Jimmy Carter Outlived The Man Who Defeated Him, Literally and Historically
Jimmy Carter turns 100 today, the first U.S. president ever to do so, and I wish my my dear friend, the late F. X. Feeney, was here to see it. F. X., the film critic for the LA Weekly, was an unabashed Carter defender who helped put Carter’s life and accomplishments into context for me. He taught me about Carter’s tenacity in brokering the Camp David Accords, and his honesty as a president, which included telling harsh truths to the American people.
But the story I remember most is one he told me about the 1980 election, in which Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide that took some of the finest Democratic Senators, Governors, and Congressmen with him. Feeney had a friend who volunteered for a suicide hotline. Commiserating over Reagan’s election, the friend said “I was watching interviews with voters and they were all saying things like ‘I couldn’t take it anymore! Carter was ruining everything! It was all horrible!’ And I thought to myself, these are the kinds of things that people say to me when they call the hotline.”
Reagan’s election was, in the words of Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, “the day the New Deal died,” and in the 40-plus years since his election, the damage he did to our country has come home to roost; not just the failed policy of supply-side economics, or the lack of a response to the AIDS Crisis, or Project Star Wars, or the speech at the Neshoba County Fair where he said he believed in states rights. It’s that Americans can finally see the full effects of his policies, which deliberately thumbed their nose at Carter’s. In rejecting the man, Republicans felt Americans were ready to reject Carter’s vision on everything. Only in the last decade, nearly 50 years since he announced he was running, have people finally understood the ways in which Carter was ahead of his time.
Take the environment as an example. President Nixon may have created the EPA as a response to the burgeoning environmental movement, but it was Jimmy Carter who created the Department of Energy, installed solar panels on the White House roof, passed legislation to tax gas-guzzling vehicles, and protected hundreds of acres of wildlife in Alaska. He has continued this work through the Carter Center, working with farmers in nations like Zambia to improve agricultural production amidst a harsh, dry climate. Before leaving office, Carter published a report titled The Global 2000 Report to the President. Credited to Gerald O. Barney, the report demanded serious changes to environmental policy before the global population reached 6 billion in the year 2000 (which it did.) “The United States, possessing the world’s largest economy, can expect its policies to have a significant influence on global trends,” the report says. “[It] must improve its ability to identify emerging problems and assess alternative responses.”
Under Reagan, to quote the narrator of Arrested Development, “it didn’t.” Reagan appointed anti-environmental cabinet members, slashed funds for environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act, and removed Carter’s solar panels, all of which cost the United States valuable time in fighting to combat the worst effects of global warming. Reagan had been equally dismissive of environmental efforts before ever holding elected office; as Governor of California, he argued against conserving California’s Redwoods, saying “a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” (Given his career as an actor, he may have been quoting the title of Hollywood director King Vidor’s autobiography, A Tree’s a Tree.)
Ironically, one of the few good things to come out of Reagan’s environmental policies was recently overturned by the Supreme Court: in 1981, then-EPA head Anne Gorsuch issued a rule reclassifying a provision of the Clean Air Act that was upheld in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave regulators the power to challenge legislation that could potentially have harmful effects on the environment. Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron in Loper Bright v. Raimondo in a 6–2 vote. One of the deciding justices was Anne Gorsuch’s son Neal.¹
Carter did his best in 1980 to attack Reagan’s ineptitude and warn Americans about his views, but nothing ever stuck. The press, fed up with what they saw as Carter’s superiority complex, repeatedly said that he was being too “mean.” This perception has never quite gone away: to this day, a segment of the left, led by writers like Matt Stoller, revile Carter as a meanie for what they see as a legacy of austerity. Rick Perlstein’s 2020 book Reaganland, an otherwise compelling look at the fall of Carter and the rise of Reagan, blames Carter’s austerity measures for his failure to win re-election rather than inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, which played larger roles in making Carter appear weak and not in control.
