8 ms·

Jimmy Carter: Unlucky President, Lucky Man

76 points by chmaynard 4y ago

dventimi 4y ago
[flagged]
- labrador 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Would you have said this about Nixon and Thatcher, too? I certainly remember the "Nixon was good actually and the people who criticize him on his deathbed are ghouls" brigade, too, as they were rushing out media products based on how wonderful and wise Nixon was. You shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      Nixon was a different character. He was a flawed genius, with his paranoia and alcoholism impacting his legacy. Carter didn’t have the temperament to be a president in his age. He was a flawed president, but a great man. He grew from failure and used his talents and pulpit to advance humanity in a small way. There’s a difference and when you look at figures in history in leadership, it happens.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        I like Carter. Amazing ex-president. We aren't required to make him into a good president to say that he was a great humanitarian post-presidency. We especially shouldn't be shaming people who think that what he did in the few years he was in the most important position on the planet outweigh anything he could have done as a private citizen.
    - labrador 4y ago
      > You shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much. I'm not upset at all so you should probably stop misreading people's emotions and telling them they should feel otherwise
  - dventimi 4y ago
    Everybody dies.
    - labrador 4y ago
      He's not dead yet. Maybe like Schopenhauer you feel he should never have been born at all. It takes all kinds. My kind likes to have a little fun with comments once in awhile.
      - dventimi 4y ago
        I'd settle for him never having been President.
        labrador 4y ago
        Fair enough
- diego_moita 4y ago
  > fund brutal despots in Latin America Well, that's a lie, he actually did the opposite of this. I remember clearly when Rosalind Carter went to Brazil and gave a speech there praising democracy and respect to human rights in front of the dictator Ernesto Geisel. I remember the U.S. Department of State criticizing the dictatorship for the practice of torture. And I do remember that he strongly and successfully pressed the dictatorship against developing nuclear weapons.
  - just_a_quack 4y ago
    As far as I can discern, the Carter administration, much like its predecessor, was responsible for providing the most of the arms used during the East Timor genocide. However I don't believe that Carter supported Latin American dictators. He stopped all US arms sales to Argentina, for one.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    And yet they did absolutely nothing about neither that dictatorship, nor any of the others. They kept backing them and trading with them and those dictatorships survived for decades more.
    - diego_moita 4y ago
      Please go study history, you are as wrong as the comment above. The Brazilian dictatorship began to collapse before the end of the Carter administration. When Carter left there was a new president in Brazil that removed censorship for the press, ended political torture and granted amnesty to all political prisoners. > those dictatorships survived for decades more. No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office. "Backing them" is something that Thatcher and Reagan did for Pinochet but not Carter.
      - unity1001 4y ago
        > No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office Read operation condor and see if the dictatorships actually ended.
- roundandround 4y ago
  It seems to me like Ronald Reagan being a traitor was not Carter's fault so his lack of second term was bad luck despite being average to good for a US President as you described.
- digianarchist 4y ago
  People forget that Ted Kennedy launched a primary challenge against him.
- huitzitziltzin 4y ago
  Sorry man but both this > deregulate transportation, and this > appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.) For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    Perhaps he's thinking of the "brutal despots" who were mobilized _against_ Carter in Iran to make Reagan look like he had some kind of mental activity.
    - dventimi 4y ago
      No. I'm not. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/carter-decides-to-resume-military-aid-to-el-salvador/16084fe6-8174-49dc-be5f-a5a147566f96/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    The only examples I've been able to find were backing Suharto in the invasion of East Timor and backing a coup in El Salvador, both of which are regrettable but are essentially as you say par for the course in terms of the US 20th Century foreign policy (albeit far tamer than the actions of his predecessor and successor).
    - digianarchist 4y ago
      The invasion of East Timor was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.
- pastor_bob 4y ago
  > appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed Carter didn't create the inflation crisis (hint it was Nixon who did), so yes having to appoint Volcker was due to a bit of being president during a unluckly economic time.
  - tasty_freeze 4y ago
    One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation. Ignoring whether it was a good or bad move, I can't imagine what would happen if Biden did that today. There would be bloodshed. Thankfully, inflation isn't bad enough to warrant any drastic action like that.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Nixon was to the left of modern Democrats on most issues.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        With a notable exception being the whole "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal" thing that Nixon had.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      > One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation. Reminds me of "Deep Impact", where President Morgan Freeman tells the world that an asteroid is coming, and by some sort of Presidential Decree he orders all prices fixed to avoid mass hoarding and price gouging. I wasn't around during the Nixon years, but the writers of that screenplay must have been.
