A nation in turmoil. An economy in flux. A professional class paddling in profligacy, and a public increasingly disgusted by the out-of-touch elite in the centre. The answer? A brilliant outsider, a financial wizard and a foreigner, who can whip the national finances into shape along with the complacent bureaucrats, too. I’m talking, of course, about ancien régime France, on the eve of the revolution. Or maybe I’m describing America in 2024. To a remarkable degree, Donald Trump’s promise to shake up the stodgy Washington consensus has striking parallels to Louis XVI and Versailles back in the pox-ridden 1780s.
For just as Trump seems to have hit upon Elon Musk to solve America’s woes — self-made, South African, and co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — so too did the French monarch hit upon his own outsider: Jacques Necker. At first glance, clearly, the portly Genevan economist, with his frockcoats and earnest Enlightenment morality, seems about as different from Musk as you can imagine. But in both his personal story, and too his final inability to tackle France’s deep, systemic problems, Necker may yet offer lessons for his New World successor.
Whatever way you look at it, the US has a laundry list of challenges. Quite aside from the issues beyond its borders — from Nato to China to the bloodbath in the Middle East — that’s clear enough domestically. From massive political polarisation to a military whose recruitment has collapsed and whose budget is shrinking or stagnant when adjusted for inflation. Then there’s that vast and growing number of Americans who simply feel like the country is going in the wrong direction. On top of that, America is flat-out broke, with the government forced to borrow increasing amounts of money just to keep the lights on. Two years ago, around 10% of total federal revenues were being spent on interest payments. Today, that sum hovers around 23% — representing nearly a quarter of the federal government’s total revenue, a figure that’s rising all the time.
To get a sense of just how dangerous that last issue is, consider what happens to someone suffering from terminal cancer. Over time, healthy and functional cells get replaced with nonfunctional, malignant alternatives, and eventually the body simply gives up and stops functioning. But no human being has ever had a body consisting entirely of cancerous cells: death happens far before the disease gets to that point. In fiscal terms, money going to interest payments can be understood in these terms: every dollar spent on paying creditors is a dollar that can’t be used on the military, or roads or bridges or schools. Throughout history, many governments have entered the same sort of debt spiral the US is currently in the middle of; none have ever gotten anywhere close to spending 100% of their total revenue on interest payments.
It’s against this backdrop that we should understand Trump’s appointment of Musk: a phenomenon we might call “the cult of the rockstar technocrat”. In him, after all, an increasing number of Americans seem to be placing their hopes of economic salvation, this one Great Man whose professional and entrepreneurial background supposedly gives him a unique ability to wade into a gridlocked bureaucracy and start cleaning up. From solving the debt crisis, to firing 70% of government workers, the dreams imputed onto Elon Musk are only growing. The system, in short, may be broken. But if the talent of driven, private sector champions could only be harnessed, perhaps the gordian knot of American dysfunction can finally, finally be hacked away.
In truth, though, the fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern. Trump, as part of the executive branch, has very little power to tell the legislature what it can or even should do. Whatever (minimal) authority he may enjoy leading a department named after a cryptocurrency and an online meme, Musk is at most empowered to make non-binding suggestions. Moreover, if he wants his “department” to actually receive any funding, it is Congress, not Trump, that secures it. The fact that the US state is split into three branches, each with their own remit, is something American children learn very early on. Neither Musk, nor his new boss, have the power to upend this division of power, nor fix problems outside the executive branch of government.
But what’s most interesting with American narratives of the sainted, singularly reformer is that they’re far from new. When France descended into gridlock and dysfunction, the same saintly aura and the same illusory hopes were then assigned to Jacques Necker. That’s clear enough even if you examine that earlier rockstar’s upbringing to his Tesla-founding successor. Born into an upper-middle-class family in Geneva (read: Pretoria), Necker moved to Paris (read: Palo Alto) early in his career and started working as a clerk at a local bank. Before long, he amassed a fortune through smart trading and commodity speculation, and was quickly made a partner. His career only flourished past that point, and he quickly made the jump from private enterprise to government service, becoming director general of the Royal Treasury in 1777. That essentially made him the finance minister of one of Europe’s great powers.
It’s not really necessary to go into the details of Necker’s sojourn in government, but suffice it to say that his attempts at reform earned him a lot of enemies: enemies who increasingly conspired to have him sacked. Eventually, they succeeded, and Necker left his post in 1781. After that, France lurched from crisis to crisis, and eventually it became clear that it simply couldn’t go on. It was broke and could borrow no more money; the crisis was at hand, and someone had to solve it.
Enter — once again — Jacques Necker. Because he’d built up such a reputation of being a genius and a financial wizard, once the terminal decline of the French monarchy truly began, around 1787, people began clamouring for his return. Only Necker could save France, or so many people thought. This time, when he came back into government in 1788, he not only became the equivalent to the minister of finance, but also chief minister to the king himself.
In the end, though, Necker didn’t save France. In fact, he barely lasted a year in office the second time around. This wasn’t really Necker’s fault: it was more that one man, no matter how clever, could never hope to solve such an intractable set of problems. France in its time was also a major power, and like America today it had a sprawling political system, rife with infighting and backbiting, leavened by a terminal case of administrative gridlock. No matter which smart reforms Necker came up with, in the end it didn’t matter: the French political system had simply lost all ability to reform itself.
Elon Musk, like Necker, enters the stage at a point where the US is rapidly going broke, where the political system has seized up, and where everyone can see the storm clouds gathering. Just like Necker, meanwhile, there are dreams of putting him in the executive to solve this or that issue. The point, though, is that the heart of American dysfunction is not in the executive, but in the Congress. In any case, and unlike with Necker, there’s no equivalent in the US to a job like “chief minister” — and it’s unclear whether he’d even want such a job anyway (Necker really, really wanted the job).
Our contemporary obsession with rockstar reformers is understandable, not least given where America finds itself today. But it’s not a particularly hopeful sign for the future. In 1788, Necker entered France as a hero. By 1789, he left as a footnote. Does that mean that individual “rockstars” are an impossibility in politics? Certainly not. Just a year after Necker returned to Geneva, a man named Lazare Carnot became minister of war. Carnot is often given credit for being the man responsible for all the military reforms that made Napoleon’s domination of Europe possible. Between introducing mass conscription and reforming tactics, he created a new type of army. Carnot is often called “the architect of victory” for a reason: he almost single-handedly took a broken French military and turned it into the greatest land army the continent had seen since the Mongols.
But Carnot was not Musk. When he really got started on reforming the French state, the country had already collapsed into bankruptcy and extrajudicial slaughter. The reforms he led helped kick off an extremely bloody and brutal civil war inside France’s borders, and the way his government typically dealt with dissent was by chopping the heads off dissenters. In revolutionary France, there was not even the possibility of political gridlock, or parliaments blocking necessary reforms. In revolutionary France, whoever tried to stand in the way of progress was simply killed. To put it slightly differently, it’s precisely because Necker couldn’t save pre-revolutionary France that Carnot could actually carry out the work of long-reaching reform.
That, if nothing else, feels like a relevant lesson for today. Put your hopes in Elon Musk and other rockstar reformers at your peril. If you do, a future where you just end up disappointed is probably the best you can hope for. It’s the future where one or two men actually do gather all the political power necessary to genuinely sweep away the rotting old regime that you really should look out for.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/