© Carl Godfrey
Published
331
He has been a discreet and level-headed sovereign for almost four years now. As a result, younger readers might not know that Charles III once championed all kinds of anti-modern causes. Quack medicine, for example. The Gwyneth Paltrow of the Windsors had a thing for homeopathy. As for his views on the built environment, this traditionalist once said that postwar architects had done more to disfigure British cities than Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe.
The connecting theme here is a suspicion of economic growth: a hunch that pre-industrial life, in which GDP per person almost never changed, was happier. The King patronises, in at least one sense of that word, a Romanian village that is all but suspended in time.
With 95 per cent confidence, we can dismiss this worldview as the inanity of a born millionaire. The other 5 per cent? The scintilla of doubt? Well, the country he is visiting this week goes some way to vindicating him.
The US has been an economic success since the financial crash of 2008-9. The UK, like much of western Europe, has scarcely recovered. Yet both countries have become political circuses. The economic determinists who make up most of the west’s governing — and commenting — class seem incurious about this conundrum.
Charles is having to meet Donald Trump because America decided to re-elect a twice-impeached president. For its part, Britain is on course to make Nigel Farage prime minister even though most voters regard his life’s work, Brexit, as a national mistake. These are two countries with comparable levels of anti-establishment anger, despite wildly divergent economic experiences over the past couple of decades. If anything, the richer and faster-growing country’s politics is the more gaga. You are left to surmise that economics is, if not quite irrelevant, then hopelessly overrated as a shaper of national mood.
To put it a different way, growth has perverse consequences. One reason that Americans keep electing Trump is that it seems not to affect their livelihoods. Job creation remains strong. US equities remain a high-performing staple of their pension portfolios. Moral hazard is not just something the state brings into being (as when it recapitalises a feckless bank or helps out with household gas bills). The market, too, can produce so much output, so consistently, as to insulate people from their electoral choices. For a decade, voting Trump has been a costless rebellion, the right’s version of backing soft-on-crime liberals from the sanctum of a concierged penthouse.
This week, as ever, Britain is lost in witless — and unreciprocated — debate about the special-ness of the relationship. Here is a clue. If it hinges so much on who is in the US administration, on whether their mother was Scottish, it is not special. It wasn’t special when the likes of Dean Acheson foreclosed on the British empire after 1945, or when John Foster Dulles seethed at London for abstaining from the Indochina war, or when George HW Bush treated a unified Germany as America’s European interlocutor. (Why are the tiffs so often with Wasp or Wasp-adjacent Americans? You would expect the opposite. I leave this matter with the Tories and Farage-ists, who think so deeply about the “cousins”.)
In truth, the UK-US pairing is only interesting nowadays because the countries represent contrasting models of political dysfunction. The British kind, born of low growth, is straightforward. There is not enough to go around, so voters turn against elites and outsiders. It is the American kind, the disease of success, that is counterintuitive. At the risk of getting someone somewhere started on a PhD, there must be such a thing as the optimal rate of growth: high enough to make voters feel prosperous but not so robust as to induce complacency when choosing a government.
Progressives will cite the unevenness of US growth. Inequality there began to widen in the late 20th century. As an account of Trumpism, this theory fails on two counts. First, voting for a tax-cutting, government-gutting Republican is an odd way of venting against social stratification. Also, populism has broken through in more equal and less equal societies, just as it has surged in republics and monarchies, in states as centralised as Britain and as federal as America, in countries that took part in the Iraq war and countries that did not. If there is a common variable, it is that immigration has been high in most places. There is no purely economic explanation that works.
It is not even clear that America is this century’s outstanding example of a growing-but-angry nation. Poland is unrecognisably richer than it was at the turn of the millennium: a one-country advertisement for capitalism, and for the EU. At the same time, it has sustained a populist movement successful enough to produce the previous prime minister and the current president.
Those of us who espouse material development have to grant that, beyond a certain point, it really does do strange things to societies. At the very least, it creates the breathing room in which once-vigilant people can take risks with their vote. It is handsome of King Charles to swallow his doubts about modernity, as he didn’t when he was a middle-aged dauphin. But it is also unfortunate timing, as the world seems to bear him out far more now than it ever did in his talkative pomp.