No person, event, or idea that is important enough to reside in the collective consciousness of a nation does so neutrally. A ruler was famous or infamous. A revolution was progressive or regressive. An ideology is either good or bad. Sometimes the connotations attached to these are not uniform across various communities. At other times, the consensus is more nuanced. At no time, however, does any aspect of history avoid having some value judgment associated with its legacy.
The late President Jimmy Carter is one such case of generally being remembered in a nuanced way. On one hand, his presidency was mired with issue after issue, most of which flourished as he, in the words of a southern governor, was “not leading the nation” but instead merely “managing the government.” Yet on the other, his post-presidency, characterized by his work with Habitat for Humanity and his advocacy around the world for human rights through the Carter Center, has earned him the title from some of “the nation’s greatest former president.” He most certainly will go down as a “bad president, but nice guy” in the minds of most Americans.
But just as the legacy of President Nixon likely never recovering from the Watergate Scandal makes it hard to appreciate the good he did—despite the attempts by the Nixon Library to rehabilitate his name—and just as the legacy of President Obama likely never being diminished from his status as our nation’s first black president makes any attempt to criticize him seem petty (or even the r-word), the negative connotation that envelopes Carter’s presidential memory can prevent us from learning from the moments of light, however rare they may be, that can be found within.
The prime example of this is his famous “Malaise” speech, his July 1979 Oval Office address properly titled “Crisis of Confidence,” the colloquial name of which serves as an example, literally in a word, of how the power of narrative can permanently contextualize a moment in history. It was also the speech in which Carter self-deprecatingly mentioned the anecdote from the anonymous southern governor cited before. Technically, the negative connotation attached to the speech was not a false or even twisted representation of its contents or its intent. In the speech, Carter struck a serious, almost melancholic tone, telling America that there was a sickness within our soul that would make it hard to successfully submit ourselves to the austerity measures that he argued were needed to combat the oil crisis affecting the nation. At a more fundamental level, however, the tarnished legacy of the speech stemmed from the fact Americans, although initially responding well to it, were ultimately jarred by hearing their president, their leader, talking with such apparent defeatism. They did not interpret his message as a call to be better—though even that would not exactly qualify as inspiring—but instead as a nationally broadcast scolding session… that was also depressing. Ronald Reagan would pick up on this sentiment in 1980 to beat Carter with his contrasting message of explicit optimism.
Central to Carter’s moral indictment in his speech was the idea that America had become a consumerist nation that had inordinately elevated material goods in our value hierarchy over other, more important albeit intangible goods. In his own words:
“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
It should come as no surprise that such words left the mouth of a man who would go on to dutifully teach Sunday School from the time he left the White House in the early 1980s until just six years before his death. This excerpt certainly could, even without the context provided here, be easily and understandably mistaken as being part of one such lesson, and a pretty good one at that.
In any case, the peanut farmer was right all along. In the decades that followed, the then-nascent culture of “self-indulgence and consumption” that pervaded the left and right has metastasized to seemingly every part of American life. The left, in its social policy, suffers more acutely with self-indulgence in its tacit approval of what can bluntly be called hedonism. At least its economic policy, for all of its practical and philosophical faults, is often predicated on selflessness and a will to help the beleaguered. The right, in its economic policy, suffers more acutely with what at times can be an excessive focus on consumption, especially in its “Chamber of Commerce” faction, although their influence has been diminished (thank goodness) in the Trump era with the resurgence of the Christian Right and their focus on morality.
Of course, these are oversimplifications, but I nonetheless think the general trends that followed in the nearly 50 years since the speech was given underline my point here. The 1980s saw economic prosperity that acclimated the average middle-class American to the joys of excess—social life, for example, came at this time to revolve around the mall instead of, say, the local soda shop. This was not necessarily a bad thing except that we tended to place our identity, as Carter feared, in this excess instead of the more meaningful aspects of our lives that such prosperity more readily afforded us. Just think of how nostalgia for the 80s and 90s and even the early 2000s are often experienced. If it isn’t somehow related to the material goods of those eras—the fashion, retro technology, the lifestyle, etc.—it likely is related to how “simpler” life was back then, a life that might even be reminiscent of Carter’s reference to “strong families” and “close-knit communities.” Ironically, it was this same economic prosperity that ushered in an age of new technology—smartphones—that in no small part helped to erode the real social good that hanging out at the mall, to return to that example, still had as a social institution.
The vice of the left at the same time complimented that of the right. As consumption started to be evermore lent upon as a value, so did self-indulgence. In many ways, we are still living in the post-sexual revolution world, a world that Carter was obviously aware of and one that was more wholeheartedly embraced by future generations, much to the chagrin, I am sure, of Reagan’s moral majority. As an example, while 48% of the cohort of women (the surveys only queried women) who came to age at the peak of the revolution engaged in premarital sex by age 20, that number skyrocketed to 76% by the mid-1990s for the corresponding cohort. Even if you don’t hold to traditional teachings regarding premarital sex, surely it must at least be admitted that its rise in popularity represents pleasure, particularly of the base kind, taking a higher position in our value hierarchy than before.
Keen readers might have noticed that while I so far have used self-indulgence and consumption to refer to the vice of the left and right, respectively, they are essentially synonymous with each other insofar as they both are forms of base pleasures that often manifest as vices—and vice feeds vice. Much of the technological advances over the last half-century have gone to serve the pleasure of self-indulgence—be it vanity in your online influencer, sloth in your doom-scroller, or the lust in the 1 in 10 men addicted to online porn—unmitigated because so much of it serves the pleasure of profit and the prosperity it brings. The progressive loosening of standards in film, television, fashion, and music during the late 20th century can be explained in the same way. Sex, as they say, sells, but too does vulgarity, violence, and a whole host of other ignoble desires—and both the left and right are complicit.
Where Carter’s wisdom really begins to shine through is when we look at where following these disordered desires has left us. The New York Times recently reported that “a politically diverse group of scholars” have concluded that while America in 2025 is quite wealthy, we also are at a 30-year high in suicidality, depression, and life dissatisfaction rates. Obviously, formal causation between the trends identified above and these issues just listed cannot be established with just this, but given all that has been said so far it surely is not implausible that some level of causation exists. Our reality today seems to comport perfectly with the last sentence of the excerpt when Carter said that “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of the lives which have no confidence or purpose.” What is funny is that he preceded that statement saying that this was a lesson we had already learned. I appreciate his trust in the American people but such an assertion, unfortunately, was clearly reflective of his characteristic naïveté.
On a brighter note, the way out of this malaise is rather straightforward, albeit difficult. As Carter said, we must once again extol “hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God.” In other words, we must make a conscious effort to pursue things that we know in our heart of hearts are more likely to lead to our flourishing over that which is most immediately pleasureful. I know saying this comes at the risk of sounding puritanical—a risk Carter took on to his detriment—but, to clarify, this does not mean that we should become Luddites, resign ourselves to only watching Little House on the Prairie, and read the Bible all day, although these things, especially the latter, certainly would not do you any harm. Instead, at a more practical level, it simply is a call to reevaluate and then reorient one’s purpose and ends in life toward long-term, perhaps even everlasting, goods. At a political level, it similarly is a call for us to become less self-indulgent and more bound to virtue, a lesson the left can definitely learn from the right, and less focused on the material life and more bound to intangible goods such as justice and selflessness, a lesson I think the right today is starting to embrace.
In the end, I would like to think that President Carter would agree with much of what was said here, but that is no guarantee and, of course, there is no way to know now. Regardless, as we sit just over one month after his death, I hope history comes to appreciate the great wisdom he conveyed in this speech despite the other aspects of his presidency that are rightly criticized.
