Look to Britain’s comeback for lessons here at home

Recently I’ve been looking for examples of national comebacks — nations that were plagued by turmoil, inequality and polarization but managed to get their act together and emerge stronger.

I’ve been especially interested in the way Britain revived itself between 1820 and 1848. Its comeback has some humbling lessons for us today.

Britain was roiled by economic and demographic changes. There were financial crises, bad harvests and a severe depression. There was crushing inequality. The average life expectancy nationwide was 40, but in the industrial cities of Manchester and Liverpool it was around 28. There were widespread riots and government crackdowns.

The nation responded to the turmoil from the bottom up and the top down.

There were, first, a series of social movements: There was the Clapham sect. This was a group of evangelical leaders, arising from the general religious revival, that sought to eradicate slavery, spread the faith, discourage indebtedness, build Sunday schools, reform behavior and basically spread what we now call Victorian morality.

There were the

Chartists. This was a radical workers’ movement that had six demands, including universal male suffrage, vote by ballot and equal electoral districts.

Finally, there was the Anti-Corn Law League. It promoted free-trade legislation to reduce the power of the landed gentry, to make food cheaper for the working classes and to encourage international exchange and cooperation.

The social movements were impressive, but the key to Britain’s success was the way political leaders responded. Britain was blessed by a stable parliamentary system and by a legislative culture that valued deliberation and debate. Political leaders understood that the winds of change were blowing and they had better initiate reforms if they wanted to head off a revolution.

The parties certainly had their bitter rivalries, but they shared a common patriotism and understood that each party had a role to play.

In 1848, worker revolutions swept across Europe, endangering regime after regime. But Britain was largely spared, because worker complaints had been at least partially addressed. Britain never fully healed its social divisions, but the nation cohered, and for the next 65 years it reigned as the greatest power on earth, the global center of science, trade and literature.

We Americans have not mobilized as the 19th-century Britons did in their moment of crisis. Americans have produced many small organizations but few compelling national movements. The Tea Party and Black Lives Matter come closest.

We have not passed a steady drumbeat of pragmatic reforms the way the Whigs and Tories did. Over the past 15 years, the United States has managed to pass just a few major pieces of social reform — Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and I guess the Trump tax reform.

The biggest gap is in the realm of political leadership. Victorian politicians had a stewardship mentality. They listened to the people, but stood slightly apart, deliberating, seeing governance as a shared professional responsibility. Our leaders come from a much broader swath of society, but they have lower standards of behavior, and less of a shared stewardship mentality.

So our revival is still in doubt.