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There’s one thing about governments that is almost never mentioned: their successes. Take the US, where people were (rightly) furious that the government allowed the deadly fentanyl epidemic and the Covid-era spike in murders. You hear much less about the fading of both phenomena. Fentanyl deaths fell 27 per cent in 2024, while homicides are on track this year to drop to their lowest level since the 1960s.
The British story is similar. Record NHS waiting lists and net immigration were national obsessions, whereas the recent slide in both tallies has been largely ignored. True, governments have only limited control over the rise or fall in these numbers. Still, they got blamed for the one and received no credit for the other.
We witnessed the same phenomenon worldwide during the pandemic. A new disease came along that certainly no western government could do anything about. Leaders probably erred on the side of caution in their lockdowns, but that was the right decision given how little anyone knew about Covid-19. Within a year, governments had funded, approved and started injecting newly invented vaccines. Yet hardly anybody said, “Thank you, government.”
Almost all modern political discourse is about unsolved problems and other supposed governmental failures. If we ignore the things governments do right, we’re omitting half the ledger. We also make it harder to understand why some policies work.
The narrative of government failure is trumpeted by anti-system politicians and amplified by their supposed adversary, the media. The journalistic maxim says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The corollary is that if somebody stops the bleeding, the story stops being a story. And if politicians make such an efficient early intervention that a disaster never happens, it never becomes a story in the first place. Take the US bailout of banks in 2008/09, which arguably prevented the financial crisis from spiralling. During this period, Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner told incoming president Barack Obama, “Your accomplishment is going to be preventing a second Great Depression.” Obama replied, correctly: “I’m not going to be defined by what I prevented.”
The moment a societal problem is ameliorated, it is practically forgotten. In France, where I live, the two great crises a decade ago were terrorism and unemployment. After both dissipated, the political debate shifted to inflation, and, now that that’s passing, on to new problems. When something goes right, as with American homicides post-2021, anti-system politicians ignore it and seize instead on freakishly unrepresentative horrors. In a country of 340 million people, Donald Trump is always telling stories about individuals allegedly murdered by undocumented immigrants. Trump also denies the existence of “wicked problems” — including homicide — that have so many interdependent causes that they can never be solved, only mitigated. Wicked problems are the essence of politics.
Perversely, amid all this bashing of governments, their biggest failure goes almost undiscussed: their surrender to climate change, which has already warmed the planet by about 1.5C since preindustrial times. But then this is one failure that anti-system politicians don’t trumpet.
Westerners are blind to governments’ successes largely because we have come to take them for granted after 80 years of peace and (mostly) economic growth. The generation that lived through world wars, the Great Depression and the routine deaths of children from disease was more recognisant of disasters averted. That helps explain why, in the early 1960s, more than 70 per cent of Americans trusted government “to do what is right just about always/most of the time”, compared with about 20 per cent in recent years, according to Pew Research.
Bill Clinton liked to say, “If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.” He meant, wrote Joe Klein in a book about Clinton’s presidency, that “the historic prosperity and the global peace that attended his time in office . . . were, at least in part, attributable to thousands of decisions . . . that Clinton and his advisers had made.”
We’re living in an era of rising longevity and incomes, and increasing equality for women. There’s been a breathtaking decline in global poverty, while the climate is, for now, still relatively benign. In short, a lot of tortoises are sitting unnoticed on fence posts. Meanwhile, almost all political careers are perceived as ending in failure and leaders typically have to die before they get any praise — look at Jimmy Carter. Future historians may wonder why we only ever complained.
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