Notes on Jimmy Carter

How I got over the Reaganite myths, and learned to see the peanut farmer's virtues.

For the last four days, people around the world have been contemplating the legacy of Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100 – the oldest age reached by any United States president. (At the moment, Joe Biden, aged 82 and still in office – and insisting that he would have won this year’s election if he hadn’t bowed out in favor of Harris! – is the oldest living president. Yes, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, and Donald Trump are all younger than him.)

I grew up in a staunchly Republican family, where I soaked up typical Republican ideas about the 1980 election and the decadence from which Ronald Reagan rescued my country. (The fact that my high school taught American History out of a two-volume textbook by William J. Bennet – Reagan’s Secretary of Education – did not help; the first half was decent enough, but the further I got into the twentieth century, the more the whole narrative read like a propaganda piece written to glorify the Reagan administration.)

I even recall, one time when I was with some other boys my age and had just done something rather idiotic, how I attempted to berate myself by turning to one of my young friends and saying “I deserve to have been named after Jimmy Carter.”

The other boy was rather confused by this, and it took me a while to explain the logic behind my self-deprecating remark. Basically, I was saying that I was a moron – in the most intense way that my 13-year-old mind could grasp.

And yet, as I grew up and started to do my own political thinking, my views on Jimmy Carter changed quite a bit. Indeed, they changed to the point that now, as my country mourns for the man, I am genuinely saddened by his loss.

First, let’s consider the myth. I grew up thinking that Jimmy Carter was a big government liberal who was responsible for the gas shortages, inflation, and general economic malaise of the late 1970s, that he was in favor of abortion and other socially liberal causes, and that his weak foreign policy and sympathy for America’s enemies had allowed Communism and Islamic fundamentalism to grow at the expense of the free world. Reagan, I was told, changed all this – his strong, confrontational foreign policy and small-government domestic policies ended the age of stagnation, made America wealthier and freer, and won the Cold War.

When I was older I admitted – reluctantly at first – that this was not true. What had happened was that Carter’s policies, both the good and the bad, continued with little change during the Reagan years, but Reagan (who not coincidentally began his career as an actor) pulled off an epic vibe shift and convinced most Americans that his policies and worldview were the opposite of Carter’s, and that all of the good things that happened during his presidency, starting with Iran’s release of the hostages during his inaugural parade, were the fruits of his victory – even though in real life, both his economic and foreign policies were largely a continuation of Carter’s.

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in Plains, Georgia, on 1 October 1924. His father was a peanut and cotton farmer and the keeper of a general store. The boy worked hard both on the farm and at school, and eventually got an appointment to the US Naval Academy where he earned an engineering degree and served aboard various ships in the early years of the Cold War. In the same year he graduated, he married Rosalynn Smith; he was 21 years old and she 19, and they would go on to have four children.

In 1952, Lieutenant Carter was assigned to work with Hyman Rickover on nuclear reactors, and in December of that year he had his closest brush with death, when he and several other men had to be lowered into the core of a partially melted down reactor at Chalk River Laboratories for just 90 seconds each (lest they be exposed to too much radiation) to perform an elaborate shutdown routine in which Carter’s job was to turn a single screw.

In 1953, Carter’s father died, and he requested (and got) a discharge from the active duty Navy so he could take over the family peanut farm. (He remained in the naval reserves until 1961.) In 1962, he won election to the Georgia State Senate, and in 1970 he successfully ran for governor under the new moniker “Jimmy,” since being known as “James Earl” was a liability so soon after James Earl Ray had assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. (James Earl Jones could get away with it since he was already well known and liked among black people.)

Upon being sworn in, Carter immediately dumped the segregationists from Georgia’s Democratic coalition (“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over…”) and shortly thereafter he consolidated a sprawling state bureaucracy of about 300 government agencies into just 22. He earned a reputation for clean governance and drawing a hard line against corruption, and a few years later, when by 1976 the Watergate scandal had made these things into a national issue, he surprised the nation by winning first the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, and then the White House itself.

