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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.
HR 9495 seems designed for political purposes, to limit debate about the most pressing issues—war, climate, economic access—our country faces today.
On November 21, 2024, the House of Representatives passed bill H.R. 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act” and passed it to the Senate for consideration.
The bill contains two separate elements, one of which is not controversial and another which is highly controversial.
The first part of the legislation proposes to postpone the tax obligations of Americans being held hostage overseas. It seems fair and right and has almost universal bipartisan support.
It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.
The second piece of the bill would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to, unilaterally and with no concrete justification, designate nonprofits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” These organizations would then lose their nonprofit status. As the ACLU has pointed out, any community news outfit, university, or civil association targeted by this law would be required to prove Treasury’s error in order to reclaim their tax-exempt status. By then, of course, the damage would have been done. The scarlet letter “T” would likely haunt the organization for as long as it attempted to act in the world. The potential effects of HR 9495, however, extend far beyond the fates of a handful of nonprofits.
This bill echoes one passed near the end of President Richard Nixon’s first year as president. President Nixon and his surrogates pitched their Tax Reform Act of 1969 in populist terms. It would, they said, prevent millionaires from squirreling away money in foundations and nonprofits in order to dodge paying their fair share to the common good. What really drove the passage of the bill, however, was another concern. Major foundations, including the Ford Foundation, had been contributing to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and his mission to bring the nation’s poor in from the “outskirts of hope.” President Johnson had called for the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in the democratic politics of their localities, states, and the nation. With funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity and Ford, the voices of the poor and marginalized were being heard. Cleveland elected its first Black mayor. Parents in Bedford Stuyvesant took control of the public schools. And in Durham and Greensboro, as well as in rural North Carolina counties, foundation-funded organizers were helping poor and working people, Black and white, to make coherent demands that would improve their lives and the lives of their children.
Threatened political and business bosses saw in Nixon an ally who could help them maintain their grip on power, as they reinforced the president’s grievance-driven “silent majority” with race-baiting and red-baiting tactics. Meanwhile, Roy Wilkins, the director of the NAACP, saw the Tax Reform Act of 1969 for what it was. “Negro citizens,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “are not deceived by the ‘tax reform’ label. They view the move (and rightly so) as an attempt to halt the increase of Negro voting strength.”
After the passage of the Tax Reform Act, over 200,000 people lost nonprofit jobs funded by the OEO and private foundations. Beyond the economic impact of the law, powerful government and private institutions cut ties with committed activists, causing many of these activists to lose faith in the country’s commitment to broadening our democracy. This pushed some of them to imagine ever-more radical solutions beyond the voting booth, even stirring in a few dreams of overthrowing the American government.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832, he saw American associations as “fundamental” to our democracy. They give voice to our citizens’ myriad thoughts, concerns, and creative ideas for improving lives and the laws that govern them; nonprofits inspire and improve democratic debate.
As the Tax Reform Act of 1969 siphoned the political power from associations, HR 9495 seems designed for political purposes, to limit debate about the most pressing issues—war, climate, economic access—our country faces today. It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.
Before they vote, we should make sure our Senators realize that by shutting people up, they will damage our democracy. They may even push some to more desperate, provocative, and unruly attempts to be heard. Instead of reducing social conflict, passing HR 9495 could well increase it.
While I see many parallels with the choice we faced back then, I now think differently about how to register my opposition to war.
In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.
I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.
But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.
Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.
Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.
What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.
I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.
Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”
This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.
In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.
Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?
In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?
More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.