Jimmy Two: America in Carter's Second Term
- Thread starter Vidal
- Start date
Yep. Stops just before November 4th, 1979, which is when the hostages were taken IOTL
It’s pretty accurate. Yes! summed him up pretty well. Perlsteins smart but he’s also an utter jackass
Amazing timeline!
How could 2nd term Carter deal with not only HIV/AIDS epidemic but the Able Archer and the treatment of the Philippines under Marcoses?
How could 2nd term Carter deal with not only HIV/AIDS epidemic but the Able Archer and the treatment of the Philippines under Marcoses?
I think Able Archer may happen much differently or not happen at all.
As part of how I process all this goodness let me gush first.
There's so much here in these three comments, and so much that my own tangents-all-the-way-down self sees related to these three comments, that it may take me a couple of days to get through it properly. @Vidal that first comment is one of the very best on this site, period, the second an excellent follow-up, and @Wolfram's response is as precise and perceptive and entirely dialed in on that as I'd expect it to be. That's a whole lot to follow up on. But I'll try, and try while I'm at it not to ramble overmuch or get too far afield.
So.
Where Rick and Jimmy come together as topic for discussion, I think, is with the fight over historical memory and especially our just-so narratives, those foundational elements of being human where we explain how things at a deep level got to be the way they are. There I think they get inextricable in terms of historiography but also in terms of human nature, a point to which I'll get at the end.
To get there I'll go in the opposite direction of the comments cited: I'll start with Rick to get to Jimmy, then come back around at the close where some themes tie them together.
It will surprise no one who knows me well around here when I say I'm not a Perlstein stan. Now, that doesn't mean his work doesn't have value - far from it, and some of it, especially his earliest work, represents real breakthroughs in our study of the era where he's at home as a historian. He was close to the first, and certainly turned out to be the most significant in terms of exposure for his work, to combine a style smart general readers could get into, full-scope academic training, and a deep understanding of who his subjects were (here I mean specifically the emergent New Right coalition in The Gathering Storm), an ability to get inside their worldview and really explain why as well as how they did as they did. When he hews closest to his original subject matter he's still one of the most knowledgeable and incisive historians of the modern Right in the US (though there are some others of equal skill and a bit more subtlety/complexity - here among others I'd name my old undergrad classmate Kevin Kruse, especially his early work on white-flight politics.) Also Perlstein helped revive the nearly-lost practice of "respectable" historians, those with strong roots in and ties to formal academia, doing broad, synthetic, era-based histories rather than overdetermined niche specialization.
(Mind, some of that specialization is very well done and, as I'll get to in a bit, Perlstein relies on it a lot more than he likes to advertise. Certainly the quality of specialist academic work has gotten a lot better since my fellow GenX historians, post-9/11, junked the PoMo gatekeep-lingo bullshit imposed on us in grad school by our Boomer professors/advisors, or at least among those who did so. But the guild-based gatekeeping of meritocratic career-ladder specialization has, as modern institutionalized "meritocracy" often does, ruined a lot of what's good about the historical profession - many other professions too.)
Now we get to the other parts. Perlstein is a rather arch, formalist, specialized, and yes very much gatekeeping fan of Modern jazz. I capitalize because I don't mean contemporary, but rather the hard bop and also more tonally-experimental jazz of the Fifties and Sixties, back in the late days of High Modernism generally. (To his credit he's a decent jazz pianist which, I know from experience, is not actually easy.) I'd say he's a lot like one of the people who may in fact (I don't know this for sure) be one of his heroes: Miles Davis. Miles, especially in his youth, was a genuinely very talented trumpet player. (Not the best mind, though a lot of hipsters would tell you so - the best was probably Dizzy or maybe, for the brief time we had him on this earth, Clifford Brown.) His particular gift, the thing that really distinguished him like Perlstein's intuitive understanding of the New Right mindset, was that Miles had an instinctive sense, and a gifted ability to translate into performance, about the musicality of silence, the way to use the spaces between sounds to enhance the music.