  - dventimi 4y ago
    If there was inflation crisis, it was probably less of a crisis than was reported at the time. At the time, the annual average inflation rate was reported to be 13%. In hindsight, it was probably more like 10%.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  >”appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed” Given the persistent and painful inflation that had been happening in the 1970’s, wouldn’t appointing an inflation hawk be considered an appropriate choice? Appointing an inflation dove would probably exacerbate the situation and I imagine he would be judged even more harshly.
  - dventimi 4y ago
    Considered an appropriate choice by whom?
mulmen 4y ago
Was he really unlucky as a president? I always had the impression that he stuck to his convictions and as a result a second term wasn't politically tenable. That seems admirable and how our system should work. We want people to get into office with an agenda, achieve it, probably with some compromise, then get out of the way for the next person. Carter did a lot of good in a single term and continued to do so for the remainder of his life.
- voisin 4y ago
  It would be more frequent if the term limit was one, but possibly a six year term.
- nwah1 4y ago
  He was definitely unlucky as a president. He presided over the bad part of the business cycle, and his attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue the American hostages in Iran via helicopter completely failed leading to a disastrous PR nightmare. But if he had been given another shot, then he could have continued the program he started with Operation Cyclone, to train and fund Bin Laden's forces. But with conviction! Unlike that other guy. Maybe in his second term he would've rolled back his policy of deporting all Iranian students.
  - e40 4y ago
    > and his attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue Iranian hostages Which was thwarted by Reagan doing backchannel negotiations, in bad faith, while Carter was still in office. So, he was unlucky in that Reagan was a criminal.
    - m348e912 4y ago
      Yup, THIS is what the Logan act was designed for.
    - nwah1 4y ago
      Perhaps there is reason to suspect that Iran held the hostages longer because of a deal. But Reagan didn't make the helicopters go down, or are you suggesting otherwise? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th...
euroderf 4y ago
Thruout the 1980s - prime Reagan/Bush regime - I told anyone that wanted to listen that history would be kind to President Carter. Mostly this opinion got hisses. Well, let's see how his legacy plays out nowadays.
- bloomingeek 4y ago
  I agree, Reagan was nothing but an actor who depended on toxic masculinity and the ability to be a humorist. Carter was honest, where Reagan lied. Carter wanted to help people, where Reagan griped about welfare queens and put millions in prisons for non-violent crimes. Carter was highly educated, where Reagan had Nancy.
  - serf 4y ago
    >Carter was honest >Carter wanted to help people He drafted mujahideen , gave them antique weapons, and hoped that both sides would extinguish each other in order to reduce deaths 'at home'. Someone can say 'Well drastic times call for drastic measures..', but personally I wouldn't refer to anyone that participated in such things as 'honest'. .. now that I think about it, I wouldn't really refer to any previous US president as 'honest' ; it's an incompatible trait with the job.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      That seems reasonable immediately after Vietnam. If we're being honest, most of international geopolitics is setting your competitors against each other.
      - dventimi 4y ago
        That doesn't seem at all reasonable to me.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Ronald Reagan: calculating cynic or genial dunce ? The jury is still out...
daveslash 4y ago
Re >> "Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981." Oof, The use of the word "most", as opposed to simply "many" hit me harder than I expected! (I'm early 80s, but not 81'). I guess taking into account how demographics skew young, that's not surprising. But still, oof. Edit: Also, the older I get, the more I admire, respect, and appreciate Carter.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  When we're young, we respect people who break things. As we age, we respect people who don't break things. When we age further, we really respect people who managed to change things with a minimum of breakage.
- jbarham 4y ago
  > I guess taking into account how demographics skew young In 2022 the US median age was 38.8, which is not that young by world standards. E.g., the median age in Afghanistan is < 19 (i.e., most people alive in Afghanistan today were born after the 9/11 attacks).
cm2012 4y ago
Here's another post revisiting Jimmy Carter's legacy: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-heard-about https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-...
rayiner 4y ago