(Sometimes, people lose sight of how wildly corrupt Nixon was. Obviously invading Cambodia without congressional authorization and lying to Congress about the progress of the Vietnam War were his biggest misdeeds in a constitutional sense. But one must also remember that, among all his other abuses, this was the man who, on hearing that George Wallace had been shot while running in the 1972 Democratic primaries, immediately called up his plumbers and told them to go to the failed assassin’s apartment and plant the campaign literature of rival Democrat George McGovern, so it would look like McGovern had inspired the act. The fact that Nixon not only thought of this so quickly, but had men on call who were ready and willing to do it, says volumes. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that if one made a candid list of all the things that Nixon deserved to be impeached for, Watergate wouldn’t even make the top ten. Meanwhile Gerald Ford, the president whom Carter defeated, was one of the weakest and most useless Republican politicians to ever exist. Just look at how he wasted his one Supreme Court pick on a judge who ended up as the Court’s leading liberal, or how he repeatedly insisted during a televised debate that “there is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.”)

President Carter was basically the anti-Nixon. Once in office, he did a great deal to reduce government corruption (which he was temperamentally unsuited to take part in anyway). Also, during his four years in the White House, one of Carter’s biggest priorities was… deregulation. Yes, I know that this is the exact reverse opposite of the Reaganite myth, where Carter was the big government stooge, but bear with me: such prominent libertarian authorities as Reason Magazine and the Foundation for Economic Education have said the same thing:

Carter gets a very bad rap, particularly from libertarians and conservatives, but it’s not entirely clear why. It has something to do with “malaise” and lack of “leadership.” And the Carter administration surely had its blunders, particularly on foreign policy….

[But] domestically, Carter was faced with a stagnant economy, oil and gas shortages, (caused by Nixon’s price controls) and double-digit inflation (caused by the energy crisis, Nixon’s abandoning the gold standard, and easy money from the Fed.)

To fight stagflation, Carter appointed tight-money advocate Paul Volker to head the Federal Reserve Board, and Volker pulled the brakes on inflationary monetary policy — hard. It solved inflation but sent the economy into a painful correction that probably cost Carter reelection.

And despite his personal big government sympathies, Carter’s most lasting legacy is as the Great Deregulator. Carter deregulated oil, trucking, railroads, airlines, and beer.

At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson chronicles the dramatic and almost unnoticed impact of Carter’s airline deregulation over the last thirty years. The bottom line: per-mile ticket prices fell by over fifty percent. And the results have transformed American social life and travel:

• In 1965, no more than 20 percent of Americans had ever flown in an airplane. By 2000, 50 percent of the country took at least one round-trip flight a year. The average was two round-trip tickets.

• The number of air passengers tripled between the 1970s and 2011.

• In 1974, it was illegal for an airline to charge less than $1,442 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a flight between New York City and Los Angeles. On Kayak, just now, I found one for $278.

The impact of beer deregulation has been similarly overlooked: In 1978, the USA had just 44 domestic breweries. After deregulation, creativity and innovation flourished in the above-ground economy. Today, there are 1,400 American breweries. And home brewing for personal consumption is also now legal.

As for civil liberties, Carter also signed the most significant reform of government surveillance powers since World War II in the original FISA Act, and in 1979, he called for the decriminalization of marijuana, well ahead of the cultural and political curve. His legacy is also significant for what he did not do: he did not start any wars.

In my writings, I have often expressed pessimism about overregulation – my thesis being that the burden has grown steadily since the New Deal, that nobody has any serious plans to cut it back, and that it’s strangling our economy and is probably the main reason that American manufacturing and infrastructure is so weak compared to rivals like China, or even Germany and Japan. And yet, not all kinds of regulation are the same – the things that are strangling the economy today, and making it nearly impossible to (for instance) lay high speed rail track or operate airlines in towns with less than a hundred thousand people – are mostly environmental and safety regulations, of the sort that Noah Smith has criticized in articles like “The Build-Nothing Country.”

