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Jimmy Carter: The First Neoliberal Democrat and the Last Boy Scout
The most meaningful measure we can make of Jimmy Carter is whether we would prefer an imperfect, yet noble man like him at the helm of the country, today. I would.
Jan 08, 2025
Virtually everybody with an opinion judges Jimmy Carter to have been a decent man. He was certainly as good an ex-president as we’ve ever had. But what about his legacy as a then-president? That assessment is murkier.
A common refrain holds that Carter was a good man but a weak president, that he was not wise to the ways of Washington, that he was naïve in his belief that pure motives could win over champions of impure schemes.
It is impossible to fairly weigh Carter’s success or failure without understanding the context in which he served. That context was some of the greatest institutional tumult the U.S. has ever seen.
First, was Vietnam. The U.S. had just limped, still bleeding, out of the Vietnam War. It was the first war America had ever lost. The trauma of that loss (to say nothing of the trauma of having tried to prevent it) cannot be overstated.
Carter was the first elected president to have to deal with the shock, the disbelief, the grief, the shame, and the anger from the loss. There wasn’t a person in America who knew how to deal with that rat’s nest of conflicting, disorienting emotions and make the country whole again.
After Vietnam (and, especially, immediately after) the U.S. was not the swaggering hegemon it had been for the 30 years since 1945. But what could it be? That Delphic divination was only the first of Carter’s monumental challenges. There was equal upheaval, economically.
In 1971, Richard Nixon had removed the dollar’s coupling to gold. That left Arab oil sheikdoms receiving paper for their once-ever patrimony. They responded by tripling the price of oil, sending both inflationary and recessionary shocks through the world’s economy.
Theory held that stagnation and inflation couldn’t exist at the same time. But there it was: stagflation. The remedy for stagnation was to lower interest rates and increase the money supply. The remedy for inflation was to raise interest rates and reduce the money supply.
Clearly, you couldn’t do both at the same time. The Keynesian framework for managing the economy, operative since the Great Depression, no longer worked. So, in 1979, Carter hired Paul Volcker to try to fix it.
Volcker jacked up interest rates to record levels, inducing an immediate recession. It was the right thing to do, but it killed Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, as he knew it would. It gave Ronald Reagan his now-famous question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
Finally, on top of the ferocious ferment roiling international and economic affairs, there was Watergate. Richard Nixon was caught trying to break into the offices of whistleblower Daniel Elsberg’s psychiatrist and also the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The crime seems petty today, especially compared to launching a mob on the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, but it was monumental, then.
Probably no event in modern history had so shattered the public’s faith in the integrity of its national institutions and actors. Nixon resigned in disgrace. All political acts—and all political actors—were suddenly suspected of being nefarious and self-dealing.
Carter was both, but he was also neither. That is, yes, he was a politician, carrying out political acts. But he was neither nefarious nor self-dealing. He was as honest and selfless a politician as we’ve ever known. But, that was the tar with which all politics, and politicians, were smeared by Nixon’s sordid bequest.
Simply put, the intellectual and institutional moorings that had anchored the country for the prior 40 years—from the New Deal consensus to the post-World War II international order—were coming unglued. That was the tectonically-shifting world that Carter inherited. Nobody had ever dealt with anything like it.
So, how did he do? In truth, he did pretty well. First, the negatives.
In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew their government and took 66 Americans hostage. They held them for 444 days, dealing a severe humiliation to the U.S. That was probably Carter’s greatest public defeat.
But the underlying grievance had started in 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed the brutal Shah Reza Pahlavi, a reliable U.S. sycophant but a ruthless enemy of his own people. The boil of that festering resentment popped in 1979, on Carter’s watch.
Also, the Reagan campaign had cut a back-door deal with the revolutionaries to not release the hostages until after the election, thereby depriving Carter of a win in the matter. It was one of the most perfidious deeds ever to degrade American politics. Most people didn’t know that then, and don’t know it, still, today, so mistakenly blame Carter for the entire ordeal.