Just as important for him, though, was his ability at the takeoff phase of his career to cultivate an aura. He was genuinely good, and had this specific gift that was special, and more than either of those two things discretely he cultivated an aura that (1) they were even bigger and more important than they probably actually were and (2) that they made everything else about him and his music that special too. As a result, Miles was able to collaborate with many of the greatest musicians of his era. Even the most basic list of folks he collaborated with on the regular at the height of his fame, either on specific records or in his two successive quintets, reads like a pantheon of Modern jazz. Sonny Rollins, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Victor Feldman ... and John Coltrane. Damn near everyone of those musicians, on their own instrument and in their own metier, was arguably more talented than Miles himself, and the rest could at least hang with him. They enhanced that Miles Davis aura tremendously, pushed him to do better himself, they produced music that's legendary for a reason through their collaborations, and gave Miles the chance to stand on their shoulders en route to becoming a legend himself.
In the long run, that didn't work out so well. Legend-hood was not good for Miles. Especially so because, as a real human person and a member of the wider family of professional music, Miles was a colossal penis. Just a garbage human. Vainglorious, narcissistic, moody, waspish, petulant, sometimes even violent, dismissive of anything that wasn't about how awesome he was in the present moment - even writing off the best music he was ever involved with as "warmed-over turkey" - or how much more awesome he'd be in the future when he could do it all on his own terms. His success standing on the shoulders of others allowed him to go so far up his own fundament that the journey could be used as a sequel to Labyrinth.
In concrete terms, he went off to get involved much deeper in the experimental version of fusion jazz, and in that process produced several albums but most notably Bitches' Brew. Bitches' Brew was hailed for decades because genre-gatekeeper elites are all knaves and fools. Its reputation has, thankfully, descended over time because it might actually be the most self-indulgent twaddle ever produced by a major artist in the world of jazz. If not it's a game effort.
It wasn't as popular as the older stuff though, and Davis hated that people didn't appreciate his full, individual endlessly self-absorbed genius. He got reclusive and even tetchier, and when he'd emerge in later years his live and recorded performances were often erratic, or at other times sounded - probably accurately - like he was phoning it in. He ended a bitter old man alone with his ego.
Now that's a rabbit hole of healthy size to go down. But it highlights some things. Part of Perlstein's dominance of synthetic history means relying on the work of a lot of other very talented people - from first-draft-of-history journos to specialized academics to other synthesists - who he's usually careful to cite thoroughly off in endnotes that few people (other than us!) read, but doesn't like to advertise. In some cases, especially in his later work - haven't really gotten into/through Reaganland but it's quite notable in the back half of Invisible Bridge - whole sections are warmed-over versions of other people's earlier accounts. Now, it's great that he's brought those subjects, those accounts, to such a wide audience. But to think that this is solely his own insight at work would overestimate him.
He is, true, terrible at much of his cultural analysis. But in an effort to be fair, that's not just his fault - nearly all formally-trained historians, whatever their own political views, are terrible at "cultural analysis" because suddenly they junk all their training and attention to sources and multiple points of view and use "close readings" of films or fads or music or other such as playgrounds for their own biases. If I ding him there, I ding nearly everyone - which I do, he's right there in the front rank but it's certainly not just him. There's hardly any exploration of sources like fan mail and communities, or oral histories of cultural phenomena, or explorations of debates or multiple meanings or the ways fans of anything take that thing and refashion it to suit themselves, much less the sort of analysis the better class of literature or film prof would apply to multiple meanings and technical methods in the artistic product.
But here's where we reel it back in from the tangents and get to the point that gets us towards Jimmy. Perlstein is not just a colossal dick personally who's gotten to be more of one with time - neither fame's insulation nor its adulation have served him at all well - he is especially a colossal dick of a very specific type.
He's the captain of the debate team who's fearsomely good at relentless, meticulous argument, at pointing out how he clearly understands the world and how folks should listen because his argument is inherently persuasive (because it's both right and the whole of rightness, he'll tell you) but if the judges don't buy it he'll throw a shit-fit. He's the whip-smart gifted kid at a high-flying high school - and God he is smart, to be fair - who has profoundly mistaken intellectual prowess and skill at ratiocination for growing the fuck up. Tl;dr he thinks the former is the latter when it is, as the kids say, so not.
Indeed, a lot of the things you two (that'd be @Vidal and @Wolfram) identified about Perlstein, about how he understands the world and the people he studies, about being "half Cassandra and half Jeremiah" when he looks in his mirror, about how he weighs and judges those whom he holds forth with judgments and reasoned arguments, flows from the fact that he's valorized intellect above all else while at the same time he's done, as a person, what Harold Wilson inaccurately accused Tony Benn of: he's immatured with age. Or rather his immaturity as a human being/spirit has become both more evident and, as he gets farther from immature ages on the calendar, seemingly more pronounced and incongruous in contrast to what you'd hope for, for someone entering his fifties. (Really, when he drops the history bits and speaks in his own voice, and occasionally about his own life, he sounds far too much like any number of emotionally underdeveloped critical-theory dudebros I knew in grad school. Complete with the overdone sartorial sense and the hipster affectations.)
