An enjoyable read, and I lived through all that. One correction: Reagan's 49-state victory was in 1984. He won a mere 44 states in 1980. Also, although I suspect this is unknowable, my impression on Inauguration Day was that Iran held the hostages just long enough to not free them during Carter's administration, out of spite, or maybe that Reagan-led tricksiness.
I enjoyed this review. But sad to see the absence of discussion of the most significant event of the administration—the time he was attacked by a killer rabbit.
Super fun review. The writerly voice seemed familiar, kind of a Freddie DeBoer or Jeff Maurer vibe. This one's my favorite of the reader reviews so far.
Just a few comments from someone who was a (prevoting age) Atlantan in 1970. First, Carl Sanders wasn't a businessman, he was a lawyer. More importantly, he was the former Governor of Georgia (1962-1966), coming back to try for a discontinuous second term, since Georgia governors at the time were limited to one consecutive term. Carter's attacks on Sanders were grotesque and inaccurate, but he did successfully portray Sanders as a creature of the Atlanta consensus. Sanders was no integrationist, but he was considerably more integrationist than Carter portrayed himself as, and that was an unfortunate path to electoral victory around that time.
By 1976 I was old enough to cast my first Presidential vote (I was in college in the North by then) and was genuinely torn on entering the voting booth... I knew Carter and trusted him not at all, and I thought Ford was second rate. I honestly cannot recall who I voted for... even today. But if I did vote for Carter, it was my only winning Presidential vote of my life. (That's not quite as weird as it sounds, since I've cast a fair number of third-party votes.)
“One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book.”
It's worth mentioning that the senator in question was S. I. Hayakawa, a follower of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics movement. Korzybski's ideas, and the proselytizing community he built around them, were a *very* influential forerunner to LessWrong-style rationalism. (Slogans like “the map is not the territory” originated in General Semantics; Yudkowsky has written about the influence.)
Basically, Jimmy Carter, while in office, had to Read The Sequences.
This was a fun and remarkably lighthearted review compared to almost all the others. It's sorta nice *not* to have an Obligatory Tie to Concerning Modern Events in a book review for once. Which was totally possible - tons of potential threads here to tie to the future. I respect that.
These events were way before my time, so I don't have much to say about the historical substance of the review, except that the "psych!" gag only really works once, maaaaaaaaybe twice, before it's stale.
I do notice that Carter was a rather more interesting and sometimes-effective politician than his modern-day image. (Even just the racism angle is fascinating!) "Forgotten" would definitely be an appropriate appraisal. It's a weakness of the book that it doesn't try to advance *any* theories for the "why" - definitely looks like a question begging for in-depth answers. Book reviewer admitting they don't have any theories either is good epistemic humility, though also a bit disappointing, since that didn't stop any of the other reviewers from shooting off wild hypotheses. Feels like part of the stylistic expectation for an SSC/ACX book review, by Scott or otherwise.
Anyway, this and __The Dawn of Everything__ are now competing for my 2022 contest vote, with no runners-up. Good job.
It gets better, but the lazy stereotypes at the start are fairly annoying:
"the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
and
"But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."
I really enjoyed this review and it made me want to buy the book. Someone beat me to the quibble: Carter won 6 states, Mondale won only 1. Also, didn't Carter upgrade the Department of Education to cabinet status?
1980 was my first presidential election. I didn't self-identify with a political party until 1982 (Democrat, but mild and then by 2000 Republican, but mild although full disclosure, my views on immigration and IQ and a few other PC/woke issues whether as Dem or GOP are considered somewhat incendiary). But I grew up way, way overseas, and I took the abandonment of the hostages very seriously. Like, that might have been me. I, too, couldn't see why we didn't charge in and attack and I believed at the time that the Iranians perceived us as weak. The failed rescue mission was horrifying--and I believe led to a reorganization of the DoD and major changes in military prep.
However, three years later, Americans were held hostage in Lebanon for *years*. Well, it's different. They weren't a country. But these weren't government officials but journalists, priests, and college administrators for the AUB--and that's after these terrorists shot Malcolm Kerr (Steve's dad) down in the streets. And no one cared. We didn't get countdowns. No one blamed Reagan. Ever since, it's been clear to me that America will move mountains to get people out if it's simple, but if it's not, then you're fucked (don't go to North Korea, Otto). So I'm very cynical when any politician talks about what "America won't stand for" because hell, we'll stand for a lot.
It's interesting that Carter went through a renaissance in the late 90s, then kind of screwed up his reputation again with his Palestinian views (right or wrong). Then once he got to a certain age he became revered again just for living that long. BTW, does no one ever speculate that his mom, Lillian, who married right after graduation and was a notoriously free spirit wildly out of step with her time and region, might have been pregnant by someone else? Earl and the other three kids all died of pancreatic cancer. Not Jimmy.
No mention of Rosalyn? She was the role model for Hillary Clinton.
Minor nitpick but the attempted Iranian hostage rescue fiasco (Operation Eagle Claw) did reach Iranian airspace (and more). The desert fueling stop where everything went wrong was actually in Iran itself.
Brilliant and hilarious. I was a Democrat at the time and could not really understand the vehemence of the disdain for Carter. I remember talking to my close friend Pauline Kael about this. We both thought the was trying to do the right thing, as the review points out. Doing the right thing was unknown in politics at the time and we were under the influence of the sixties, that great swelling of spiritual self righteousness and drug induced innocence. This is a wise and witty review indeed and strikes the right balance, revealing Carter as a Holy Fool on the one hand and an infantile egomaniac on the other.
> Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist.
Well, this comment can't stand up to even a millisecond of thought. The obvious implication would be that Southern plantation owners would have been among the least racist groups in the US. I don't think that argument has been advanced by anyone concerned with who is or isn't a racist.
How do you write something like this with a straight face?
Interesting review. I believe there is an error, however, in your comments about gas lines. There was plenty of gas in the US in the 1970s, as the Shah once pointed out on national television, and as proven by insurance records. The shortages were a consequence of the US government taking over distribution. High prices are one thing, but lines were another. Generally the price will rise to clear the "line" since people would rather pay a higher price than wait.
This is what I remember about the "shortages" caused by the embargos of the early 70s. There may be some other explanation of later "shortages." However, high prices and waiting lines don't generally go together. The price just goes up to the point where the business can sell gas quickly.
To review the review as a formal exercise: this was the one I felt best mimicked Scott's voice. But for a few easily-tweaked things, I would likely not have suspected a thing if it had been run in Scott's name as a normal ACX/SSC post. So full marks on the pastiche.
Now for things which look like telltale clues with full hindsight, though
1. Scott wouldn't be quite so dismissive of the "maybe the real problem is Americans being too consumerist" Words of Wisdom. He'd certainly joke about them, or at least about Carter taking them on-board as though they'd been groundbreaking insights rather than old platitudes. But I think he'd have expended more effort getting into the heads of the people who are getting this once-in-a-century chance to directly try to change the mind of an American President who looks like he's genuinely listening, and steelmanning why they would think it worth it to yell those "useless truisms" at him. I think he would have been right. Our Anonymous Pseudo-Scott here seems to chuckle at the platitudes and move on in far too dismissive a way, not just in terms of successful Scott impersonation, but also of the pursuit of intellectual insight.
2. More trivially, I felt that some of the puns felt a bit… perfunctory isn't the right word, because they're good puns as such, but a bit self-conscious. "Scott makes light-hearted puns and remarks about people's weird names, doesn't he? Let me wedge some of those in." This is one of the ones I am least confident would have stood out to me if I'd genuinely had no idea this wasn't by Scott, though.
'As a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."'
This is an interesting idea, actually. I think it's probably a lot better to have a spiritual crisis. In any event, it's closer to the cognitive view -- that it's your ways of thinking that are getting you down, rather than the dark forces of biochemistry. Most people I meet who say they are "depressed" seem to view it as something they have little or no control over; they hope for a magic pill, but the pill rarely arrives (never, in my limited experience, but Scott says the pills do work for a certain percentage of depressed people, and I have to believe him). If they had a spiritual crisis, they might see the problem as fundamentally caused by faulty ways of viewing the world and themselves, which is usually closer to the truth about "depression."
