Welcome Back, Carter

‘T he ’70s are back!” declares French fashion magazine l’Officiel. No kidding: Prices are up, crime is up, Iranian kidnapping plots targeting Americans are up. . . . Surely the groovy sounds of disco and a heady whiff of Hai Karate cannot be far behind.

My first political memory is feeling pity for President Jimmy Carter, who was obviously overmatched by the job and seemed to be universally loathed for his inability to do much of anything. That was the worst of the 1970s: gasoline rationing, high unemployment, inflation running so hot that the price of meat was remarked upon in both a Brady Bunch episode and a Warren Zevon song. (How’s that for pop-cultural omnipresence?) And in the middle of it all was purse-lipped, dead-eyed Jimmy Carter, who could not have been a flatter or duller representation of the 1970s if he had been printed on linoleum.

That was the last time I felt pity for a politician.

Joe Biden will get none, because he should know better. The feckless Forrest Gump of American politics was there for the 1970s the first time around: Your grey-bearded correspondent had just been born, fresh-faced young Donald Trump was facing his first federal housing-discrimination case (represented in the proceedings by Roy Cohn, of course), Tony Orlando owned the radio airwaves — and Joe Biden, that carbuncular encrustation, that lifer, that plodding careerist, that dull wooden fixture of the Capitol scene, was already getting settled into the Senate, where he would spend some decades accomplishing precisely squat, his only achievement having grown old enough and remained white enough that he could be used as demographic ballast by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

(Obama — you know, the Netflix guy.)

The big domestic concerns of the 1970s were inflation and crime. Biden should probably worry about the same concerns in the same order today: The first could effectively end his presidency in a matter of months, while the second threatens to undermine the position of his party going forward — possibly for years.

Vice President Kamala Harris, whose political wit is indicated by the fact that she was the first to be knocked out of a primary that ultimately was won by the clod she works for, has helpfully underscored the inflation issue, noting in a recent speech that many American families are having a hard time with the rising prices of food, gasoline, housing, electricity, and other necessities. Republicans agreed (if this were the Washington Post, I’d have written “Republicans pounced”), and decried the “hidden tax” of inflation, which they blame on excessive spending and the specter of excessive spending to come.

The basic economic theory goes like this: We have had a whole lot of stimulus, both monetary and fiscal, mostly in response to the coronavirus epidemic, but Democrats want to keep up those high levels of spending, establishing a new normal in which federal outlays account for about 25 percent of GDP — forever. This has happened against an economic background in which epidemic-related disruptions have left many goods and raw materials in short supply. When you send a bigger stream of money to chase a supply of goods that is not expanding in a similar way (and that in some cases has contracted), then you can expect higher prices.

There are many responsible economists, including Democrats, who are worried that serious, problematic inflation is on the way. Even if we assume that some substantial share of recent price increases has been driven by short-term supply interruptions that will be in most cases sorted out in a few months, that still leaves room for real inflation worries. You don’t have to be a doctrinaire Keynesian to believe that it is reasonable to have government borrow and spend a bit more during economic downturns — or to respond to a genuine crisis that has severe economic effects even if it is not economic in origin — provided that corrective countermeasures are taken when the economy is booming again. Contemporary Democrats are committed to exactly one half of that bargain, ratcheting spending up during emergencies and downturns and then doing their best to keep it there if and when growth returns to normal.

Voters like it when Washington spends money on them, but they won’t like the effects of that spending if gasoline hits $7 a gallon or mortgage rates go up to 12 percent — or if we have to cut back Social Security because the cost of financing the national debt has doubled. Because we sophisticated moderns have never really stopped believing in god-man government, we tend to exaggerate the effect presidents have on the economy — but with a Democrat-controlled Congress and a White House cheerleading for a spending spree that is Augustan in its ambition, President Biden can expect to be on the hook for every nickel increase in the price of a can of beans.

Sure, Republicans will be denounced as hypocrites — and not without cause — for deciding that they care about spending and deficits again only because Democrats are in power. But if we can’t call it a win when a politician does the right thing for a self-interested reason, then there aren’t going to be very many wins in politics at all. Republicans don’t have to convince Americans to embrace the whole of conservative economic thinking — they only have to convince Americans that we do not need to keep up emergency spending measures now that the emergency has passed, with unemployment relatively low and growth relatively strong.

What about crime?

One rare piece of good luck for Republicans: Because they are utterly uncompetitive in elections in almost every major city in the country (the largest cities with Republican governments are Jacksonville, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City), they get very little blame for the day-to-day maladministration of urban America. Of course, local Democrats in places such as Philadelphia and Detroit will always try to find a Republican — some Republican, somewhere — to blame for their useless schools and chaotic streets, but nobody really takes that seriously. (There are some smart people with professional obligations to pretend to take it seriously.) For better and for worse, if you want to know what Democratic governance in the United States looks like as it careers downwardly toward its logical conclusion, the answer is, roughly, Los Angeles, where housing prices are up by more than 20 percent year-over-year and murders are up almost 40 percent. It’s a remarkable testament to the allure of southern California that you can knock off that many people without creating enough vacancies to drive down housing prices.

Self-conscious conservatives are used to being called racists by Democrats. It comes with the territory. But there must be many millions of Americans, including many sensible progressives, who look at the situations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Dallas, Detroit, etc., and say to themselves, “No, thanks. I’m all for gay marriage and for raising taxes on Jeff Bezos, but I don’t want to pay $400 a square foot for housing in a neighborhood that smells like piss, weed, and the smoke from a Dollar General that has just been burned down in the pursuit of social justice.” Right now, the best response that the Democrats have come up with is to lecture these people that they are racists, too. And though that’ll work on some of them, it won’t work on all of them. Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative is a “liberal who has been mugged by reality,” but it may be enough just to get mugged, period. Even so, Republicans can’t just camp out in the Texas suburbs and sneer about “New York values” — they have to go where the people are.

Republicans could and should be making a case for themselves on crime, one that combines a call for more assertive enforcement where appropriate and, at the same time, reform and rehabilitation where appropriate. There’s nothing wrong with saying that we don’t want to lock people up for smoking marijuana, but we do want to lock them up for murder, armed robbery, rioting, etc. (Republicans are still against rioting, right? Hello?) And Republicans should be making that case in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Dallas, Detroit, etc. In fact, if the GOP had any sense of drama, the party would hold the Republican National Convention in Chicago or Baltimore or some other Democratic dystopia every four years and offer guided bus tours of progressive failure. Let’s drop George Stephanopoulos off at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny in Philadelphia and see what happens — it’ll be a hoot.

President Biden probably has fond memories of the 1970s. I’ll bet it was a fun time to be a young senator. But the rest of us cannot afford to live in the past. One Carter administration was enough.