Jimmy Carter is my archetype of an American. A nuclear engineer who served in the Navy, and then worked on his family peanut farm, became a citizen President, and then returned to his small Georgia hometown to live out his days while doing humanitarian work. Even then, he wasn't above working with his hands to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Habitat for Humanity is still one of my favorite volunteer orgs: because they're damn good at scaling. {A few contractors} + {unskilled volunteers} + {subsidized/donated materials} + {future owner sweat equity} = houses And I specifically like that they don't build overly large houses, nor just turn them over. They recognize that something earned is something valued, requiring recipients to work on their house AND others'. In addition to having owners attending financial literacy courses and check-ins through the first few years of ownership. It's how bottom-up should work, if people actually cared about getting things done.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  * not a nuclear engineer
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine. https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/jimmy_carter.html https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/jimmy_carter.html
    - emmelaich 4y ago
pessimizer 4y ago
Awful president, very pleasant ex-president. This is the guy who ushered in the neoliberal era; the guy they stuck in to suppress the left of the Democratic party, the first successful anti-McGovern candidate (whose slightly left-of-neocon positions were blamed for the loss of the previous election.) Carter left office as a failure, partially due to behind the scenes manipulation of the Iran situation by the Reagan campaign, but mostly due to the fact that there was no positive case to be made for his presidency either. Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism (with a brief stroll through the Party's destruction of the Rainbow Coalition), where the parties only ever differ on a handful of wedge issues. A merger that destroyed Democratic political dominance in the US, it didn't save it. He should be celebrated for his post-presidency e.g. his work for Habitat for Humanity and for Palestinian rights. But Democrats should stop trying to retcon him. I expect the effort to increase after he is dead, since he will have lost the ability to remind them that he's been opposed to their policies on the Israeli occupation. I could swear he was getting bipartisan-ly smeared as an anti-Semite just 15 or so years ago.
00F_ 4y ago
at the time that carter was running for office, south korea was embroiled in a political battle between student-church led populists and park chung hee, essentially a benevolent dictator. the populists or leftists as we might call them now were pushing hard against the normalization of relations with japan among other things. in the capital environment of that time, with south korea being poorer than north korea at a certain point, south korea was not in a position to turn its nose up to any kind of investment. this was made even more true by the post-vietnam cooling of the relationship between south korea and the united states. the only way that korea has become one of the most dynamic and successful countries in the world is because they accepted investment from japan and because they had a highly centralized form of government. if the student led leftist movement had gotten its way, they would have rejected investment from japan on principle, never allowed the chaebol to flourish through massive government deals, and south korea would today be more comparable to chad than singapore. naturally the students would stage huge protests against their own wellbeing and these were responded to with force. this caused lots of people in the united states to take a political stance against the park regime. one of the things that carter ran on was withdrawing from south korea militarily completely so as to not lend support to the brutal dictator. this was of course completely insane. when he won, he tried to go through with it, giving official mandates to withdraw. in the end the department of defense was forced to intervene and stop carter. and of course we never withdrew. imagine if nobody had stopped carter and all the idiotic people who supported him. even if the north had not immediately invaded, nobody would have invested a dime in a country in that position. might as well just donate the money to the soviet union. i think its fair to say that jimmy carter tried to destroy a country for political gain.
specialist 4y ago
I dimly recall the Carter Admin was also dealing with the aftermath of OPEC oil embargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis The environmental efforts of the time were also framed in terms of energy independence, economic growth, etc. Also a huge motivator for promoting peace and stability in the Middle East. -- Everyone has probably seen https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com, a graph that shows the point in time when wages where decoupled from productivity. Apparently, Vaclav Smil argues that deflection point is because of the rising cost of oil. I'm willing to be persuaded. However, I agree with u/pessimizer (upthread) that "Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902957 Here's a hot-take from the right that I find agreeable: https://redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/01/13/the-decline-of-unions-part-one-president-jimmy-carter-union-buster-extraordinaire-n37598 https://redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/01/13/the-decline... Another broader analysis from the left. TLDR: Labor's nadir was the '70s, inclusion of minorities (due to civil rights era reforms) undermined unity, foreign competition devalued domestic labor, and just plain old exhaustion. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labor-history/ https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labo... The book Lobbying America is a history of Capital's decades long effort to roll back The New Deal, from the vantage of corporate America. https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-Society/dp/0691168016 https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-So... FWIW, that effort grew into the larger reactionary project, the culmination we're experiencing today.