(Nota bene - What happened with Benn was different: Tony was always a rather combative personality, but he became more idealistic with age, less willing to mistake careerist cynicism for pragmatism, which the cynical and likely chronically depressed Wilson misdiagnosed as immaturity, because when you have dysthymia the deepest and most central lie it tells you, via its bad body chemistry, is that everything ultimately is bad at its root and that will never really change, so idealism, like actual change, is a childish fantasy. That's wildly off the mark of some very observable realities, especially the constancy of change in life and the universe, but boy do you believe it when the bad chemistry drives the bus.)
The valorization of intellect, of "rationality" (which often isn't: a lot of the folks who prize it most simply don't notice as their own petulance, peevishness, and prejudices infuse the logic chains and judgments they generate), of knowing it all, of having the better argument, when it comes to maturity - to wisdom especially - that misses the mark. All that stuff really is valuable, in its place, but it's a part, a portion, of a greater whole. Wisdom, and together with it the ability to live at peace with oneself and live most effectively in the world, that comes from life lived and often from life's most painful or complicated experiences. Grief, as Stephen Colbert who knows from it deeply (lost his father and two of his several brothers in a famous airline crash), when effectively processed over time, makes us kinder. Loss makes us more generous, helps us understand how and why to value things deeply. Failure really is the best teacher, or at least one of the best. Regret -and learning to be at peace with what we once regretted, not repeating platitudes to make it go away but actual peace with it - is too. Living with choices or actions we can never entirely come back from - despite our brains, despite our frequently-youthful desire to always do the right thing so we don't have to live with being the villain in our own story in any way - teaches acceptance of our own messy humanity, compassion for others, a healthy rather than a debilitating degree of self-reflection and self-doubt. Pain and disaster teach resilience, the ability to handle both those things better the next time, and the time after that. The act of living fully is the best teacher for how to live.
And all of that, all of it, only if we let it. If we don't bury or push it to the side, if we let down our defenses, if we accept that the only way is through, and that "through" is both non-linear and may take a while. And and, all of that is very different from thinking you're the best, most successful person in the world because you have the best logic chain, that you can think your way past all problems, that being right makes you best.
Some folks are more attuned to that inherently than others, mostly folks with the strongest built-in capacity for empathy - but even they may struggle, and folks who were less empathetic to start may in fact get there. Because usually, for whoever it is, pride and folly, especially the kinds that we never knew were in fact pride and folly at the time, usually hold the most important classes. Seminars, even. With reading lists. Even then, a lot of folks who rise to significant and influential things in life never get fully to grips with the path to wisdom, or develop it as deeply as they might. Usually because something, or a collection of somethings, in the varied parts of themselves gets in the way. And often an unbroken run of success, over a long period, is the most dangerous thing in the world on that count, the thing that teaches all the wrong lessons.
Here, at long last, we angle around again to Jimmy.
In Jimmy's case I think he was both undone and let down by his own virtue: specifically by virtue, by his belief in it, his ironclad reliance on it, the degree to which his best qualities exemplified virtue and reached out to union with it, the ways in which virtue was at the heart of his remarkable run of success from Annapolis up through January of '77, by his readiness to tell even unpleasant truths on its behalf. He was amazingly virtuous, and as the best tragedies center on people led to ruin by their best qualities rather than their worst, it led him there too.
Why? How? Like this I think.
Carter wasn't fully prepared to reckon with or especially to embrace the sheer messiness, the inner variety, the beautiful imperfection, the fungibility of people, despite the other qualities he had to his real credit. The ability to love humanity not despite the fact we're sinners (i.e. those who miss the mark) but rather because we all are sinners, and in that lies so much of our potential for growth and wisdom, so much of what makes us human in the first place.
If virtue is not the highest goal and certainly not always its own reward, what do we go for instead? I tend reliably to pick kindness over virtue, which is why George Stanley McGovern is my guy. Interestingly in their two cases - Jimmy's and George's - it can be tied in with their own very distinct but really equally deep, character-defining Christianity. Jimmy valued the moral rightness, the moral urgency, the moral clarity of Christ; George most valued the compassion of Jesus.
