[On November 2nd, 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected President. Perhaps the most delightfully straightforward person ever to hold the office nonetheless connects to a number of compelling contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them. Leading up to a special weekend post on thi year’s midterm election results (which I don’t know when I’m scheduling the rest of the series)!]
On one famous critique of Carter’s presidency that definitely holds up, one that only partly does, and one that definitely doesn’t.
- Deregulation: Part of engaging seriously with American history is resisting the most simplified narratives, even (or maybe especially) if those simpler stories would line up with our own perspective. For example, I’m a big fan overall of Jimmy Carter and believe his presidency is often unfairly critiqued, and that many of those critiques reflect conservative ideologies that are presented as mainstream ideas. But not all of them—one of the genuinely destructive things Carter did was appoint the famous deregulator Alfred Kahn to lead the Civil Aeronautics Board. Kahn didn’t just spearhead the thorough deregulation of the airline industry, contributing to the climate of price gouging, competitions to charge money for more and more aspects of domestic air travel, and the general enshittification of the industry. He helped usher in an era of deregulation across much of the U.S. economy, one that Ronald Reagan would be all-too-happy to extend and amplify. Not great, Jimmy!
- Foreign policy: This is a case where my point about conservative ideologies does partly apply—Carter famously pursued a foreign policy agenda driven by a concern for human rights, rather than by the kinds of realpolitik that had been dominant for most of the Cold War; and the idea that his doing so was naïve or doomed to fail or the like is, to my mind, a specific ideological take that we shouldn’t accept as just common sense. After all, he got closer to true peace in the Middle East than has any other president in the 80 years since the founding of Israel. So I don’t agree with that particular critique of Carter—and if anything, would say that it was when his administration fell short of that human rights emphasis that his foreign policy was likewise compromised. A case in point would be his CIA’s clandestine support for the Afghan resistance to the USSR’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, a choice that has continued to echo in destructive ways for the half-century since.
- Energy: Ironically but tellingly enough, the most consistent critiques of Carter’s presidency are to my mind the ones that get things most consistently wrong. It’s true that there was a sustained energy and gas crisis during the latter couple years of his administration, and that said crisis contributed to many other economic issues including inflation and recession. However, not only was Carter not responsible for that crisis, but his attempts to use it as an opportunity to raise red flags about the oil industry and to aggressively pursue energy alternatives as a result were spot-on and represent perhaps the most frustrating what-if of the last 50 years. To cite the most striking single detail: Carter put solar panels on the White House; and Reagan ripped them off. If we had listened to Carter (including, yes, in the infamous “malaise” speech) and started on a path to alternative, renewable, non-fossil-fuel driven energy, would we have avoided the climate crisis in which we now find ourselves? No one knows for sure, but goddamn do I wish we had listened to Carter and tried.
Last CarterStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
PPS. Also thanks to Jason Lee Guthrie for sharing his podcast on Carter!
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