Jimmy Carter was one of the key figures in the rise of conservatism
How we should really remember our 39th president
When it comes to remembering Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at age 100, it is imperative to preface any discussion of his presidency with two crucial facts.
First, Carter was a truly great person. This was exhibited most during his more than four decade long post-presidency, which was full of tireless work for peace and democracy, as well as charitable endeavors and Sunday school teaching. His decades of good highlighted his modesty and his genuine decency. No other president has come close to matching this post-presidential record, and Carter should be a shining example for all of us.
Additionally, when assessing his presidential record, we ought to consider the very real possibility that whoever was in the White House between 1977 and 1981 — Democrat or Republican — would have struggled, and maybe even flopped. The mixture of stagflation, a combination of rampant inflation and a stagnant economy that economists hadn’t considered to be possible before the 1970s, oil shocks, deindustrialization, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the explosion of fierce cultural fights over the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, and LGBTQ rights made the 1970s, especially Carter’s term, exceedingly difficult for any president to navigate.
He also got handed a lot of poor luck. His three predecessors, for example, had worked on negotiations/treaties to return the Panama Canal to Panama — something that was necessary policy wise, but was fiercely controversial at home — but it was left to Carter to complete. Similarly, a battle had been brewing over the tax exemptions held by all-White private schools dating back to the late 1960s, and both courts and Richard Nixon had ordered the IRS to strip the schools of their exemptions. With the rise of all-White Christian schools in the 1970s, the IRS had moved to tighten guidelines, but the issue didn’t erupt until, in the face of evidence that the existing policies were failing, Carter’s IRS commissioner tried to create new regulations. In a third case, Gerald Ford had signed the legislation mandating that the International Women’s Year convention be held in 1977. Like the IRS issue, the conference proved to be deeply divisive, and helped coalesce the rising religious right.
All of these were matters where no matter what Carter did, it probably was going to hurt him politically — on the tax exemption issue for example, if he had caved to outraged conservative Christians, Carter risked infuriating civil rights advocates.
Carter’s bad luck extended to things that might’ve provided a political boost: he intended to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, but then became the only president in history not to have a vacancy to fill over a full term. The only other presidents who hadn’t had an appointment were William Henry Harrison, who only served a month in office, and Zachary Taylor, who only spent 16 months in office.
He also was not without significant, major achievements — especially on the environment and conservation and in fostering peace between Israel and Egypt.
A bunch of friendly new biographies and accounts of Carter’s presidency highlight these very real accomplishments and use them to make the case that he was a far better president than is typically thought.
Nonetheless, on balance, Carter is best seen as the president whose mistakes and political tin ear fueled the rise of a hard-edged conservatism, which had been marginalized in American politics since Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1933, and did massive damage to his political party.
Some of Carter’s problem stemmed from being the first in a series of “outsider” presidents without significant experience in Washington politics. The gravitation toward outsiders was a reaction by the electorate to the twin disasters of Vietnam and Watergate at the hands of two presidents with deep Washington experience.
Nonetheless, Carter’s inexperience led to crucial mistakes, like trying to cancel water projects that he considered to be wasteful spending, but which powerful member of Congress — whose support was necessary for his agenda — saw as both their prerogative and as crucial for their districts or states. He also ignored the advice of outgoing Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney to name a single staffer above all others (at the time, a relatively new practice), and then when he finally did name a chief of staff in 1979, he chose the divisive, inexperienced Hamilton Jordan.
The water project debacle reflected how Carter was a genuine fiscal conservative of the old sort — who valued balanced budgets. The electorate also voted for Carter because of his deep rectitude and faith, which was refreshing in the wake of Watergate. But his religiosity meant that Carter was socially conservative too.
His conservatism prompted Carter to refuse to undertake any large scale new government programs prized by the left, including national health insurance and subsidies for child care. He also tried to find compromises on the new, ascending social issues, especially abortion — Carter opposed a constitutional amendment overturning Roe v. Wade, while supporting the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortion. These moves increasingly alienated major portions of the Democratic base, without winning over social conservatives, many of whom had supported their fellow born again Christian in 1976.
To many Democrats, Carter was a far cry from Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, who had moved to use the power of government to help Americans during tough times. This sense fueled a primary challenge from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy in 1980 that left Carter deeply wounded and with a fractured party entering the general election. Kennedy might even have beaten Carter, but for the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the winter of 1979-1980. These foreign policy shocks fueled a rally around the president effect, which doomed Kennedy’s campaign in the wake of a rocky start. By the time Americans started souring on Carter’s handling of the Hostage Crisis, and Kennedy hit his stride, it was too late to wrest the nomination away from the incumbent.
But Carter’s weak political state wasn’t his only role in elevating Ronald Reagan to the presidency, despite Reagan being far to the right of where many observers had thought a politician could be if he hoped to win the presidency.
