James Earl Carter was a liberal, but the occasional steps he took in conservative directions are worth honoring and laid key foundations for the Reagan Revolution.
James Earl Carter was a liberal, but the occasional steps he took in conservative directions are worth honoring and laid key foundations for the Reagan Revolution.
T he duty of an obituarist is not to avoid speaking any ill of the dead — this would often demand dishonesty — but to approach the recently departed with a sense of charity, emphasizing his virtues and not dwelling with undue vindictiveness upon his failings. It is an unavoidable historical reality that Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a failure by any sensible metric. The legacy of that presidency, however, was not entirely negative. Conservatives should spare a moment of thanks for some of the ways in which Carter laid the groundwork for key aspects of the Reagan Revolution, and not only by the negative example that brought Ronald Reagan to power.
Jimmy Carter championed some genuinely conservative ideas, and they worked. They pointed the way to what Reagan would do on a much larger scale.
A Failed Presidency
The four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency were only a tiny fraction of his long and eventful public career, much of which is worthy of its own comment, but they are why he is remembered in death, 43 years after leaving office. The failure of that presidency is a historical fact as unyielding as gravity.
To start with, it is beyond dispute that Carter was a colossal political failure. Carter won a national popular majority to enter office: 1976 was one of just two popular-vote majorities, along with 1964, won by a Democrat in the 15 presidential elections from 1948 through 2004. Like Joe Biden, he won that majority primarily as a negative reaction against a Republican presidency that left an especially bad ethical odor. When Carter entered office, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 61–38 Senate majority and a massive 292–143 majority in the House.
As the leader of the liberal party but hailing from a culturally and religiously conservative background as a Navy veteran and evangelical Christian in the most conservative part of the country, Carter was presented with an enormous opportunity to forge a new political synthesis and a new policy agenda. His supporters in 1976 ran the gamut from Hunter S. Thompson to Pat Robertson. Four years later, however, it had all unraveled. Until the Trump era, the Democrats under Carter from 1976–80 were the only party since 1896 to win the White House, then lose it again four years later (Trump and Biden have now both done it).
Carter attracted two heavyweight primary challengers within his own party, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy and California governor Jerry Brown, and for a time stood in serious danger of being just the second elected president denied renomination. In November 1980, he lost 44 states with just 41 percent of the popular vote. Democrats, in four years, lost 15 Senate seats and their majority, as well as 51 House seats, giving effective control of the chamber on multiple issues to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats.
A political realignment followed. Carter’s vice president, running four years later, lost 49 states and an 18-point popular vote landslide. A 15-point registration edge for Democrats in 1980 shrank to three points by 1984. Carter’s home region of the South, which he carried decisively in 1976, would vote Republican for a generation thereafter. Southern Democrats, hegemonic since the collapse of the Southern Whigs in the early 1850s, have never recovered. Republicans ran on the memory of the Carter era to retain the presidency for twelve years.
Carter failed by any other metric as well. On his own terms, much of his policy agenda failed to pass a Congress controlled by his own party. In practical terms, when Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago,” the answer was obvious to everyone. After four years of Carter, the economy was in worse shape, with the infamous “stagflation” of high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, and a stagnant stock market. The world was in worse shape, too: Communism was on the march in Southeast Asia, Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. American prestige was at a modern low with the yearlong Iranian hostage crisis. Carter himself spoke (in the so-called “malaise speech”) of a national “crisis of confidence” he was powerless to heal.
The lone improvement in the world for which Carter could take undisputed credit was peace between Israel and Egypt, countries that had gone to war in 1967 and 1973. The Camp David accords made a tenuous peace, but one that has held now for 44 years, buttressed by lavish American aid to both peacemakers. The legacy of Camp David is a proud and legitimate one, but at the time Carter left office, it was nearly the only real-world improvement that was immediately visible.
Before the Revolution
For all of that, however, the Carter presidency laid important foundations for major conservative policy successes during the Reagan years. Carter deserves a share of the credit for that, even if his party spent the succeeding years attacking those steps and abandoning their ideological underpinnings.
We begin with inflation. Carter spent the bulk of his presidency helpless to do anything about the stagflationary economy. Carter didn’t create the inflation problem: One can find the roots in Lyndon Johnson’s guns-and-butter approach to Vietnam and the Great Society, Richard Nixon’s lax monetary policy and wage-and-price-control tomfoolery, and, of course, the big-spending liberal Democrat supermajorities that controlled Congress between 1965 and 1980.