For me, this has been the worst of the guest reviews so far. The repeated attempts at humor by using worn out tropes (sike!) and casual slander (all southerners are racist dontcha know!) got old pretty fast, which is a shame because the subject matter seems to have potential.
I think the author of this review got the Camp David Accords wrong. The deal was not peace in exchange for no settlements, it was peace in exchange for the Sinai Peninsula. Putting the emphasis on Israeli settlements (especially with that giant graph) falsely implies that Israel broke its side of the Camp David Accords, when actually Israel evacuated its settlements in the Sinai and handed the area over to Egypt as promised.
Both the book and the review apparently overlook the massive extent to which Carter was a budget hawk. That may have played as large a role In his 1880 loss as anything else.
You completely glossed over Jimmy's lovable lout-brother Billy. The perennially drunken gas-station owner / sudden red-neck playboy. Billy's antics were fun-luvn' hill-billy hick, competing in all manner of red-neck antics, belly-flop contests etc. You'd never forget your first taste of his self-branded Billy-Beer ... ick, nasty fizzy yellow water, not fit for even cleaning something. I wonder now, if Billy wasn't encouraged to keep the spotlight off Jimmy.
I lived through this as a teen. Gas went from 30 cents to 50, then to a dollar, then a buck fifty. There's nothing like gasoline going 5x on you. Cars back then were serious gas guzzlers too, which didn't help. Of course if you're a teen, you need a muscle car, which is what all my friends had. If you're in line for 20 minutes to get gas, you turned off your car. Since its hot, and we're in California, we'd all get out of the car ... and push it ahead as the line moves. And we'd talk with the others who were doing the same thing.
Carter paid heavily for the hostage crisis. I think he paid an even higher price for not immediately invading Iran. I do believe Carter meant well, but in trying too hard to be 'a man of peace' his anti-aggressive stance became a weapon which could be used against him, and the whole country. This weakness, in addition to the sting from the recent capitulation of the Vietnam war. President Carter's pardoning draft dodgers. Congress ending the draft system, only to reinstate the draft under the new name of The Selective Service Act, years of a really bad economy, race riots following the recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X ... [got bogged down in the sadness, where was I] all this contributed to the general national malaise and most of it rested on the shoulders of the suddenly very sad and tired looking President Carter.
Even on a good day, Carter was no match for Reagan. Reagan was a showman, communicator, unifier. If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California. Reagan—like Clinton has—a magnetic personality. His language was fun, jocular, friendly, and as I said before unifying.
Excellent article as always - I learned a lot. This is really pedantic and I apologize for that, but in the first pictures of Jimmy Carter (the one in his Naval Whites), you said he was a Lieutenant. His rank is actually "Midshipman First Class" via his shoulder boards. That rank is specific to the Naval Academy NROTC.
The one line summary of Carter's presidency: great guy, terrible politician.
The lesson of his administration to me is this: the president should be an extremely effective _implementer_ of values which are decided upon by other people, namely the American people themselves. He should not be obsessively focused on embodying these values himself, unless this is absolutely necessary for their implementation.
Carter's mistake was in not understanding that "good leadership" of the largest, most powerful political entity in the world is very different from "good leadership" on a personal, local level. Ulysses S. Grant made similar mistakes.
I learned a lot from this review and love the racy and gently ironic style, though on occasion reviewer got carried away by their own flights of ebullience - like '(and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox' I mean is that really an awesome name?
As a Brit and youth CND campaigner at the time, I was vaguely aware that the Iran hostage crisis did for Carter, and Reagan was a dead-eyed warmongering ex-actor and stooge of the arms industry. Didn't appreciate his homely charisma until much later!
> The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing.
Rationing and price controls are the cause of the queues.
Canada didn't have price controls, and thus just got higher petrol prices but neither queues nor queuing related violence.
> When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
This is something I appreciate in a book review. You find something interesting that the book didn't explain, and if you can't explain it yourself, you leave the reader with multiple possibilities. I find both plausible.
A third possibility is not domestic versus foreign but short-term vs interminable. Carter apparently hid his opposition to discrimination until he was elected governor. We are told that he could negotiate effectively with foreign leaders, but they must have mostly returned to their countries shortly. He negotiated with senators over a treaty; once the treaty was ratified, the Senate's leverage was gone.
However, had he attempted serious negotiation with congressmen on normal issues, it might have continued exhaustingly through almost every working day of his presidency. Maybe the thought of it made him anxious.
The more general case would be people who can pull themselves together for a burst of effort under pressure, but will not change their basic habits of largely avoiding high-pressure interactions.
There's a gap in this review which I would like to see addressed: Carter as a 70s Democrat. There's a couple of lines which are dropped in and not expanded on, such as the following:
"It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
And then we move on after that glib characterisation of three people with no development, *How* were they "as racist as you'd expect"? My memories of the time are that the one sibling of his I'd ever heard of was Billy, who was - let's say - "colourful" which the media loved and ate up (he was a drunk who did embarassing/amusing things until he sobered up, including various attempts to cash in on his brother's importance as president - Hunter Biden without the crack and no foreign companies willing to pay huge bribes for access). I don't remember anything about him being a "racist as you'd expect", unless we consider that was just the times back then, baby, you expect a 70s Southerner to be a racist and it was unremarked upon because it was unremarkable.
His other siblings were Gloria, whom Wikipedia tells me "She was noted as one of the first women inducted into Harley-Davidson’s 100,000 Mile Club, was named Most Outstanding Female Motorcyclist in 1978 and worked as an activist for motorcycle rights", I don't see how racism fits in there unless you mean "motorcycle clubs - bikers - racism and crime" and which seems to be contradicted by "In 1964, Spann [her married name] resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending" and Ruth, again from Wikipedia "She was a Christian evangelist ...In 1977, she became friends with pornographer Larry Flynt and managed to briefly convert him to Christianity". Whatever your opinion of her healing ministry, she at least did have a Proper University Qualification (master's in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for the practice, even if she was only a Georgia shit-kicker talking about Jesus to the rubes.
So, I'd appreciate a little fleshing-out of "pooh, they were white Southerners, of *course* they were racists", please!
The interesting, perhaps ghoulish, fact is that Carter's father and siblings all died of pancreatic cancer while his mother died of breast cancer, so his continuing long life is really extraordinary. Perhaps that is one reason he might feel singled out or specially favoured?
I think the problem in this review, as with the 70s coverage of Carter as a weirdo, is the struggle to believe that actually yes, he does have a sincere Christian faith and when he talked about God and sin he meant it, and means it. For people who don't have a religious faith, this does seem prime weirdo territory. I wonder, though, if the same thing were cast in what is acceptable to modern tastes - the therapeutic approach, the post-MeToo scenario, the context of 'rape culture' - such revelations as "I've struggled with lust" would be acclaimed as doing work on problematic behaviour and an example of emotional openness that was the antithesis of 'toxic masculinity'.
There's been some discussion on here about "why do the Republicans have the lock on religious voters, why can't the Democrats appeal to Christian values?" and I think Carter's presidency is one explanation why: he's the last openly Christian Democrat (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are all "yeah I'm a Real Catholic" but they have no problems at all going along with the party line on gay marriage, abortion, etc. etc. etc.) and as this review says, was considered a weirdo at the time. The next Southerner elected as president would be Bill Clinton, a very different type: not alone with buckets of charisma unlike Carter, but someone who had no problems with lust: presidential blowjobs are more preferred to painful sincerity about male sexuality?
He also embodies the pragmatism some wish the current Democrats could emulate in order to Get Things Done, go along with your political opponents, make some compromises, and get your policies passed rather than be held hostage to the pure progressive wing who would rather no bread than half a loaf:
"In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue."
Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Having been defeated by fraud the first time, he decides to do what it takes to get elected, and if that means getting down-and-dirty, so be it? Then he gets elected and can implement his true policies. The complaint seems to be the same as the progressive purity demands: he gets elected as a fake racist, then throws that off. Again, would it be preferable had he stuck to his anti-racist guns and let a *real* racist get elected?
