Atlanta, Georgia
One of the many flaws in American governance is that the president is expected to be both chief executive and head of state. There is no division of duties as in Britain between the monarch and the prime minister, or as in Germany, with its chancellor and president. The U.S. president is expected to fill both the executive role of making hard decisions and the ceremonial role of making the public feel they’re part of a cohesive nation. Except perhaps in times of war, it’s virtually impossible for a political figure whose job it is to win at the dirty game of politics to project those qualities of a nation that transcend mere politics. Jimmy Carter, who entered home hospice care this past weekend, was a far better symbol than he was an executive. It’s a shame that he wasn’t the symbol this gold medal obsessed nation wanted.
On July 15, 1979, in a televised address ostensibly about the energy crisis, Carter uttered words that a head of state needed to tell his people. But because they were too honest and challenging, they were also words no elected official could get away with saying.
That night, the peanut farmer from Georgia didn’t talk about unhappiness in the land or of a momentary spell of anxiety. He warned that too many Americans had traded a sense of purpose and community for “self indulgence” and a growing belief in “consumption.” Sounding like the Sunday school teacher he was, he said that Americans’ identities were becoming more defined by what they owned rather than by how they made a living. But he reminded us that “material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives” without purpose. Yes. An American president spoke to Americans from the Oval Office and told them that they needed to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
Perhaps even more striking is that he didn’t propose a governmental solution to this problem. In fact, he confessed, “that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” Americans had to do it by and for themselves.
Carter feared that Americans would choose the path that led “to fragmentation and self-interest.” “Down that road,” he warned, “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.”
Materialism, pessimism, a “growing disrespect” for government, churches, and other essential institutions, Carter saw the “symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.” And he was well aware that this message was not one of “happiness or reassurance.” But he knew it was true, and said it anyways. Though the speech did not use the word “malaise,” the press labeled it his “malaise speech.” That alone suggests that they didn’t understand the depth of Carter’s assessment of the state of the union.
Despite its brilliance, Carter’s infamous speech is most often remembered as another example of a “tone-deaf” one-term president. A year later, an aggressively optimistic former actor, who insisted that it was still “morning in America,” defeated him in a landslide.
Because we willfully misinterpreted and then ignored him, America has become the nation Carter feared it would. Humble, anti-elitist, the only Democratic former president in my memory who didn’t become filthy rich after leaving the White House, Carter was too straight an arrow to be an effective president. But he was also one of the very, very few national political figures who had the courage to tell the truth about the state of American culture.
