In 1979 the price of gas at the American pump doubled to $39.50 a barrel – $172 in today’s money. The future of industrial civilisation seemed in doubt. But to Jimmy Carter, these oil woes were a distraction from the real issue: the moral failure of the American people. ‘Much deeper’ than the energy crisis, said the President, was a ‘crisis of confidence’ in politics and society, born out of a ‘worship of self-indulgence and consumption’.
It was an example of a very old trick. The default response of a governing class to a crisis is to frame it as a general moral one – one that, conveniently, implicates everyone and no one in particular. A ‘crisis of confidence’, as opposed to an oil crisis, was wide and nonspecific enough to have no real solution: no solution, at least, that would require Carter to leave office.
Our own era has no shortage of problems, and no shortage of crises of confidence to explain them away.
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