"His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way."
I don't think, after the Beer Summit, any modern presidency has room to throw stones here:
The reviewer seems to find Carter unsympathetic, and I do understand why. But I also think if you don't remember the 70s even a little bit, it's hard to understand the atmosphere of the times. Carter was unlucky in that his presidency coincided with the fuel crisis etc. Biden is running into the same problem, and we see his approval ratings sinking like a stone.
But the 70s were also the hey-day of psychotherapy and all kinds of radical inner wellness movements, philosophies, and cults. Indeed, it degenerated into navel-gazing of the most self-obsessed kind. Do you EST? Have you tried TM? There's a selection of gurus, be there genuine Indian ones or Western psuedo-scientific ones, to pick and choose from. Scientology is quasi-respectable (and the 70s are when they engage in a genuine attempt at 'domestic terrorism' and other unsavoury activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White).
In that light, Carter's interview with "Playboy" (and have you considered the openness it must have taken for a Southern Baptist running for President to do an interview with what, despite the jokes about "I read it for the articles", is basically a skin mag?) is painfully honest, because the 70s were all about radical openness and interior transformation. But because this is driven by sincere Christian belief, rather than West Coast therapeutic culture, of course the media perceive him as a weirdo. He's not expressing himself in the acceptable shibboleths of the day.
I don't have much of an opinion on Carter one way or the other; yes, he wasn't inspirational or ground-breaking, but personally I think I prefer someone who wants to keep the spending on his own office down, rather than taking the opportunity to soak the taxpayers for expensive refurbishments https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/lulu-lytle-carrie-symonds-downing-street/, or uses interns as private sexual accommodations. But then, I'm old-fashioned like that.
"Is it to tell blunt truths to the American public and push us to acknowledge our country’s flaws? Or is it to implement policies that lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives? While the best leaders may do some of both, ultimately the latter is what really matters. "
Reading this, it's funny how it's the exact opposite of the argument of Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias. He contrasts leaders who actually improve the wisdom of their populace with those who merely 'gratify their' (usually ignorant) wishes. Moral improvement is the important thing, because mere GDP can be (will be?) pointed towards evil and or stupid things:
"[A]s to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that."
Does this competition have a working definition of a book review? Some of these reviews seem more like précis, and some more like critiques. Are we just walking through what the book says or are we interrogating it?
1) The United States never cheated the Panamanians out of "their canal". There was no canal when the US intervened on the behalf of Panamanian rebels to to secure Panamanian independence from Colombia in order to eliminate Colombia's veto of the construction of a canal, nor was there a canal after that until the United States actually built one at the US's own expense.
2) I want you to imagine that, on November 3rd, 2020, Donald Trump used his power as President to stop all counting of the vote in the northeast and west coast states, on the grounds that the election was being stolen. On January 3, 2021, the 117th Congress takes its seats, and no Congressmen from those northeast or west coast states are seated, because the votes in those states haven't been counted, so nobody was elected. On January 6th, this rump Congress declares that Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 231-124, with 183 votes not cast (the states where Trump stopped the counting). Then Trump holds a referendum on whether he should be dictator with the power to unilaterally amend the Constitution, with separate polling places for voting "Yes, Trump should be dictator" and "No, I don't want Trump to be dictator". The claimed result of this blatantly rigged referendum is that Trump was elected dictator with 99.9% of the vote.
Would you then say that a subsequent military coup that removed Trump from power overthrew the "democratically-elected government" of the United States? Or would you say that Trump had already made sure there was no democratically-elected government that could be overthrown, whatever one's opinion of the people who then overthrew the Trump regime?
Decent summary of Carter's political life. I amazed that it (or the book?) fails to mention the infamous "attack rabbit" and "Mush From the Wimp" events.
In any case, my memory of his presidency is that it was one catastrophe after another, and that everyone hated him. (Living as I did in Tip O'Neill country, that's pretty much expected.)
I enjoyed reading this piece, but in no way can I describe it as a review. It's something completely different - as others have suggested, perhaps a precis?
Maybe the norms of book reviewing have shifted over time and I have simply failed to notice?
It reminds me of the opening of Susanna Clark's novel 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel' where one of the title characters (who is a genuine magician) attends a meeting of a Society of Magicians. He is somewhat flabbergasted to find they not only perform no magic whatsoever, but also think it odd that anybody might expect them to do so; magic having died out as a result of neglect and disinterest some hundreds of years previously. They just talk and 'theorise' about magic.
Is there no genuine book reviewing left? Isn't anybody interested in book reviews, as in the real reviewing of books?
I thought that was what this contest was about!
But maybe book reviewing has quietly died out without me noticing?
I don't get a chance to read a lot of these reviews by the blog's readers (don't have the time, etc.), so I can't compare this one with the others But I'll say it's very well-written. The summary you provide is as good a primer on Carter's presidency as any, and I might bookmark it for future reference. Thanks for writing it!
Now that’s a great review! Especially because the book doesn’t actually sound that good and the subject is definitely terrible and yet the review is great to read.
One quibble: it’s not “sike”, it’s “psych”. Spelling it phonetically looks illiterate.
Carter was the first President of whom I have any memory. I find it interesting that neither Afghanistan nor the Olympics were mentioned - my family was as miserable as anyone else under the OPEC oil shock, (yes, I remember sitting in a turned off car with no ac waiting for our turn at the pump) but it was the international humiliations of Iran, Panama, and the Olympics that really soured them on Carter.
Of note, beyond the split screen tv broadcasts of Carter leaving the White House and the Iranians releasing the hostages, (my family voted for Regan but thought that humiliation was too much) I also recall the near daily recitals of inflation and job losses on the news - on all three news stations! (Two on the upper dial and the one on the lower - we never did get NBC to come in clear.)
The willingness of news media to attack a Democrat had cooled quite a bit by the time Clinton was in office.
Finally, regarding Carters civil service reform - I would be willing to read a review that looked at the positive and negative tradeoffs of that choice.
This review takes the commonly-asserted - but, I think, poorly-supported - position that the Mossadegh government overthrown by the 1953 US-backed Iranian coup had been democratically elected.
There are three votes relevant here. The first is the nomination of Mossadegh as Prime Minister by the legislature in 1951. This was, as far as I can tell, in procedural accordance with democratic norms ... but its legitimacy suffers a bit because Mossadegh's predecessor, Razmara, was assassinated by a gunman linked to Mossadegh's party, whom Mossadegh pardoned after gaining power. This demonstration of force, and impunity in the use of it, may have made the voters understandably reluctant to oppose him.
The second vote is the 1952 Iranian legislative election. This was certainly not in accordance with democratic norms: Mossadegh arranged for the electorates with the greatest support for his party to be counted first, and then halted the vote before the remaining ones could be counted, leaving him with a majority in a rump legislature (rather than a minority in a complete one).
Mossadegh's tame legislature granted him, then extended, emergency powers to wield executive authority without oversight by parliament - which was, in fact, permitted by the constitution. After a year, however, further extension of this authority required the constitution to be revised, so in 1953 he held a referendum to dissolve parliament, and grant himself dictatorial power, indefinitely. This third vote was held without a secret ballot, so "yes" and "no" voters could be publicly identified. It passed with 99.94% of the vote. And *then* came the coup.
The way so many Western authors ostentatiously describe Mossadegh's government as "democratically-elected" seems to me to be a case of politicised rhetoric: Mossadegh was a left-wing dictator, so the far left feel they need to voice their support for him. The Shah's government was not democratic either but, given time and Western pressure, and in the absence of the Iranian revolution, it might have become so, as happened in e.g. Chile, Greece and South Korea.
There was tons of critique of "why not racist" statement already. I will just note that if there were any racism in Carter at the time, military service would likely help with it.
Quote from "Black like me", (the scene happens deep in South):
> An army officer hurried to get at there arof the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon. I have learned that men in uniform, particularly officers, rarely descend to show discrimination, perhaps because of the integration of the armed forces.
