Jimmy Carter, Conservative

Everybody knows that Jimmy Carter was America’s last truly liberal president until Barack Obama. But everybody is wrong. Carter was the first in the conservative line of presidents more commonly associated with Ronald Reagan.

Carter’s 1980 defeat by Reagan, after serving a single term, “marked the decline and fall of the public’s faith in statist liberalism,” the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) once said. A more favorable popular conceit, as described by the journalist Nicholas Lemann, is that Carter was “too much the good-hearted liberal to maintain a hold on the presidential electorate.”

These misconceptions seem plausible today because Carter’s four-decade post-presidency was notably more left-leaning than his presidency ever was. The ex-president’s peace missions to North Korea and Cuba and his frequent criticisms of U.S. policies regarding everything from the Palestinians (whose treatment by Israel he famously likened to apartheid) to domestic surveillance (“unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy”) positioned Carter well to the left of Republican and Democratic successors alike.

Historical memory of Carter’s presidency is also distorted by a failure to consider his administration’s policies in their proper historical context. The creation of the Education Department, for example, or passage of the oil windfall profits tax, seem liberal only when you forget that the political spectrum drifted rightward for three decades after Carter left office. Judged outside that context, even many of Reagan’s policies today seem liberal.

In truth, the pendulum started swinging to the right before Carter took office, and continued doing so under Carter’s presidency. Reagan didn’t change the pendulum’s direction; he just accelerated its speed.

Carter’s two Democratic predecessors in the White House, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, spoke expansively of what government could do. Carter, a former governor in the conservative Deep South, preferred to point out that there was much government couldn’t do. “There is a limit to the role and the function of government,” Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union speech. “Government cannot solve our problems.”

Reagan would subsequently rework that statement (in his first inaugural address) into “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” which carried the thought much further than Carter ever would. Nor would Carter have likely declared, as President Bill Clinton did in 1996, that “the era of big government is over.”

But Carter’s warning about government’s limitations, anodyne though it may seem today, shocked liberals at the time. “Can anyone imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt talking this way?” fumed the historian and political activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Can anyone imagine Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, or George McGovern uttering those words?” Carter, Schlesinger concluded, “is not a Democrat — at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word.”

Bob Shrum, the liberal Democratic operative who would later be a political consultant to Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, found Carter so hesitant to support liberal positions that he quit Carter’s 1976 campaign after 10 days. “Your strategy is largely designed to conceal your true convictions,” Shrum wrote in his resignation letter, “whatever they may be.” Four years later Shrum was a speechwriter for Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who in the Democratic presidential primaries challenged Carter, unsuccessfully, from the left.

If Shrum was a fish out of water with Carter, Carter was a fish out of water among Kennedy and other liberal Democrats. “I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do the others,” he confided in his White House diary, “although the liberals vote with me more often.”

The New Deal liberal ascendancy with which Carter is wrongly associated ended around 1974. It was killed off by the white backlash to the civil rights movement, which ended Democratic dominance in the South; by the Vietnam war, which ended Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and split the Democrats into warring factions; by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which ended permanently the widely shared prosperity that undergirded liberal policies after 1945; and by the Watergate scandal that expelled Richard Nixon from the White House.

This last might seem counterintuitive, given that Nixon was a Republican much reviled by liberal Democrats. And indeed, Watergate’s immediate consequences were a Democratic congressional sweep in 1974 (the so-called “Watergate babies”) and Carter’s own narrow victory over Gerald Ford two years later. But Vietnam’s “credibility gap” and Watergate’s outright criminality undermined the public’s faith in government, a shift that over the long term mostly benefited the anti-government right.

Watergate also put Ford, a Republican notably more conservative than Nixon, into the Oval Office. Nixon’s domestic policies, it’s often observed, were largely a continuation of New Deal liberalism (the main exception, ironic given Nixon’s own law-breaking, being the area of criminal justice). Among other actions, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (the regulatory agency most hated by conservatives today); proposed what amounted to a guaranteed family income; and imposed wage and price controls. It’s difficult to imagine Ford — who would expel Henry Kissinger for being too pro-détente, deny New York City a bailout when it verged on bankruptcy, and look nervously over his shoulder at a right-flank primary challenge from Reagan — doing any of these things.

But tempting though it is to name Ford rather than Carter the first president of the conservative ascendancy, he must be denied that prize, for three reasons. First, he was in the White House only two years, barely enough time to change the drapes. Second, political circumstances required Ford to focus mainly on calming the waters after the “long national nightmare” that was Watergate. Third, Ford was temperamentally inclined, as former House minority leader in a Congress far more courteous and clubby than today’s, to work cooperatively.

Carter was a different animal altogether.

It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat. He was fiscally conservative, and bequeathed Reagan a budget deficit of about $74 billion. That was thought high at the time, but within five years Reagan had more than doubled it, after inflation. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit fell under Carter; it would rise under Reagan, who preached fiscal conservatism but did not practice it.

The twin pillars of conservatism today are opposition to taxes and opposition to regulation. These first came to the fore during Carter’s presidency.

