Would you have said this about Nixon and Thatcher, too? I certainly remember the "Nixon was good actually and the people who criticize him on his deathbed are ghouls" brigade, too, as they were rushing out media products based on how wonderful and wise Nixon was.
You shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much.
Nixon was a different character. He was a flawed genius, with his paranoia and alcoholism impacting his legacy.
Carter didn’t have the temperament to be a president in his age. He was a flawed president, but a great man. He grew from failure and used his talents and pulpit to advance humanity in a small way.
There’s a difference and when you look at figures in history in leadership, it happens.
I like Carter. Amazing ex-president. We aren't required to make him into a good president to say that he was a great humanitarian post-presidency. We especially shouldn't be shaming people who think that what he did in the few years he was in the most important position on the planet outweigh anything he could have done as a private citizen.
He's not dead yet. Maybe like Schopenhauer you feel he should never have been born at all. It takes all kinds. My kind likes to have a little fun with comments once in awhile.
Well, that's a lie, he actually did the opposite of this.
I remember clearly when Rosalind Carter went to Brazil and gave a speech there praising democracy and respect to human rights in front of the dictator Ernesto Geisel. I remember the U.S. Department of State criticizing the dictatorship for the practice of torture.
And I do remember that he strongly and successfully pressed the dictatorship against developing nuclear weapons.
As far as I can discern, the Carter administration, much like its predecessor, was responsible for providing the most of the arms used during the East Timor genocide. However I don't believe that Carter supported Latin American dictators. He stopped all US arms sales to Argentina, for one.
And yet they did absolutely nothing about neither that dictatorship, nor any of the others. They kept backing them and trading with them and those dictatorships survived for decades more.
Please go study history, you are as wrong as the comment above.
The Brazilian dictatorship began to collapse before the end of the Carter administration. When Carter left there was a new president in Brazil that removed censorship for the press, ended political torture and granted amnesty to all political prisoners.
> those dictatorships survived for decades more.
No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office. "Backing them" is something that Thatcher and Reagan did for Pinochet but not Carter.
It seems to me like Ronald Reagan being a traitor was not Carter's fault so his lack of second term was bad luck despite being average to good for a US President as you described.
were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.)
For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.
Perhaps he's thinking of the "brutal despots" who were mobilized _against_ Carter in Iran to make Reagan look like he had some kind of mental activity.
The only examples I've been able to find were backing Suharto in the invasion of East Timor and backing a coup in El Salvador, both of which are regrettable but are essentially as you say par for the course in terms of the US 20th Century foreign policy (albeit far tamer than the actions of his predecessor and successor).
> “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context
Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.
If you want to contribute more positively, you can do so by educating us on the regimes that were backed specifically by the Carter Administration. Nobody is denying that the US has had a habit of supporting brutal dictators (especially as a knee-jerk response to the presence of a USSR-backed opposition), but as far as I can tell the Carter admin was less eager to do so than its peers.
Also, if you can show me a large country that got through the 20th century without backing (or being) a brutal dictatorship, I'd be very appreciative.
No. This is HackerNews. Not some random forum. The education and intelligence levels in this forum are supposed to be much higher. Even in most far-right nationalist American forums people stopped making such knee-jerk retorts that 'require education'. From FOIA requests to those countries making their documents public, there isn't anything left to debate, discuss, leave aside 'not know about'.
If someone educated and intelligent is making such utterly ignorant sounding commentary about this in such a forum, at this point it cant be ignorance, it definitely cant be lack of intelligence, it can only be bad faith. And there is no reasoning with bad faith - like how your last sentence demonstrates.
If saying I’d like more context and that I could buy OP’s claim makes me guilty of having strong and ‘insulting’ opinions… then IDK yeah I guess I do?
FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common!
I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?
In Indonesia the Carter administration provided aid and weapons to the Suharto government even after evidence of atrocities in East Timor and many other atrocities had come to light.
In El Salvador the Carter administration provided funding to the Revolutionary Government Junta who were also responsible for numerous atrocities.