The financial regulations that were set up under Roosevelt, Johnson, and Nixon, and pared back by Carter, Reagan, and Clinton (note the complete irrelevance of the partisan affiliations here) were of a different sort, and it’s to America’s great benefit that both political parties have dumped the economic theories that once made them seem desirable.

So Jimmy Carter deserves credit for cutting the kinds of regulations that mattered the most during his actual time in office. He also deserves credit for escalating the Cold War against the USSR by funding the Polish Solidarity Movement and other nonviolent resistors in Eastern Europe, for imposing a grain embargo after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and for arming the Afghan Mujahedeen. (The boycott of the 1980 Olympics was well-meaning but, in my opinion, went too far.)

Carter was also in the right to help a few hundred thousand South Asian refugees resettle in the United States. (It is one thing to be an open-borders squash; it is another thing to be a Godfearing man who thinks that when one nation recklessly endangers the lives and liberties of a bunch of foreigners – as the United States had just done in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos – it is said nation’s responsibility to effect those people’s survival as best it can.)

There are of course plenty of things President Carter did that I disagree with. I do not think that he should have broken off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to placate the Chinese Communist Party. (The fact that Taiwan was smaller and less strategically useful to the US isn’t the important thing; the important thing is that numerous presidents before Carter had promised continued diplomatic and military support to Taiwan in exchange for Taiwan not developing nuclear weapons, and breaking a promise simply because it’s expedient tends to ruin a nation’s credibility and encourage its enemies to further exploit its demonstrated weakness.)

Likewise, I disagree with Carter’s failure to do or say anything meaningful against the recent train of lawless power-grabs by the US Supreme Court, especially the nationwide legalization of abortion, which Carter admitted (in accordance with his Christian faith) was a great evil. And I have mixed feelings about Carter’s decision to pardon the Vietnam draft dodgers. On the one hand, it was a slap in the face to the million or so Americans who answered the call of duty and fought and sometimes died in Vietnam, but at the same time, the draft dodgers’ basic intuition – that the Vietnam War was a pointless waste of life and that America’s leaders knew this and weren’t being honest about it – was correct.

But despite all of this, it is very difficult for an intelligent person to respond to Carter’s failures by saying that Reagan was the man who set things right, since it turned out that Reagan, after lambasting Carter during the election in so many ways, just kept on doing whatever Carter had been doing, both the good and the bad. He continued deregulation (though after the first two years or so he caved to administrative inertia and ended up accomplishing less than Carter had), and he kept Paul Volcker on as his Fed chair all the way through 1987.

Reagan kept a big military presence in the Middle East (in accordance with the Carter Doctrine), he found ways to further escalate the Cold War, and he stood manfully against Russian communism while wisely keeping America out of direct conflicts resembling the Vietnam War. But he also continued to lick Deng Xiaoping’s boots and carry water for Chinese communism – for instance by conducting hostile espionage against Taiwan and successfully bullying Taiwan into giving up its nuclear weapons program once that CIA had publicized it with the help of the traitor Chang Hsien-yi.

And Reagan, after running on promises to appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and help the religious right ban abortion and enact other socially conservative laws, ended up throwing those people under the bus. There is just no other way to explain his nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor – who was on record trying to decriminalize abortion when she was in the Arizona State Legislature in 1970 – to his first Supreme Court vacancy, when the Republican Senate would have easily confirmed anybody. (The Anthony Kennedy nomination in 1988 is somewhat more forgivable, as the Democratic Senate had just rejected the originalist Robert Bork, but a better option would have been to pick someone like Byron White who was pro-life but centrist on economic/labor issues where the Court just didn’t matter as much.)

At least with Jimmy Carter, religious voters knew that they were getting someone who wanted to keep his Christian principles semi-private and avoid trying to reverse the left’s recent gains.

