Goldmark: Political restlessness in West

The West does not have its act together.

Europe and the United States are both in prolonged, multiyear economic slumps. On both continents, the politics are becoming explosive: in the United States, the hard right wing is sharpening its claws to pounce on any moderate they think they can slay; continental Europe's two largest economies, Germany and France, have seen incumbent governments with cautious austerity-oriented economic policies suffer dramatic losses at the polls; and in Greece, a country mired in economic and political chaos, no party last week was even able to form a government after turbulent elections where both extremes gained at the expense of the middle.

As political restlessness becomes more evident throughout the Western democracies, many voices, adding up to a cacophony, seek to interpret recent election results. Some say people are tired of austerity and want policies of growth. Others say people have had it with big government and big deficits and want to cut the size of both. The new president of France, François Hollande, says austerity won't work; the prime minister of England says austerity is the only thing that will work.

Meanwhile economists are at one another's throats, with the "cyclicists" saying that the only way to get out of the recession is to spend more and stimulate growth, and the "structuralists" saying that until old bureaucratic regulations and labor arrangements are swept away, the capitalist system will not be able to grow again.

But most ordinary people don't have fervent ideas about whether austerity or stimulus is preferable. The May European election results and the continuing political instability in the United States may mean that people are telling their leaders something both more primitive and more dangerous: Things are bad and getting worse, and you, our present leaders, don't have a convincing plan to get us out of it.

What people see is higher prices at the gas pump and the supermarket, their retirement plans in trouble, too few jobs, and the middle class getting squeezed while the rich get richer. On neither continent do they see big plans to invest for the future.

In the absence of cogent plans, shrill attack and zealous bravado often carry the day. Is it any surprise that the Western democracies haven't seen many victories in 2012 by incumbents or majority parties of any stripe?

There is no plausible road forward that is not extremely difficult: We will have to raise revenue, cut spending and invest on a large scale -- all at the same time. Everyone must share in carrying that burden. One reason this challenge paralyzes the Western democracies is that the mix of required steps cuts across the conventional categories that have defined domestic politics for decades. There are parties that want to cut, and parties that want to raise revenue -- but no parties that want to do both. There are political groups that want to cut back and rationalize the role of government, and groups that want to invest in capital infrastructure and regulate the financial sector with more discipline -- but few who want to do both.

Time is running out. Europe and the United States account for roughly half of total global economic activity, and neither China nor Japan are strong enough today to help pick up the slack.

Maybe some of these harsh election results will wake our elected leaders up. Voters will no longer be patient with those perceived to be mumbling and dithering. The voters will not punish boldness, and they will not punish vitriol. They will punish business as usual, because business as usual is not working.

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.