Oil like electricity is oxygen to the first world economy. We're not going to stop use immediately. OPEC reduced oil supplies 5% every month, until they cut supplies completely.
When prices sky-rocketed, when lower income elderly froze to death in their homes, then it mattered.
Re Carter's obsession with micromanagement: I was working in the Executive Office of the President early in Reagan's presidency and I was told that Carter also involved himself in wrangling over slots for the White House tennis courts. The professional staff, regardless of their politics, are fond of presidents who are good at delegating (Reagan himself was a superb delegator) and not fond of micromanagers.
My impression at the time was that Jimmy Carter tended to be an unlucky President. Weird stuff seemed to happen to him that nobody foresaw: e.g., even though nobody believed it, he really was attacked by giant swimming rabbit (we have a photo of the incident); or, on a more consequential scale, the Ayatollah became the ruler of Iran.
Another impression I have is that Carter's last two years in office were kind of proto-Reagan Revolution Lite: e.g., he raised defense spending, he appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair, etc. You can see a lot of the projects of the Reagan Administration in embryonic form in Carter's embattled 1979-1980 years.
This review is interesting and also hilarious. My favorite part is where Carter is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor and develops super powers. I did not know this about him! I am glad for this review bc now I feel I do not have to read the book.
So as far as behavior towards different groups, I think that is just about expectations. I have a bad habit of this.
I can be a bit of a jerk/asshole/high expectations with family/friends. And moreso with coworkers. And very much so with bosses.
But clients and strangers and children always find me super personable and helpful and charming. Because I don’t actually expect full partnership from them. A coworker should be someone rowing the boat with me, and a boss someone better at rowing the boat than me. I got no time for slackers.
But the client/stranger is more like the water.
Maybe something like this is why Carter worked poorly with congress but well with foreigners?
This review was interesting but the rather glib style kept irritating me. At the same time, I found myself thinking that this anonymous review reads a lot like the work of one Scott Alexander.
The statement that people under 70 mostly know Carter from his post-presidency struck me as kind of weird. I’m 56 and I remember Carter’s presidency pretty well, and also his “I’ll never lie to you” campaign promise.
I had not known, though, that Carter ran for governor of Georgia posing as a quasi-racist. That’s rather interesting. Nor had I known (unless I’ve just forgotten) that S.I. Hayakawa made Carter read a semantics textbook. (The review does not mention the Senator’s name, but surely it must have been Hayakawa; how many semantics professors could there possibly have been in the Senate, even in the ‘70s?)
Oil prices did not spike in the late 1970s, at least not compared to gold. They actually went down from from 1976 to 1981. Nixon taking the US off the (last remnants of the) gold standard is what caused the dollar-denominated price of oil to spike because of inflation.
The potshots at Israel were gratuitous and factually wrong.
Not only did the 1978 accords not discuss whether Jews would live in Gaza or the West Bank at the end of the peace process, but some of those spikes in Jews living in the West Bank were Jews relocated after being ripped out of Gaza in 2005 so that Gaza would be Judenrein to the Palestinians’ satisfaction. That experiment continues to be telling.
Israel and Egypt both complied with the deal that Carter brokered, establishing a peace that has remained cold but effective. The deal fractured the united anti-Israel Arab front, opening the door for later peace deals. It removed the Suez Canal, a key artery of international trade, from the list of hotspots. It began the unwinding of a conflict that had threatened to turn the Cold War hot.
To conclude that Carter’s deeply held beliefs meant he couldn’t get things done while minimizing things he got done that were viewed as impossible and only happened because of his deeply held beliefs is a weird move.
If you quizzed me before I read this I would have guessed that Reagan was the one who deregulated the airline and trucking industries. There's this image of Reagan being the deregulator and Carter being the big government democrat. But actually Reagan was an intensification of a trend that began earlier. Sort of like FDR. Hoover initiated unprecedented amounts of government intervention in the economy, which was intensified later by FDR, and people only remember the contrast so Hoover got this false reputation as laissez-faire.
> A prominent rabbi tells Carter that the real problem is Americans’ “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence.” A Berkeley sociologist adds that Carter needs to “come down from the mountain with some hard truths” to help the American people “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods.” Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up.
I find that dismissive tone kinda narrow-minded and out of place?
US Americans are consuming more resources than any other large country and are responsible for A) a huge chunk of direct pollution on the planet and B) a wasteful consumerist culture emulated on the whole globe. If US as the trendsetter would have focused on sustainability as a mainstream goal since the 1970s it would have been a huge blessing!
The “civil service reform” mentioned in passing was what basically eliminated merit in federal hiring for the sake of affirmative action and racial balancing. That’s what was meant by supporting “racial equality” according to liberals by the time Carter was president, not fighting segregation.
If this sort of thing interests you, let me also suggest Reaganland which, in spite of the name, is essentially a panoramic history of America during the Carter years. One can view it in a sense as an answer to the question “why did the country so angry with Nixon and so in love with Carter flip to Reagan within 4 years?”
Like all Rick Perlstein’s writing, he’s fundamentally a Democrat, but too honest to let that modify much of his writing. You get a book that’s more “America in the late 70s” and less just Jimmy Carter, which some may find a more interesting starting point.
Quite a few inaccuracies that others have pointed out. I'll add the summary of the Camp David accords.
The deal was Egyptian recognition of Israel and Peace in return for the land of the Sinai peninsula, plus all kinds of technical demilitarization and oversight. The only settlements mentioned specifically where those in Sinai, and they were dismantled (e.g. Yamit). There was some non-specific lip-service parts regarding the West Bank-Gaza and Palestinians. As they were non-specific they could not be broken.
As for his negotiation prowess, it has been said that JC almost tanked the deal because he insisted that the peace deal be regional and included Syria.
The camp david's treatment is so bad I don't know if to believe the rest of the piece.
for example, it doesn't mention Israel evicted the entire Sinai peninsula, a territory more than 2 time the current size of Israel, including a city that was built there.
This is a concise, well-written, informative, and hard-hitting review on an interesting topic. However, I don't plan to vote for it, for two reasons. First, the reviewer (or maybe in part the author?) has obvious political leanings and lets them color the discussion without acknowledgement. Second, the reviewer isn't really adding much to the discussion. The review closely and successfully emulates the tone, structure, and style of SSC's Hoover review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) but doesn't deliver a similar level of interest or payoff.
Still, a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. As always, many thanks for contributing!
As someone who lived through the Carter administration I'm solidly in the "he's an underrated president" camp. He didn't do things out of political expediency. He appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman even after Volcker told him (in the job interview) that he would raise interest rates (a lot) to try to kill inflation (in an election year). Volcker did not expect to be appointed as Fed chairman after being that up-front with Carter - but Carter did appoint him. And interest rates soared during an election year which certainly didn't help Carter's re-election campaign. But it was the right thing to do.
Had we listened to Carter and taken heed to his warnings we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. We'd likely be way ahead of where we are now on alternative energy and tackling climate change.
Also, if you're looking for a better picture of what motivated Carter and understand him you should read his autobiography "A Full Life". You can get it straight from the horse's mouth.
An enjoyable read, and I lived through all that. One correction: Reagan's 49-state victory was in 1984. He won a mere 44 states in 1980. Also, although I suspect this is unknowable, my impression on Inauguration Day was that Iran held the hostages just long enough to not free them during Carter's administration, out of spite, or maybe that Reagan-led tricksiness.
Was going to mention the correct spelling of 'psych,' but evidently 'sike' is now common. Ugh.
The Camp David Accords never mention settlements. They discuss self-government of the Palestinians.
The Shah was in no sense new. He already had considerable power under a constitutional monarchy.
I enjoyed this review. But sad to see the absence of discussion of the most significant event of the administration—the time he was attacked by a killer rabbit.
Super fun review. The writerly voice seemed familiar, kind of a Freddie DeBoer or Jeff Maurer vibe. This one's my favorite of the reader reviews so far.