Later in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter had provoked the invasion. Six months before, he had begun supplying arms to the opponents of the Soviet-leaning Afghan government. The Soviets invaded to prop up their ally which was under attack by U.S.-supported terrorists, including the later-to-become-infamous Osama bin Laden.
Ironically, Afghanistan proved to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, draining it of treasure, manpower, and willpower. It is widely regarded to have been the single greatest cause of the Soviet collapse, in 1991. Carter’s critics who condemn his actions at the time always seem to forget that they eventuated in the defeat of the U.S.’ greatest adversary of the twentieth century.
Carter’s solutions to economic woes leaned conservative, or even further. It was he who began the Neoliberal regime we often associate with Ronald Reagan.
He deregulated the airline, trucking, and railroad industries. He reduced spending on welfare much more than either Nixon or Reagan ever did. Fearing inflation, he fought the United Mine Workers in their 1978 national coal strike, alienating one of his—and the Democratic party’s—most important bases.
But what of the good things that Carter delivered?
For all of the upheaval, he actually delivered better economic performance than did Ronald Reagan. That meant faster GDP growth and higher levels of business investment. He delivered the last balance of payments surplus the country has ever known. And he did this without the budget busting deficits that followed him.
When Carter left office, in January, 1981, the national debt—the cumulation of all federal borrowing over 204 years—stood at just under $1 trillion. Reagan tripled that debt in only eight years, an ominous portent of things to come. It is $36 trillion, today.
Carter placed more women and minorities in the federal judiciary—40 and 87, respectively—than all of his predecessors, combined. Ruth Bader Ginsburg attributed her decision to become a judge to Carter’s initiative. He literally actualized the centuries-long-delayed intent embodied in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.
Carter established the Department of Energy, an essential move, given the way the country and the world were being whipsawed by Arab oil producers. It has been a huge contributor to the U.S.’ being one of the world’s top energy producers still, today.
He started the Department of Education. An educated work force is probably the most valuable social asset a society can produce. But before Carter, it was left to the scattered machinations of 50 different state bureaucracies, a guarantee for national failure.
Carter engineered the Camp David Accords, bringing Israel and Egypt together to bury at least part of the hostility that has afflicted the Middle East since Israel’s founding in 1948. He proved prescient on the Israelis, predicting that they would not honor their promises to cede greater autonomy to the Palestinians.
Finally, Carter introduced Human Rights into U.S. foreign policy considerations. Even if done badly, it signaled an aspiration for what the U.S. stood for in its desire to be “the leader of the free world.”
The sum of this amounts to as adroit (though not flawless) an adaptation to the challenges of the time as could be conceived.
Besides considering the context and weighing the balance on Carter, there is one more lens through which we can, and should, judge him. That is, “Who would you rather have at the helm, today, steering the country through waters that are at least as perilous as those Carter faced?”
The U.S. is going through similar—or even greater—dislocations, today, as it was in Carter’s time. Its status in the world is plummeting as it has done everything it possibly could to bolster Israel’s heinous genocide of the Palestinians, and as China has blown by it in manufacturing, commerce, and in many areas of technology.
It has suffered withering military defeats, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, now, Ukraine. The majority of the world’s nations—led by Russia and China—are aligning against it as a Global South. Its economy, too, is much worse today than it was in Carter’s time.
In 1980, the U.S. had not begun hollowing out its economy with 40 years of de-industrialization. It had not begun the psychotic debt binge it has taken, borrowing $35 trillion dollars to try to mask the rot and keep the lights on. It was not hazarding the onset of actuarial bankruptcy, as it is, today.
These are not the signifiers of a healthy global leader. They are the signs of a wounded, faltering behemoth struggling to find a way to regain its once-heralded, even respected, primacy.
So, where does all of this leave us with Jimmy Carter?