The Carter administration also provided support for the Guatemalan military government including using Israel to provide them with weapons and military aid in defiance of the embargoes passed by congress. His administration even provided training for their security forces at clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.
There's no such thing as an unambiguous policy win. All public policies have winners and losers, and every public policy has alternatives. I would give a very poor evaluation to any economics professor who seemed not to understand those crucial facts.
Carter didn't create the inflation crisis (hint it was Nixon who did), so yes having to appoint Volcker was due to a bit of being president during a unluckly economic time.
One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation. Ignoring whether it was a good or bad move, I can't imagine what would happen if Biden did that today. There would be bloodshed.
Thankfully, inflation isn't bad enough to warrant any drastic action like that.
> One of the thing that blows my mind is that Nixon unilaterally declared a price and wage freeze in an attempt to combat inflation.
Reminds me of "Deep Impact", where President Morgan Freeman tells the world that an asteroid is coming, and by some sort of Presidential Decree he orders all prices fixed to avoid mass hoarding and price gouging. I wasn't around during the Nixon years, but the writers of that screenplay must have been.
If there was inflation crisis, it was probably less of a crisis than was reported at the time. At the time, the annual average inflation rate was reported to be 13%. In hindsight, it was probably more like 10%.
Given the persistent and painful inflation that had been happening in the 1970’s, wouldn’t appointing an inflation hawk be considered an appropriate choice?
Appointing an inflation dove would probably exacerbate the situation and I imagine he would be judged even more harshly.
Was he really unlucky as a president? I always had the impression that he stuck to his convictions and as a result a second term wasn't politically tenable. That seems admirable and how our system should work. We want people to get into office with an agenda, achieve it, probably with some compromise, then get out of the way for the next person. Carter did a lot of good in a single term and continued to do so for the remainder of his life.
He was definitely unlucky as a president. He presided over the bad part of the business cycle, and his attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) to rescue the American hostages in Iran via helicopter completely failed leading to a disastrous PR nightmare.
But if he had been given another shot, then he could have continued the program he started with Operation Cyclone, to train and fund Bin Laden's forces. But with conviction! Unlike that other guy.
Maybe in his second term he would've rolled back his policy of deporting all Iranian students.
Perhaps there is reason to suspect that Iran held the hostages longer because of a deal. But Reagan didn't make the helicopters go down, or are you suggesting otherwise?
Also don't forget, Carter was brave enough to get the fed to kill the inflation monster by forcing high interest rates which he knew would tank the economy into recession. It was a terrible price to pay on the economy but seems like the right idea in retrospect. Then the next president benefited a few years later when inflation ended (and took credit for it of course). Not many presidents would be willing to do that.
He didn't have power over the Fed, but he did nominate a wise man to lead it. He would've come out looking tarnished under any circumstance, regardless of what the Fed did. Either inflation or high interest rates eventually result in bad times, because that is the nature of the business cycle.
Some people paid that price more than others, and some not at all. Those who paid the most might say that it wasn't worth it to them, and you're in no position to say they're wrong.
I was referring to the people who said it was a bad move politically. I was like 5 years old then. But it looks like the right thing looking back historically and politically in reality, except that it lead to Reagan winning.
This is a week old, but in retrospect what would you have done at that time? I don't know, I was fortunate as a child that my parents remained employed during that time. I wonder what they thought might happen. There must have been people that lost their jobs and then lost their houses, just like in 2008 and maybe even now with interest rates going up, one can't afford a new house. Everything's more expensive.
People lost their jobs at that time not because of inflation, but because of Volcker's efforts to reign in inflation. Throwing people out of work was a feature not a bug. Raising unemployment was his objective, and he achieved that. That's certainly one way to go, but it's not the only way to go. It's not the way I would have gone.
I agree, Reagan was nothing but an actor who depended on toxic masculinity and the ability to be a humorist. Carter was honest, where Reagan lied. Carter wanted to help people, where Reagan griped about welfare queens and put millions in prisons for non-violent crimes. Carter was highly educated, where Reagan had Nancy.
He drafted mujahideen , gave them antique weapons, and hoped that both sides would extinguish each other in order to reduce deaths 'at home'.
