The ongoing supply chain crisis, which threatens the pipeline of consumer goods from China to the United States, has resulted in a cluster of predictable political reactions. The right has jumped on the optics, tagging the president “Bare Shelves Biden”; the administration, playing defense, has stepped up efforts to prove that it’s pushing companies and major ports to resolve the blockages. What hasn’t happened yet, at least not on the national stage, is a moral discussion around American habits of consumption and a discussion of whether we could meet this crisis by modifying some of those habits. To judge by the last 40-odd years of American politics, that may never happen.
That’s because the Biden administration’s struggle to frame the supply chain crisis recalls another besieged presidency from our past: that of Jimmy Carter. Remember Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, as it came to be known (though the word malaise appears nowhere in the actual speech)? Amid an energy crisis, Carter went on national television on July 15, 1979, and called for America to return to a sense of civic republicanism (lower case) that would unify citizens through a call to shared sacrifice for a common good.
I describe in my book, “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?,” how this speech came about. Carter had canceled an earlier scheduled energy crisis speech so that he could deliberate more on what he wanted to say. To write the “Crisis of Confidence” speech (the actual title), he gathered elected officials, accomplished scholars, religious leaders, and public intellectuals, having dinners at the White House and meetings at Camp David with thinkers like Marc Tanenbaum, then national director for interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee. In their meeting, Tanenbaum pushed the president to ask Americans to move away from “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence” in order to find a way to “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on an endless accumulation of goods.”
Following Tanenbaum, the sociologist Robert Bellah—who was becoming known as a “communitarian” at the time—argued that Carter could learn from the original Puritan settlers and their “covenant model,” and use the language of America as a “City on the Hill” (an idea that Ronald Reagan would later steal for his own). Bellah argued to the president that he could present the vision of a world in which “people participate in each other’s lives because they are mutually committed to values that transcend self-interest.”