Jimmy Carter was a great man, yet his Legacy is the post-truth era, a weak and divided American left, and the belief that selflessness is for suckers
The Peanut Farmer is dead: should centrists rejoice or despair?
I was both conceived and born during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. I think this is a key aspect of my emotional, psychological and professional make up. His wholesomeness, his selflessness, and his belief in making America a better and more equitable place, more capable of fostering international institutions are at the core of my being.
Jimmy Carter was the last of an old generation of American politicians. He represented a simpler/better/more honest time. A time when an evangelical Christian could be left wing and want higher taxes, a time when an internationalist, who wanted to promote American power could care about human rights, a time when a Southern farmer could rise to the presidency on the sheer force of his character.
Jimmy Carter was a great man and a great American. Yet I fear his legacy has been to usher in our current culture wars and to cast support for international institutions and rules as contrary to America’s realpolitik interests. The cruc of the matter is the rule of law and taxation equity (things we desperately need) must be paired with shrewd decision making to succeed. Carter didn’t increase peace in the Middle East despite signing the Camp David Accords, he didn’t increase American leverage in the Middle East, he foreshadowed the withdrawal of that power and the empowerment of America’s fissiparous and fractious and shortsighted allies. Carter didn’t succeed in making America more equitable at home, his lack of genuine leadership allowed the rise of the neo-liberals and Reagan/Thatcherite weakening of State capacity. Carter was a great human but a poor leader.
To show you how divided opinion is about Carter first I direct you to friend of the Podcast, Brian Klaas’s substack:
But achieve much he did.
Carter deregulated airlines, bringing affordble air travel to the masses; he appointed 57 ethnic minority judges to the bench, along with 41 female judges—more than all of his predecessors combined; he advocated for environmental policies that were decades before their time; and in an era in which the United States was notorious for propping up murderous regimes across the globe so long as they were our allies, he put human rights center stage in American foreign policy debates.
Carter was a consequential president.
But unlike most presidents, Carter did more for humanity after leaving the White House. The Carter Center, the NGO that he founded in 1982, has been a crucial force for good, known primarily for its work on successfully promoting democracy and providing high-quality election monitoring across the globe. It deserves that reputation….
The post-presidency reveals a president’s true character
There are good presidents and bad ones, but it’s often difficult to disentangle how much of a president’s legacy is down to character, how much is down to skill, and how much is down to luck….
We have lost Jimmy Carter, but Carter’s presence will be felt around the world for decades to come. Now that he has died, consider his hidden legacies—because he has literally saved millions upon millions of people from excruciating pain, debilitating disease, and blindness. That, surely, is a legacy we can all agree is worth celebrating.
Brian has expressed his case brilliantly as he always does. I agree on Jimmy’s character but I take a more cynical view of his legacy. I think he failed to press America’s advantage and create a world where Freedom could thrive and our enemies would fear us.
To present the polar opposite view I next I direct you to the hard right, pro-Western, pro-Israeli, American nationalist Christopher Messina’s subtack:
Ambassador Oren has written accurately and has been far more polite in his treatment of Carter’s trail of damage than I ever could be. I have covered Jimmy’s stupidity ad nauseam in my writings on the Federal Budget…
I celebrate Carter’s passing and hope he’s getting exactly what he deserves in the afterlife he believed in.
So let us say there exists a not so mild controversy about Carter and my view is somewhere in the middle… I prefer Brian’s view of course and I want it to be the overall truth but I fear despite his fairly odious language that Christopher Messina may be on to something. Tragic but true… and part of my New Year’s resolution is to give the hard right its due when it has correctly seized on Establishment weakness or fecklessness.
So to hear my thoughts and a very funny story about the Peanut Farmer that happened to be told to me by a man who met him, reviled him, and deeply understood the Middle East… pls listen to this below audio (you can watch the video if you want but you can also just click and listen):
We are back tomorrow with a New Year’s Eve episode of Disorder to share on the substack… Until then be well