Someone can say 'Well drastic times call for drastic measures..', but personally I wouldn't refer to anyone that participated in such things as 'honest'.
.. now that I think about it, I wouldn't really refer to any previous US president as 'honest' ; it's an incompatible trait with the job.
The more I read about the Iran-Contra scandal, the more convinced I am that Reagan and the people he surrounded himself with (including bush) were/are crooks.
The only reason history will be kind is that nobody will be left that actually lived through his presidency. He was a terrible president and the 1980 election results are proof. There are so many things he failed at, as a manager. I would be interested in knowing the age of all the comments here lauding him as a great example of a president. Likely the vast majority of those were not born.
He certainly was a nice guy from a personal perspective.
Re >> "Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981."
Oof, The use of the word "most", as opposed to simply "many" hit me harder than I expected! (I'm early 80s, but not 81'). I guess taking into account how demographics skew young, that's not surprising. But still, oof.
Edit: Also, the older I get, the more I admire, respect, and appreciate Carter.
Jimmy Carter is my archetype of an American. A nuclear engineer who served in the Navy, and then worked on his family peanut farm, became a citizen President, and then returned to his small Georgia hometown to live out his days while doing humanitarian work. Even then, he wasn't above working with his hands to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.
And I specifically like that they don't build overly large houses, nor just turn them over.
They recognize that something earned is something valued, requiring recipients to work on their house AND others'. In addition to having owners attending financial literacy courses and check-ins through the first few years of ownership.
It's how bottom-up should work, if people actually cared about getting things done.
> He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.
> "In March 1953, Carter began nuclear power school, a six-month non-credit course covering nuclear power plant operation at the Union College in Schenectady."
which was not completed, through no fault of his own.
Former Navy nuclear engineering officer here -- I guess it depends on your definition of "nuclear engineer," but I imagine most of us "nukes" think of Jimmy Carter as one of our own.
This is the guy who ushered in the neoliberal era; the guy they stuck in to suppress the left of the Democratic party, the first successful anti-McGovern candidate (whose slightly left-of-neocon positions were blamed for the loss of the previous election.) Carter left office as a failure, partially due to behind the scenes manipulation of the Iran situation by the Reagan campaign, but mostly due to the fact that there was no positive case to be made for his presidency either.
Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism (with a brief stroll through the Party's destruction of the Rainbow Coalition), where the parties only ever differ on a handful of wedge issues. A merger that destroyed Democratic political dominance in the US, it didn't save it.
He should be celebrated for his post-presidency e.g. his work for Habitat for Humanity and for Palestinian rights. But Democrats should stop trying to retcon him. I expect the effort to increase after he is dead, since he will have lost the ability to remind them that he's been opposed to their policies on the Israeli occupation. I could swear he was getting bipartisan-ly smeared as an anti-Semite just 15 or so years ago.
at the time that carter was running for office, south korea was embroiled in a political battle between student-church led populists and park chung hee, essentially a benevolent dictator. the populists or leftists as we might call them now were pushing hard against the normalization of relations with japan among other things. in the capital environment of that time, with south korea being poorer than north korea at a certain point, south korea was not in a position to turn its nose up to any kind of investment. this was made even more true by the post-vietnam cooling of the relationship between south korea and the united states. the only way that korea has become one of the most dynamic and successful countries in the world is because they accepted investment from japan and because they had a highly centralized form of government. if the student led leftist movement had gotten its way, they would have rejected investment from japan on principle, never allowed the chaebol to flourish through massive government deals, and south korea would today be more comparable to chad than singapore.
naturally the students would stage huge protests against their own wellbeing and these were responded to with force. this caused lots of people in the united states to take a political stance against the park regime. one of the things that carter ran on was withdrawing from south korea militarily completely so as to not lend support to the brutal dictator. this was of course completely insane. when he won, he tried to go through with it, giving official mandates to withdraw. in the end the department of defense was forced to intervene and stop carter. and of course we never withdrew. imagine if nobody had stopped carter and all the idiotic people who supported him. even if the north had not immediately invaded, nobody would have invested a dime in a country in that position. might as well just donate the money to the soviet union. i think its fair to say that jimmy carter tried to destroy a country for political gain.
