Since news organizations do draft obituaries long in advance, there will be plenty of information about Jimmy Carter and his legacy coming out.
My view of his Presidential Administration is mixed. But so far as I’m aware, he has been by far the best ex-President ever. He devoted his post-Presidential career promoting charitable work like building houses with Habitat for Humanity for people too poor to buy one. And also working with his Carter Center to encourage constructive international diplomacy and peaceful settlements of conflicts. The Carter Center provided important election-monitoring in countries that were struggling to secure democratic governance for themselves.
His positions in his post-Presidential period are symbolized for me by two books he published. One from 2005:
Carter was a Southern Baptist most of his life, though he eventually formally left the Southern Baptist Convention because it had so embraced rightwing social values that it celebrated war and the death penalty, while bitterly opposing women’s rights including the right to abortion. In that book, he explained that the endangerment to decent American – and honest Christian – values was coming from militarism and the Radical Right. And this was long before Donald Trump sent a violent, howling mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempted “auto-coup” to keep Trump in office even though he had lost the 2020 Presidential election.
In this book, he calls out the torture program at Guantanamo – which is still to this day open as a US-run prison, to the shame of every Administration since the one headed by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He also denounced the systematic torture of prisoners in Iraq under the orders of that grim Administration:
The terrible pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have brought discredit on our country. This is especially disturbing, since U.S. intelligence officers estimated to the Red Cross that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees at this prison were held by mistake. Military officials reported that at least 108 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other secret locations just since 2002, with homicide acknowledged as the cause of death in at least 28 cases. The fact that only one of these was in Abu Ghraib prison indicates the widespread pattern of prisoner abuse, certainly not limited to the actions or decisions of just a few rogue enlisted persons. ...
The superficial investigations under the auspices of the Department of Defense have made it obvious that no high-level military officers or government officials will be held accountable, but there is no doubt that their public statements and private directives cast doubt and sometimes ridicule on the applicability of international standards of human rights and the treatment of prisoners. [my emphasis]
He also denounced the “extraordinary rendition” program that was one of the ugliest symptoms of the depravity of the Cheney-Bush government:
Subsequent evidence revealed that despite previous denials … American leaders had adopted a supplementary policy of transferring prisoners to foreign countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan, most of which have been condemned in our government's annual human rights reports for habitually using torture to extract information. Although opposed by the State Department, this practice has been approved at the top levels of U.S. government. It is known as "extraordinary rendition," and the official excuses are that the victims have been classified as "illegal enemy combatants" and that our military or CIA personnel "don't know for certain" that they will be tortured. Members of Congress and legal specialists estimate that 150 prisoners have been included in this exceptional program. The techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, "partial boiling of a hand or an arm," with at least two prisoners boiled to death. [my emphasis]
The
de facto immunity that the officials responsible for that program received is a disgrace to the US justice system and, in particular, to the Obama Administration. Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder never made a serious effort to perform their duty of making a serious criminal investigation on the architects of the torture program. This is one of the instances of elite immunity for criminal acts that set the stage for the January 6 coup attempt.
In that book, he also called out the disastrous direction of US Israel policy, and described the destructive role that the Christian Zionist Protestant fundamentalists that are a major piece of Trump’s constituency now had contributed to thoroughly irresponsible US policy in support of illegal acts and territorial annexations by Israel.
And he flagged the harmful nature of the civil liberties abuses empowered by the Cheney-Bush “Patriot Act.”
And he flagged the harmful nature of the civil liberties abuses empowered by the Cheney-Bush “Patriot Act.”
Carter really did take a liberal, social activist
Christian view of the world and of politics. This is part of why I find the European usage of “political Islam” so awkward. Because it’s certainly possible to have religiously motivated concerns that don’t come married to an insistence on a state church or an official religion or suppression of dissenting religious beliefs. The American Christian nationalists also have a “political Christianity,” but it is very much a repressive, non-liberal one that does not respect the liberal-democratic notion of separation of church and state. But Carter did have a social and political outlook very much influenced by his Protestant Christian faith. Much the way that four-time California Gov. Jerry Brown has a social vision very much influenced by Catholic Christianity and by Zen Buddhism.
