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{"text":[[{"start":4.9,"text":"A year into his job, the German chancellor is almost terminally unpopular. “Friedrich Merz can’t go on like this,” judges The Economist. But then neither can Sir Keir Starmer. No UK leader has collapsed from landslide-winner to national joke with such speed. He can reassure himself that his peer in the Élysée Palace inspires an even greater hatred. (Macron enculé, a phrase that I can’t find in my Collins French Conversation Second Edition, adorns many an exterior wall in Paris, that 16th-century Florence of graffiti.) As for Donald Trump, he was unpopular even before the Iran war."}],[{"start":43.8,"text":"What are the chances that all these heads of government are useless? Or “out of touch”? This could be an unusually bad cohort, but that was said of their immediate predecessors too, which is quite the coincidence. Think of the Scholzes, the Sunaks, the Bidens. We all know that Starmer’s successor will be a hate figure within months. If the next US president has an average approval rating of under 50 per cent, that will be the fifth one in a row. What bad luck voters are having."}],[{"start":74,"text":"I’ll be called a metropolitan snob — an absurd accusation, as I was telling the sommelier at Oma the other night — but isn’t it likelier that public expectations are the issue here? In rich and established democracies, what people want from life goes up until no conceivable government can provide it. Notice that one of the few major western countries to have a popular leader right now is Spain. It is a place with recent memories of dictatorship. India was very poor very recently. Sure enough, on some measures, Narendra Modi is the most popular leader in the free world."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
So much Anglo-French gloom is an incomprehension that large-ish countries, once dominant on Earth, are impotent in the face of events
"}],[{"start":111.95,"text":"Low expectations, born of a low starting point, is most of the trick to happiness. The trouble is that, if I am right, almost nothing can be done. Britain cannot choose to have a Franco in its recent past to make it grateful for a well-meaning plodder like Starmer. And no state is going to induce a crisis every decade or two just to temper public expectations. There is a lot of Stoic or Buddhist-tinged advice out there about acceptance and detachment from desire. But I have known no one downgrade their expectations as an adult without bitterness, except through one method: a premature brush with death, after which each tree is greener, each neighbour easier to bear, each government suddenly deserving of the benefit of the doubt. "}],[{"start":155.7,"text":"The happiest countries are geographically dispersed, such as Finland, Costa Rica, Israel and New Zealand. Some have lots of immigrants. Some are more homogeneous. The one through-line, besides high or high-ish income levels, is that almost all are small. No doubt, 8mn people are easier to govern well than 80mn. But perhaps something else is at work: small countries don’t expect to be able to shape reality. Change — demographic, technological, cultural — is less traumatic for those who are used to being takers not makers of world trends. So much Anglo-French gloom is disbelief that large-ish countries, once dominant on Earth, are impotent in the face of events, whether the event is a refugee boat or a local high street gone to seed."}],[{"start":204.2,"text":"It is probable — I can’t know — that I had a less advantageous upbringing than the average of my professional peers. This once felt somewhat isolating, and now feels like a godsend. My “patrimony” is a set of modest expectations that were surpassed at around age 23. The ultimate result is a lenient attitude to elites — who, after all, have presided over a bonanza of an adult life for me — and pro-status quo politics. Is this unattractive complacency? Solipsism? Perhaps, but I can’t help it, any more than someone whose life took a different gradient can help being susceptible to a radical’s message."}],[{"start":243.85,"text":"To be upwardly mobile in a country, a continent and perhaps even a civilisation going the other way rather alerts a man to the importance of starting-points in shaping mood. In the end, if electorates bring the system down to avenge dashed expectations, we can console ourselves that it was all decided long ago."}],[{"start":270.15000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778379556_2274.mp3"}