But, there's a lot worse things than genuine virtue, and I do think Jimmy's virtue was the genuine article. He has, in some ways, at least a few of those wisdom characteristics too - many of them taught to him by his first really major, significant failure in what was already by then a longish life, namely his presidency, and even there as @Vidal points out his inherent virtue led him to do a few remarkable things of value - but especially he has virtue.
That's not to say George lacked virtue, or that Jimmy was unkind. Rather, I think that for Jimmy kindness was understood and bounded by its relationship to virtue, while for George virtue was understood and bounded by its relationship to kindness. Simple confirmation bias that, because I'm wired like George, I prefer his approach. Doesn't mean I'm right - we simply don't know in a cosmic sense whether either approach or some other is "right," if there truly are cosmic rules or at least goals for how we conduct our lives they might be very different than we storytelling chimps think - but it is how I do.
The interesting thing about each approach is how human it makes both those men. And, related to the fact that I've adopted the buried lede of @Vidal's second comment there as my latest sig line, I tend to prefer a Human President to a Perfect one too, I'm thrilled to bits about this TL and what it's about.
But back to virtue for a moment. Here's where Rick and Jimmy rendezvous at last.
In that sense - here comes the bit where it maybe all ties together - I suspect that though Rick lacks entirely the self-awareness to see it, one of the principal reasons Perlstein hates Carter is that, in good adolescent fashion, he hates the fact that they're so much alike. By that I mean that they both prize virtue above pretty much everything else, even though they'd define it differently from one another. They both understand themselves as virtuous truth tellers who strive to educate the world and bring it along their virtuous path. And they both get really hacked off when people fail to see the light of their virtuous judgments, the truth of the path they chart. Perlstein fulminates like that debate-team kid I related to him above while Jimmy seethes behind the Third Smile (h/t Zbiggy Stardust) but with both men if you don't grok and embrace their virtuous way forward, they get pissy.
Given that, though, I'll take virtue over intellect every single damn time. Not, as I say, because intellect is unimportant, sometimes it's vital, and especially in an era where the screaming ids of a lot of bitter, small, vicious people dominate the woes of the world, intellect matters that much more as an answer and a defense against what they might do to our species and the planet - are doing to it. But for a truly better world, wisdom is the answer, and that lies far more in things like virtue and kindness, compassion, resilience, patience, service. And Jimmy's conception of virtue, I think, hews closer to those things, draws arguments made from intellect towards them, where more often Perlstein's end up valorizing the process - the intellect part - and at the same time not only allow but actively encourage the perfect to be the enemy of the good more often than Jimmy's. (On that front, as evidence for Jimmy valuing good over perfect, I'd enter both his most significant responses to the Tehran hostage crisis - the dice-roll mishegas of RICEBOWL/EAGLE CLAW and the ensuing decision to pursue safe release even at the cost of his presidency.)
Now a meta moment.
There's a great line in one of Jimmy Stewart's best movies, Harvey, wherein he says:
"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "in this world Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me." (Thanks Jimmy; I just did.)
"Pleasant" properly understood as something far, far deeper than that, yeah, that's about right. Or rather, smart is genuinely, genuinely valuable, but really only gets you so far, and if unsupported by the right depth and quality of "pleasant" can go terribly awry.
One thing I will always say for Jimmy, he gained at least a bit of that perspective from those four hard years. Not that he doesn't still have plenty of exacting smartness and coruscating virtue, but when stuff went wrong, it taught him a bit more about pleasant and he was, in some ways at least, willing and able to learn. That's a lot to say for someone. It's not all, but that's ok. We all, in the end, are human. Which is at once the worst and also the very, very best thing about us. Bar none.
Last edited:
The Big Damn Comment did not disappoint. Will probably take me a few re-reads to get it all, but thank you for it.
My initial reaction is that this is a great insight. In @Wolfram's point about Perlstein believing he has the answers and wanting the left to not repeat its mistakes, there's a similar element of Carter. To play on the title of Alter's biography They Know Best seems to be a similar tread between author and subject.
This will be quite fascinating and looking forward to this!
Carter had his couple of issues when it came to getting stuff done, due to not working that well with his party. That being said, anyone voted in 1976 would be strugglng in 1980, especially Republicans because of the extra baggage that they would be carrying of the time. Granted, now that Volcker should be in, this should help Carter out when the economy recovers, probably earlier than OTL.
