The Inflection Point: Jimmy Carter and the Birth of Neoliberalism

As we remember Jimmy Carter, it's necessary to understand his presidency represented the beginning of our modern era

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Jimmy Carter’s death on Sunday at the age of 100 inspired the usual spate of remembrances. The vast majority focused on his post-presidential life, a forty-three year period in which Carter spent his time volunteering for groups like Habitat for Humanity and traveling the world in search of opportunities to foster peace and tackling problems like the Guinea worm, saving god knows how many lives. It is telling that this will be his enduring legacy, four decades of humanitarian work following a troubled and ultimately failed presidency.

We should remember Carter in this way while also learning lessons from his tenure as president. In his volunteer life, Carter seemed freed by his distance from the office and unburdened by his role. This is not accidental. Carter’s presidency was failed for the same reason that his post-presidency was successful. Because, during his time as the 39th President of the United States, Carter witnessed the country and the presidency change, contort, and ultimately develop into the state we are all enduring now.

Fundamentally, Joe Biden’s presidency will be remembered much like Carter’s. Biden entered the office in 2021 promising a new era of decency and a salvaging of what remained of a tarnished reputation. For Carter, it was the fallout from Richard Nixon’s resignation following Watergate and the tumult of the 1960’s and 70’s. Biden promised to return America to “normal” following the ascendance of Donald Trump and the devastation of COVID. Both failed and both ended their presidencies with calamitous approval ratings and a general sense of powerlessness in the face of the problems they set out to correct.

Retrospectives of Carter’s administration all center around the same defining points. The disastrous Iran Hostage Crisis and damning stagflation that ground America’s economy to a crushing hult. Carter has been assessed as having no answers for either situation, inspiring a conventional history in which he was a well-meaning but ultimately ineffective executive. Then, according to all the mass-consumed histories, Ronald Reagan promised a new day in America and reinvigorated the country, thus giving birth to the late-century behemoth and expanding empire. Nevermind, of course, that Reagan, like Donald Trump, was an avatar of a wealth class power grab, and that his fantasy of “making America great again” was a conjob to hide the smash and grab efforts.

Even according to some of his closest allies, Carter was victim to prevailing trends and powerless to do much to curb them. In this, he and Biden are quite similar. But the conventional histories often gloss over the fact that Carter’s response, or, rather, capitulation, to the stagflation crisis ushered in our modern world.

Those histories tend to give us a sepia-toned vision of America prior to that moment, telling us that the post-war period was a moment of abundance and plenty, the so-called “golden years” that Trump and others continue to harken back to. This, as I have covered previously, was the moment in which America took advantage of the wartime devastation of Europe, welcomed the parasite of capitalist leadership, and reaped the rewards. By the time Carter came to power, it was time for the next evolution in capitalism, namely the Neoliberal turn.

Rather than pushing for championed reforms and progressive policies, including proposed laws that would guarentee employment for all Americans, Carter spent his time prior to the economic crisis finding bipartisan and largely conservative “solutions” that only made problems worse. He deregulated the dominant sectors in the country and turned against organized labor. When stagflation hit, any tools that might have been at his disposal were gone, leaving him little to do besides embrace the rising tide of Neoliberalism. In 1979 he named economist Paul Volcker the 12th Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker raised interest rates and delivered a punishing “shock” that left Americans hurting, prioritized businesses and the wealthy, and set off decades of wage stagnation as the rich got richer, laying the foundation for Reagan’s presidency, the rise of the Neoliberal consensus, and the birth of our modern crisis.

A closer look at that era reveals a few things. The conditions that determined Carter’s presidency and ultimately its failure were a result of past failures. It is a convenient fiction that the problem following Nixon’s resignation was faith in government, but what that focus has done is distract from the fact that the rising military-industrial complex, the intertwining of capitalism and U.S power, and a continued push by the wealthy to dismantle the New Deal, reestablish wealth class control, and undermine everything from public education to the social safety net, created the environment in which Neoliberalism would ultimately win out and determine the future. Even Nixon himself recognized that it was getting out of control prior to his own humiliation, and before him John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower had seen it firsthand.

Carter was incapable and probably unwilling to wrestle the beast, but by then the conditions were more or less locked in. What happened was almost elementary and, when considering future Democratic presidents, exemplary of how our modern era works. In the past, presidents presided over a muscular office and were judged by their ability to use the regulatory state for the benefit of the people. Following, the office was morphed into a shepherd’s position and determined by market forces and expectations of the wealth class. In this mold, Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden sweeped into office promising reform and progress in the face of Republican destruction and were quickly met with “reality” as determined by the market, the Republican Party, and whichever Fed Chairman had their ear. Quickly, they jettisoned their promises and set about the continued whittling of the social safety net and the completion of Neoliberal Globalism as desired by the market. Clinton finished the free-trade plans of the wealth class as designed under the Reagan and Bush Administrations. Obama set off the new Tech economy that has now captured power, but only after settling the capitalism crisis with the help of Voclker, who he named his head economic adviser leading into his presidency.

This cycle was cemented with Carter and created the modern template for a Democratic president. Promise to make the country fairer and then be forced to deal with the financial and political consequences of capitalism and the Republican Party, then leave office as the country assesses your presidency and remarks on the “moderation” of your ideology as you helped the market toward its goals.

As president, Carter was unable to do much good because that wasn’t his job. He was locked into caretaking and following these demands. Outside of it, he was able to follow his heart and help fellow human beings have better lives. By all accounts, he was an exceptionally kind and caring man. It appears he was loved by those he loved. As a man, we should admire and lionize such things. As a president, we should look back at this moment and begin to understand how things got to this point.