On taxes, Carter’s own ambitions were liberal. But he couldn’t sell his progressive tax reform to Congress because a nationwide tax revolt was spreading, sparked by passage of Proposition 13, a California initiative limiting property taxes. That revolt can be blamed, at least in part, on Carter for failing to address effectively the out-of-control inflation that was jacking up home values (and therefore property taxes). Even here, though, it should be remembered that the government official widely credited with finally curbing, in the early 1980s, the decade-long Great Inflation was Paul Volcker, chair of the Federal Reserve Board — and a Carter appointee.

With his tax reform a dead letter, Carter signed into law instead a 1978 bill initiated by Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Sen. William Roth (R-Del.) that lowered substantially the capital gains tax. The rest, as they say, is history. “Emboldened by their ability to force a Democratic president and Congress to enact what was essentially a conservative tax bill,” Kemp aide Bruce Bartlett would later recall, Kemp and Roth “pressed on with more radical tax reduction efforts” that won enthusiastic support from candidate Reagan and were enacted in 1981. This second Kemp-Roth tax bill is now remembered as the signature legislative embodiment of supply-side economics, the reigning economic doctrine of the Reagan years.

The Carter era also saw calls for government deregulation begin to take fruit. Carter’s focus was on economic deregulation, a cause then supported even by liberals like Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader on the theory that it would expose corporations to unwanted competition that would benefit consumers. It was under Carter that Congress passed significant bills deregulating the trucking, railroad and airline industries; these would be followed by more sweeping deregulation under Reagan, Bush and Clinton of bus travel, shipping, energy, telecommunications and banking, and by new statutory restrictions on health and safety regulations.

The conservative movement has always valued a strong military. Carter is remembered as weak on defense because his April 1980 attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran ended in ignominious failure. (The New Republic labeled it “The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic.”) But, particularly for a Democrat, Carter was notably pro-defense. He had, after all, spent 10 years in the Navy — more years of military service than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. Contrary to popular wisdom, it was Carter, not Reagan, who reversed the decline in military spending (after inflation) that followed U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War. Reagan would merely accelerate that rate of growth.

Carter displeased conservatives by granting unconditional amnesty to Vietnam draft evaders, which infuriated hawks at the time. But Carter’s program merely expanded a clemency program Ford had instituted three years earlier. Nor was the amnesty as “unconditional” as advertised; in his 2008 book “The Age of Reagan,” the historian Sean Wilentz observed that it “sustained many of the burdens imposed by Ford” and that as a result “very few Vietnam-era military deserters and AWOLS would ever receive any form of legal relief.”

Since the ‘80s it’s been de rigueur for presidential candidates of both parties to position themselves as Washington outsiders who will challenge the capital’s corrupt culture — a game at which Republicans bent on shrinking government enjoy a home field advantage. That competition began with Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s whole campaign was predicated on the idea that America desperately needed someone to restore honesty and decency to government. “For a long time our American citizens have been excluded, sometimes misled, sometimes have been lied to,” he said in a 1976 debate with Ford. Carter promised to be different: “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you has in me, and I will never avoid a controversial issue.” It was a preposterous and sanctimonious pledge, one no living, breathing politician could hope ever to live up to. But it was what voters wanted to hear after Watergate and Vietnam.

Carter was also the first president of the modern era to legitimize, for good or ill, extensive discussion by a presidential candidate of his personal faith — another arena that would prove more hospitable to conservatives than liberals.

Before Carter, U.S. presidents thought it in poor taste to go on too much about their religious beliefs. True, Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and formalized “In God We Trust” as the national motto, and he once said “I am the most intensely religious man I know.” But Ike wasn’t even a regular churchgoer before he became president, and he was never particularly voluble about his Presbyterianism (or about anything else). Kennedy saw his Catholic religion as more liability than asset, and neither LBJ nor Nixon, despite their many photo ops with the Rev. Billy Graham, was especially devout. Ford was, but would later explain, “I didn't think it was appropriate to advertise my religious beliefs.”

Carter changed that. He was the first president ever to declare himself “born again,” and the first to rely on evangelicals to win the presidency. Carter’s election coincided with the politicization of evangelical Christianity, which would play a significant role in presidential politics during the 1980s and 1990s. But the movement’s conservatives quickly established political dominance with the establishment of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and the transformation of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network from a small regional broadcast network to a national cable network. As a result, the evangelical vote shifted from Carter to Reagan. By 2000, Carter’s own Southern Baptist church had moved so far to the right — or perhaps he to the left — that he severed his ties to it.

The rightward shift under Carter was slight compared to the changes that would come later under Reagan, whom the smartest political thinkers, before his 1980 victory, judged way too conservative to be elected president. (So much for smart political thinkers.) Minor adjustments to the New Deal political consensus under Carter became major adjustments during what historians properly term the Reagan era, which lasted at least until 2008 and in many respects lingers today. But the first president of that era wasn’t a former Hollywood actor turned governor. It was a former Naval engineer turned peanut farmer turned governor. That’s not a laurel Carter would have been pleased to receive, but it’s his just the same.