And so, when you really look at it, the main difference between Carter and Reagan is one of showmanship. Reagan, the actor, had the right mix of genuine theatrical skills and old-fashioned hypocrisy to bill himself as the anti-Carter, and then continue Carter’s (mostly successful) policies while taking all of the credit and none of the blame.

Carter, despite having a good engineering and administrative mind, did not shine nearly as well on the debate stage. Also, he was willing to do things like letting Paul Volcker cause a depression right before the 1980 election by raising interest rates to 17.61% (since this was the only way to stop inflation), or telling Americans bluntly, in his famous “sweater speech,” that oil and natural gas are finite resources and that only real answer to the energy crisis is to just use less energy (for instance by not turning up one’s heater when one could wear a sweater instead.)

And this opened up vulnerabilities that Reagan ruthlessly exploited, by spinning up the myth of Carter as a soft president who failed to rescue the hostages in Iran, counselled defeatism in the face of high energy prices, and wouldn’t confront the liberal lawyers who were tearing down America’s public morality… no wonder this man was the only president to make the news by getting attacked by a giant swimming rabbit.

Fortunately, Jimmy Carter picked himself up after his electoral defeat and went on to have, by far, the best post-presidency of any modern president.

The fact that he and Rosalynn were fairly young when they left (only 56 and 54 years old) and that they went on to live a long time certainly helped, but the main reason that they accomplished so much with the Carter Center was that (unlike the Clintons) they were just less interested in glitz and hobnobbing with famous people. Besides the usual mix of democracy-promotion and education and poverty relief, the Carters picked an important but unglamorous cause to focus their efforts on – eradicating the guinea worm, a truly nasty parasite which caused about 3.5 million infections in Africa and South Asia in 1986.

Jimmy Carter pursued the guinea worm problem with the same mixture of Christian charity and old-fashioned work ethic that led him to keep on teaching Sunday school in his little church in Plains, Georgia clear into his nineties. And now, thanks largely to his efforts, in 2024 there were only eleven guinea worm infections in just two countries – Chad and South Sudan. Carter didn’t quite reach his goal of outliving the last guinea worm, but he came close.

And we shouldn’t discount the diplomatic value of a president spending his sunset years travelling around India and the Sahel on bumpy dirt roads and sleeping in plain houses, all so he could meet with the leaders of the villages who needed help dealing with the 3-foot-long flesh-eating worms that were infecting their people. This went a long ways in convincing impressionable people that America wasn’t an evil empire bent on exploitation – perhaps not far enough to offset the effects of a Nixon or a Kissinger, but further than any other president has gone. (He was certainly more deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize than Kissinger – or, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson or Barrack Obama; Theodore Roosevelt was the only other US president whose actions really merited it.)

I think that, on the balance, Carter was the best president the United States had between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump. He did not have the salesmanship skills that made Nixon and Reagan better politicians – his mind was more of the administrator or the engineer than the retail politician, which is why he generally got better results working on nuclear reactors at the beginning of his life, and killing off guinea worms at the end, than politicking in the middle.

Obviously, Carter did not have the mixture of foresight and courage that a man would have needed to confront the long-term problems that were set in motion shortly before he took office, and which have by now tipped the United States over into decline – runaway entitlement spending, the unconstrained administrative state, the collapse of public morality, the lack of limits on judicial power, and the endless proliferation of environmental and safety and credentialing and race equity regulations that have by now strangled our physical economy.

A few people realized early on what was happening – Barry Goldwater, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jesse Helms, Ron Paul, Thomas Sowell – but none of them got close to the White House. The America of Jimmy Carter’s day wasn’t capable of producing a world-historical leader, so we shouldn’t blame Carter for not being one. What we got was a man of high personal integrity who served his country in some fairly limited ways, but who also served it more effectively than most of his contemporaries did. And this – my family’s legacy of Reaganism notwithstanding – is something to be grateful for.