This following book of Carter’s from 2006 was a plea for a more practical and realistic view of Israel and the reality of its settlement policies.
He argued for a return to actively pursuing a two-state solution, which the Cheney-Bush and subsequent Presidential Administrations ignored. Carter described there the de facto state of apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories that had been developing.
Carter’s promotion as President of the peace process that produced the Camp David Accords of 1978, which led to the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, is widely credited with opening the way to a diplomatic approach that could have led to an independent Palestinian state. Critics at the time, like Democratic Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota – the first Arab-American Senator, who passed away in 2023 – warned at the time that failure to include a settlement of the Palestinian questions, which the Camp David process essentially sidestepped, could lead to bad long-term consequences.
But Carter continued to actively push for such a settlement the rest of his life. Allan Brownfeld as part of a 2023 series on Carter’s legacy for the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs wrote:
Dedicated to peace and human rights around the world, Carter’s tireless efforts to bring Israel and Egypt together in a peace agreement during the 1978 negotiations at Camp David are widely viewed as the most consequential contribution any U.S. president has made toward Israel’s security since its founding. This represented the first personally negotiated peace agreement since Theodore Roosevelt successfully settled the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Even Menachem Begin reluctantly agreed that Carter “had worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.”
Yet Carter was repaid for his success and for his commitment to both Israeli security and Palestinian rights with a consistent campaign of vilification by American Jewish leaders. Most of them never forgave him for the tenacity with which he pursued his vision of an evenhanded Middle East peace. [my emphasis] (1)
Deborah Lipstadt is an important Holocaust scholar who now works for the State Department. Her successful court fight with the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving was an important win for honest history. But her response to Carter’s
Peace Not Apartheid book is indefensible:
When he wrote the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which became a New York Times best-seller in 2007, the attacks on Carter became brutal. Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor at Emory University, now Special State Department Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, reviewed the book for The Washington Post and accused Carter of relying on “anti-Semitic stereotypes.” She charged that Carter “has repeatedly fallen back on traditional anti-Semitic canards. When David Duke spouts it, I yawn, when Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.”
At the time, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman called Carter “a bigot” and denounced him in paid newspaper advertisements around the country. Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic and an outspoken Zionist, called Carter a “Jew-hater” and “a jackass.” We could fill pages with the bitter assaults on Jimmy Carter by Zionist activists whose first charge against anyone who criticizes Israeli policy is “anti-Semitism.”
Lipstadt in her current role has been a staunch defender of the genocide that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is currently pursuing in Gaza.
Foreign Policy as President
Carter took office in 1977 when there was strong public sentiment to move away from the kind of military interventionism that had led to the Vietnam disaster. It’s a sign of the ambiguity of Carter’s foreign policy that he campaigned in 1976 on a promise to reduce the number of US troops in South Korea. By 1980, he was campaigning on the fact that he had
increased the number of troops there.
Carter’s Administration was very divided on its foreign policy course. Cyrus Vance, who served as Secretary of State from 1977 to 1980, argued for a less militarized and confrontational approach in foreign affairs. He was consistently opposed by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who took basically a hawkish/militarist approach.
On the most critical issue for American foreign policy, nuclear arms control, Carter successfully negotiated the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union, which was observed in practice even though it wasn’t ratified by the US Senate as a formal treaty.
