Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech Revisited 1/31/2010

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.