Everybody agrees that Carter was an honest, decent, dignified, intelligent, hard-working, selfless public servant who never used his office for personal gain. It’s the things he wasn’t, though, that makes the things he was stand out in such dazzling, admirable, relief.
He wasn’t a pathological liar. He wasn’t a serial sexual abuser. He didn’t consort with porn stars and Playboy bunnies. In fact, he was married to the same woman for 77 years. His daddy didn’t leave him $413 million, so he wasn’t a phony put-up as a self-made man. He wasn’t a five-time draft dodger. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and served seven honorable years in active duty.
He wasn’t a tax cheat or a convicted felon—probably didn’t even have traffic tickets, he was such a Boy Scout. He didn’t use his office to boost his own personal wealth. He didn’t sell access to billionaires. He didn’t foment racial hatred for electoral gain. He wasn’t a bully. He didn’t threaten to send journalists and political foes to jail, in order to silence them. He didn’t steal state secrets on his way out of the presidency. And he certainly never tried to overthrow the government to keep himself in power.
It’s amazing how far our putative standards have fallen, and how we can so readily, fatuously, condemn a good man who, facing the greatest task of many decades, gave our country his very best, and, in fact, healed so many of the wounds of distrust and division that he and we had inherited.
Smug, supercilious condescension about Jimmy Carter is precisely the sign of our own inadequacy to judge him. We insist of him, even in his death, that he be some kind of incongruous super-human avatar: both chaste and worldly-wise; honest and wily; simple, but savvy; idealistic, yet pragmatic; compassionate, yet ruthless.
Would that we could apply such standards in our own time, to wildly, egregiously inferior human beings, repulsive, amoral self-dealers, setting out to loot the country for their own vanity and personal gain, again.
The most meaningful measure we can make of Jimmy Carter is whether we would prefer an imperfect, yet noble man like him at the helm of the country, today. I would. You? There you go.
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Jimmy Carter's Daughter Thanks Writer for Focus on Her Dad's Defense of Palestinian Rights
"There is no better way to remember him," said Amy Carter.
Dec 30, 2024
Amid of flurry of reflections on former U.S. President Jimmy Carter following his death at age 100 on Sunday, his daughter Amy Carter thanked one writer for highlighting her father's historic support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israeli apartheid.
Qasim Rashid, a human rights lawyer and former Democratic congressional candidate who has forcefully criticized the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over the past nearly 15 months, remembered Carter on Sunday by writing on Substack about the 39th president's stance on Israel and Palestine. Rashid included a clip from a 2007 interview with Democracy Now! about a book that Carter published the previous year, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
"In this book, President Carter cogently argues that the main obstacle to peace in Israel and Palestine is in fact the hundreds of thousands of illegal settlements that Israel continues to build, all with U.S. backing and support," Rashid wrote, also emphasizing Carter's point from the interview that it is politically risky for elected officials in Washington, D.C. to support Palestinian rights. "Contrast President Carter's clarity and courageous voice with the cowardice and complicit nature of every president since, including their appeasement of the Israeli government's settlement expansion, land annexation, and apartheid enforcement."
Later Sunday, Rashid posted on social media a screenshot of Substack subscriber Amy Carter's response to his article. The 57-year-old—who was arrested as a teenager for protesting apartheid in South Africa—said in part: "There is no better way to remember him and I appreciate that you and your readers are keeping this important part of his legacy alive. Thank you."
Floored to receive this beautiful comment from Amy Carter, daughter of President Jimmy Carter. She proudly elevates her father's legacy in promoting justice for Palestine & calls upon everyone to keep that legacy alive. Here's my article she is responding to: www.qasimrashid.com/p/president-...