Carter’s foibles, and his lack of positive solutions for the nation’s ailments made clear that the liberalism ushered in by Roosevelt was spent. He had failed to adequately learn the political lessons of the preceding five decades. Democrats had thrived because they were the party that promised voters things — government programs and other interventions and protections to make life better. Republicans had been the scrooges in American politics worrying about spending too much and claiming that the nation needed to tighten its belt.
But that all flipped during Carter’s presidency. Republican economic orthodoxy went from the prioritizing balanced budgets to championing tax cuts, at a moment when inflation was causing bracket creep and fueling a budding tax revolt. All of a sudden the GOP had a carrot to dangle in front of American voters. Simultaneously, Carter preached sacrificing and cutting back in response to a time of scarcity and struggle.
In his most famous presidential address, Carter told Americans, “There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.” He asked them, “to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.”
After diagnosing the country as having a crisis of spirit far deeper than its material problems, Carter basically discarded the catechism of modern liberalism. He declared, “all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America.” He derided consumption observing, “We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
And this wasn’t a one time thing.
In his second State of the Union address, Carter had baldly intoned, “but we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government. Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.” And on his way out of office, in January, 1981, he recited the problems facing the American people, but warned, “the Federal Government itself may not always be the proper source of such assistance. For example, it must not usurp functions if they can be more appropriately decided upon, managed, and financed by the private sector or by State and local governments.”
He even backed Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker’s shocks to the economy (aimed at bringing inflation under control over the long term) despite Volcker admitting that “the standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don’t think you can escape that.”
Americans could have been forgiven for wondering if they had elected a conservative Republican instead of a Democrat. As Kennedy put it in 1980, “Democratic policies have not failed these last four years. They have not been tried.”
While there might have been much truth in what Carter said, preaching sacrifice and learning to live with less was bitter medicine that was a far cry from Roosevelt’s philosophy of using government to address national problems and improve Americans’ lives. The patron saint of American liberalism had also governed during rough times, and he too had called for sacrifice. But it was leavened with the creation of myriad government programs aimed at helping Americans struggling under the weight of the Great Depression. Instead of showing that government could help them, Carter undermined Americans’ faith in the power of government to do good and to solve problems, helping to shatter the philosophical underpinnings of Democrats’ agenda for the previous half century.
Carter’s turn as national scold was also a far cry from Ronald Reagan’s hopeful optimism. Reagan said to voters, in essence, screw sacrifice. I’ll get government off your back and we can go back to improving standards of living, consuming whatever we well please, and being the best country in the world. In the speech announcing his 1980 campaign, Reagan scornfully observed, “Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our own high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in the sharing of scarcity.”To him, this was all hogwash.
It’s not hard to see why Americans preferred the latter approach. And after the economy improved on Reagan’s watch and he relentlessly hammered the utility and value of government programs for eight years, it fundamentally shifted the public philosophy. That, in turn, has limited what has been possible for all of his successors — including the Democrats who would like to create new programs to address very real societal ills.
That’s not to say that a liberal Democrat would necessarily have been able to enact new programs in the economic and political climate of the late 1970s. Conservatism was rising all around the country.
But at the very least, a liberal president — be it Kennedy or one of Carter’s primary opponents in 1976, like Henry “Scoop” Jackson or Frank Church — would have been perceived as fighting to make Americans’ lives easier and addressing some of the hardships they felt with more than calls for sacrifice. Liberalism might have appeared somewhat less bankrupt, and the Democratic Party might not have split. Many of the economically liberal, but socially conservative, Democrats who became Reagan Democrats also might have been more inclined to stay in the fold with a president who tended to their economic needs.
More importantly, such a president would have offered a contrast. After all, it made sense that when voters were tasked with choosing between a conservative Republican and a conservative-lite Democrat, they chose the real thing.
This assessment of Carter is also not to say he deserves all of the blame for liberalism cratering and conservatism rising. Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous handling of Vietnam eroded faith in government and starved his domestic agenda of funding, while also beginning to fuel inflation. It also contributed to rupturing the delicately balanced Democratic coalition. The rise of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement’s shift in focus toward economic inequality and Northern racism, and the fissures exposed by the antiwar movement also would have made it difficult for any Democrat to hold together the wings of Carter’s party that increasingly wanted opposite things. Attempting to address the holes in the social safety net, with benefits flowing to the neediest Americans instead of universal programs, also created resentments that unmade the Democratic Party.
But Carter’s conservatism and his way of handling a moment when Americans were struggling eliminated any hope of holding the coalition together. It said to Americans that Democrats didn’t really have solutions to their problems — other than put on a sweater — so they might as well try the other guys. To me, that’s Carter’s most long-lasting legacy in American politics. It’s why in 2024 Democrats are still struggling for many of the same things they were fighting for in the 1970s — affordable health care, affordable child care, early childhood education and more.
The degree of difficulty for Carter was exceedingly high, but his disastrous four years in office in a very real way dealt the death blow to American liberalism.