JONNY STEINBERG: Looking back, we’ll be grateful for our tolerant political culture

In his newly published economic history of the 20th century, Slouching Towards Utopia, Bradford DeLong tries to explain a puzzle about the US, and the global North more generally, in the 1970s.

In the 30 years following the end of World War 2 the US adopted something resembling a social democracy. The welfare state expanded dramatically. Much of the working class was organised and trade unions were strong. It was also the most prosperous period in the history of the US, and indeed of the entire advanced capitalist world. By 1973 the Group of Seven countries were three times better off than they had been in 1938.

Why, then, DeLong asks, did the US dismantle social democracy so rudely and so soon, under Ronald Reagan? The oil shocks and inflation of the 1970s were certainly a time of crisis, but prosperity did not reverse or even stall; it just slowed. Why jettison the most successful economic arrangement in history at the first sign of trouble? DeLong’s answer is that the “Thirty Glorious Years” had set the bar very high.

“People in the global North had come to expect to see incomes … doubling every generation, and they expected economic uncertainty to be very low.” The result is that they gave up an astonishingly successful economic order the moment it wobbled.

Reading DeLong’s book made me think of the economic history of SA’s democracy. For the first 17 years per capita income grew. True, inequality increased sharply, but the welfare state redistributed resources effectively. By 2011 the bottom two deciles of SA households received 40% more income than they had at the beginning of the democratic era. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century almost everyone was better off than they had been in 1994.

That story ended in 2011. Per capita income stopped growing for the first time in the democratic era and then began shrinking. It has kept shrinking ever since. Much of SA is poorer than it was 11 years ago.

Had you told me in 2010 what was going to happen I would have bet that the ANC, the economic order, and indeed the democratic order itself, would hit trouble. The idea of freedom in SA is wedded to material improvement. Every poll conducted in the last 28 years confirms this.

And so, 11 years later, why have South Africans jettisoned neither the ANC nor the economic order, nor indeed democracy? Part of the answer is perhaps that the ANC managed, at least for a while, to shelter its core constituencies from stagnation, partly through the civil service wage bill, partly through a dense web of government contracts, partly through welfare.

But in the long run that is fiscally unsustainable, in fact, it is just now finally coming apart. And so perhaps the last decade has been a long parenthesis. Perhaps only now will the catastrophic political consequences of stagnation play out.

That may be so. But I think there is a more plausible story to tell. SA’s tolerance for disappointment may actually be far more elastic than anyone imagined. That is not because people are docile or resigned, but because we happen to live in a world where radical alternatives are hard to imagine. We also live in a political system that struggles to fashion a credible opposition.

This is both a bad and a good thing. Bad because instead of challenging the system the country simply fragments. Everyone takes what they can from the present, unconvinced that there is a shared future. It’s a soul-destroying spectacle.

But an endlessly tolerant political culture is also a blessing. It gives a country something DeLong’s social democracy did not have: time. Two decades from now SA may just have efficient energy generation, railroads and ports, largely in private hands. And it is set to benefit handsomely from a resource boom connected to the rise of green energy.

If this comes to pass the country will be grateful that its people put up with so much disappointment for so long, instead of destroying the foundations of the good times before they had begun.

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.