76 points by chmaynard 4y ago

dventimi 4y ago

[flagged]

labrador 4y ago
[flagged]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Would you have said this about Nixon and Thatcher, too? I certainly remember the "Nixon was good actually and the people who criticize him on his deathbed are ghouls" brigade, too, as they were rushing out media products based on how wonderful and wise Nixon was. You shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Nixon was a different character. He was a flawed genius, with his paranoia and alcoholism impacting his legacy. Carter didn’t have the temperament to be a president in his age. He was a flawed president, but a great man. He grew from failure and used his talents and pulpit to advance humanity in a small way. There’s a difference and when you look at figures in history in leadership, it happens.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I like Carter. Amazing ex-president. We aren't required to make him into a good president to say that he was a great humanitarian post-presidency. We especially shouldn't be shaming people who think that what he did in the few years he was in the most important position on the planet outweigh anything he could have done as a private citizen.
  - labrador 4y ago
    > You shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much. I'm not upset at all so you should probably stop misreading people's emotions and telling them they should feel otherwise
- dventimi 4y ago
  Everybody dies.
  - labrador 4y ago
    He's not dead yet. Maybe like Schopenhauer you feel he should never have been born at all. It takes all kinds. My kind likes to have a little fun with comments once in awhile.
    - dventimi 4y ago
      I'd settle for him never having been President.
      - labrador 4y ago
        Fair enough
diego_moita 4y ago
> fund brutal despots in Latin America Well, that's a lie, he actually did the opposite of this. I remember clearly when Rosalind Carter went to Brazil and gave a speech there praising democracy and respect to human rights in front of the dictator Ernesto Geisel. I remember the U.S. Department of State criticizing the dictatorship for the practice of torture. And I do remember that he strongly and successfully pressed the dictatorship against developing nuclear weapons.
- just_a_quack 4y ago
  As far as I can discern, the Carter administration, much like its predecessor, was responsible for providing the most of the arms used during the East Timor genocide. However I don't believe that Carter supported Latin American dictators. He stopped all US arms sales to Argentina, for one.
- unity1001 4y ago
  And yet they did absolutely nothing about neither that dictatorship, nor any of the others. They kept backing them and trading with them and those dictatorships survived for decades more.
  - diego_moita 4y ago
    Please go study history, you are as wrong as the comment above. The Brazilian dictatorship began to collapse before the end of the Carter administration. When Carter left there was a new president in Brazil that removed censorship for the press, ended political torture and granted amnesty to all political prisoners. > those dictatorships survived for decades more. No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office. "Backing them" is something that Thatcher and Reagan did for Pinochet but not Carter.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      > No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office Read operation condor and see if the dictatorships actually ended.
roundandround 4y ago
It seems to me like Ronald Reagan being a traitor was not Carter's fault so his lack of second term was bad luck despite being average to good for a US President as you described.
digianarchist 4y ago
People forget that Ted Kennedy launched a primary challenge against him.
huitzitziltzin 4y ago
Sorry man but both this > deregulate transportation, and this > appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.) For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  Perhaps he's thinking of the "brutal despots" who were mobilized _against_ Carter in Iran to make Reagan look like he had some kind of mental activity.
  - dventimi 4y ago
    No. I'm not. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/carter-decides-to-resume-military-aid-to-el-salvador/16084fe6-8174-49dc-be5f-a5a147566f96/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  The only examples I've been able to find were backing Suharto in the invasion of East Timor and backing a coup in El Salvador, both of which are regrettable but are essentially as you say par for the course in terms of the US 20th Century foreign policy (albeit far tamer than the actions of his predecessor and successor).
  - digianarchist 4y ago
    The invasion of East Timor was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.
pastor_bob 4y ago
> appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed Carter didn't create the inflation crisis (hint it was Nixon who did), so yes having to appoint Volcker was due to a bit of being president during a unluckly economic time.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago
  One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation. Ignoring whether it was a good or bad move, I can't imagine what would happen if Biden did that today. There would be bloodshed. Thankfully, inflation isn't bad enough to warrant any drastic action like that.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Nixon was to the left of modern Democrats on most issues.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      With a notable exception being the whole "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal" thing that Nixon had.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation. Reminds me of "Deep Impact", where President Morgan Freeman tells the world that an asteroid is coming, and by some sort of Presidential Decree he orders all prices fixed to avoid mass hoarding and price gouging. I wasn't around during the Nixon years, but the writers of that screenplay must have been.
- dventimi 4y ago
  If there was inflation crisis, it was probably less of a crisis than was reported at the time. At the time, the annual average inflation rate was reported to be 13%. In hindsight, it was probably more like 10%.
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
>”appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed” Given the persistent and painful inflation that had been happening in the 1970’s, wouldn’t appointing an inflation hawk be considered an appropriate choice? Appointing an inflation dove would probably exacerbate the situation and I imagine he would be judged even more harshly.
- dventimi 4y ago
  Considered an appropriate choice by whom?

