MICHAEL MORRIS: SA’s future is not preordained - Business Day
Michael Morris
One of the most interesting things I read in the last days of 2024 was an appraisal of Jimmy Carter, published only hours after the former US president’s death on December 29, in the journal Reason.
I am indebted to colleague Chris Hattingh, executive director of the Centre for Risk Analysis, for sharing Gene Healy’s article “RIP Jimmy Carter, the ‘passionless’ president — the libertarian case for the late Jimmy Carter”, and being reminded of those difficult, often cynical late-Cold War years of the more or less unlovely 1970s, and their importance in shaping the world in which my generation came, restless and wary, to adulthood.
As is often true of insightful examinations of human efforts elsewhere in the world, this take on Carter seemed to have something important to say to us in SA.
Healy, a vice-president at the Cato Institute in Washington and author of The Cult of the Presidency, acknowledges that “Jimmy Carter evokes images we’d rather blot out: gas lines, yellow ribbons around trees, burning helicopters in the desert, that goddamned cardigan sweater”.
He draws on historian Bruce J Schulman’s damning assessment that Carter “left office as a potent symbol for the futility of government and naiveté of reformist zeal, as much a relic of the despised, disparaged ’70s as yellow smiley faces, disco records and leisure suits”.
But, it seems, Carter exceeded this paltry exhibit. Healy invokes, for example, The Wall Street Journal writer Holman Jenkins’ 2014 conclusion that “under this uninspiring president, the country accomplished a revolution that seems almost impossible... deregulating large swathes of its transportation and energy industries while putting decades-old federal agencies to extinction”.
What’s more, as Healy writes, “unlike most revolutions, Carter’s actually benefited the masses, in the form of radically cheaper shipping costs and affordable air travel for the general public. In 1965, fewer than 20% of Americans had ever flown in a plane; by the turn of the century, fewer than 20% hadn’t and 40% or more travelled by plane at least once a year. It’s impossible to imagine the rollicking economy of the ’80s and ’90s without his achievements”.
There is a lesson for us here. Just last month, colleague Terence Corrigan cited the late John Kane-Berman’s bald reminder that SA’s future “is not preordained”, and that the country can “continue on its present path... (or) change course”. But who chooses? Policymakers make policy, but not beyond our reach.
Strikingly, as Healy reminds us, Carter used his succinct inaugural address to sound “a note of programmatic humility” in reminding Americans that, “even our great nation has its recognised limits ... We can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything ... We must simply do our best”.
Here, surely, is one of the most challenging truths of constitutional governance: no democratic state has the power — or even ought to — to realise the idealised vision that it is assumed presidents or governments must be capable of delivering. Testing the limits, looking for the answers, doing our best ... these are as much our responsibility as any policymaker’s, perhaps more so, not least electorally.
SA’s 2025 is likely to be a year of living dangerously, but the biggest threat will be mundane: the risk of squandering the best promise we have had in a long time of making good on that 1994 promise of delivering a better life for all.
As Carter reminds us, the choices are ours, too — and policymakers need to know as much.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations