“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” So said the British politician Enoch Powell, whose once-stellar career ended in spectacular failure.
Lately, careers have been ending in failure more frequently. Consider Powell’s native Britain, which this week installed its fourth Conservative Party prime minister in 12 years. David Cameron resigned after Britons rejected his advice and voted for Brexit in 2016, and Theresa May was ousted in 2019 after failing to implement Brexit. Boris Johnson got Brexit done but was ousted for ethics violations this summer. His successor, Liz Truss, could lose a general election that must be held by 2024.
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister for 11 years, Tony Blair for 10. The four most recent incumbents’ average tenure was three.
Failure is apparent across the Channel as well. French President Emmanuel Macron was reelected in May, but in June, voters installed a solid anti-Macron majority in the parliament.
Angela Merkel, hailed by the Economist as German chancellor from 2005 to 2021, has seen her policies repudiated by events. Reliance on Russian natural gas and (in cloudy and not especially windy northern Europe) wind and solar energy and the closure of nuclear plants have left Germans scarfing up firewood to get through the winter.
Merkel’s appeasement of Russia was followed by its invasion of Ukraine, and Merkel’s low military budgets have left Germany unable to provide much help to the Ukrainians. Not since Neville Chamberlain has a leader widely hailed as a statesman been revealed so quickly to be a failure.
Nor is it apparent that the policies of the world’s great dictators have been crowned with success. Vladimir Putin’s demoralized troops have failed to conquer Ukraine; his aggression has pushed Finland and Sweden into NATO, making the Baltic a NATO lake; his economy has taken a hit and may stagger more in years to come.
His pal Xi Jinping may get another 10-year term as China’s leader, but that only means he will have to reckon with the decline in the working-age population and stringent COVID lockdowns that have slowed or may altogether halt China’s economic growth. Xi’s China has crushed Hong Kong’s liberties, but it has also made enemies of all of China’s neighbors.
American leaders are not faring much better. After three successive American presidents have managed to get reelected, albeit with 49%, 51%, and 51% of popular votes, their two successors have not managed more than a few moments above 50% job approval.
Donald Trump could claim some positive trends occurred under his watch: lower-income wage gains, low unemployment, and border controls that produced a higher-skill legal immigration flow. But COVID lockdowns shut most of the economy down, and violent crime skyrocketed after the George Floyd riots.
Any positive trends under President Joe Biden have been overwhelmed by chaotic results plausibly flowing from his party’s policies — out-of-control inflation, out-of-control illegal immigration, and out-of-control violent crime. The economy hasn’t snapped back to pre-COVID conditions. School lockdowns have left many children far behind in learning and nonwhite children even further behind than they were before.
Unlike Enoch Powell, neither septuagenarian U.S. president has suffered definitive failure yet. Both are seeking to run again in 2024, despite evidence that large majorities want each out of the race.
Trump, who came within 42,000 votes of a second Electoral College majority in 2020, refuses to stop relitigating that contest, and any chance of another Trump term depends on a Democratic nominee being again found unacceptable.
Biden, who came within 42,000 votes of losing in 2020, has careened far left on policy. Even as he accuses Trump of ending democracy, his Justice Department is elevating Trump’s visibility by searching Mar-a-Lago. His party’s leaders spend millions promoting Trumpish candidates in Republican primaries.
Neither Biden’s nor Trump’s career seems likely to end in success.
Their policy failures and those of leaders abroad seem to have another cause: an overreliance on the prescriptions of supposed experts, from economists to epidemiologists, based on models formulated on how the world used to work, or supposedly worked, but which are out of line with how the world works now.
Latest studies indicate that lockdowns prompted by epidemiologists’ models, based on deadlier diseases, produced minimal reductions in deaths but imposed high ancillary health, economic, and educational costs. Similarly, economists recommended pumping large sums of money into the economy, though it has been damaged in ways far different from how it was in 20th-century recessions. Their prescriptions have failed to restore pre-COVID workforce levels and have produced unpredicted inflation.
Political failure is the democratic process’s way of punishing mistakes. The rash of political careers ending in failure points to a need to relearn how the world works, not just to sweep aside flailing septuagenarians.