mulmen 4y ago

Was he really unlucky as a president? I always had the impression that he stuck to his convictions and as a result a second term wasn't politically tenable. That seems admirable and how our system should work. We want people to get into office with an agenda, achieve it, probably with some compromise, then get out of the way for the next person. Carter did a lot of good in a single term and continued to do so for the remainder of his life.

voisin 4y ago
It would be more frequent if the term limit was one, but possibly a six year term.
nwah1 4y ago
He was definitely unlucky as a president. He presided over the bad part of the business cycle, and his attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue the American hostages in Iran via helicopter completely failed leading to a disastrous PR nightmare. But if he had been given another shot, then he could have continued the program he started with Operation Cyclone, to train and fund Bin Laden's forces. But with conviction! Unlike that other guy. Maybe in his second term he would've rolled back his policy of deporting all Iranian students.
- e40 4y ago
  > and his attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue Iranian hostages Which was thwarted by Reagan doing backchannel negotiations, in bad faith, while Carter was still in office. So, he was unlucky in that Reagan was a criminal.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    Yup, THIS is what the Logan act was designed for.
  - nwah1 4y ago
    Perhaps there is reason to suspect that Iran held the hostages longer because of a deal. But Reagan didn't make the helicopters go down, or are you suggesting otherwise? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th...

euroderf 4y ago

Thruout the 1980s - prime Reagan/Bush regime - I told anyone that wanted to listen that history would be kind to President Carter. Mostly this opinion got hisses. Well, let's see how his legacy plays out nowadays.

bloomingeek 4y ago
I agree, Reagan was nothing but an actor who depended on toxic masculinity and the ability to be a humorist. Carter was honest, where Reagan lied. Carter wanted to help people, where Reagan griped about welfare queens and put millions in prisons for non-violent crimes. Carter was highly educated, where Reagan had Nancy.
- serf 4y ago
  >Carter was honest >Carter wanted to help people He drafted mujahideen , gave them antique weapons, and hoped that both sides would extinguish each other in order to reduce deaths 'at home'. Someone can say 'Well drastic times call for drastic measures..', but personally I wouldn't refer to anyone that participated in such things as 'honest'. .. now that I think about it, I wouldn't really refer to any previous US president as 'honest' ; it's an incompatible trait with the job.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    That seems reasonable immediately after Vietnam. If we're being honest, most of international geopolitics is setting your competitors against each other.
    - dventimi 4y ago
      That doesn't seem at all reasonable to me.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Ronald Reagan: calculating cynic or genial dunce ? The jury is still out...

daveslash 4y ago

Re >> "Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981." Oof, The use of the word "most", as opposed to simply "many" hit me harder than I expected! (I'm early 80s, but not 81'). I guess taking into account how demographics skew young, that's not surprising. But still, oof. Edit: Also, the older I get, the more I admire, respect, and appreciate Carter.

ethbr0 4y ago
When we're young, we respect people who break things. As we age, we respect people who don't break things. When we age further, we really respect people who managed to change things with a minimum of breakage.
jbarham 4y ago
> I guess taking into account how demographics skew young In 2022 the US median age was 38.8, which is not that young by world standards. E.g., the median age in Afghanistan is < 19 (i.e., most people alive in Afghanistan today were born after the 9/11 attacks).

cm2012 4y ago

Here's another post revisiting Jimmy Carter's legacy: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-heard-about https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-...

rayiner 4y ago

Jimmy Carter is my archetype of an American. A nuclear engineer who served in the Navy, and then worked on his family peanut farm, became a citizen President, and then returned to his small Georgia hometown to live out his days while doing humanitarian work. Even then, he wasn't above working with his hands to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.

