Jimmy Carter Was the Anti-Trump

The Trump message is not only a social, intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical obscenity. It is the most anti-Carter message imaginable.

by Rich Herschlag

Americans are notoriously bad when it comes to accepting criticism. We can accept it at certain times from certain people, but if you want to scold an American—or especially Americans as a group—learn the lay of the land or risk abject failure.

The passing of Jimmy Carter and the availability of YouTube prompted me to go back to the infamous “Malaise” or “Crisis of Confidence” speech. On July 15, 1979 I was nearing my 17^th birthday and taking summer classes at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. I was a fairly nerdy kid taking college level calculus and electrical engineering courses as a way to fast-track my college applications the following year. In my free time, instead of wandering the lush and partially empty campus in search of girls to talk to, I either hit the weight room or buried myself in a student lounge and an extracurricular book. At the time I was reading a treatise on foreign policy by Henry Kissinger.

I was primed to stop by the student lounge later in the evening, not just for some much needed human contact but to watch President Jimmy Carter give a special address to the nation about the energy crisis. I was a young policy wonk and an aspiring engineering major, so I was ready to absorb constructive solutions like a human sponge. My skepticism was fairly low, as I came from a family of Democrats and always leaned toward practical solutions to problems—personal, local, or national.

My family backdrop was sound but a bit rattled as of late. My dad and stepmom had been talking about moving out of our apartment in Queens and buying a house, but with mortgage interest rates around 12 percent and rising, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Two years earlier my dad had picked a less than ideal time to quit his managerial job in the menswear tradeshow industry and hang out his own shingle as an advertising and marketing specialist. Business was slow, and it appeared I would have to apply for financial aid the following year. The fact of the matter was, I should have been working a nasty summer job in the city instead of playing academic prodigy out in the boonies, but we scraped together the tuition and board in the name of my future.

The more serious background issue was not a family one but the state of the union in general and the city in particular. Unemployment—the other leg of stagflation—was rising steadily. The number was much higher for youths and still higher for minority youths. There were plenty of marginally occupied young men roaming around the five boroughs and New Jersey looking for a trouble, a buck, or some combination of the two. In the year 1977 over 130,000 cars were stolen right off the streets of New York City, with most of the vehicles ending up less than an hour later in one of the many mob run or independent chop shops. Literally no family you knew hadn’t had at least one car stolen during the 70s unless they never owned one. If you still had your car, good luck waiting in a gas line for hours—an “even” or “odd” day depending upon the last digit of your license plate—and hoping no one in front of you or behind lost their cool and pulled out a handgun. The streets were for the most part filthy. Illegal drugs were everywhere.

Crime was through the roof, with muggings so common you were told to keep a few dollars in your wallet and the bigger wad in your sock, as if well armed pro New York assailants hadn’t thought of making you strip below the knees. An entire subgenre of American urban crime nightmare movies was going full tilt—the Deathwish series, the Dirty Harry series, Dog Day Afternoon, The Taking of Pelham 123, Taxi Driver. Earlier that year, one of the best of the lot made its debut—The Warriors, an instant classic about New York City youth gangs living in their own desperate, violent bubble. The movie was ostensibly futuristic but was primarily a compelling dark satire of the here and now.

When the Carter speech kicked in that night I experienced a mild sinking feeling which got worse as the speech wore on. I was well versed enough in American history to understand the notion of a top-down figurative call to arms, but something was clearly amiss. The President could not muster the hint of a smile while quoting letters he’d received from disenchanted American constituents. Their written critiques of Carter and his approach to governing seemed to be darts hitting the Executive-in-Chief’s head and torso, and his insistence on reading them aloud, one after another, seemed to be an exercise in public masochism. The President’s mood appeared even more dour and severe as he transitioned to diagnosing America’s “crisis of confidence.” Their “malaise.” The once stoic people of this nation, he explained, were morally and spiritually compromised and as such had brought these various crises upon themselves—if not directly, then at least indirectly by failing to fight their way out of it.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Game, set, match. We were a bunch of lazy ass hedonists not worthy of the flags we were hanging from our porch windows. The money my folks scraped together to send me to summer school evidently came from some sort of lottery, and the eight to ten hours of daily coursework and other studying I was doing was apparently a form of mental masturbation. The fear we felt when taking the E train home late at night was imagined, and the inability to afford the mortgage rates was a symptom of my dad’s unwillingness to commit to working three shifts, seven days a week as he pushed fifty.

