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Jimmy Carter Is Gone. His Legacy Was Greater Than Americans Realize.
In March 1976, Time magazine profiled a Democratic governor from Georgia who was making a long-shot bid for the presidency.
A former peanut farmer, he was viewed as an oddity in progressive circles. He talked about his relationship with Jesus and promised to “never tell a lie” when — not if — he was elected president. Even more shocking, he promised to slash bureaucracy if elected, pledging to “reduce the number of federal bureaus from 1,900 to 200.”
“If you don’t want to see the Government completely reorganized,” he proclaimed, “don’t vote for me.”
The man was Jimmy Carter, and he would go on to win the presidency over incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, becoming the first Democrat from the Deep South in the Oval Office since 1844.
In February 2023, it was reported that Carter had been moved into hospice care. He died in Plains, Georgia, on Dec. 29 at age 100, the longest-lived president in U.S. history.
As a single-term president who led the nation during a period of economic turbulence, Carter’s legacy is rarely trumpeted. He tends to rank low in presidential rankings performed by historians and is even trotted out as a cautionary tale of how not to govern.
This is unfortunate because it overlooks how much good Carter did in his lone presidential term.
It’s well known that Carter bucked history by embracing civil rights in the South while serving in the Georgia Senate. This move, though courageous, likely cost Carter the state’s gubernatorial election in 1966; he took third, losing to fellow Democrat Lester Maddox, an ardent segregationist.
Jimmy Carter showed a level of common sense, humility, and political courage that is rare among the political class.
What’s less well known is that Carter brought a similar courage and reform mentality to rolling back a bloated federal bureaucracy when he became president, an enthusiasm he also showed at the state level. Carter, after becoming the 76th governor of Georgia, was appalled by the labyrinth of government agencies he encountered in the Peach State.
“It had got so that every time I opened the closet door of my office, a new state agency would fall out,” he said of the “300 overlapping state agencies.”
The federal government was much worse, and Carter eventually began a massive privatization effort that eventually earned him the nickname “the Great Deregulator.” With energy prices surging, Carter signed the National Energy Act of 1978, which goosed production and eased supply constraints.
“The deregulation of oil and natural gas prices that resulted would lead to a vast increase in the supply of energy in the 1980s, and consequently a lowering of prices,” writes Robert A. Strong, professor of politics at Washington and Lee University.
Reform didn’t stop with energy, however. Carter deregulated everything from transportation to airline ticket pricing to even beer.
Next time you’re sipping an IPA at the local watering hole, take a moment to thank Carter. The dramatic surge in the number of craft breweries across America — “from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,500” just three decades later — stems directly from Carter’s decisions to repeal post–Prohibition-era regulations on production.
“You can see how the large brewers continued to consolidate and grow and absorb more and more market share right up to the point where Carter deregulated the industry,” the Atlantic noted in 2010, quoting several bloggers. “Deregulation reopened the market to craft brewers and the industry blossomed through organic growth and the preferences of consumers.”
Perhaps Carter’s greatest legacy was that of laying the groundwork to tame the historic surge in prices the country experienced during the Great Inflation of 1965–1982, a period that saw an enormous expansion of the money supply to finance the Vietnam War and other government programs.
Carter didn’t sever the U.S. from the gold standard or start the Vietnam War — you can thank Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson for that — but he was forced to deal with the consequences of those policies. In 1977, the year Carter assumed office, inflation averaged 6.5 percent; by December 1979, inflation was north of 13 percent (in part because of Carter’s own ambitious legislative agenda).
Recognizing the pernicious effects of inflation, Carter appointed inflation hawk Paul Volcker chair of the Federal Reserve. Carter’s decision to earnestly tackle inflation probably cost him the 1980 election, as most economists agree that Volcker’s interest-rate hikes triggered the recession that followed. Yet the temporary pain put the U.S. economy on the road to healing and paved the way for the Reagan Revolution and economic growth that followed.
Finally, it should be noted that the Nobel Peace Prize shared by then–Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then–Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would not have been possible without Carter, whose White House led the 14 months of diplomacy that culminated in the Camp David Accords. (Carter would take home his own Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.)
Jimmy Carter was neither a perfect president nor a political saint, but he showed a level of common sense, humility, and political courage that is rare among the political class.
In an era when such qualities are in short supply, it’s a reminder that Americans could do much worse than the peanut farmer from Georgia.
Jonathan Miltimore is the managing editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and Star Tribune.
READ MORE from Jonathan Miltimore:
In Minnesota, Tim Walz Had a Covid Snitch Line
Nancy Pelosi’s Other Legacy: A Mountain of Debt for Our Children
The Horrors of the Holodomor Must Not Be Forgotten
The post Jimmy Carter Is Gone. His Legacy Was Greater Than Americans Realize. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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