On Jimmy Carter, Malaise, and Revenge

With the sensible side of the blogosphere justifiably impressed and depressed with Billmon's emerging from his latest herimage to drop his recent missive on preemptive nuclear attack, it's interesting to watch how reality brings conventional wisdom down with such regularity. "Surely we would never do that, allow that, be that" overwhelmed by human hubris and perversity. And it makes me think again about Jimmy Carter.

The CW about Carter is now and has been for some time that he was an awful president who has made good in retirement, Nobel Prize, Habitat for Humanity, book after book, clean elections (except here), all that. But, when historians get a look at this period from the other side, assuming there are still writing implements, I look for them to give Jimmy a bit of revenge and conclude that he wasn't a bad president. In fact, he was one of the best we ever put in office. We were bad Americans.

Look at what Carter stressed most in his single term at the end of the 70s. He tried to get the sclerotic Democratic leadership in Congress to revitalize itself before its inherent arrogance and decay left it and those who believed in its principles in the wilderness for decades to come. He tried to get Americans to accept that the world was changing in a way that gave the US a commanding position if it would address the needs that were developing, needs for new forms of energy, new attention to all humans' rights in the world, new focus on environmental protection, new controls on nuclear proliferation. Go back and read his so-called "malaise" speech (in which he never said "malaise"). Like reading Nostradamus or Jeanne Dixon, it is. In short, he tried to get us to get real, to face up to the dangers we faced, and to deal with them in the spirit of our American heritage.

We dumped him for Ronald Reagan and "Morning in America." Carter warned us that a vote for Reagan would divide the nation by race, by gender, by class, by region, by religion. Geez, how wrong could a man be? Look how united we are. Barbara Walters, one of the Four Horsemen of the now-successful Media Apocalypse, got the vapors and accused him of being mean, just before she ran off to interview Burt Reynolds for the eighty-third time. We as voters decided that the combo of inflation and kidnapping led by ayatollahs disqualified Carter as a president and took the "greed is good" option. We're living with the consequences.

It's easy to say he should have been a better leader. Maybe if he'd had the vapid social skills of a Reagan or a Clinton, he could have convinced more of us to go along. But I doubt it. The times then and now did not call for us to feel good about ourselves; they called for us to take a sober, serious look at ourselves, count our blessings and shortcomings, and work to max out the first and diminish the second. As one of Carter's favorite writers, Reinhold Niebuhr, knew well, people who "love themselves" are too busy with their mirrors to do the hard work that was needed and still needs to be done. Carter laid it out and said we had a legacy to uphold so let's buckle down and do it. We said, "Screw you. Let's eat the seed corn." The problem wasn't Carter, it was us.

So, as you think about peak oil and torture and preemptive wars, nuclear ones even, about corruption of political parties and policy and leadership, about how good some basic honesty and goodness and intelligence would look in the White House about now, tell yourself what a rotten president Jimmy Carter was. And be proud of what WE did to him.

Or, as Billmon put it,

It appears our long national journey towards complete idiocy is over. We've arrived.