No one will disagree that Carter inherited a terrible economy rife with inflation and high gas prices. And not all of his responses to this crisis, such as deregulating industries like trucking and transportation, were ideal. Most controversial of all was his decision to appoint Paul Volcker to the Chair of Federal Reserve. Volcker combated inflation by instituting what became known as “The Volcker Shock,” raising the interest rate to as high as 20% to reduce spending. The shock induced two brief recessions and raised unemployment, which affected the end of Carter’s presidency and the beginning of Reagan’s. But as controversial as the Volcker Shock was, by the time inflation came down in 1983, it had fallen to a level of 5%, where it would remain (more or less) for nearly 40 years. Reagan took the credit for it, and highlighted it in his famous “Morning in America” ads that helped win him a 49-state landslide for re-election in 1984. Carter took the hit for an unpopular decision, but Reagan reaped the benefits. Even when Wall Street experienced the worst crash since the Great Depression, it did little to harm his approval ratings.
Reagan’s consistent popularity as President came in large part from his status as “the great communicator”: years on camera had given him a natural ease on TV and on the stump that allowed him to play the role of a kind grandfather soothing Americans, which Carter couldn’t always do. In 1976, he admirably pledged that if elected President, he would never tell a lie. The drawback to this virtue was that too often, most notably in his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech², Carter could correctly diagnose the problem without pointing out a cure. By contrast, Reagan could sell the cure, but hide that the diagnosis was predicated on hastily thought-out canards like the infamous Laffer Curve that said tax cuts would pay for themselves.
Reagan could also sell himself as the man who guided great historical events to their ends. If one can point to anything admirable about the man, it was his willingness to negotiate with USSR Chair Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce the nuclear stockpile. Even if Reagan did not “end the Cold War,” as his supporters often claim he did, he and his administration deserve credit for ushering in a brief but fruitful era of U.S.-Soviet relations.
The great irony of this, however, is the fact that if Gorbachev resembles any U.S. leader, it is his fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Jimmy Carter. Both Gorbachev and Carter were highly perceptive men with a forthrightness both admirable and stubborn, and both of their their presidencies (or in the case of Gorbachev, chairmanship) came with harsh ends that reverberate to this day: Carter by losing 44 states, and Gorbachev with a coup that forced his resignation in 1991. But most importantly, both Carter and Gorbachev carry a legacy of peace with honor. Gorbachev ended the Cold War without causing a real one, and Carter remains the only U.S. President since the end of the Second World War not to fire a shot. Carter’s actions at Camp David have led to a peace between Egypt and Israel that has lasted to this day.
And Carter’s stern criticism of Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians must be heeded, especially as Benjamin Netanyahu now threatens Lebanon in addition to pummeling the Gaza Strip. “The people [of Israel] support a settlement,” Carter said in 1979. “Political leaders are the obstacle to peace.” In his 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, released the same year Hamas won control of Palestine’s government, Carter gave advocates for statehood an accurate and useful framework to argue from. Although criticized as antisemitic by people like Alan Dershowitz, Carter showed how you can argue for Israel’s right to exist while condemning its actions, and that the United States can lead the way to negotiate statehood. “A system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other…is the policy now being followed,” he wrote. “The only rational response to this continuing tragedy is to revitalize the peace process.”
Throughout his post-presidency, Carter broke with the tradition not to criticize his successor to attack Reagan on issues such as the economy. His wife of 76 years, Rosalynn, said Reagan made people “comfortable with their prejudices.” Reagan, on the other hand, never lost his popularity, and is still valorized by Republicans to this day in a way Democrats have never quite done with Carter. Critics frequently say that Democrats “should act more like Republicans.” Maybe that starts not with attacking Republicans 24–7, but with embracing the man who lived long enough to see his legacy redeemed, his home state turn blue, and his successor finally receive the scrutiny he deserved.
[1] Carter bears the unfortunate distinction of being the first president since Andrew Johnson not to appoint any Supreme Court Justices. However, he did make several notable appointments to the U.S. district and circuit courts, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom he appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980, a seat later held by Ketanji Brown Jackson.
[2] Although referred to as “the malaise speech,” Carter never used the word “malaise.”