It was during Carter’s Administration that the Iranian Revolution took place, which notoriously involved militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini taking over the American Embassy and holding US personnel hostage. Here, the Brzezinski hard line that Carter pursued in stubbornly backing the Shah, to the point of bringing him physically to the United States, served to aggravate the problems the Iranian Revolution caused for the US. It turned out to be a major reason for Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Another embarrassing moment in Carter’s foreign policy came after Vietnam’s incursion in January 1979 into Cambodia and its replacing of the grotesque, cultish Pol Pot dictatorship. The Carter Administration insisted on continuing to recognize the Pol Pot gang as Cambodia’s official representation at the United Nations even after the government was overthrown:
In the face of mounting evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, the U.S. government stayed quiet. After the debacle of the Vietnam War, few American politicians were willing to get reinvolved in Southeast Asia, and the government was not eager to examine its complex role in Cambodia's collapse. Not until April 1978 did President Jimmy Carter declare the Khmer Rouge "the worst violator of human rights in the world." (2)
The decision to continue recognizing the Pol Pot group as the formal government was arguably in line with conventional diplomatic practice. The government had been overthrown by a foreign invasion. In the context of that remarkably cruel Cambodian regime, that was an exceptionally awkward moment. Especially since Carter had made promotion of human rights a major theme of his Administration.
Carter approved a military incursion into Iran to try to rescue the hostages, a move with Vance opposed and Brzezinski supported. The US military just plain botched that mission and it became a huge political embarrassment for the Administration. The decision to launch that raid led to Vance’s resignation as Secretary of State. (3)
And, yes, there was heavy circumstantial evidence of an actual conspiracy on the part of the Reagan campaign to delay the release of the US hostages until after the 1980 election. That plan was almost certainly a factor that led the Reagan Administration to pursue the Iran-Contra arms sales, which became a major scandal for Reagan. Carter’s White House point man for Iran, Gary Sick explained that situation in his 1991 book,
October Surprise. (4)
Another fateful decision in which Carter took the foreign policy course advocated by Brzezinski was to back the Brave Mujahideen Freedom Fighters (as they were known then) waging guerilla war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. They later came to be known as Islamist jihadists. Osama bin Laden got his start in the jihadist business in Afghanistan. Since the Soviets did eventually leave, hawks have argued ever since that supporting the Islamic terrorists – uh, I mean the Brave Mujahideen Freedom Fighters – was decisive in bringing down the Soviet Union. And that idea also encouraged the notion that having a war of Ukrainians against Russia would be equally beneficial to American interests.
Brzezinski infamously evaluated the results: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" As Rachel Bronson said in a 2003 statement prepared for the 9/11 Commission using that comment as an example, “American leaders were convinced that bringing down the Soviet Union was worth the costs of empowering religious radicals.” (5)
Carter’s Domestic Policies
As much of an icon as Carter became later to Democrats, it may take some effort to recall that the Democratic left and the labor unions were at best reserved about his policies. As a politically weakened candidate for renomination in 2000, he faced active challenges from Ted Kennedy and Jerry Brown. Carter is often given blame (or credit, depending on one’s point of view) for initiating what is now familiarly called the “neoliberal” turn in American economic policy. Historian David Gibbs wrote on the occasion of Carter’s 100th birthday:
As he celebrates his 100th birthday on Tuesday, Jimmy Carter is known for many things: He is a white southerner who advocated racial integration and equality. He is a Sunday-school Bible teacher who also supports abortion rights. As an ex-president, he has mediated global conflicts and worked to eradicate disease. But Carter must also be remembered for something else: During his term as president, he inaugurated the neoliberal revolution in political economy. (6)
Michael Lind has even taken the quirky view that: “An epochal shift indeed took place -- but it happened in 1976, not 1980. The Age of Reagan should be called the Age of Carter, in politics and policy alike.” (7) The most generous spin I could put on that view is that it obscures more than it explains.
Broadly speaking, neoliberalism involved a turn away from welfare-state or social-democratic perspective toward deregulation of business, weakening of labor unions, privatization of public property, and conservative approaches to controlling inflation. I would argue that the most significant turn that Carter made in that regard was appointing Paul Volcker, Jr., as chair of the Federal Reserve. With housing prices rising sharply in urban areas in the 1970s, inflation was aggravated by an oil shortage resulting from a relatively small (4%) drop in Iranian oil production in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which resulted in the much-dreaded “gas lines” at service stations. Volcker’s response was to drastically raise interest rates, thus exacerbating the recession of January-July 1980.