But as things spun out of control, in an August 1979 reshuffling, Carter took Federal Reserve chairman G. William Miller into his cabinet as secretary of the treasury and replaced Miller with Paul Volcker. It was an inspired choice and one that Carter knew would result in more immediate economic pain as the inflation hawk Volcker set about the contractionary interest rate policies that drove up mortgage rates and squeezed the stock market and the job market but eventually tamed runaway inflation. Carter was long out of office by the time the policy succeeded, and indeed, his party benefited in the 1982 midterms from blaming the ensuing recession on “Reaganomics.”
Then there’s the defense buildup. Reagan greatly increased the defense budget, expanded the Army and the Navy, built more missiles, and ultimately, invested heavily in space-based missile defense. But there, too, Carter had begun the turnaround from the post-Vietnam decay of the military. In his 1976 campaign and his first budget, he stood for slashing the military budget by as much as $7 billion, which was still real money in those days. This was, in the utopian terms of Seventies liberalism, “intended to signal restraint to Moscow and to spur strategic arms negotiations.” But in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter proposed a five-year, $100 billion increase in defense spending, telling Congress that “Our forces must be increased if they are to contain Soviet aggression.” As the Washington Post commented at the time, Carter “certified himself as a big defense spender” in his last year in office. By 1986, even Reagan noted that “My predecessor had called attention to this and had proposed a five-year expansion of the defense budget.”
A third key element of Reagan’s policy success in winning the Cold War was his public diplomacy to delegitimize the tyranny of the Soviet empire, its mistreatment of Jews and other refuseniks, and its rule over captive nations within the Soviet Union and in the Warsaw Pact. Here, too, in his own style, Carter helped pave the way. As with the defense budget, this involved pivoting away from his earlier dovish instincts, but one major initiative of the Carter years from the outset was to turn the 1975 Helsinki Accords on human rights into a propaganda weapon against the pervasive human rights abuses of the Soviet Union.
A common thread in these three Carter–Reagan initiatives is that bringing them to fruition required the iron will to endure torrents of criticism, most of it from the left, and absorb short-term political pain for the long-term betterment of the nation. Would Carter have withstood all of that for a full second term? Would he have transformed or shattered his party in the process? We can guess, but we cannot know. It is hard to picture him taking other crucial steps that Reagan added to this mix, such as the major supply-side tax cuts that led the recovery once inflation was conquered, branding the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” or calling for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, or engaging in a race to build space-based missile defense that proved ruinously expensive for the creaking Soviet economy. Still, even if we doubt that Carter could have finished these jobs as Reagan did, we can give him his share of the credit for starting them.
One area in which Carter excelled was deregulation. The regulatory mania of liberals had gotten so far out of hand by the late 1970s that even a Democrat could notice it and do something about it. The Carter administration, sometimes with help from Congress, pursued extensive deregulation of airlines, oil, railroads (with the Staggers Act of 1980), and trucking. That had a revolutionary impact on American commercial and recreational travel. Airfares dropped by 50 percent over the next 30 years, vastly increasing the number of Americans who had access to the skies.
Carter’s FCC commissioners helped pave the way for the Reagan-era end of the Fairness Doctrine that stifled free speech and competition in broadcasting. Without the end of the Fairness Doctrine, we would never have had Rush Limbaugh and the conservative talk-radio revival in the 1990s. Carter also rolled back regulations on brewing, allowing the explosive growth of homebrewing and the craft beer industry; there were only 44 breweries in the United States in 1978, but there are well over a thousand today. His redneck brother Billy’s much-mocked “Billy Beer” may have been a source of mirth, but new beers turned out to be one of the icons of a genuine Carter victory for which he got too little credit.
In a similar vein, Carter was the last national Democrat who was an enthusiastic proponent of nuclear power, and fittingly so, given that he’d helped to clean up a nuclear accident while in the Navy and was studying to be a nuclear power plant engineer when his father died and he left the Navy to run the peanut farm. In this case, Carter was right, but represents a road sadly not taken.
Even in his post-presidency, Carter rendered one more important service to his country when, in 2005, he co-chaired a commission with James Baker that issued a report on the integrity of American elections. The commission, among other things, “called on states to increase voter ID requirements; to be leery of mail-in voting; to halt ballot harvesting; to maintain voter lists, in part to ensure dead people are promptly removed from them; to allow election observers to monitor ballot counting; and to make sure voting machines are working properly.”
Our 39th president was no conservative. The list of his wrongheaded liberal ideas and policies and his bad judicial appointments would be extensive. He drifted much further to the left after leaving office, with misadventures that included rejecting the legitimacy of the 2000 and 2016 elections. Phil Klein has a fuller review of the harm done by Carter after leaving office.
But when Jimmy Carter went right, he was right. We should remember that aspect of his legacy fondly. R.I.P.