Carter had his couple of issues when it came to getting stuff done, due to not working that well with his party. That being said, anyone voted in 1976 would be strugglng in 1980, especially Republicans because of the extra baggage that they would be carrying of the time. Granted, now that Volcker should be in, this should help Carter out when the economy recovers, probably earlier than OTL.
You know, I've read all three of Perlstein's big books, and I have to say I didn't see most of what y'all are talking about in them. It's like y'all are from a different universe or something, close to ours but not quite the same.
I've read absolutely zero of Perlstein's books, but I will cite the lesson I was given by my 11th-grade history teacher that maybe has something to do with it:
"Whenever you read a biography, it's always good to figure out the person who wrote it" (abridged the quote--I have no clue what he said word-for-word, sorry Mr. Richards). Essentially, figuring our the author's biases helps filter the reading.
Well, there are four of them, so that might be the case!
More seriously, I think it's one of those things that's more true of his later work, and even more true of his less filtered work (read: Twitter, articles). His books are a bit less psychological. But even in Nixonland, he takes a lot of time to puncture the mythmaking of all involved (or maybe I just paid undue attention to that as someone who absorbed those myths less critically than was perhaps right, for whom Perlstein opened my eyes) - to highlight the way that radicals and mainstream Democrats both took the American people for granted and lost their support in a million avoidable ways. I don't think it would be unreasonable to read that as just a series of neutral statements of fact - but for myself, even outside of reading anything else by him, it seemed and still seems like the words, and specifically the tone, of a man on a mission that he feels strongly about on a personal level.
Just scanning through Nixonland, here's a fairly representative passage (from Chapter 33):
Now, you can read that as a series of matter-of-fact statements, or as a pure defense of a reasoned thesis - that the reformers and establishment both had good points and bad points, that neither were able to meaningfully compromise for both personal and structural reasons, and that the conflict between the two (perhaps more than even the reformers' victory) pushed wavering old-line Democrats into the arms of Nixon. I think that's a defensible reading, and certainly there's a lot to be said for not psychoanalyzing people you don't know. But I think there's a lot of personality showing through there - disdain for the reformers' willingness to partake of creature comforts despite their public image of being "purer" than the Democrats of the past, mockery of their unwillingness to compromise and pretensions to represent the Democratic Party, and a sense of tragedy at the fact that, even though he sympathizes with the reformers' aims and with some of their more respectable members, the end result was something Nixon could use and abuse. And while everyone comes in for criticism now and again, he does seem to reserve his sharpest lines for his "own" side, the progressive, anti-establishment wing of the Democratic Party.
Now here is where I am going to depart from @Yes - I think Perlstein's personal tetchiness and ego is part of what's going on here, but on reflection I don't think it's the biggest part of it. I think there's a lot of fear there, a fear that Democrats won't learn from their mistakes and will continue to be trapped in the mausoleum of their own unduly valorized past and that the other side will take that opportunity to hurt the vulnerable. Certainly there's more than a little snobbery, both aimed at the wingers who self-radicalized through John Wayne and Anita Bryant and at the middle-class middlebrow moderates who failed to stop them. But the main issue is less his own ego and more that the urgency of the task brings out the worst in him - the "Cassandra and Jeremiah" comment was aimed at the fact that, among other things, he doesn't really expect to be listened to, and that helplessness both gives him a permission structure to hector his own side more sharply than is necessarily fair - why not put yourself in a position to be able to say "I warned you" and say everything you really mean? - and heightens the sense of the walls closing in, the sense that if what he's saying or doing is ever going to matter it's going to be now so he had better make damned sure people listened. And certainly his own sense of himself informs the way he tries to cast himself in the psychodrama of the modern American left, but I do think that that impulse to make himself useful, to find the path out and then convince people to take it because real people's suffering is on the line, is both one of Perlstein's most admirable qualities (at least in the abstract) and the source of a lot of what he's like as a historian and writer and activist, for good and for ill. (To his credit, too, it leads to a lot of his greatest qualities as those too - his efforts not to self-delude about the virtue of his own side and to understand the ways in which they were not blameless in the rise of the American right are very welcome, and I do appreciate that he neither presents himself as an unbiased observer nor uses that as license to be an uncritical partisan polemicist.)
