RIP Jimmy Carter: A Decent Democrat Dies

Jimmy Carter died at the age of 100 on December 29, after a life that went from Georgia peanut farmer to president of the United States. But it was not so much his presidency that earned Mr. Carter fame as it was his Georgia-peanut-farmer decency. As history has it, Jimmy Carter was a feeble president with strong morals; but that his legacy is one of dignity and courtesy is a sign that there is something good in the heart of America. Though it is also telling that a man of virtue, such as Jimmy Carter was, made for a poor president.

When former Georgia governor James Earl Carter, a sincere Southern Baptist and soft-spoken Southern gentleman, ran as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1976, his candidacy in brave-new-world politics was threatened by his brave-old-world morality. Late in his campaign, Carter accepted an interview with Playboy Magazine, which seemed odd or off for a decent man; but in so doing, he joined respectable ranks who used the pornographic publication’s readership as a political platform.

Carter caused a stir that nearly toppled his bid, however—not by talking to a Playboy journalist, but by admitting that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and had therefore “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” He said this (to Playboy of all outlets) to show that he was not so pious a person to be rigid as president in judging others. In the same interview, Carter also grouped the last Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, with disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon for his handling of the Vietnam War and accused both of “lying, cheating, and distorting the truth.”

Instead of being hailed for his Christian honesty and humility, Carter was scoffed at by Republicans as an antique prude at best or an abject creep at worst. In a way, not much has changed, looking at the scandals that rocked Trump and Biden, that saw their integrity under constant attack whether because of shady business dealings or offensive or self-serving behavior. But in another way, everything has changed, in that the role of virtue in American politics is not seriously valued by a seriously unvirtuous American populace.

But virtue is intrinsically good, and even if Americans are slipping into depravity, they still desire the good. And they prize virtue in a way that is distorted by the prevalent influences of relativism and personal license while politicians give plenty of lip service to traditional virtues. But Jimmy Carter meant more when he promised Americans that he would never lie to them. He was as true to the American people as he was to Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years. He assumed office in a time of political scandal but never had a speck of scandal about his person. Jimmy Carter was a decent, old-fashioned Democrat; but decent, old-fashioned democracy isn’t the path to success as an American president.

Jimmy Carter’s death may mark the death of decency in politics, memorializing an era when Americans expected a level of truthfulness and decorum and honor in their leaders. The Founding Fathers wrote a great deal on the essential role of virtue, both private and public, if freedom or a true democratic republic were to exist. President-elect Trump has, thankfully, secured another term to “make America great again,” but American Christians and Catholics especially should bear in mind the words of John Adams: “No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous;” or Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Jimmy Carter lived a life of virtuous public service with confidence, but the general failure of his presidency was a harbinger of the collapse of American virtue and American confidence.

The problem of confidence is a good summation of the problem of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Three years into his single term, before he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980, as the nation reeled under the post-Nixon energy crisis, President Carter delivered a speech to address what he identified as “a crisis of confidence”: a nationwide malaise in the aftershock of the murders of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. together with the Vietnam War fallout and the Watergate scandal.

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. 

Though his speech was primarily directed at concerns of energy conservation, President Carter’s diagnosis of the deeper fear that was dividing the American people has deepened over the last four decades into a grim shadow. What Jimmy Carter said on national television decades ago rings with a prophetic paradox as the United States continues to crumble under what has become a collapse of confidence—for without the strength and resolve of virtue, what confidence can be had?

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America,” spoke President Carter in 1979. 

It is a crisis 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. 

The symptoms of this crisis remain. Most Americans feel either betrayed, forgotten, or misunderstood by the Washington woke swamp. Many Americans don’t see the point in voting as they will assuredly be misrepresented by corrupt politicians, stuck in the status quo, or voiceless against the money machine. Though Trump’s reelection represents a rise in hope, it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a rise in confidence in a culture that clearly has a growing and seemingly irreversible lack of respect and trust toward government, churches, schools, and news media. 

Jimmy Carter was a decent man who was president of an indecent country, and he had the moral confidence to warn against the loss of cultural confidence. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.” Any lack of confidence finds its source in a lack of competence, but the incongruity of Carter’s spirit with the American spirit resulted in his own incompetence and contribution to the crisis in confidence. Jimmy Carter was a decent man who was president of an indecent country, and he had the moral confidence to warn against the loss of cultural confidence. Tweet This

His policy responses to the unrest in America caused by assassinations, war, political scandal, runaway inflation, and a swelling national debt were to bargain with America’s enemies, cut defense budgets, and make humility the new American brand. These policies largely resulted in the surge of enemies in Iran, a need to increase defense spending, and a deepening of public skepticism. As Carter himself put it, 

We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.

Jimmy Carter may have been a virtuous man, but he did not have the political virtue to raise America from her knees—and she has fallen flat on her face since. It may also be said, from a Machiavellian perspective, that Carter’s righteousness was his greatest strength as a man and his greatest weakness as a president. That is a terrible paradox of politics, where the attitude to win at all costs is far too prevalent. What is good politically may not be right morally, and thus, as French philosopher Joseph de Maistre famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves.”

With Jimmy Carter’s passing, Americans must mourn a good man. Even if he was a failed president, Carter was a generous, tireless statesman and human rights advocate who did as much good for his country as he could in the century God gave him. While his presidential strategy may not have been effective, his life’s work was driven by decency, and Jimmy Carter’s enduring legacy of Christian kindness and civility demonstrates that America still values what it refuses to enshrine. Until spiritual virtues are made central, America will continue to languish under the crisis of confidence that Mr. Carter identified and warned against. God rest his soul. In God we trust.