In memoriam James Earl Carter

Election Night, 1980.

I was all of ten years old, and was already a political junkie. My family was watching the returns. I believe I had CBS on, because of course I did. As it became clear that President Jimmy Carter was going to lose to Ronald Reagan, my mother sighed and said, "That good man is losing to the actor."

President James Earl Carter passed away on Sunday. I have existed in my entire political life with jokes about Jimmy Carter. That he was a failure. That he was a dreamer. That he was not fit for the office.

The fact is that Jimmy Carter was that oddest of people in politics: He told the truth, to the best of his ability.

I'm just old enough to remember his "Malaise" speech. How he was excoriated for it. America can never fail! It's not in malaise! Fast forward twenty years, and President George H. W. Bush was gleefully sounding an end to the "Vietnam malaise" after the success of Operation Desert Storm. So, I guess there was American malaise?

Americans don't want to hear the truth. They want to be fed happy nostrums, sweet pabulum that we are the greatest country God has ever devised, unburdened by history, never able to fail. Jimmy Carter was that rare politician who told the truth. That this country had a brokenness in it. That it was failing vast swathes of its commonwealth. As only a man from a small town in the South could see; generations of dysfunction which would eventually engender a reaction.

And we're seeing that reaction now. In the Age of Trump, the people feeling the malaise now admit that there's malaise, and blame the Other for it, and elected a carnival barker who promised to fix it. But there's no fixing it, not in the way they think it can be fixed. American malaise can be rectified only by expanding the commonwealth, by accepting all of the people who live in this country, legal and undocumented, and children of this flawed experiment.

Bill Clinton, a fellow Southerner, also analysed this malaise. When he was facing a showdown with the Republican Congress, he said in private that the GOP was just looking to hurt people. Including those who voted for it. This is where we are. We have a party which is evil, and a party which is imperfect and gets punished for that imperfection, while the evil party succeeds in conning the electorate.

Jimmy Carter was far from perfect. But that just means that he was a complex man, and no one is perfectly made. But his career after his too-short presidency showed that, however imperfect he was, he had a love for his fellow human which transcended boundaries. Unlike George W. Bush, he didn't spend his post-presidential life collecting honorariums. He spent them building houses for those who didn't have a place in which to lay their heads. Whatever you may think of his presidency, his life afterwards lived up to the teachings of the Nazarene carpenter whom he followed.

And how can we neglect his life with his wife, Rosalynn? His best friend, his helpmeet. We have elected a man who has cheated on each of his spouses, and his followers hold him up as a paragon of Christian virtue. Meanwhile, men like Pres. Carter, Pres. Biden, and Pres. Obama are treated as heathens.

Rest in eternal power, James Earl Carter. May this country eventually come to appreciate what a great man you were.