Another broader analysis from the left. TLDR: Labor's nadir was the '70s, inclusion of minorities (due to civil rights era reforms) undermined unity, foreign competition devalued domestic labor, and just plain old exhaustion. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labo...
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadYou shouldn't let other people's feelings about political figures upset you so much.
Carter didn’t have the temperament to be a president in his age. He was a flawed president, but a great man. He grew from failure and used his talents and pulpit to advance humanity in a small way.
There’s a difference and when you look at figures in history in leadership, it happens.
I'm not upset at all so you should probably stop misreading people's emotions and telling them they should feel otherwise
Well, that's a lie, he actually did the opposite of this.
I remember clearly when Rosalind Carter went to Brazil and gave a speech there praising democracy and respect to human rights in front of the dictator Ernesto Geisel. I remember the U.S. Department of State criticizing the dictatorship for the practice of torture.
And I do remember that he strongly and successfully pressed the dictatorship against developing nuclear weapons.
The Brazilian dictatorship began to collapse before the end of the Carter administration. When Carter left there was a new president in Brazil that removed censorship for the press, ended political torture and granted amnesty to all political prisoners.
> those dictatorships survived for decades more.
No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office. "Backing them" is something that Thatcher and Reagan did for Pinochet but not Carter.
Read operation condor and see if the dictatorships actually ended.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
> deregulate transportation,
and this
> appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed
were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.)
For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.
Also, if you can show me a large country that got through the 20th century without backing (or being) a brutal dictatorship, I'd be very appreciative.
No. This is HackerNews. Not some random forum. The education and intelligence levels in this forum are supposed to be much higher. Even in most far-right nationalist American forums people stopped making such knee-jerk retorts that 'require education'. From FOIA requests to those countries making their documents public, there isn't anything left to debate, discuss, leave aside 'not know about'.
If someone educated and intelligent is making such utterly ignorant sounding commentary about this in such a forum, at this point it cant be ignorance, it definitely cant be lack of intelligence, it can only be bad faith. And there is no reasoning with bad faith - like how your last sentence demonstrates.
FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common!
I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
In El Salvador the Carter administration provided funding to the Revolutionary Government Junta who were also responsible for numerous atrocities.
The Carter administration also provided support for the Guatemalan military government including using Israel to provide them with weapons and military aid in defiance of the embargoes passed by congress. His administration even provided training for their security forces at clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.
Carter didn't create the inflation crisis (hint it was Nixon who did), so yes having to appoint Volcker was due to a bit of being president during a unluckly economic time.
Thankfully, inflation isn't bad enough to warrant any drastic action like that.
Reminds me of "Deep Impact", where President Morgan Freeman tells the world that an asteroid is coming, and by some sort of Presidential Decree he orders all prices fixed to avoid mass hoarding and price gouging. I wasn't around during the Nixon years, but the writers of that screenplay must have been.
Given the persistent and painful inflation that had been happening in the 1970’s, wouldn’t appointing an inflation hawk be considered an appropriate choice?
Appointing an inflation dove would probably exacerbate the situation and I imagine he would be judged even more harshly.
But if he had been given another shot, then he could have continued the program he started with Operation Cyclone, to train and fund Bin Laden's forces. But with conviction! Unlike that other guy.
Maybe in his second term he would've rolled back his policy of deporting all Iranian students.
Which was thwarted by Reagan doing backchannel negotiations, in bad faith, while Carter was still in office.
So, he was unlucky in that Reagan was a criminal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th...
to you
Mostly this opinion got hisses.
Well, let's see how his legacy plays out nowadays.
>Carter wanted to help people
He drafted mujahideen , gave them antique weapons, and hoped that both sides would extinguish each other in order to reduce deaths 'at home'.
Someone can say 'Well drastic times call for drastic measures..', but personally I wouldn't refer to anyone that participated in such things as 'honest'.
.. now that I think about it, I wouldn't really refer to any previous US president as 'honest' ; it's an incompatible trait with the job.