Just a few comments from someone who was a (prevoting age) Atlantan in 1970. First, Carl Sanders wasn't a businessman, he was a lawyer. More importantly, he was the former Governor of Georgia (1962-1966), coming back to try for a discontinuous second term, since Georgia governors at the time were limited to one consecutive term. Carter's attacks on Sanders were grotesque and inaccurate, but he did successfully portray Sanders as a creature of the Atlanta consensus. Sanders was no integrationist, but he was considerably more integrationist than Carter portrayed himself as, and that was an unfortunate path to electoral victory around that time.
By 1976 I was old enough to cast my first Presidential vote (I was in college in the North by then) and was genuinely torn on entering the voting booth... I knew Carter and trusted him not at all, and I thought Ford was second rate. I honestly cannot recall who I voted for... even today. But if I did vote for Carter, it was my only winning Presidential vote of my life. (That's not quite as weird as it sounds, since I've cast a fair number of third-party votes.)
“One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book.”
It's worth mentioning that the senator in question was S. I. Hayakawa, a follower of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics movement. Korzybski's ideas, and the proselytizing community he built around them, were a *very* influential forerunner to LessWrong-style rationalism. (Slogans like “the map is not the territory” originated in General Semantics; Yudkowsky has written about the influence.)
Basically, Jimmy Carter, while in office, had to Read The Sequences.
This was a fun and remarkably lighthearted review compared to almost all the others. It's sorta nice *not* to have an Obligatory Tie to Concerning Modern Events in a book review for once. Which was totally possible - tons of potential threads here to tie to the future. I respect that.
These events were way before my time, so I don't have much to say about the historical substance of the review, except that the "psych!" gag only really works once, maaaaaaaaybe twice, before it's stale.
I do notice that Carter was a rather more interesting and sometimes-effective politician than his modern-day image. (Even just the racism angle is fascinating!) "Forgotten" would definitely be an appropriate appraisal. It's a weakness of the book that it doesn't try to advance *any* theories for the "why" - definitely looks like a question begging for in-depth answers. Book reviewer admitting they don't have any theories either is good epistemic humility, though also a bit disappointing, since that didn't stop any of the other reviewers from shooting off wild hypotheses. Feels like part of the stylistic expectation for an SSC/ACX book review, by Scott or otherwise.
Anyway, this and __The Dawn of Everything__ are now competing for my 2022 contest vote, with no runners-up. Good job.
It gets better, but the lazy stereotypes at the start are fairly annoying:
"the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
and
"But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."
I really enjoyed this review and it made me want to buy the book. Someone beat me to the quibble: Carter won 6 states, Mondale won only 1. Also, didn't Carter upgrade the Department of Education to cabinet status?
1980 was my first presidential election. I didn't self-identify with a political party until 1982 (Democrat, but mild and then by 2000 Republican, but mild although full disclosure, my views on immigration and IQ and a few other PC/woke issues whether as Dem or GOP are considered somewhat incendiary). But I grew up way, way overseas, and I took the abandonment of the hostages very seriously. Like, that might have been me. I, too, couldn't see why we didn't charge in and attack and I believed at the time that the Iranians perceived us as weak. The failed rescue mission was horrifying--and I believe led to a reorganization of the DoD and major changes in military prep.
However, three years later, Americans were held hostage in Lebanon for *years*. Well, it's different. They weren't a country. But these weren't government officials but journalists, priests, and college administrators for the AUB--and that's after these terrorists shot Malcolm Kerr (Steve's dad) down in the streets. And no one cared. We didn't get countdowns. No one blamed Reagan. Ever since, it's been clear to me that America will move mountains to get people out if it's simple, but if it's not, then you're fucked (don't go to North Korea, Otto). So I'm very cynical when any politician talks about what "America won't stand for" because hell, we'll stand for a lot.
It's interesting that Carter went through a renaissance in the late 90s, then kind of screwed up his reputation again with his Palestinian views (right or wrong). Then once he got to a certain age he became revered again just for living that long. BTW, does no one ever speculate that his mom, Lillian, who married right after graduation and was a notoriously free spirit wildly out of step with her time and region, might have been pregnant by someone else? Earl and the other three kids all died of pancreatic cancer. Not Jimmy.
No mention of Rosalyn? She was the role model for Hillary Clinton.
Minor nitpick but the attempted Iranian hostage rescue fiasco (Operation Eagle Claw) did reach Iranian airspace (and more). The desert fueling stop where everything went wrong was actually in Iran itself.
“as you can tell from the name ‘Plains,’”
Very unfortunate missed opportunity to pull out the old “in accordance with nominative determinism,”
Great review; I had no idea Carter was that unlikable. Nice deregulation + Volcker appointment, though.
Brilliant and hilarious. I was a Democrat at the time and could not really understand the vehemence of the disdain for Carter. I remember talking to my close friend Pauline Kael about this. We both thought the was trying to do the right thing, as the review points out. Doing the right thing was unknown in politics at the time and we were under the influence of the sixties, that great swelling of spiritual self righteousness and drug induced innocence. This is a wise and witty review indeed and strikes the right balance, revealing Carter as a Holy Fool on the one hand and an infantile egomaniac on the other.
Minor correction: looks like the Shah/Concorde lunch story is an apocryphal tale, not something that actually happened (at least with regularity).
> Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist.
Well, this comment can't stand up to even a millisecond of thought. The obvious implication would be that Southern plantation owners would have been among the least racist groups in the US. I don't think that argument has been advanced by anyone concerned with who is or isn't a racist.
How do you write something like this with a straight face?
Interesting review. I believe there is an error, however, in your comments about gas lines. There was plenty of gas in the US in the 1970s, as the Shah once pointed out on national television, and as proven by insurance records. The shortages were a consequence of the US government taking over distribution. High prices are one thing, but lines were another. Generally the price will rise to clear the "line" since people would rather pay a higher price than wait.
This is what I remember about the "shortages" caused by the embargos of the early 70s. There may be some other explanation of later "shortages." However, high prices and waiting lines don't generally go together. The price just goes up to the point where the business can sell gas quickly.
To review the review as a formal exercise: this was the one I felt best mimicked Scott's voice. But for a few easily-tweaked things, I would likely not have suspected a thing if it had been run in Scott's name as a normal ACX/SSC post. So full marks on the pastiche.
Now for things which look like telltale clues with full hindsight, though
1. Scott wouldn't be quite so dismissive of the "maybe the real problem is Americans being too consumerist" Words of Wisdom. He'd certainly joke about them, or at least about Carter taking them on-board as though they'd been groundbreaking insights rather than old platitudes. But I think he'd have expended more effort getting into the heads of the people who are getting this once-in-a-century chance to directly try to change the mind of an American President who looks like he's genuinely listening, and steelmanning why they would think it worth it to yell those "useless truisms" at him. I think he would have been right. Our Anonymous Pseudo-Scott here seems to chuckle at the platitudes and move on in far too dismissive a way, not just in terms of successful Scott impersonation, but also of the pursuit of intellectual insight.
2. More trivially, I felt that some of the puns felt a bit… perfunctory isn't the right word, because they're good puns as such, but a bit self-conscious. "Scott makes light-hearted puns and remarks about people's weird names, doesn't he? Let me wedge some of those in." This is one of the ones I am least confident would have stood out to me if I'd genuinely had no idea this wasn't by Scott, though.
'As a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."'
This is an interesting idea, actually. I think it's probably a lot better to have a spiritual crisis. In any event, it's closer to the cognitive view -- that it's your ways of thinking that are getting you down, rather than the dark forces of biochemistry. Most people I meet who say they are "depressed" seem to view it as something they have little or no control over; they hope for a magic pill, but the pill rarely arrives (never, in my limited experience, but Scott says the pills do work for a certain percentage of depressed people, and I have to believe him). If they had a spiritual crisis, they might see the problem as fundamentally caused by faulty ways of viewing the world and themselves, which is usually closer to the truth about "depression."
For me, this has been the worst of the guest reviews so far. The repeated attempts at humor by using worn out tropes (sike!) and casual slander (all southerners are racist dontcha know!) got old pretty fast, which is a shame because the subject matter seems to have potential.
