The Passing of Presidents

And how time lets us forget.

Presidents almost always grow more popular out of office as time passes. Perhaps if nothing else, this is because we start to see them more and more as failed men rather than heroic demigods. It is helped by the fact that the passing of time and focus of the current gives us a perspective on the past that is warped by nostalgia as well as downplayed through quaint rationalization.

To mitigate against this, we need to fully examine the past with humility but also complete judgment. Hence, this reflection on the passing of Jimmy Carter.

I know I'm pointing to this a bit late—some would say the moment has passed. I think it is still topical given that the emotion of that moment has faded as well as the coincident moment of emotion surrounding Trump officially taking office a second time.

With Biden's departure and Trump now actually forced to do the work, this reflection on another failed presidency (they are all failed in once important sense or another) is apropos.

Like all men and all U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter was a complex person with many wonderful attributes and numerous flaws. Gene Healy sums his presidency up well noting the flaws, which are too well remembered, and the successes, which are nearly lost to history. Beyond the very important deregulation successes, Healy refers to him as the last “peace president”:

When it comes to weighing up presidential legacies, Jimmy Carter’s frugality with American blood and treasure ought to count heavily in his favor. So why is he almost universally viewed as one of history’s losers?

…

Presidential rankers consistently award high marks for regime change abroad and at home—favoring “transformational presidents” who “leave the office stronger than they found it.” It’s a perverse metric, unless you think the executive branch can never have too much power. Nonetheless, the scholarly bias in favor of presidential activism puts Jimmy Carter, with his modest goals and mostly harmless errors, 15 places behind the monstrous Wilson in a 2018 survey of American Political Science Association presidential scholars.

More disturbing still, the rankers give bellicose commanders in chief a “combat bonus.” In a 2012 study, David Henderson and Zachary Gochenour found a strong positive correlation between the number of Americans killed in battle during a president’s term(s) and his place in such standings: “Military deaths as a percentage of population,” they concluded, are “a major determinant of greatness in the eyes of historians.”

By that standard, it’s to Carter’s credit that he’s never ranked among the “great presidents.” His “passionless presidency” did comparatively little harm and a considerable measure of good. We could do worse. We usually do.

I once made a comparison of Biden to both Carter and Ford saying he was trying to be the worst version of both. I think that sums up his presidency well. It is also a good way to understand why even if healthy, he was not likely to win in 2024.

I remain ambivalent on Carter aligning much with Tyler Cowen’s perspective.

I fully appreciate his legacy of deregulation, which far exceeded that of the Reagan administration. Plus Carter appointed Volcker and stood by him. He was honest right after the Watergate scandals, and Camp David was a major achievement and furthermore it has stood the test of time in Egypt. Those are some significant accomplishments, and at the time I felt he was a decent President.

But I did not like his overall vibes, and for a President that is important.

He struck me as a pious moralizer who did not have a great sense of the differences between good and harmful altruism. Somehow morality had to be packaged with some strange form of gentlemanly, southern, cloying self-abnegation.

All true. Still, we would do well to have a president with many of the principles and perspectives that Carter possessed. May the last peace president himself rest in peace.