Jimmy
Carter's Malaise Speech Revisited
President
Jimmy Carter's televised speech on July 15, 1979, has been one
of the most maligned Presidential speeches in American history.
The speech will over time gain momentum in American history for its
subtlety and relevance just as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has.
Carter was no Lincoln and I do not mean to demean Carter.
Carter has been one of the most providential American presidents in
history. While most ex-presidents sharpen their teeth on world
events, Carter has sought to influence world events through
mediation.
Carter's
speech was an honest assessment of the direction America was
heading and provided remedies to forestall and reverse the
impending American decline just as Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address provided a remedy for the nation's suffering by
reversing the animosities and setting the nation on a course of
reconciliation and healing. Carter's speech like Lincoln's was
an appeal to each of us to take the moral high ground. Carter's
speech was essentially Christian in its attitude on materialism.
“[F]or one's life does not consist in the abundance of things he
possesses” (Luke 12:15). Carter asked us to exercise old-fashioned
stewardship over our financial and natural resources just as Lincoln
appealed to the propositions by which our nation was founded.
Like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Carter's speech called on us to
have a new birth of freedom; a freedom from materialism and
self-indulgence. According to Carter:
[W]e
are also beginning to close the door on our past... 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.
Initially, the American people liked the
message, and we were ready to rally around our President...at
least for a couple of days. Television had shortened our
attention spans but not quite as much as today's cell phones
and iPods. Once the special interest groups circled
their wagons and Carter's political adversaries put
their spin on the speech, the speech was turned into a kind of
defamation of the American spirit. As a nation, we were
vulnerable to political diatribes. We needed someone to uplift
our spirits; to tell us it was okay to take that extra cookie from
the cookie jar because we deserved it. Vietnam, Watergate,
and assassinations had taken their toll on our collective
consciousness and we were in no mood to downsize our appetites.
We needed the cavalry to come to our rescue. Instead, we got an
actor in a cowboy's white hat who had read one chapter in
Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom with annotations by Mrs.
Thatcher.
The Reagan Revolutionaries ran against Carter's
message of austerity and sacrifice and told us that everything was
fine as long as we waved the flag, chanted patriotic slogans, and
bought on credit. With the help of the Ayatollah, the era of
profligacy began. Carter was no competition for the great
communicator Ronald Reagan who tapped into the yet unexploited aspect
of the Boomer's Generation's culture of narcissism, greed. After all,
Nixon had freed the children of the Boomer's from the draft.
There was no need to worry about their kids grades anymore so they
could get a draft deferment for college. There would be no
interruption of service to the self.
Tiring of
their introspective soul searching for meaning, the
boomers rediscovered what their parents, who were children of
the Great Depression, had always been skeptical of, the
wide open objective horizon of laissez-faire capitalism; the
same capitalism that had forced them to eat bread and lard during the
thirties. From kindergarten to the workforce, there was a beeline to
prosperity. Teachers who were viewed as nation builders in
Asia, were viewed as obstacles on the road to success for American
children if they gave out a C, gave too much homework, or challenged
students with rigorous lessons. As test scores dropped along
with student competence, Reagan proclaimed we could have it all
and we could have it now. Education became even more suspect
than before as Americans looked to college dropouts and basketball
players like Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Donald Trump, Magic
Johnson, Larry Bird, Sam Walton, and Steve Jobs as
icons of achievement.
Reagan's message was that we
could extol ourselves into greatness if we only believed. It
was our perceptions that were holding us back not the truth.
We could spend ourselves to the American Dream. Our rugged
individualism along with Hayek's deregulated marketplace was enough
to fulfill our manifest destiny to be a beacon to the world by
exporting our culture and democratic values. We would dominate the
world with our technological innovation, financial services, and
voluntary professional armed forces that would police the world to
guarantee our national security and the flow of oil at an affordable
price. If Juan Valdez complained about earning a buck a day to
guarantee our thirty-nine cent a pound bananas, we could always have
our Ollie Norths do our dirty work. What we needed was a good
war; one at home and one abroad. Reagan fired the air traffic
controller and invaded Granada to save the medical students whose
grades weren't good enough to cut in American medical schools.
