Jimmy Carter’s real legacy
It was good for former US President Jimmy Carter’s reputation that he lived as long as he did. For those who didn’t experience his administration between 1977 and 1981, Carter was known as an advocate committed to human rights, global public health, and service to the poor. In labelling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid,” he even won a reputation as a truth-teller.
The political amnesia that Carter’s post-presidency created led liberals to view the Carter years through rose-tinted glasses. Reverand Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who is little more than a Democratic Party shill on the liberal MSNBC network, praised Carter’s trailblazing for appointing one of Martin Luther King’s lieutenants, Andrew Young, as US ambassador to the United Nations.
Sharpton neglected to note that Carter fired Young in 1979—provoking an outcry from civil rights leaders—for the sin of meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. (Young’s ostensible purpose was to convince the PLO to support the shelving of a UN report calling for a Palestinian state!)
For many in the Washington elite and its punditocracy, Carter’s is the epitome of a failed presidency. In their superficial summaries of Carter’s term, images of lines of cars waiting for hours at gas stations, blind-folded US embassy personnel held in Tehran, or a pasty, stumbling Carter gasping for air during a 10k run combine to form an image of a bumbler in over his head.
By the time Carter ran for re-election, a substantial section of the Democratic Party had rejected him and supported a liberal primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Carter lost in a 1980 landslide to Ronald Reagan, who many considered too “extreme” to be handed the nuclear codes. When he left office, Carter had the support of just over 30 percent in national opinion surveys.
When looking at the Carter years, we should reject the shallow score-keeping that obsesses the Washington elite. Carter was a terrible president—but not because he was ineffective or preachy in his public pronouncements. He was terrible when he was effective because much of what we have come to call the “neoliberal” era began under Carter, rather than his Republican successor Ronald Reagan.
Two deep recessions signalling the end of the long post-Second World War boom bookended Carter’s term in office. The Democrat-led New Deal political economy that underpinned much of that period unravelled, and Carter’s administration served as a transition to a new paradigm that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in Britain personified.
What were the hallmarks of Reaganism? Cuts in social spending. Trickle-down economics based on tax cuts for the rich. A military buildup. Regressive social policy. Carter initiated all of this.
Responding to a concerted business offensive pushing for cuts to social spending, Carter reversed a lengthy period of expansion of domestic programs. His 1978 tax plan anticipated Reaganomics by cutting capital gains taxes for the wealthy while increasing Social Security taxes on workers. It was the first time since the 1930s that Congress—with an overwhelmingly Democratic Party majority—passed an unambiguously regressive tax plan.
Carter appointed banker Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve in 1979. With the president’s support, Volcker jacked up interest rates, engineering a recession and mass unemployment to cut workers’ demands for their pay to keep up with inflation.
In 1979, the Carter administration negotiated a federal government bailout of the bankrupt Chrysler Corp., requiring union givebacks and opening the way for a wave of concessionary contracts from major unions over the next decade. Carter deployed the anti-union Taft Hartley Act to halt the 1977-78 coal miners’ strike. A labour law reform intended to help unions organise went down to defeat in Congress in 1977, with Carter letting it twist in the wind.
The Carter administration drew up the plan to fire and replace striking air traffic controllers, which Reagan implemented in 1981, and began the mania for deregulation that became the economic gospel for subsequent administrations. Carter’s deregulation of trucking, air travel and energy prices led to higher prices, worse service and union-busting across key industries.
Considering his post-presidential image as Nobel laureate and international peace envoy, it is essential to recall that Carter launched the military buildup that Reagan pursued vigorously. In 1980, in the wake of revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, and the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, Carter sharply increased the military budget, reinstated registration for the military draft and created the Rapid Deployment Force for intervention in the Middle East.
His administration also changed US nuclear weapons policy to allow a US “first strike” in a “limited nuclear war” and initiated the arming and training of Islamist guerrillas fighting the pro-Russian government in Afghanistan prior to the USSR’s invasion. This covert action, later championed by the Reagan administration, nurtured the networks from which Al Qaeda emerged.
Carter established the “Carter doctrine”, a declaration that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”. This was the pretence for the US war against Iraq that began in 1991 and continued, in one way or another, for another two decades.
On the domestic front, Carter supported and signed the Hyde Amendment barring Medicaid funding for abortion in 1977. It was one of the anti-abortion movement’s first victories after the US Supreme Court legalised abortion nationwide in 1973.
When a reporter asked Carter why he approved of a provision that disproportionately affected poor women, he responded: “There are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford, and poor people can’t”. It wasn’t the federal government’s role, he said, to make “opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved”.
Carter’s sense of Christian morality wasn’t moved in 1980 when Archbishop Óscar A. Romero of El Salvador appealed to his “religious sentiments and your feelings for the defence of human rights” to end military aid to that country’s far-right junta, which was carrying out massacres of civilians and murders of activists in its civil war. In the month following Romero’s letter, a far-right death squad assassinated the priest. On his way out of the White House, Carter increased aid to the Salvadoran junta.
No one was more wrong about Carter than Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America. In a debate with the Socialist Workers Party’s Peter Camejo held on the eve of the 1976 election, Harrington argued: “[T]he conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working-class militancy, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually make victories on full employment, national health, and issues like that”.
The exact opposite scenario unfolded. The Carter years marked a hinge point—not for an upsurge of militancy, but for the beginning of decades of retreat and retrenchment. As Ed Burmila wrote in Chaotic Neutral, “Carter did not merely oversee the collapse of the postwar political and economic order; he actively advanced it”.
Today’s liberals may want to put a halo on Carter and blame the generations-long shift to the right on Reagan and the Republicans. But Carter bears significant responsibility for the paving the way.
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