If we're being honest, most of international geopolitics is setting your competitors against each other.
The jury is still out...
Oof, The use of the word "most", as opposed to simply "many" hit me harder than I expected! (I'm early 80s, but not 81'). I guess taking into account how demographics skew young, that's not surprising. But still, oof.
Edit: Also, the older I get, the more I admire, respect, and appreciate Carter.
As we age, we respect people who don't break things.
When we age further, we really respect people who managed to change things with a minimum of breakage.
In 2022 the US median age was 38.8, which is not that young by world standards.
E.g., the median age in Afghanistan is < 19 (i.e., most people alive in Afghanistan today were born after the 9/11 attacks).
{A few contractors} + {unskilled volunteers} + {subsidized/donated materials} + {future owner sweat equity} = houses
And I specifically like that they don't build overly large houses, nor just turn them over.
They recognize that something earned is something valued, requiring recipients to work on their house AND others'. In addition to having owners attending financial literacy courses and check-ins through the first few years of ownership.
It's how bottom-up should work, if people actually cared about getting things done.
https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/jimmy_carter.html
> "In March 1953, Carter began nuclear power school, a six-month non-credit course covering nuclear power plant operation at the Union College in Schenectady."
which was not completed, through no fault of his own.
Former Navy nuclear engineering officer here -- I guess it depends on your definition of "nuclear engineer," but I imagine most of us "nukes" think of Jimmy Carter as one of our own.
This is the guy who ushered in the neoliberal era; the guy they stuck in to suppress the left of the Democratic party, the first successful anti-McGovern candidate (whose slightly left-of-neocon positions were blamed for the loss of the previous election.) Carter left office as a failure, partially due to behind the scenes manipulation of the Iran situation by the Reagan campaign, but mostly due to the fact that there was no positive case to be made for his presidency either.
Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism (with a brief stroll through the Party's destruction of the Rainbow Coalition), where the parties only ever differ on a handful of wedge issues. A merger that destroyed Democratic political dominance in the US, it didn't save it.
He should be celebrated for his post-presidency e.g. his work for Habitat for Humanity and for Palestinian rights. But Democrats should stop trying to retcon him. I expect the effort to increase after he is dead, since he will have lost the ability to remind them that he's been opposed to their policies on the Israeli occupation. I could swear he was getting bipartisan-ly smeared as an anti-Semite just 15 or so years ago.
naturally the students would stage huge protests against their own wellbeing and these were responded to with force. this caused lots of people in the united states to take a political stance against the park regime. one of the things that carter ran on was withdrawing from south korea militarily completely so as to not lend support to the brutal dictator. this was of course completely insane. when he won, he tried to go through with it, giving official mandates to withdraw. in the end the department of defense was forced to intervene and stop carter. and of course we never withdrew. imagine if nobody had stopped carter and all the idiotic people who supported him. even if the north had not immediately invaded, nobody would have invested a dime in a country in that position. might as well just donate the money to the soviet union. i think its fair to say that jimmy carter tried to destroy a country for political gain.
The environmental efforts of the time were also framed in terms of energy independence, economic growth, etc.
Also a huge motivator for promoting peace and stability in the Middle East.
--
Everyone has probably seen https://wtfhappenedin1971.com, a graph that shows the point in time when wages where decoupled from productivity.
Apparently, Vaclav Smil argues that deflection point is because of the rising cost of oil. I'm willing to be persuaded.
However, I agree with u/pessimizer (upthread) that "Carter was the bridge from the New Deal to Clintonism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902957
Here's a hot-take from the right that I find agreeable: https://redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/01/13/the-decline...
Another broader analysis from the left. TLDR: Labor's nadir was the '70s, inclusion of minorities (due to civil rights era reforms) undermined unity, foreign competition devalued domestic labor, and just plain old exhaustion. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/1970s-decade-strike-workers-labo...
The book Lobbying America is a history of Capital's decades long effort to roll back The New Deal, from the vantage of corporate America. https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-So...
FWIW, that effort grew into the larger reactionary project, the culmination we're experiencing today.