America was back in the saddle again.
I bought into
Reagan's message donating to his Republican Presidential Task Force.
I was actually a charter member. I received my certificate, medal,
and flag. It took me twenty-years and a second mortgage from the debt
I accrued to pay for them. Spending ourselves to the American Dream
has led us to consume ourselves over the past thirty-years until we
are now confronted with the present day American nightmare. Our
national public debt is 14 trillion dollars. Our government deficit
is about 1.5 trillion. The "fundamental threat to American
democracy" that Carter spoke of in 1979, is our tendency "to
worship self-indulgence and consumption." Our "identity"
is no longer defined by what [we do], but by what [we own]. We can
hear today social critics and free market economists proclaim the
business model as the key to all our woes. Hospitals, schools,
museums, public libraries, and government agencies should heed the
great entrepreneurial spirit, privatize when possible, and restate
their missions to be more pragmatic and tacitly useful to the
masses. The bottom-line is that if institutions do not
contribute to the economy than their purpose is suspect and not worth
our attention if they can't pay for themselves.
The
real danger to our freedoms is not government debt but our personal
debt. It is a greater threat than the bomb, Reagan’s Evil Empire,
or Al Qaeda. Personal debt enslaves us to tyrannical
masters. We become accustomed to the whip and are grateful for
it. Debt makes us vulnerable to the rolling tides of time and
the foibles of those who would strive for power. Debt destroys
our free will. Debt keeps us silent when we should speak out.
Debt makes us dependent on the world's approval and not on the
approval of our conscience. Debt makes us appeasers as we seek
to avoid conflict. Debt undermines our courage and sets us
on a path of timidity. Debt causes us to feel guilty about
leisure that is essential to recreate and create. Debt causes
us to focus on what we might lose rather than what we have to gain.
Debt has caused us to become a people of the status quo. The
proliferation of easy credit in the United States was the final nail
in the coffin for our people. More than anything else, it
has immobilized us. The great irony is that those who spoke
most vehemently about overspending were the ones who encouraged the
American people to spend more and who accrued the greatest government
debt. Conspiracy theorists need not look any further for the
hidden hand that has put us in our present predicament. We as a
nation were manipulated into insolvency.
The Reaganites and
their predecessors, including Clintonian Democrats, did not
mention that part of their contract with America was the mass
exporting of jobs and our manufacturing base overseas. Those of
us not fortunate enough by birth, pedigree, or disposition to
have the entrepreneurial spirit; those of us who did not have
the killer instinct for competition; those in our society who
had not read Suzuki's book on Zen, Castaneda's Journey to
Ixtlan, or who had not been provided a jump start by
a lump sum from their parents who as senior citizens had accumulated
more wealth than any generation in the history of the world,
were left behind or placed on the margins of society. There
would be no trickle down of wealth to them. Well, they could
always assemble TV sets. The problem today is that not one
single TV is manufactured in the United States. This increased
the bifurcation between the great American middle class and the rich
but it also, even more ominously, increased the divide between the
poor and the middle class. We can see today how the middle
class is becoming radicalized by the Tea-Party Movement.
I
am beginning to hear rumblings amongst the American people; slight
tremors of truth on the social Richter Scale. Although, telling
the truth is not politically advantageous. In fact, we
ourselves have muted our own voices so much by political correctness
that we can't even speak the language of solutions. I have my
doubts that we as a people will ever be able to return to the time
when we could honestly appraise our situation and act to remedy it
without first tearing it all down and starting over. The rugged
individualist has been replaced by the pulp individualist who is
fossilized in adolescence and like most adolescents view themselves
as the hub from which the whole world revolves. Senior citizens
no longer want to invest in the future of their grandchildren.
Blacks hold Whites in a perpetual state of guilt that impedes
constructive discussion on the real problems in minority
communities. Hispanics seeking a larger piece of the economic,
political, and cultural pie accuse politicians of xenophobia and
racism when solutions for the issues of immigration are
proffered. Whites form tea-parties and militias to protect
what they thought belonged to them but never did as
the great American middle class shrinks and they blame everybody but
themselves for their inertia. We have not yet been Balkanized
territorially but we have long passed the point of balkanization
culturally.