I think the author of this review got the Camp David Accords wrong. The deal was not peace in exchange for no settlements, it was peace in exchange for the Sinai Peninsula. Putting the emphasis on Israeli settlements (especially with that giant graph) falsely implies that Israel broke its side of the Camp David Accords, when actually Israel evacuated its settlements in the Sinai and handed the area over to Egypt as promised.
Both the book and the review apparently overlook the massive extent to which Carter was a budget hawk. That may have played as large a role In his 1880 loss as anything else.
You completely glossed over Jimmy's lovable lout-brother Billy. The perennially drunken gas-station owner / sudden red-neck playboy. Billy's antics were fun-luvn' hill-billy hick, competing in all manner of red-neck antics, belly-flop contests etc. You'd never forget your first taste of his self-branded Billy-Beer ... ick, nasty fizzy yellow water, not fit for even cleaning something. I wonder now, if Billy wasn't encouraged to keep the spotlight off Jimmy.
I lived through this as a teen. Gas went from 30 cents to 50, then to a dollar, then a buck fifty. There's nothing like gasoline going 5x on you. Cars back then were serious gas guzzlers too, which didn't help. Of course if you're a teen, you need a muscle car, which is what all my friends had. If you're in line for 20 minutes to get gas, you turned off your car. Since its hot, and we're in California, we'd all get out of the car ... and push it ahead as the line moves. And we'd talk with the others who were doing the same thing.
Carter paid heavily for the hostage crisis. I think he paid an even higher price for not immediately invading Iran. I do believe Carter meant well, but in trying too hard to be 'a man of peace' his anti-aggressive stance became a weapon which could be used against him, and the whole country. This weakness, in addition to the sting from the recent capitulation of the Vietnam war. President Carter's pardoning draft dodgers. Congress ending the draft system, only to reinstate the draft under the new name of The Selective Service Act, years of a really bad economy, race riots following the recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X ... [got bogged down in the sadness, where was I] all this contributed to the general national malaise and most of it rested on the shoulders of the suddenly very sad and tired looking President Carter.
Even on a good day, Carter was no match for Reagan. Reagan was a showman, communicator, unifier. If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California. Reagan—like Clinton has—a magnetic personality. His language was fun, jocular, friendly, and as I said before unifying.
Excellent article as always - I learned a lot. This is really pedantic and I apologize for that, but in the first pictures of Jimmy Carter (the one in his Naval Whites), you said he was a Lieutenant. His rank is actually "Midshipman First Class" via his shoulder boards. That rank is specific to the Naval Academy NROTC.
The one line summary of Carter's presidency: great guy, terrible politician.
The lesson of his administration to me is this: the president should be an extremely effective _implementer_ of values which are decided upon by other people, namely the American people themselves. He should not be obsessively focused on embodying these values himself, unless this is absolutely necessary for their implementation.
Carter's mistake was in not understanding that "good leadership" of the largest, most powerful political entity in the world is very different from "good leadership" on a personal, local level. Ulysses S. Grant made similar mistakes.
Very enjoyable read, thanks!
I learned a lot from this review and love the racy and gently ironic style, though on occasion reviewer got carried away by their own flights of ebullience - like '(and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox' I mean is that really an awesome name?
As a Brit and youth CND campaigner at the time, I was vaguely aware that the Iran hostage crisis did for Carter, and Reagan was a dead-eyed warmongering ex-actor and stooge of the arms industry. Didn't appreciate his homely charisma until much later!
> The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing.
Rationing and price controls are the cause of the queues.
Canada didn't have price controls, and thus just got higher petrol prices but neither queues nor queuing related violence.
Great review. Weird President.
> When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
This is something I appreciate in a book review. You find something interesting that the book didn't explain, and if you can't explain it yourself, you leave the reader with multiple possibilities. I find both plausible.
A third possibility is not domestic versus foreign but short-term vs interminable. Carter apparently hid his opposition to discrimination until he was elected governor. We are told that he could negotiate effectively with foreign leaders, but they must have mostly returned to their countries shortly. He negotiated with senators over a treaty; once the treaty was ratified, the Senate's leverage was gone.
However, had he attempted serious negotiation with congressmen on normal issues, it might have continued exhaustingly through almost every working day of his presidency. Maybe the thought of it made him anxious.
The more general case would be people who can pull themselves together for a burst of effort under pressure, but will not change their basic habits of largely avoiding high-pressure interactions.
There's a gap in this review which I would like to see addressed: Carter as a 70s Democrat. There's a couple of lines which are dropped in and not expanded on, such as the following:
"It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
And then we move on after that glib characterisation of three people with no development, *How* were they "as racist as you'd expect"? My memories of the time are that the one sibling of his I'd ever heard of was Billy, who was - let's say - "colourful" which the media loved and ate up (he was a drunk who did embarassing/amusing things until he sobered up, including various attempts to cash in on his brother's importance as president - Hunter Biden without the crack and no foreign companies willing to pay huge bribes for access). I don't remember anything about him being a "racist as you'd expect", unless we consider that was just the times back then, baby, you expect a 70s Southerner to be a racist and it was unremarked upon because it was unremarkable.
His other siblings were Gloria, whom Wikipedia tells me "She was noted as one of the first women inducted into Harley-Davidson’s 100,000 Mile Club, was named Most Outstanding Female Motorcyclist in 1978 and worked as an activist for motorcycle rights", I don't see how racism fits in there unless you mean "motorcycle clubs - bikers - racism and crime" and which seems to be contradicted by "In 1964, Spann [her married name] resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending" and Ruth, again from Wikipedia "She was a Christian evangelist ...In 1977, she became friends with pornographer Larry Flynt and managed to briefly convert him to Christianity". Whatever your opinion of her healing ministry, she at least did have a Proper University Qualification (master's in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for the practice, even if she was only a Georgia shit-kicker talking about Jesus to the rubes.
So, I'd appreciate a little fleshing-out of "pooh, they were white Southerners, of *course* they were racists", please!
The interesting, perhaps ghoulish, fact is that Carter's father and siblings all died of pancreatic cancer while his mother died of breast cancer, so his continuing long life is really extraordinary. Perhaps that is one reason he might feel singled out or specially favoured?
I think the problem in this review, as with the 70s coverage of Carter as a weirdo, is the struggle to believe that actually yes, he does have a sincere Christian faith and when he talked about God and sin he meant it, and means it. For people who don't have a religious faith, this does seem prime weirdo territory. I wonder, though, if the same thing were cast in what is acceptable to modern tastes - the therapeutic approach, the post-MeToo scenario, the context of 'rape culture' - such revelations as "I've struggled with lust" would be acclaimed as doing work on problematic behaviour and an example of emotional openness that was the antithesis of 'toxic masculinity'.
There's been some discussion on here about "why do the Republicans have the lock on religious voters, why can't the Democrats appeal to Christian values?" and I think Carter's presidency is one explanation why: he's the last openly Christian Democrat (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are all "yeah I'm a Real Catholic" but they have no problems at all going along with the party line on gay marriage, abortion, etc. etc. etc.) and as this review says, was considered a weirdo at the time. The next Southerner elected as president would be Bill Clinton, a very different type: not alone with buckets of charisma unlike Carter, but someone who had no problems with lust: presidential blowjobs are more preferred to painful sincerity about male sexuality?
He also embodies the pragmatism some wish the current Democrats could emulate in order to Get Things Done, go along with your political opponents, make some compromises, and get your policies passed rather than be held hostage to the pure progressive wing who would rather no bread than half a loaf:
"In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue."
Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Having been defeated by fraud the first time, he decides to do what it takes to get elected, and if that means getting down-and-dirty, so be it? Then he gets elected and can implement his true policies. The complaint seems to be the same as the progressive purity demands: he gets elected as a fake racist, then throws that off. Again, would it be preferable had he stuck to his anti-racist guns and let a *real* racist get elected?
"His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way."
