Newspaper Reader comments.
Jan 02, 2025
Headline: Things have to get worse to get better
Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble
https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19
Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is a bit puzzled by his story telling methodology. The cast of characters keeps evolving, let me attempt to demonstarte the ‘how’ of it, as a kind of wayward political meander.
I once met a sweet old couple in west Texas who still felt sore at Jimmy Carter.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Things had to get worse to get better.
…
Editor: Here Ganesh’s political story telling attempts to takes flight, in a report on the Neo-Liberal Capture of The West, that began with Mrs. Thatcher Hayekian Revolution, carefully laundered by Ganesh’s etolted chatter, about worse/better as a kind of convient story telling device.
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.
Editor: The uttery corrupt Macron then becomes the subject of Ganesh’s apologetic: he describes Macron’s ‘ordeal’, this The Financial Times! , but leaves his Anti-constitutional political methodology untouched, garnished via well worn platiudes.
Editor: The Will To Believe fully graps our would be Shahrazad.
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.
…
(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.
…
Otherwise, Argentina would have put its economic house in order decades ago.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Not long after, it lined up exquisitely with the public mood. The tragedy of Carter was one of timing, not talent.
…
Newspaper Reader offer a link to Michael K Smith’s
December 30, 2024
Jimmy Carter: the False Savior
Michael K. Smith
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/30/jimmy-carter-the-false-savoir
…
Having run as a Washington “outsider,” he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request “inactive” status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews [Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed’s supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was “egocentric” to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail “the end of the human race.” Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.
…
Headline: Things have to get worse to get better
Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble
https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19
Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is a bit puzzled by his story telling methodology. The cast of characters keeps evolving, let me attempt to demonstarte the ‘how’ of it, as a kind of wayward political meander.
I once met a sweet old couple in west Texas who still felt sore at Jimmy Carter.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Things had to get worse to get better.
…
Editor: Here Ganesh’s political story telling attempts to takes flight, in a report on the Neo-Liberal Capture of The West, that began with Mrs. Thatcher Hayekian Revolution, carefully laundered by Ganesh’s etolted chatter, about worse/better as a kind of convient story telling device.
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.
Editor: The uttery corrupt Macron then becomes the subject of Ganesh’s apologetic: he describes Macron’s ‘ordeal’, this The Financial Times! , but leaves his Anti-constitutional political methodology untouched, garnished via well worn platiudes.
Editor: The Will To Believe fully graps our would be Shahrazad.
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.
…
(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.
…
Otherwise, Argentina would have put its economic house in order decades ago.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Not long after, it lined up exquisitely with the public mood. The tragedy of Carter was one of timing, not talent.
…
Newspaper Reader offer a link to Michael K Smith’s
December 30, 2024
Jimmy Carter: the False Savior
Michael K. Smith
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/30/jimmy-carter-the-false-savoir
…
Having run as a Washington “outsider,” he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request “inactive” status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews [Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed’s supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was “egocentric” to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail “the end of the human race.” Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.
…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/30/jimmy-carter-the-false-savoir
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