Jimmy Carter: A President Ahead of His Time

 by James Burkinshaw

Former US President Jimmy Carter's entry into hospice care this week, aged 98, has led many to reflect on his legacy. Carter's election, in 1976, is among my earliest political memories. I recall how  exciting American politics seemed in comparison to our own, with campaign events taking place against epic backdrops, from snow-bound New Hampshire to sun-soaked California, as the  Georgia peanut farmer, with earnest manner and toothy grin, emerged from political obscurity to win an improbable victory.  

As a political outsider and born-again Christian, Carter seemed to offer the chance of national renewal after Vietnam and Watergate, claiming "I'll never lie to you." However, four years later, he became the first president since Herbert Hoover, half a century earlier, to lose his bid for re-election. His defeat after one term has defined Carter, ever since, as a 'failed president' overwhelmed by an economic and energy crisis at home and the Iranian hostage crisis overseas. Yet, he appeared to attain a kind of redemption in his role as former president. Over the next four decades, Jimmy Carter became widely admired for his humanitarian work across the globe and for his personal integrity, eschewing the generous speaking fees and corporate sinecures that have become de rigeur for other former-presidents (from Bushes Sr and Jr to Clinton and Obama). 

However, Jimmy Carter was a more complex figure than the "failed president, inspirational ex-president" media cliché.                      

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First of all, he was decades ahead of any other mainstream politician in his environmental awareness:  introducing strong pollution controls and toxic clean-up legislation, doubling the size of the national parks system and creating a Department of Energy that funded what would now be called "green technology". Carter even installed solar panels on the White House roof (which his successor, Ronald Reagan, removed, while gutting the renewable-energy budget). 

Carter was prescient in seeing that economic and environmental issues facing the country were interlinked. In July 1979, he broadcast a major speech to the nation from the White House, arguing that Americans defined themselves "no longer by what one does but by what one owns . . . We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose." He called on those who were the most materially comfortable to help those less well off: “Our nation must be fair to the poorest among us, so we will increase aid to needy Americans to cope with rising energy prices.” 

This rejection of unrestrained consumerism struck a chord with the public (prompting an 11% boost in Carter's popularity), rooted, as it was, in a vision of America dating back to the seventeenth century. A key adviser on the speech was communitarian, Robert Bellah, who cited the Puritans' "covenant model" whereby people “participate in each other’s lives because they are mutually committed to values that transcend self interest”. Bellah quoted a sermon given by John Winthrop in 1630, describing America as "a shining city on a hill". As noted in a previous article, this image was an attack on the complacency and hypocrisy of a community (the Massachusetts colony) on the brink of collapse. Carter was a genuinely devout Christian and his televised speech was reaching back to America's Puritan past in search of a resonant language of moral urgency. 

However, it was not Carter who was to make Winthrop's image famous, but his opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan. His speeches repeatedly described America as "a shining city on a hill" but in a way that entirely inverted Winthrop's meaning. In Reagan's telling, America was "shining" because there was nothing wrong with it, except for those, like Carter, who wanted to talk it down. The arch-conservative Reagan's political genius was to purge American conservatism of its traditionally pessimistic view of human nature (rooted in a Puritan sense of sin) and to make progressives such as Carter seem to be the pessimists with their talk of reform. Reagan's campaign transformed perceptions of Carter's TV address, labelling it the 'Malaise' speech (even though Carter never used the word). Rather than offering them a moral challenge, Reagan gave them absolution: “I find no national malaise . . . I find nothing wrong with the American people.” 

The irony was that many of the voters looking for absolution were the Evangelical Christians who made up so much of Reagan's electoral base. In a further irony, the candidate they rejected, Carter was (unlike Reagan) an Evangelical Christian himself. However, the issues that motivated them in 1980 were gender, sexuality and race (still the case 40 years later) rather than equality or the environment. And, after the upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies (from Vietnam to Civil Rights, Watergate to Jonestown), most Americans had wearied of soul-searching - including many Christians. As a former Hollywood actor, who had played many cowboys in his time, Ronald Reagan was adept at crafting reassuringly simple hero-villain narratives, in which "real" Americans were "the good guys" - no need for self-recrimination (or societal reform). He realised that, even among his evangelical base, there was more mileage in pop-culture references than Puritan sermons. He labelled the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire", in an allusion to Star Wars, which first appeared in 1977. Star Wars was, itself, inspired by the old 'black hat/white hat' Westerns director George Lucas had enjoyed growing up, but it also turned out to be the future of film: representing a shift towards "good guy/bad guy" blockbusters and away from the morally complex movies of the early 1970s. 

