useful ideas, as does Carter. As with the “nausea” speech, his despondency over the state of affairs at least shows that he understands how much has to change. But once he asks voters to bear some short-term loss or disruption for a greater gain, he finds himself alone. Like Carter, he is stuck in one of those pockets of history where the national appetite for change is growing but not in time for his administration. And why would it? Brexit is a drag on economic growth, but not such a disaster as to force an immediate review. The NHS is forever teetering on the precipice without quite sinking. As some areas threaten to deteriorate (schools), something else balances out (planning). Things are tolerably bad. And that's not bad enough. Those who think Starmer is overly cautious might 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 big difference between dissatisfaction and breaking point. A radical political agenda in the US in 1972 or 1976 would be stillborn from the press. Not long after, it matched the public mood perfectly. Carter's tragedy was timing, not talent. Britain now, like America in his day, is still some years away from the moment in the lives of nations when voters look around and say at last, “Enough.”
