Jimmy Carter was admired by so many people because there have been so few people like him. Even those who take a dim view of his presidency or have little sympathy for his Christian worldview have found Carter to be almost saintlike. He wore clothes from the dollar store, built houses for charity, and always arrived on time.
He spoke forthrightly on subjects like Israeli apartheid and American inequality. On the latter, he sounded like Bernie Sanders, for whom he voted in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. When Carter entered hospice care almost two years ago, one progressive leader (from the Working Families Party) called him “ahead of his time” and another (from MoveOn) hailed his “legacy of progressive people-first policies.”
Yet it was Carter who ushered in the neoliberal policy regime that has shaped our age of inequality and provoked bitter opposition from the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, as we consider the former president’s legacy, we cannot disentangle his attractive personal qualities with his much more fraught neoliberal policy legacy.
His private virtues proved to be public vices. The same thrift and moral seriousness that make Carter stand out also fed into his austerity policies — which proved to be political suicide in 1980 and, in updated versions ever since, have stunted the lives of millions of Americans and sustained extreme social inequality, which looks increasingly incompatible with our democracy.
Nearly everything you might associate with Reaganomics was actually underway by the time Carter left office: deregulation of energy, transportation, communications and finance; higher military spending alongside reductions in support for low-income Americans; punishingly high interest rates; trade expansion; rapid deindustrialization; and accelerating de-unionization. Carter was hardly the only force behind these outcomes, but he contributed intentionally to each.
By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”
It is common to separate Carter’s laudable personal qualities from his presidency, which even admirers tend to consider a failure. But his neoliberalism was bound up with his temperament and value system. Think about the different meanings of “austerity.” In political economy, the word refers to budget cuts and wage restraint. In personal life, austerity means the moralization of sparseness, the practice of sucking it up and doing without.