I don't think, after the Beer Summit, any modern presidency has room to throw stones here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy#%22Beer_Summit%22
The reviewer seems to find Carter unsympathetic, and I do understand why. But I also think if you don't remember the 70s even a little bit, it's hard to understand the atmosphere of the times. Carter was unlucky in that his presidency coincided with the fuel crisis etc. Biden is running into the same problem, and we see his approval ratings sinking like a stone.
But the 70s were also the hey-day of psychotherapy and all kinds of radical inner wellness movements, philosophies, and cults. Indeed, it degenerated into navel-gazing of the most self-obsessed kind. Do you EST? Have you tried TM? There's a selection of gurus, be there genuine Indian ones or Western psuedo-scientific ones, to pick and choose from. Scientology is quasi-respectable (and the 70s are when they engage in a genuine attempt at 'domestic terrorism' and other unsavoury activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White).
In that light, Carter's interview with "Playboy" (and have you considered the openness it must have taken for a Southern Baptist running for President to do an interview with what, despite the jokes about "I read it for the articles", is basically a skin mag?) is painfully honest, because the 70s were all about radical openness and interior transformation. But because this is driven by sincere Christian belief, rather than West Coast therapeutic culture, of course the media perceive him as a weirdo. He's not expressing himself in the acceptable shibboleths of the day.
I don't have much of an opinion on Carter one way or the other; yes, he wasn't inspirational or ground-breaking, but personally I think I prefer someone who wants to keep the spending on his own office down, rather than taking the opportunity to soak the taxpayers for expensive refurbishments https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/lulu-lytle-carrie-symonds-downing-street/, or uses interns as private sexual accommodations. But then, I'm old-fashioned like that.
More of a précis than a review. Saved me reading the actual book though.
"Is it to tell blunt truths to the American public and push us to acknowledge our country’s flaws? Or is it to implement policies that lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives? While the best leaders may do some of both, ultimately the latter is what really matters. "
Reading this, it's funny how it's the exact opposite of the argument of Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias. He contrasts leaders who actually improve the wisdom of their populace with those who merely 'gratify their' (usually ignorant) wishes. Moral improvement is the important thing, because mere GDP can be (will be?) pointed towards evil and or stupid things:
"[A]s to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm
Interestingly, much of the "Reagan Revolution" of deregulation began under Carter.
Does this competition have a working definition of a book review? Some of these reviews seem more like précis, and some more like critiques. Are we just walking through what the book says or are we interrogating it?
1) The United States never cheated the Panamanians out of "their canal". There was no canal when the US intervened on the behalf of Panamanian rebels to to secure Panamanian independence from Colombia in order to eliminate Colombia's veto of the construction of a canal, nor was there a canal after that until the United States actually built one at the US's own expense.
2) I want you to imagine that, on November 3rd, 2020, Donald Trump used his power as President to stop all counting of the vote in the northeast and west coast states, on the grounds that the election was being stolen. On January 3, 2021, the 117th Congress takes its seats, and no Congressmen from those northeast or west coast states are seated, because the votes in those states haven't been counted, so nobody was elected. On January 6th, this rump Congress declares that Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 231-124, with 183 votes not cast (the states where Trump stopped the counting). Then Trump holds a referendum on whether he should be dictator with the power to unilaterally amend the Constitution, with separate polling places for voting "Yes, Trump should be dictator" and "No, I don't want Trump to be dictator". The claimed result of this blatantly rigged referendum is that Trump was elected dictator with 99.9% of the vote.
Would you then say that a subsequent military coup that removed Trump from power overthrew the "democratically-elected government" of the United States? Or would you say that Trump had already made sure there was no democratically-elected government that could be overthrown, whatever one's opinion of the people who then overthrew the Trump regime?
Decent summary of Carter's political life. I amazed that it (or the book?) fails to mention the infamous "attack rabbit" and "Mush From the Wimp" events.
In any case, my memory of his presidency is that it was one catastrophe after another, and that everyone hated him. (Living as I did in Tip O'Neill country, that's pretty much expected.)
I enjoyed reading this piece, but in no way can I describe it as a review. It's something completely different - as others have suggested, perhaps a precis?
Maybe the norms of book reviewing have shifted over time and I have simply failed to notice?
It reminds me of the opening of Susanna Clark's novel 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel' where one of the title characters (who is a genuine magician) attends a meeting of a Society of Magicians. He is somewhat flabbergasted to find they not only perform no magic whatsoever, but also think it odd that anybody might expect them to do so; magic having died out as a result of neglect and disinterest some hundreds of years previously. They just talk and 'theorise' about magic.
Is there no genuine book reviewing left? Isn't anybody interested in book reviews, as in the real reviewing of books?
I thought that was what this contest was about!
But maybe book reviewing has quietly died out without me noticing?
I don't get a chance to read a lot of these reviews by the blog's readers (don't have the time, etc.), so I can't compare this one with the others But I'll say it's very well-written. The summary you provide is as good a primer on Carter's presidency as any, and I might bookmark it for future reference. Thanks for writing it!
I did not expect this piece to be at all interesting. And the first sentence just reinforced my impression.
But as it turned out, once I started reading it, I couldn't stop. Very engaging.
I loved this. I finally have enough knowledge to understand the Jimmy Carter jokes on the Simpsons!
Now that’s a great review! Especially because the book doesn’t actually sound that good and the subject is definitely terrible and yet the review is great to read.
One quibble: it’s not “sike”, it’s “psych”. Spelling it phonetically looks illiterate.
Carter was the first President of whom I have any memory. I find it interesting that neither Afghanistan nor the Olympics were mentioned - my family was as miserable as anyone else under the OPEC oil shock, (yes, I remember sitting in a turned off car with no ac waiting for our turn at the pump) but it was the international humiliations of Iran, Panama, and the Olympics that really soured them on Carter.
Of note, beyond the split screen tv broadcasts of Carter leaving the White House and the Iranians releasing the hostages, (my family voted for Regan but thought that humiliation was too much) I also recall the near daily recitals of inflation and job losses on the news - on all three news stations! (Two on the upper dial and the one on the lower - we never did get NBC to come in clear.)
The willingness of news media to attack a Democrat had cooled quite a bit by the time Clinton was in office.
Finally, regarding Carters civil service reform - I would be willing to read a review that looked at the positive and negative tradeoffs of that choice.
This review takes the commonly-asserted - but, I think, poorly-supported - position that the Mossadegh government overthrown by the 1953 US-backed Iranian coup had been democratically elected.
There are three votes relevant here. The first is the nomination of Mossadegh as Prime Minister by the legislature in 1951. This was, as far as I can tell, in procedural accordance with democratic norms ... but its legitimacy suffers a bit because Mossadegh's predecessor, Razmara, was assassinated by a gunman linked to Mossadegh's party, whom Mossadegh pardoned after gaining power. This demonstration of force, and impunity in the use of it, may have made the voters understandably reluctant to oppose him.
The second vote is the 1952 Iranian legislative election. This was certainly not in accordance with democratic norms: Mossadegh arranged for the electorates with the greatest support for his party to be counted first, and then halted the vote before the remaining ones could be counted, leaving him with a majority in a rump legislature (rather than a minority in a complete one).
Mossadegh's tame legislature granted him, then extended, emergency powers to wield executive authority without oversight by parliament - which was, in fact, permitted by the constitution. After a year, however, further extension of this authority required the constitution to be revised, so in 1953 he held a referendum to dissolve parliament, and grant himself dictatorial power, indefinitely. This third vote was held without a secret ballot, so "yes" and "no" voters could be publicly identified. It passed with 99.94% of the vote. And *then* came the coup.
The way so many Western authors ostentatiously describe Mossadegh's government as "democratically-elected" seems to me to be a case of politicised rhetoric: Mossadegh was a left-wing dictator, so the far left feel they need to voice their support for him. The Shah's government was not democratic either but, given time and Western pressure, and in the absence of the Iranian revolution, it might have become so, as happened in e.g. Chile, Greece and South Korea.
This review is amazing. I must learn the author’s name.
There was tons of critique of "why not racist" statement already. I will just note that if there were any racism in Carter at the time, military service would likely help with it.
