Jimmy Carter's Legacy: A Puppet Show and an All Powerful Purse
Jimmy Carter’s presidency, much like an uninspired sermon from a preacher doubting his own faith, left America adrift in a storm of unmet promises. Carter, a self-styled champion of equality and justice, delivered a moralistic rhetoric that rang hollow when confronted with the realities of his governance. His presidency was a missed opportunity to reform systems corrupted by the Nixon years, from restoring trust in government to addressing structural inequalities left to fester. His tenure, mired in economic malaise and international embarrassment, laid the groundwork for a chain of causation that would stretch from Reagan’s polished pieties to Trump’s vulgar demagoguery, exposing both Democrats and Republicans as two sides of the same gilded coin.
Carter’s administration heralded deregulation as a panacea for economic woes. The airline, trucking, and financial industries were all loosed from federal oversight, a move cloaked in promises of efficiency and cost-saving but ultimately favoring corporate profits over public welfare. The immediate impact was an erosion of working-class stability, a precursor to the neoliberal consensus that would dominate the political landscape. Carter, despite his pious proclamations, proved unable to manage the inflationary spirals and energy crises that gripped the nation, leaving the electorate disillusioned and vulnerable to the snake oil of Reaganomics.
Enter Ronald Reagan, who seized Carter’s failures as a springboard for a revolution in plutocracy, a trajectory continued under George H.W. Bush, whose administration maintained the Reagan-era emphasis on deregulation and military expansion. Reagan offered the nation a heady brew of supply-side economics, cutting taxes for the wealthy while gutting social programs. His administration’s zeal for deregulation and privatization further entrenched corporate dominance, widening the chasm between elites and ordinary citizens. Democrats, rather than offering a genuine alternative, began their own flirtation with neoliberalism. Bill Clinton’s presidency embraced free trade agreements, welfare reform, and financial deregulation, solidifying a bipartisan consensus that the market, not the state, was the ultimate arbiter of progress. George W. Bush’s administration further entrenched this dynamic with tax cuts favoring the wealthy and a mishandling of the 2008 financial crisis that deepened corporate control over the economy.
Obama, hailed as a progressive savior, inherited the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, a catastrophe born of the very policies his party had helped implement. Yet, rather than seizing the opportunity to break the elite stranglehold on power, his administration propped up the same Wall Street interests that had plunged millions into economic despair. The Affordable Care Act, while an improvement over the status quo, was crafted to placate insurance companies rather than to deliver true universal healthcare. Obama’s failure to deliver systemic change deepened public cynicism, setting the stage for Trump.
Donald Trump, a carnival barker with a golden megaphone, exploited decades of bipartisan betrayal. The groundwork for his rise was laid not only by Democratic compromises but also by Republican policies, particularly under the Bush administrations. George W. Bush's Iraq War and economic mismanagement amplified public disillusionment, while George H.W. Bush's continuation of Reagan-era policies further entrenched corporate dominance, creating an environment ripe for Trump’s faux populism. His faux populism resonated with a public weary of elite condescension and economic precarity. Yet, his policies, a grotesque amplification of Reaganomics, served the same entrenched interests while cloaking them in the garish rhetoric of grievance. Democrats, now the self-styled party of resistance, failed to reckon with their role in creating the conditions for Trump’s rise. The Biden administration further compounded this failure by attempting to turn back the clock to the Obama years, mirroring Carter’s missteps in facing nearly identical circumstances. Both administrations inherited crises requiring systemic reform—Carter in the wake of Nixonian corruption and economic instability, and Biden in the aftermath of Trump’s divisive populism and a global pandemic. Yet, like Carter, Biden offered incremental solutions and moralistic rhetoric, failing to seize the opportunity for transformative change. This inability to embrace substantive reform reinforced public cynicism and widened the gulf between elites and ordinary citizens. They lamented his crudeness while offering little more than a return to the status quo ante, a status quo that had long ceased to serve the majority.
The chain of causation from Carter to Trump reveals a fundamental truth: both parties are beholden to the same class of elites. Democrats cloak their allegiance in the language of justice and inclusion, while Republicans wrap theirs in patriotism and freedom. Yet, the result is the same: a political system that serves corporate interests at the expense of the people. This elite duopoly perpetuates cycles of exploitation and disillusionment, offering the electorate a choice between the velvet glove and the iron fist.
Carter’s sanctimony, Reagan’s sophistry, Clinton’s triangulation, Obama’s pragmatism, and Trump’s bombast are all threads in the same fabric of elite consolidation. Each iteration promises change while reinforcing the underlying dynamics of power. Until this cycle is broken, the American experiment will remain a puppet show, with different hands pulling the strings but the same interests holding the purse.
-Yuval-
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