To what extent Ronald Reagan believed his own myths continues to be a matter of debate. What is certain is that Carter could not match Reagan's acting skills and salesman patter. In this sense, Carter resembled another earnest, hardworking engineer and one-term president, Herbert Hoover. Just as American conservatives could not craft a convincing narrative to counter Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, between 1932 and 1980 (including Republican presidents such as Eisenhower and Nixon), Reagan's mythic image of America has remained unchallenged since 1980. As Richard Rorty wrote in 2000, "the choice between the major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence.”  

                                                                                            * * *                                                                                                              Criticism of Carter's speech came not only from the Right, but from many on the Left, who saw his questioning of consumerism as reactionary. They blamed Carter's failure to get bills supporting progressive taxation, labour protection and affordable healthcare through Congress on his ideological half-heartedness. Their scepticism seemed to be confirmed by Carter's acquiescence in the Federal Reserve's deflationary policies, which raised unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression; inflation went down, but any benefits were not felt until after the 1980 election, allowing Reagan to reap the political rewards. Many on the Left still see Carter as a harbinger of neoliberalism, Reaganite in economic policy, even if not in style.   

Even Carter's idealistic declaration, in 1976, that human rights represented “the soul of our foreign policy” was quickly subordinated to the neoconservative Cold War priorities of his predecessor, Nixon, and his successor, Reagan, whether supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge in armed conflict with Soviet-backed Vietnam, increasing military aid to Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia or supporting brutal authoritarians in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. Cold War priorities also shaped Carter's support for the Shah of Iran’s repressive rule, which ended in political disaster when Iranian revolutionaries took US embassy staff in Tehran hostage. Carter's inability to negotiate their release, and a botched rescue attempt, seemed to symbolise American impotence, as did the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. However, Carter achieved two significant foreign-policy successes. One was negotiation of the Panama Canal treaty, helping to prevent a major regional war in Central America. The other was Carter's brokering of the Camp David accords, a historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. On leaving office, he undertook peace negotiations and campaigned for human rights across the globe, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. His continuing desire to find a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led him to write Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in 2006. 

His use of the word "apartheid" caused intense debate (explored in Jonathan Demme’s fascinating documentary, Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains (2007)). It is particular interesting in light of the fact that Carter himself grew up in a segregated South for the first four decades of his life. As a Georgia state senator, in the 1960s, he supported voting rights for Black citizens; in 1966, he ran for governor, attracting a large number of Black voters, but losing to White segregationist Lester Maddox. Running again, four years later,  Carter indulged in what later came to be called 'dog-whistle' politics, making coded racial references designed to appeal to Maddox voters. He won. His actions during that gubernatorial campaign have been much criticised since; however, as Governor and President, Carter strengthened Black voting rights, funded an expansion in education and business opportunities for Black citizens, and appointed an unprecedented number of Black Americans to judgeships and other governmental posts, including Cabinet officials.  His invitation of Black jazz artists, such as Dizzy Gillespie, to the White House, reflected Carter's lifelong immersion in Southern musical culture, from the gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the country-rock of the Allman Brothers. Even a political commentator as jaded as Hunter S Thompson was struck by the incongruity of this rather stiff, puritanical, former naval officer's close friendship with counter-cultural figures like Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. Indeed, Carter's first act, as president was to formally pardon over 100,000 Americans who had evaded the military draft during the Vietnam War (see Mary Wharton's documentary, Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President (2020)):  

 In sum, Carter was a much more paradoxical and interesting political figure than the 'failed president' caricatured by some on the Right or 'sainted former-president' apotheosised by some on the Left. He was preacher and pragmatist, micromanager and visionary. And, four decades after his defeat, as we face an unprecedented climate crisis and as 66% of Americans (in a recent poll) demand a more fair and equal society, it is Carter's message, rather than Reagan's, that, has better stood the test of time.