Much has been made of the legacy of the late President Jimmy Carter. Some commentators have offered revisionist accounts of his one term in the Oval Office, emphasizing his moral decency and commitment to human rights.
Others have lionized the years after he left the White House, focusing their attention on the fact he did not try to capitalize on his fame for personal gain and his continuing work in service of humanity. One even dubbed Carter the best and most successful former president in American history.
But little has been said about the depths of his concerns about American democracy. His articulation of those concerns can be traced back to his time as president and continued until almost the end of his life.
Much of what worried President Carter has come to pass. In some ways Americans are living Carter’s nightmare.
But, as he elaborated on his concerns, he laid out a vision for a democratic life based on a commitment to the common good rather than the pleasures and preferences of each individual.
Carter’s worries about our democracy were not abstract, philosophical musings. They were instead rooted in events that shaped his presidency.
The most important of those was the 1979 oil crisis which followed the Iranian Revolution and resulted in extreme shortages and long lines at gasoline stations. Not surprisingly, many Americans were deeply troubled by hours spent waiting for a commodity that they had long taken for granted.
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They took their frustrations out on the Carter Administration, and the president’s popularity plummeted. The president looked for a way to respond but, not just to the oil crisis itself but to what he perceived as a crisis of the American spirit.
In July 1979, Carter delivered the most famous speech of his presidency, the so-called “Malaise Speech,” from the Oval Office.
As the Bill of Rights Institute notes in an article on the speech, “Pat Caddell, Carter’s young pollster, had already told him the electorate was losing faith in democracy and the government’s ability to deal with problems….The polling data told Carter that many Americans no longer believed the future was theirs to make.”
Carter reacted to that data in an earnest and straightforward way. He “invited dozens of American politicians and ordinary citizens to the presidential retreat at Camp David to voice their concerns. They told him: ‘Mr. President, we are confronted with a moral and spiritual crisis.’”
While the malaise speech quickly became fodder for Carter’s political opponents and grist for the mill of late-night comedians, it was well received at the time it was delivered. Today we mostly remember it as a speech about energy policy, it was as much a showcase for Carter’s worries about democracy as about anything else.
Early in the speech, the president signaled his interest in speaking about what he called “the true problems of our Nation,” which, he said, ran “much deeper...than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”
He called that much deeper problem “a fundamental threat to American democracy.”
As he described that threat, it became clear that Carter was less interested in problems of our political institutions than in those that afflicted the culture of democracy and the nature of democratic citizenship. Carter’s identification of the threat to democracy was primarily spiritual, not political.
He called it a “crisis of confidence…that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”
“Confidence in the future,” Carter argued, “has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States.”
That confidence and democracy itself, he thought, could only survive if the people it served found meaning in their lives and led meaningful lives. But lest he be misunderstood, Carter paired that focus with a view that democracy could only work if it were built on a foundation of “unity of purpose.”
Treading into unusual territory for an Oval Office address, Carter went on to say, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns…. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
Empty lives, Carter argued, were fueling “growing disrespect for government” and a gap “between our citizens and our government (that) has never been so wide.” He bemoaned a situation where “every extreme position (is) defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”
And Carter warned that Americans faced a choice. They could follow a “path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest.”
“Down that road,” he observed, “lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests, ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”
Or we could take “another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.” Choosing that path would lead to a restoration of “faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation.”
It is clear what path America followed in the years following Carter’s speech. Instead of unity of purpose, we have ever-increasing hostility across partisan lines. Instead of restored faith in each other and our government, we have seen a dramatic loss of confidence. Instead of confidence in the future of the country and its democracy, Americans have growing doubts.
Carter lived to see all that. In January 2022, one year after the attack on the Capitol, Carter penned an op-ed for the New York Times describing what he called “toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.”
He noted that “36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that ‘the traditional American way of life’ is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Still, the former president’s prescription for saving democracy and his democratic creed remained intact over the more than four decades since his 1979 remarks.
To save and improve our democracy, Carter again called on “people of all political stripes…(to) agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law…” and to “resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics.”
We must, Carter said, “focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans, and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive.” Carter asked his fellow Americans “to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and…the spread of disinformation, especially on social media.”
Warning in tones even darker than those that informed his malaise speech, Carter said, “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy.”
To address that risk, Carter reiterated what he had said in 1979: “Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.” If only the former president could have helped us figure out how to do it, his legacy would be even greater than it already is.
That work is urgent for all of us, leaders and citizens alike.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
