“The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that is so big and so obvious… that no one ever comments on it any more…Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940s touched off a boom that has continued for more than 30 years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history…”
So wrote Tom Wolfe in a once-famous essay that appeared in August 1976, just a few months before Jimmy Carter beat the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford by a hair and won the White House on a platform of explicitly Christian piety. Wolfe was characteristically hyperbolic – the country was still in a historic economic slump – but it was a fact that America was slowly making its way out of a grinding recession into the dawn of a new prosperity – for the upper classes, anyway. The unbridled hedonism of the counterculture was being smoothly assimilated by a racing commercial culture, as once-subversive values – eg “if it feels good, do it” – became the motto for a lucrative new market: young people making their way from Woodstock to Urban Outfitters, Studio 54 and beyond.
Just as disgust with woke coercions helped boost Trump back into power, revulsion against a new culture without limits helped make Jimmy Carter president. A lot is being said, as it should be, about Carter’s unabashed references to the Bible and to his evangelical Protestantism. But what made Carter the right president at the right moment in November 1976 was not his outward professions of faith, but the inward turn of his gaze.
Much as Elon Musk stands behind Trump’s looming presidency, a very different sort of figure was positioned behind Carter: Peter Bourne, a British-born medical doctor and anthropologist who had won several awards for valour during a year in Vietnam, and then served as an army captain working for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, Bourne studied the effects of trauma and stress on combat veterans, eventually writing a highly regarded book on the subject. Later on, while a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, he established a programme to help alcoholic prisoners and then led Georgia’s first community mental health centre. Carter, who was Georgia’s governor at the time, chose Bourne to head the state’s narcotics treatment programme. He later made Bourne his campaign director during his presidential run in 1976. After Carter became president, he kept Bourne close to him, putting him in charge of programmes related to mental health, drugs, national health insurance, hunger and malnutrition. Bourne was Carter’s caring Christian soul in action.
As the country underwent a revolution in mores, loosening individual restraints, for good and ill, in just about every realm of social and cultural life – as “me” became the American war cry – Carter, under the influence of a man himself influenced by his experience in treating people for the deepest mental and emotional scars, moved in the opposite direction. In this, his uncanny ministrations to the straining American nervous system, Carter anticipated his opposite number, Trump, whose most potent political skill has been to connect to the depths of the American psyche in electric fashion.
No one should doubt the sincerity of Carter’s “born again” conversion to evangelical Christianity after his loss to the segregationist Lester Maddox in his first run for the Georgia governorship, in 1966. But with his new outlook, Carter didn’t only out-South, as it were, Maddox, a caricature of Southern racism. He also plunged into the mentality of the Deep South, which had been trying to become reborn since the end of the Civil War in 1865, and even more a century later, following the northern liberals’ immolation of so many of the South’s sons in Vietnam. In the same way, and coming from an entirely different direction, Trump’s catastrophism, his darkness about American life, does not reflect American life but speaks to the anger and fear flickering in anxious American minds.
Carter’s bluntness also strangely anticipated Trump. No American president had ever told the American people, as Carter did in his so-called malaise speech of July 1979, that they were experiencing a “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation”. No American president had ever told the American people that “the erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America”. It was Carter’s version of Trump’s “American carnage”, of Trump telling Americans that they could not walk across the street to the grocery store without getting raped or killed. The profound difference between the two startling declarations was that Trump coupled his candour with a vindictiveness directed toward his enemies. Carter, true Christian that he was, had only friends.
He gave the Democrats what they were seeking in 1976, which was to win the Deep South, which FDR had swept in four straight elections, thus preserving the New Deal. It is a feat the Democrats have not repeated since Carter. Instead they watched as the South slowly slipped away, waiting for the next political messiah from that part of the country, Bill Clinton, to carry a sliver of it. In the larger context, Carter’s introspective manner, his heartfelt spirituality, was a balm to all Americans, not just in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, but in the spasms of turbulent cultural change that always follow the destruction and trauma of war.
As president, though, Carter found it hard to put his spiritual principles into practical political action; no surprise there, since the analogy would be like using fire to stop a flood. Similar to Barack Obama after him, Carter had a tendency to withdraw when faced with having to do politics rather than, as he admirably often did, practise his principles. In his 1978 State of the Union address, amid still-stubborn inflation and the high cost of living, Carter stunned fellow liberals by proclaiming that “government cannot solve our problems… it cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy”. He was playing politics, to be sure, appealing to increasingly centrist Democrats along with moderate Republicans. But it was a surprisingly maladroit rejection of New Deal values.
A more specific example of Carter’s political myopia were the Camp David Accords. The president whose initials were JC and who in later life worked benevolently, selflessly and consequently, yet always in full public view, as a carpenter, was not immune to moral hubris despite the goodness and the courage of his morality. (The overwhelming, gratifying, non-stop, yet somewhat numbing coverage of Carter’s death in the American media is a deliberate rebuke to Trump as the president-elect waits to take office.) Carter persisted in bringing together Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to produce a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, despite the fact that failure in that project would have spelled his political combustion. (He combusted anyway.)
But perhaps because of Carter’s intense evangelical identification with the Holy Land, he left out, incredibly, any representative of the Palestinian people. Perhaps he felt certain that if he had made the fate of the Palestinians central to the peace plan, rather than, in effect, leaving it to a string of virtuous contingencies, the plan almost certainly would have foundered sooner than it eventually did. Trump made the same fatal omission in his Abraham Accords. Whatever Carter’s motives for leaving the Palestinian question to later generations, one wonders what might have happened if he had represented the interests of Palestine, to both Sadat and Begin, with the threat of an iron American hand.
Truly spiritual people like Carter are always, at heart, conservative. They are cautious about earthly affairs, wary of an illusory meliorism: seeing life under the aspect of eternity is inherently conservative. In 1976, Carter’s contemplative, humble, pious, introspective manner moved people. But as the force fields of politics seemed to leave Carter dazed by sordid intractabilities, his introspection appeared defeatist.
Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again” – revived by Trump, who acts originally, but who cannot think originally – was a direct reference to Carter’s defeatist air. Reagan brought the imperial American self back out of detention. During his eight years as president, he cut the top tax rate from 70 per cent to 28 per cent, thus raising the prices of precious goods like housing, healthcare and higher education to stratospheric levels. In the process, he made it possible for American liberals to materially remove themselves from any proximity to the working class – the so-called Reagan Democrats – who they felt had betrayed them. That was when Reagan’s “me” vanquished Carter’s “thou” – and with it, what remained of American liberalism – for good. As Carter is laid to rest on 9 January, America need not ask for whom the bell tolls.
[See also: Jimmy Carter never needed redemption]
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