I also think his attitude towards Carter comes in large part from their differences - they are, yes, a lot closer than Perlstein is to most other figures, but that I think only heightens (from Perlstein's perspective) the distance between them. As one important example, Carter saw his virtue in a deontological way - no matter the consequences, he would do what was right. Perlstein sees, I think, political virtue in a consequentialist way - if Carter's rules brought him, and all of us, where they did when there were other options, what were they good for? This leads him to see a lot of what Carter did as essentially hypocritical, and while Perlstein definitely seems to have a visceral reaction to hypocrisy (see, for example, the article @Vidal linked), I do think that reaction is more consequentialist ("We lost middle America because both the Democratic establishment and the people who sought to replace them wouldn't live up to the rules they set for other people") than it is anything else. And since Carter just didn't operate that way, because Carter believed that he had a duty to do The Right Thing and damn the consequences, the surface-level similarities between the two almost obscure more than they reveal. (Also Carter was deeply motivated by a sense of other people's responsibility, particularly fiscal responsibility, that Perlstein correctly recognizes is almost always a mask for disdain for the poor and helped legitimize Reagan's war on "welfare queens" even, maybe especially, if Carter sincerely didn't feel that disdain or want that to happen. I'll admit that I'm less willing to take it at face value than some of Carter's defenders, but I think there's a real extent to which Carter was sincere, and Perlstein either doesn't recognize that or feels there's not much real difference between intentionally and unintentionally advancing that rhetoric.)
Right. It's easy to get sucked into Perlstein's rhetoric, to just say 'why, yes, yes, it's all so easy'--it's why you should balance him out with other writers.
On the pop culture front, the most egregious failure is his reading of Altman's Nashville, where Perlstein not only misses the message of the film's political storyline, he misses that the film arguably agrees with him. (Hal Philip Walker isn't a nostalgic call for a Reagan figure, he's an indictment of that very desire, damn it.)
I really want to drill down here, because this is a point where I think our interpretations of Carter diverge, and also an illustration of where I diverge with Perlstein, too. (And because it's just so fun that the Peanut Farm is bringing out this debate -- I couldn't have imagined, but I'm loving every bit of it):
I think, fundamentally, Carter thought he could show everyone his way and overcome the inevitable march of his rhetoric. I think a core part of why I view him as Too Good to be President is because he thought the American people were inherently good. They would come to understand. They wanted to sacrifice for their country, like he did. They wanted to clothe the naked, feed the hungry. So, while I'm sure there were people saying, Boss, if you talk like that, people are going to assume you don't want to help the poor, Carter replied something along the lines of, How could they? My faith. My Virtue. That's who I am. A really core interpretation of Carter that I have is he thought he could explain it all: In some ways, you have to admire the man's chutzpah because he couldn't give a speech to save his life (or his margin of victory), but he really thought he could (and this, @Wolfram, gets to a point we discussed offline about the Carter influences of Bartlet) raise the level of discourse if he just explained it all.
So, where I diverge, is I think the totality of Carter's life -- the post-presidency work, the modest home, the Sunday services and Bible studies -- reflect a desire to live a Virtuous life and to have compassion for others. There's a certain truth in @Yes's commentary about Carter's relationship with compassion through the lens of being virtuous. I need to read his book Faith, which is next after What It Takes, to really make my mind up there -- but setting all that aside for now... Whether it stems from a desire to be virtuous or because it is a recognition of compassion as central to the teachings of Jesus, I do think Carter has a real concern for the plight of the poor. Despite being the first president born in a hospital, which I think was always sort of used to pin Carter as a "modern president," the story of his upbringing resembles, more closely, the realities of LBJ's childhood than Kennedy's or Bush's. I mean I was really struck in An Hour Before Daylight by just how similar the upbringings were when Carter was born nearly two full decades after LBJ.
So when it comes to Perlstein's read that Carter helped participate in the rise of the New Right, which I think is somewhat impossible to disagree with though he and I may disagree on how he did it, I struggle with the idea that intentions don't matter. If he doesn't think Carter cared about people, or he thinks that Carter was willing to sacrifice his belief in helping the disadvantaged to score political points, then I have to point him to the hostage crisis, which I think shows an unwillingness to take the politically expedient route when people are at stake. I'm not saying Carter didn't do things that were political. One of the major points of divergences coming up shows Carter submitting to his political instincts, which he had, but lives weren't at stake in the way they were elsewhere. But if he thinks intentions don't matter, I think he stops his thinking too soon. If he grants Carter didn't intend to advance the disdain for the poor and legitimize Reagan's "welfare queens" rhetoric, he has every right to be angry and say Carter should have known better, but I think he also owes it to Carter to ask: Well, what were his intentions?