God help us if the streets of Cairo forebode a
future in America. I bet many Americans believe that those Egyptians
are not filled with the strength of political will that we Americans
have. Many of us who are isolated in a geopolitical box believe
that our political system is too strong to collapse. Our
nation is a young nation and still filled with great promise.
That may be true but first we have to make it to adulthood.
That is what Carter's speech thirty-one years ago asked us to
do. Carter asked us as a people to become adults again.
He reminded us to look to the past in order to undue our future; to
remember the courage of those involved in the early Civil Rights
Movement who understood that freedom had to be earned and not
bought; to remember those sacrifices of the GI Generation that
helped save the world from fascism; and to remember the
resiliency of those who had lived through the Great Depression.
Carter's speech has not yet been recognized as one of the most
important speeches in our history. It will eventually after
historians look back on our decline. Our decline is inevitable.
No amount of staged patriotism is going to change the direction we
have set for ourselves. They will write about how the most
powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the world destroyed
itself in such a short period of time. Our history from
1945 until today is filled with mistakes and
misjudgments. Historians will blame the American
people for our lack of vigilance, our naiveté, and our
greed. I hope they will note that we were brainwashed.
We were set against one another. We were divided and we were
conquered not by the barbarians at our frontiers but by the very
people we trusted to lead us.
Perhaps the second American Civil
War has been occurring ever since 1980. There are no Antietam's
or Chancellorsville's to gauge this civil war. Until recently,
it has been a clandestine civil war against the American people. We
do not tally the dead, the wounded, or those missing in action in
military terms but we can tally them in cultural, spiritual, and
economic terms. It has been a civil war between those who had
faith in our country and those who sought to milk it for their own
self-interest. It was treason by misinformation,
subversion, and sabotage. Who were the traitors: corporations,
banks, Wall Street and their accomplices; the media, lobbyists, and
politicians who viewed their positions of power as jobs and not as a
duty to serve. Their guiding motivation was profit.
Service was for do-gooders, enablers, or for those who had no choice
but to put on a uniform to get a step up on the socio-economic
ladder.
The collapse of the housing market and the bailout of
banks was the Gettysburg of the clandestine civil war against the
American people. We as a nation will never recover from it.
The material machinery of our recovery has long been stripped from us
and outsourced, exported, or relocated; but what is even more
important, the moral fabric of America has been torn asunder.
We are a people engulfed in the flames of our centrisms. There
will be more battles to fight but the tide has turned and as the
economies of China and India improve our Appomattox draws closer and
closer. The situation brings to mind another speech by a great
President, Abraham Lincoln, as he surveyed the battlefield of
Gettysburg. We can look back and mourn the fallen but we cannot
sanctify what has already been sanctified. Historians will
write the epitaph of our nation in such terms; how a noble and
generous people lined up row by row to be nothing more than cannon
fodder for the rich and powerful. The Egyptians are having
their new birth of freedom. Lincoln asks us, "When will
we?"
We cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we
cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add
or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us
the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
1/31/2010
Carter's
Speech (excerpted)
(Delivered
on July 15, 1979)
[A]fter
listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all
the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So,
I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more
serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now
about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
The
threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of
confidence. 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 erosion of our
confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the
political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have
always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb
in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It
is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development
as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else
-- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and
the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined
our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always
believed in something called progress. 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. As a people we know our past and we are proud of
it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even
the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement
of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for
freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose.
But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also
beginning to close the door on our past.
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.
As you know,
there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for
schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a
message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a
warning.
What you see too often in Washington and
elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems
incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every
direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special
interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote,
almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You
often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a
little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without
support and without friends.
Often you see paralysis and
stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can
we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we
can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith
in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this
nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now
the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this
generation of Americans.
One of the visitors to Camp
David last week put it this way: "We've got to stop crying and
start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and
start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White
House, but from every house in America."
We are at a
turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a
path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation
and self-interest. Down that road 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.
All
the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the
promises of our future point to another path, the path of common
purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to
true freedom for our nation and ourselves.
