Things have to get worse to get better

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I once met a sweet old couple in west Texas who still felt sore at Jimmy Carter. His crime? Enforcing the 55mph speed limit on the nation’s roads some four decades earlier.

Bashing the 39th US president, who died on Sunday, was never just a conservative sport, though. He was a recurring punchline in The Simpsons too. This was harsh on a decent and often far-sighted man whose governing struggles — with inflation, with Iran — were largely outside his control. On the other hand, without that anger, that historic snapping of public patience at the end of the 1970s, there wouldn’t have been the corresponding appetite for new ideas. No rage, no Reagan.

I am increasingly convinced of something that we might call the Carter 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 acute trouble. The chronic kind isn’t enough. Reaganism was on offer before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and fresh thinker in office. But the electorate wasn’t fed up enough at that stage to entertain a total rupture with the postwar Keynesian consensus. There had to be more pain. The parallel with Britain in the same period is eerie: an air of malaise, a false start or two at reform, then a galvanising humiliation (the IMF loan of 1976) that at last persuades voters to give carte blanche to Thatcher. Things had to get worse to get better.

Understand this, and you understand much about contemporary Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck with flawed economic models because, in the end, things aren’t so bad there. The status quo is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the upfront costs of change. And so the merest cut to pensioner benefits or inheritance tax exemptions incurs public wrath. Now contrast this with southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has reformed its way into economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the brush with doom that was the Eurozone crisis circa 2010. Essentialist arguments about the “character” of the south, about its work ethic and so on, turned out to be nonsense. Forced to change, it did.

Of course, leaders can and should try to buck the rule. They are honour-bound to act before their nation’s predicament becomes acute. But doesn’t this describe Emmanuel Macron in recent years? And look at his ordeal. If the president of France had tried to pass his controversial budget in response to a sovereign debt crunch, rather than to avoid one, it would have commanded more of a hearing. Had he raised the state pension age amid a crisis, not to stave one off, the protests would not have been so intense. There are no votes in preventive action. Few of us mean it when we urge governments to think long-term, to fix roofs while the sun is shining, and so on.

Once you see the Carter Rule in one place, you start to see it everywhere. It is now plain that Europe could have weaned itself off Russian energy long ago. But it took a war to force the issue. India had decades to scrap the Licence Raj and other governmental rigidities. But it took the acute economic distress of 1991 to concentrate 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 next of kin to a sort of strategic defeatism: an active desire for things to get worse, that they might improve. Well, to be clear, “burn it all down” is an unconscionable 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 isn’t quite a sufficient condition for change, I suggest it has become a necessary one. This is even truer of high-income countries, where enough voters have enough to lose that even small tweaks to the status quo are provocative.

And so to Britain. If any leader today should pore over Carter’s life and times, it is Sir Keir Starmer. The prime minister has useful ideas, as Carter did. As with the “malaise” speech, his bleakness about the state of things at least shows that he understands how much needs to change. But as soon as he asks voters to bear some near-term loss or disruption for larger gain, he finds himself alone. Like Carter, he is stuck in one of those pockets of history when the national stomach 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 catastrophe as to force immediate revision. The NHS forever teeters on the abyss without quite falling in. As some areas threaten to get worse (schools), something else improves to compensate (planning). Things are tolerably bad. And that isn’t bad enough. Those who think Starmer is too cautious might overrate the role of individual agency. It is the public that decides when it is ready to make difficult trade-offs.

In politics, as in marriage, there is a world of difference between dissatisfaction and breaking point. A radical policy programme in the US of 1972 or 1976 would have fallen stillborn from the press. Not long after, it lined up exquisitely with the public mood. The tragedy of Carter was one of timing, not talent. Britain now, like America in his time, is still a few years away from that moment in the life of nations when voters look around and say, at last, “Enough.”

janan.ganesh@ft.com

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