And -- coming full circle -- I think it was Carter's belief/intent that he could overcome that and change the way people viewed and/or talked about the issue. He could balance the budget and do it without harming the poor and when he did that everyone would agree that was the way to do it.
We should also pepper in that hindsight is 20/20 and as @Yes points out, we're writing about people and people will make mistakes. Carter's economic philosophy was a mistake, but he was feeding off of an energy that was very present in the country at the time and thought he was the President who could take those base instincts and apply them in a way that showed people there was a more humanitarian way to go about it.
Anyone is allowed to say it was naive. But I think it's admirable he viewed the presidency as an opportunity to make Americans think harder. It didn't work IOTL, but I would like to think he has a little more success here.
Last edited:
Yes, I agree with all of this. (I should say that my doubt is less in Carter's sincere compassion for people - I don't think that's in dispute - but rather the extent to which that compassion is based on, to put it uncharitable, seeing people in bad situations as sinners in need of salvation. And even there it's less that I definitely think Carter ran with that and more that it seems like he had a note of those tendencies and I haven't studied him well enough to say how strong that note was.)
I think the thing here is that you - we - see our job here as entirely different from Perlstein. I think Perlstein looks at trying to contextualize Carter's failures in terms of his intentions as fundamentally an attempt to absolve him for those failures - 'sure, millions of people lost their jobs because he appointed Volcker, millions more suffered in poverty because he let Reagan in, and his foreign policy ultimately led to Reagan getting to enact his views in Central America and nearly bring the world to World War III - but at least our intentions were good' - and responds badly to that because we shouldn't look away from the times our heroes and their principles lead us to a bad place just because it's inconvenient to our self-image to look there too closely. I don't think he sees humanizing Carter as his job - we liberals, his target audience, are already inclined to sympathize with Carter, and seeing things from his perspective will only lead us to buy into his myth and ultimately repeat it. His job, as he sees it, is to dehumanize (or, more accurately, defamiliarize) him, in a way, to get readers to see him as just another politician who can be dispassionately weighed in the balance and found wanting rather than a tragic hero.
I do not know whether that's the right approach even for what Perlstein is trying to do, but it would definitely be wrong for this project. It’s possible to have compassion for Carter and still keep an eye on his flaws - but not if you’re deliberately trying not to let him off the hook, or to give any opportunity for your readers to do the same.
(Your point about Carter not expecting there to be a tradeoff between doing the right thing and the political thing in the way we, with hindsight, would is well taken - I'll have to think on that.)
Last edited:
@Wolfram,
It’ll take me a bit to put together a proper reply but while I have a minute I wanted to say that’s a great comment and a valuable argument. Some stuff I agree with and some not but all of it made me think more broadly and more thoroughly so thank you. Of course, you’re good at that so I’m grateful but also not surprised.
It’ll take me a bit to put together a proper reply but while I have a minute I wanted to say that’s a great comment and a valuable argument. Some stuff I agree with and some not but all of it made me think more broadly and more thoroughly so thank you. Of course, you’re good at that so I’m grateful but also not surprised.
I think this a bit nice to Carter. Carter’s time in Georgian politics clearly shows he was a very shrewd operator. I think people tend to mistaken Carter’s stubbornness for naiveness. I just don’t think Carter’s personality fit with the troubling times he was president.
Sure. The (winning) gubernatorial campaign used rhetoric that was pretty inexcusable. No contest there. I think, at the end of the day, the reality is these are all people -- and no person exists without creating some paradoxes of themselves. Very few actually live in a way that perfectly follows some North Star, but the way I choose to read the gubernatorial campaign is that after it happened, Carter immediately resolved Never again. He wasn't going to win that way again, and so he was going to do all he could to raise the level of discourse and make the American people see the angels within themselves.
Take, for example, how he hit Reagan in the general election around race. He said his actions were racist -- at a time when that wasn't a word hurled at political opponents. And everyone turned on Carter, and Carter just sort of shrugged. He was acting racist. Someone should point that out.
So I think the extents to which Carter went to win the Governor's Mansion informed his later outlook -- that going to those extremes wasn't worth it.