[image or embed]
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. ( @qasimrashid.com) December 29, 2024 at 9:33 PM
While the former president has faced praise and scrutiny from across the political spectrum for various foreign policy decisions and positions, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner's support for Palestinian rights does stand out from those who have held the Oval Office since his single term—which included the Camp David Accords, signed in September 1978 by him, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Rashid was not alone in focusing on Carter's controversial 2006 book and broader position on Palestine in the wake of his death—as Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for slaughtering over 45,500 Palestinians in Gaza and starving those who have managed to survive.
On Monday morning, Democracy Now! shared on social media a version of the 2007 clip Rashid noted, during which Carter stresses that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "is not dedicated to peace," but rather is working and succeeding at convincing the American public, media, and political leaders to support the policies of the Israeli government.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan—who recently launchedZeteo after his MSNBC show was canceled following his criticism of Israel's assault on Gaza—on Sunday shared "eight critical Jimmy Carter quotes you won't see in most mainstream media obits."
In a Sunday obituary for Foreign Policy, Jonathan Alter—author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life—wrote:
The Camp David Accords turned out to be the most durable diplomatic achievement since the end of World War II. "What he has done with the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary things any president in history has ever accomplished," said Averell Harriman, a veteran U.S. diplomat who sometimes gave Carter advice.
Carter was the first president to back a Palestinian state, which along with his rhetoric afterward—including a 2006 book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid—made him the most pro-Palestinian U.S. president ever, a fact that angered American Jews for decades. Based on the Camp David Accords alone, however, he also turned out to be the best U.S. president for Israel's security since Harry Truman. That's because the only army with the capacity to destroy Israel—the Egyptian army—has been neutralized for more than four decades.
Mitchell Plitnick, a political analyst and writer, asserted at Mondoweiss on Sunday that Carter "is a man whose legacy will forever be inextricably linked to Israel and Palestine. Yet that legacy will be built as much on myth as on reality, as with so many other aspects of the history and politics of the 'Holy Land.'"
Calling for Carter's legacy to be "scrutinized carefully and honestly," Plitnick—like Alter—wrote of the Camp David Accords that "Carter understood, as any observer would, that if Israel made peace with Egypt, it would remove the single biggest military challenger in the region and the remaining Arab states would no longer be able to mount a credible threat against Israel."
He also argued that Carter's 2006 book "itself was far less remarkable than the title," given that its substance "made it clear that he was trying to steer Israel away from its own self-immolation on the altar of its occupation."
"The hateful comments that came his way for many years, mostly from the Jewish community but also from the Christian Zionists who share his evangelical beliefs but not his understanding of what those beliefs mean, were horribly misplaced," Plitnick added. "He cared deeply and tried to do what he could to create a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. For that, he's been called an antisemite. Every person who ever uttered that slur against him owes him an apology. Now would be a good time to send it."
As The Guardian's Chris McGreal reported on Monday, at least one key person did apologize before Carter died:
Among those outraged by Carter's book in 2006 were members of the former president's own foundation, which has built an international reputation for its work on human rights and to alleviate suffering. Steve Berman led a mass resignation from the Carter Center's board of councilors at the time.
Earlier this year, Berman revealed that he later wrote to Carter to apologize and to say that the former president had been right.
"I had started to view Israel's occupation of the Palestinians as something that started in 1967 as an accident but was now becoming an enterprise with colonial intentions," Berman said in his letter to Carter.
Shortly before Carter's death, Peter Beinart, described as "the most influential liberal Zionist of his generation," said the time had come for the former president's critics to apologize for the "shameful way that the book was received by many significant people."
Leading Muslim groups in the United States have also released statements since Carter's death on Sunday.
"President Carter was a friend of the American Muslim community and a champion for many just causes, including Palestinian freedom," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad. "Even when President Carter faced vitriolic attacks from anti-Palestinian groups for his prescient book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he stood firm. He was a humanitarian role model, and we pray that a new generation of political leaders will take inspiration from his legacy."