Quote from "Black like me", (the scene happens deep in South):
> An army officer hurried to get at there arof the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon. I have learned that men in uniform, particularly officers, rarely descend to show discrimination, perhaps because of the integration of the armed forces.
Oil like electricity is oxygen to the first world economy. We're not going to stop use immediately. OPEC reduced oil supplies 5% every month, until they cut supplies completely.
When prices sky-rocketed, when lower income elderly froze to death in their homes, then it mattered.
Re Carter's obsession with micromanagement: I was working in the Executive Office of the President early in Reagan's presidency and I was told that Carter also involved himself in wrangling over slots for the White House tennis courts. The professional staff, regardless of their politics, are fond of presidents who are good at delegating (Reagan himself was a superb delegator) and not fond of micromanagers.
My impression at the time was that Jimmy Carter tended to be an unlucky President. Weird stuff seemed to happen to him that nobody foresaw: e.g., even though nobody believed it, he really was attacked by giant swimming rabbit (we have a photo of the incident); or, on a more consequential scale, the Ayatollah became the ruler of Iran.
Another impression I have is that Carter's last two years in office were kind of proto-Reagan Revolution Lite: e.g., he raised defense spending, he appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair, etc. You can see a lot of the projects of the Reagan Administration in embryonic form in Carter's embattled 1979-1980 years.
In discussions of Carter's foreign policy I typically hear of the fall of the Shah alongside Somoza.
Andrew Bacevich is still a fan of the "malaise" speech and would promote it in the pages of The American Conservative.
This review is interesting and also hilarious. My favorite part is where Carter is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor and develops super powers. I did not know this about him! I am glad for this review bc now I feel I do not have to read the book.
So as far as behavior towards different groups, I think that is just about expectations. I have a bad habit of this.
I can be a bit of a jerk/asshole/high expectations with family/friends. And moreso with coworkers. And very much so with bosses.
But clients and strangers and children always find me super personable and helpful and charming. Because I don’t actually expect full partnership from them. A coworker should be someone rowing the boat with me, and a boss someone better at rowing the boat than me. I got no time for slackers.
But the client/stranger is more like the water.
Maybe something like this is why Carter worked poorly with congress but well with foreigners?
This was hilarious. Thank you!
This review was interesting but the rather glib style kept irritating me. At the same time, I found myself thinking that this anonymous review reads a lot like the work of one Scott Alexander.
The statement that people under 70 mostly know Carter from his post-presidency struck me as kind of weird. I’m 56 and I remember Carter’s presidency pretty well, and also his “I’ll never lie to you” campaign promise.
I had not known, though, that Carter ran for governor of Georgia posing as a quasi-racist. That’s rather interesting. Nor had I known (unless I’ve just forgotten) that S.I. Hayakawa made Carter read a semantics textbook. (The review does not mention the Senator’s name, but surely it must have been Hayakawa; how many semantics professors could there possibly have been in the Senate, even in the ‘70s?)
Oil prices did not spike in the late 1970s, at least not compared to gold. They actually went down from from 1976 to 1981. Nixon taking the US off the (last remnants of the) gold standard is what caused the dollar-denominated price of oil to spike because of inflation.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/oil-gold-ratio/
The potshots at Israel were gratuitous and factually wrong.
Not only did the 1978 accords not discuss whether Jews would live in Gaza or the West Bank at the end of the peace process, but some of those spikes in Jews living in the West Bank were Jews relocated after being ripped out of Gaza in 2005 so that Gaza would be Judenrein to the Palestinians’ satisfaction. That experiment continues to be telling.
Israel and Egypt both complied with the deal that Carter brokered, establishing a peace that has remained cold but effective. The deal fractured the united anti-Israel Arab front, opening the door for later peace deals. It removed the Suez Canal, a key artery of international trade, from the list of hotspots. It began the unwinding of a conflict that had threatened to turn the Cold War hot.
To conclude that Carter’s deeply held beliefs meant he couldn’t get things done while minimizing things he got done that were viewed as impossible and only happened because of his deeply held beliefs is a weird move.
If you quizzed me before I read this I would have guessed that Reagan was the one who deregulated the airline and trucking industries. There's this image of Reagan being the deregulator and Carter being the big government democrat. But actually Reagan was an intensification of a trend that began earlier. Sort of like FDR. Hoover initiated unprecedented amounts of government intervention in the economy, which was intensified later by FDR, and people only remember the contrast so Hoover got this false reputation as laissez-faire.
> A prominent rabbi tells Carter that the real problem is Americans’ “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence.” A Berkeley sociologist adds that Carter needs to “come down from the mountain with some hard truths” to help the American people “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods.” Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up.
I find that dismissive tone kinda narrow-minded and out of place?
US Americans are consuming more resources than any other large country and are responsible for A) a huge chunk of direct pollution on the planet and B) a wasteful consumerist culture emulated on the whole globe. If US as the trendsetter would have focused on sustainability as a mainstream goal since the 1970s it would have been a huge blessing!
The “civil service reform” mentioned in passing was what basically eliminated merit in federal hiring for the sake of affirmative action and racial balancing. That’s what was meant by supporting “racial equality” according to liberals by the time Carter was president, not fighting segregation.
The review claims the book won a Pulitzer, but everything I Google says the author did win a Pulitzer, but not for this book.
I'm a big fan of Pulitzer prize winners, so this stuck out for me.
If this sort of thing interests you, let me also suggest Reaganland which, in spite of the name, is essentially a panoramic history of America during the Carter years. One can view it in a sense as an answer to the question “why did the country so angry with Nixon and so in love with Carter flip to Reagan within 4 years?”
Like all Rick Perlstein’s writing, he’s fundamentally a Democrat, but too honest to let that modify much of his writing. You get a book that’s more “America in the late 70s” and less just Jimmy Carter, which some may find a more interesting starting point.
Quite a few inaccuracies that others have pointed out. I'll add the summary of the Camp David accords.
The deal was Egyptian recognition of Israel and Peace in return for the land of the Sinai peninsula, plus all kinds of technical demilitarization and oversight. The only settlements mentioned specifically where those in Sinai, and they were dismantled (e.g. Yamit). There was some non-specific lip-service parts regarding the West Bank-Gaza and Palestinians. As they were non-specific they could not be broken.
As for his negotiation prowess, it has been said that JC almost tanked the deal because he insisted that the peace deal be regional and included Syria.
The camp david's treatment is so bad I don't know if to believe the rest of the piece.
for example, it doesn't mention Israel evicted the entire Sinai peninsula, a territory more than 2 time the current size of Israel, including a city that was built there.
I was amused to observe that this review has escaped onto the most influential social media site: tumblr (sadly, whoever posted did not attribute)
https://st-just.tumblr.com/post/689537177529483264/not-to-be-a-carter-apologist-or-anything-but
Review-of-the-review: 8/10
This is a concise, well-written, informative, and hard-hitting review on an interesting topic. However, I don't plan to vote for it, for two reasons. First, the reviewer (or maybe in part the author?) has obvious political leanings and lets them color the discussion without acknowledgement. Second, the reviewer isn't really adding much to the discussion. The review closely and successfully emulates the tone, structure, and style of SSC's Hoover review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) but doesn't deliver a similar level of interest or payoff.
Still, a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. As always, many thanks for contributing!
As someone who lived through the Carter administration I'm solidly in the "he's an underrated president" camp. He didn't do things out of political expediency. He appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman even after Volcker told him (in the job interview) that he would raise interest rates (a lot) to try to kill inflation (in an election year). Volcker did not expect to be appointed as Fed chairman after being that up-front with Carter - but Carter did appoint him. And interest rates soared during an election year which certainly didn't help Carter's re-election campaign. But it was the right thing to do.
Had we listened to Carter and taken heed to his warnings we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. We'd likely be way ahead of where we are now on alternative energy and tackling climate change.
Also, if you're looking for a better picture of what motivated Carter and understand him you should read his autobiography "A Full Life". You can get it straight from the horse's mouth.