There I was, barely 17 and part of the next generation of eager progressive intellectuals, and the President had lost me. I continued to watch and listen as the address went on to describe fairly practical and ambitious proposals to reduce energy consumption and increase production (solar energy!). But to use a sports analogy, by that point we were playing out the string.

The following year I would volunteer for the campaign of Senator Edward Kennedy, who was seeking to primary the sitting but highly vulnerable President of the United States—a service that would put me in the middle of rural gunslinging New Hampshire knocking on doors in subfreezing temperatures. And I enjoyed it. Because I was nothing if not the opposite of a lazy ass American hedonist.

Looking back these last two weeks following Jimmy Carter’s passing at age 100, like millions of Americans and world citizens I was filled with respect and awe for the full spectrum of steadfast accomplishments during a true statesman’s troubled presidency and, moreover, his achievements and enlightenment in the decades after. Watching the malaise speech video with the advantage of age (I’m older now than when Carter gave it!), it’s easy to see that—grim bedside manner aside—he was on point and preternaturally prescient.

Still, when you play schoolmarm or taskmaster with the American people you take your political life in your hands. It’s surgery. You can conceivably get it right, but there is precious little room for error. When in his first inaugural address Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” he was issuing a bold, forthright clarion call to beleaguered Americans who at that moment needed the coach’s pep talk of a lifetime. When in his own inaugural address John F. Kennedy proclaimed “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country!” he was tapping into the pride of the World War II generation—his generation—and almost every voter in the 1960 election had at least some direct memory of the war.

In July of 1979, World War II veteran Jimmy Carter was still talking primarily to his generation. But by this point they were into their fourth decade of work and either struggling, watching their peers struggle, or both. Their kids were entering the labor force and housing market and hitting a brick wall. In what sense, they may have thought, did I bring this on myself after fighting the Battle of the Bulge and then working as a mechanic for 34 years? Jimmy Carter’s retroactively brilliant speech was at the time an epic failure to read the room, from sea to shining sea.

A year and change later, Ronald Reagan came along and cleaned Carter’s electoral clock. Reagan’s tone was exuberant, his smile infectious, and his message clear—you people are the best God ever created, but the government is holding you back.

Not surprisingly, presidential messaging and results ever since have tended to favor the optimistic over the wary: Clinton over George H.W. Bush; George W. Bush over Gore and Kerry; Obama over McCain and Romney. But something in this already somewhat superficial victory formula has gone haywire as of late. Donald Trump has won two out of three presidential contests while proclaiming the American dream is dead. While denigrating our educated, our “poorly educated,” our women, our progressives, our disabled, our scientists, our statesmen, our laws, our judiciary, our media, our intellectuals, our Muslims, our brown people, our military, our Constitution, and essentially anyone standing for a microsecond between Trump and the object of his bloodlust du jour. Exactly what room did Trump read and how did he read it?

What Trump did is take the preexisting American aversion to criticism and self-blame and distill it to its underlying 200 proof chemistry. This approach could not possibly have succeeded in 1932, 1960, or 1980. But in 2016—with a fractured, balkanized population far removed from World War II and not at all removed from 9/11, two long misbegotten Middle East wars, or the mortgage crisis of 2008—it was damn well worth a shot. I mean, what did he have to lose?

The message of 2016, marginally revamped for 2024, was not simply that you Americans (and you know who you are) are the best on God’s green earth. The metamessage was each and every one of your failures and disappointments in this life can be directly blamed on other Americans, other civilizations, other cultures, and other races. That is a powerfully alluring message for millions of people who are not simply tired of looking inward but for the most part never really learned to do it in the first place.

The Trump message is not only a social, intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical obscenity. It is the most anti-Carter message imaginable, and it is the battle cry for a once disciplined civilization rapidly becoming unmoored from decency, responsibility, and accountability. With only a few short days to go before the new “D-Day,” can you blame Jimmy Carter’s rarified, nuanced, kindly old soul for finally hitting the eject button?

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