The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO)—an umbrella group that includes CAIR—said that it "joined American Muslims in commemorating former President Jimmy Carter as a principled humanitarian who dedicated his post-presidency to pursuing social and international justice, including courageously and forthrightly warning the American public about the harmful influence of pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and the Israeli government's intent on entrenching a colonial apartheid state on Palestinian land."
In addition to praising Carter's 2006 book, USCMO said that "he candidly called the U.S. 'Road Map for Peace' a sham that intended failure. He went on record, nearly alone among U.S. politicians at the time, to debunk the so-called Israeli 'security wall' as an 'imprisonment wall' to intern West Bank Palestinians. Moreover, he stood alone among his political peers in the U.S. in unfailingly and publicly defending Islam and Muslims against a rising, politically motivated, systematic Islamophobia media campaign as a foil for promoting religious nationalism in American politics."
"We convey our sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of James Earl Carter Jr.," USCMO concluded, "and to the American people who have lost a rarity in our politics—a former president who stood for the best interests of this nation and its stated values of freedom, justice, and democracy, regardless of outside political pressure to sell out those American values."
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Will Egypt Ditch Camp David Accords If Israel Invades Rafah?
A peace treaty that has been the cornerstone of Egyptian-Israeli relations for nearly half a century could be about to crack wide open.
Feb 12, 2024
It is being widely reported based on press leaks that the Egyptian government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has privately threatened Israel. Cairo is said to have warned that the 1978 Camp David Peace Treaty will be suspended “with immediate effect” if the government of Binyamin Netanyahu tries to take over the Philadelphi Corridor at the Gaza-Egypt Border and if it expels the Palestinians of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula at the Rafah border crossing as a result of an invasion of Rafah City. Israel attempted to convince an Egyptian delegation to Tel Aviv on Friday that Cairo should cooperate with the Israeli war plan, but allegedly was rebuffed.
The peace treaty has been the cornerstone of Egyptian-Israeli relations for nearly half a century.
The Egyptian government had not said much in public about these reports until yesterday. Mahmud `Abd al-Raziq of al-Khalij 35 reports reports that on Sunday, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry issued a stern warning to Israel that any operation in Rafah City would have “severe consequences.” The communique said that Egypt “continues its contacts and actions with various parties in order to arrive at an immediate ceasefire, enforce calm, and achieve an exchange of hostages and prisoners.” That is, Egypt is seeking another Israel-Hamas agreement, along with the US and Qatar.
The ministry asked responsible international actors (we’re looking at you, Joe Biden) to pressure Israel not to do anything that would “complicate the situation further and cause harm to the interests of everyone without exception.”
Prominent Egyptian parliamentarian and journalist (he has a talk show!) Mustafa Bakri had openly said earlier that the Egyptian border is a “red line” and its breach would threaten the Camp David Accords.
In an interview with Sky News, the former deputy head of Egyptian military intelligence, Gen. Ahmad Ibrahim, had said that from his country’s point of view any Israeli take-over of the Philadelphi Corridor would constitute a breach of the Camp David Accords. He warned that Egypt’s military is “powerful.”
The Saudi foreign ministry also condemned the planned attack on Rafah City and any further coerced displacement of the Palestinians there. The Saudis called for an immediate ceasefire and a UN Security Council resolution against Netanyahu’s plan.
This position was echoed by the spokesman for the Gulf Cooperation Council, which rejected the Israeli plan to assault Rafah after forcibly expelling the civilian population.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab states called Friday for immediate, concrete and irreversible steps to recognize a Palestinian state.
It seems clear that even countries that are more or less at peace with Israel, whether formally (Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates) or informally (Saudi Arabia) have their hair on fire about the proposed Rafah operation.
Although American newspapers depict Egypt as broke, desperate, and easily manipulated, my own estimation is that Cairo absolutely will not accept the Palestinians of Gaza as refugees on its soil. The Sinai is already a security problem for Cairo, and 2 million radicalized Palestinians would make it ungovernable. No amount of debt forgiveness would make such a bitter pill go down.
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