But Carter’s economic policy was not full-blown Reaganomics. It was during Carter’s term that the crackpot notion of “supply-side economics” took off among Republicans, representing one of the dumber manifestations of the neoliberal trends. The Carter Administration, however, took the problem of unemployment very seriously. He initiated an effective job-training program called CETA, which in that case stood for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (not the current EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, also known as CETA).
Sean Byrnes writing for the social-democratic
Jacobin has a more realistic perspective:
Though Carter achieved more than he is generally given credit for — and remains among the more decent men to have held the office — his presidency failed to bring about the fundamental transformation he sought. Instead, his term helped establish a far more dubious pattern: Democratic presidents with admirably ambitious policy agendas stymied by an inability to form a durable coalition or stem the erosion of their party’s support among the working and middle classes. (8)
And I can’t improve on Byrnes’ concluding comment. He argues that Carter started a trend among Democrats of “solutions-oriented politics,” but which lacked “substantive attempts to immediately improve the economic lives of voters by redistributing income” in the New Deal/Great Society tradition:
All of his Democratic successors in the Oval Office have fallen into much the same trap. Carter’s presidency did therefore prove transformational, just not in the way he intended. Those on the Left seeking to escape the pattern Carter established should look less to his presidency, and more to his post-presidency: an admirable, long, and dedicated effort to immediately improve and elevate the lives of those suffering from depravation, illness, and want. A president pursuing such an approach in office could be transformational indeed. [my emphasis]
But I also don’t want to slide into too-easy generalizations. For all his very real faults, especially in foreign policy, Joe Biden’s “industrial policy” economic approach, combined with active encouragement of labor organizing and an active anti-trust policy, really did represent a turn back toward the Great Society legacy that Carter’s Democratic critics in 1976 and 1980 were defending. (9) If the Democratic Party doesn’t want the country to have to stumble and bumble through decades of Trumpism, they need to go further and more consistently in the direction that Biden moved on economic policy.
At the very least, the publicity about Carter on the occasion of his passing and the constructive contrasts his example during and after his Presidency present to what we’ve endured in more recent decades will be an important reminder that there are better alternatives.
Notes:
(1) Brownfeld, Allan (2023) in Five Views - President Jimmy Carter’s Legacy.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2023. <
https://www.wrmea.org/2023-may/jewish-community-smears-carter-with-charges-of-anti-semitism.html> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(2) Chronicle of Survival-1975-1979-Terror and Genocide.
PBS Frontline World Pol Pot's Shadow Oct. 2002. <
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl03.html> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(3) Vance recounted his version in his memoir,
Hard choices: Critical years in America's Foreign Policy (1983).
(4) Sick, Gary (1991):
October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. New York & Toronto: Times Books.
See also: Parry, Robert (1993):
Trick Or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery. New York: Sheridan Square Press.
(5) Statement of Rachel Bronson to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States July 9, 2003. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. <
https://9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing3/witness_bronson.htm> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(6) Gibbs, David (2024): America’s First Neoliberal President.
Compact 10/01/2024. <
https://www.compactmag.com/article/americas-first-neoliberal-president/> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(7) Lind, Michael (2011): How Reaganism actually started with Carter.
Salon 02/08/2011. <
https://www.salon.com/2011/02/08/lind_reaganism_carter/> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(8) Byrnes, Sean (2024): Jimmy Carter Held the Door Open for Neoliberalism.
Jacobin 12/29/2024. <
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-obituary-neoliberalism-foreign-policy> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
(9) Glass, Aurelia & Walter, Karla (2022): How Biden’s American-Style Industrial Policy Will Create Quality Jobs. Center for American Progress 10/27/2024. <
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-bidens-american-style-industrial-policy-will-create-quality-jobs/> (Accessed: 2024-30-12).