ethbr0 4y ago
Habitat for Humanity is still one of my favorite volunteer orgs: because they're damn good at scaling. {A few contractors} + {unskilled volunteers} + {subsidized/donated materials} + {future owner sweat equity} = houses And I specifically like that they don't build overly large houses, nor just turn them over. They recognize that something earned is something valued, requiring recipients to work on their house AND others'. In addition to having owners attending financial literacy courses and check-ins through the first few years of ownership. It's how bottom-up should work, if people actually cared about getting things done.
emmelaich 4y ago
* not a nuclear engineer
- rayiner 4y ago
  > He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine. https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/jimmy_carter.html https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/jimmy_carter.html
  - emmelaich 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

Awful president, very pleasant ex-president. This is the guy who ushered in the neoliberal era; the guy they stuck in to suppress the left of the Democratic party, the first successful anti-McGovern candidate (whose slightly left-of-neocon positions were blamed for the loss of the previous election.) Carter left office as a failure, partially due to behind the scenes manipulation of the Iran situation by the Reagan campaign, but mostly due to the fact that there was no positive case to be made for his presidency either. Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism (with a brief stroll through the Party's destruction of the Rainbow Coalition), where the parties only ever differ on a handful of wedge issues. A merger that destroyed Democratic political dominance in the US, it didn't save it. He should be celebrated for his post-presidency e.g. his work for Habitat for Humanity and for Palestinian rights. But Democrats should stop trying to retcon him. I expect the effort to increase after he is dead, since he will have lost the ability to remind them that he's been opposed to their policies on the Israeli occupation. I could swear he was getting bipartisan-ly smeared as an anti-Semite just 15 or so years ago.

00F_ 4y ago

at the time that carter was running for office, south korea was embroiled in a political battle between student-church led populists and park chung hee, essentially a benevolent dictator. the populists or leftists as we might call them now were pushing hard against the normalization of relations with japan among other things. in the capital environment of that time, with south korea being poorer than north korea at a certain point, south korea was not in a position to turn its nose up to any kind of investment. this was made even more true by the post-vietnam cooling of the relationship between south korea and the united states. the only way that korea has become one of the most dynamic and successful countries in the world is because they accepted investment from japan and because they had a highly centralized form of government. if the student led leftist movement had gotten its way, they would have rejected investment from japan on principle, never allowed the chaebol to flourish through massive government deals, and south korea would today be more comparable to chad than singapore. naturally the students would stage huge protests against their own wellbeing and these were responded to with force. this caused lots of people in the united states to take a political stance against the park regime. one of the things that carter ran on was withdrawing from south korea militarily completely so as to not lend support to the brutal dictator. this was of course completely insane. when he won, he tried to go through with it, giving official mandates to withdraw. in the end the department of defense was forced to intervene and stop carter. and of course we never withdrew. imagine if nobody had stopped carter and all the idiotic people who supported him. even if the north had not immediately invaded, nobody would have invested a dime in a country in that position. might as well just donate the money to the soviet union. i think its fair to say that jimmy carter tried to destroy a country for political gain.

specialist 4y ago

I dimly recall the Carter Admin was also dealing with the aftermath of OPEC oil embargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis The environmental efforts of the time were also framed in terms of energy independence, economic growth, etc. Also a huge motivator for promoting peace and stability in the Middle East. -- Everyone has probably seen https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com, a graph that shows the point in time when wages where decoupled from productivity. Apparently, Vaclav Smil argues that deflection point is because of the rising cost of oil. I'm willing to be persuaded. However, I agree with u/pessimizer (upthread) that "Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902957 Here's a hot-take from the right that I find agreeable: https://redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/01/13/the-decline-of-unions-part-one-president-jimmy-carter-union-buster-extraordinaire-n37598 https://redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/01/13/the-decline... Another broader analysis from the left. TLDR: Labor's nadir was the '70s, inclusion of minorities (due to civil rights era reforms) undermined unity, foreign competition devalued domestic labor, and just plain old exhaustion. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labor-history/ https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labo... The book Lobbying America is a history of Capital's decades long effort to roll back The New Deal, from the vantage of corporate America. https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-Society/dp/0691168016 https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-So... FWIW, that effort grew into the larger reactionary project, the culmination we're experiencing today.