People will fondly remember Jimmy Carter and his good works. In particular Habitat for Humanity, which builds housing for those who don’t have it. Neighbors helping each other. Jimmy Carter was the best ex-president in the history of the United States. But as president, he was simply mediocre.
He only served one term as president, from 1976 to 1980, then easily beaten by Ronald Reagan. The American Democratic Party had nevertheless started the 1970s by imposing itself as the dominant national force. However, at the end of the decade, it was only shreds. Hundreds of thousands of working-class Democrats had turned their backs on Franklin Roosevelt’s party and the New Deal.
Years ago, I spent several weeks combing through the archives of the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia. The experience opened my eyes.
It was Carter, not Reagan, who kick-started deregulation in the United States.
In his re-election speech at the Democratic nomination in 1980, Carter went so far as to celebrate his deregulation of the airlines, the trucking industry and the financial system.
One could therefore say that he paved the way for the neoliberal order.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency coincides with an industrial crisis. Thousands of factories are closing, and unemployment is skyrocketing. In 1977 alone, 14 steelworks definitively ceased their activities. However, Carter rarely talks about economic problems, despite the fact that many Americans are suffering from them. His administration offers them little more than a shrug.
For many American workers of the time, it was not uncommon to show up at work one day and find the factory gates padlocked. In the United States, unlike Canada, there was no law requiring American employers to give notice to their employees so that they had time to adjust to the loss of their jobs. Numerous bills intended to mitigate the socioeconomic impact of the layoffs were introduced in Congress, but Carter never supported them. It was Reagan, not Carter, who signed the law making this kind of notice mandatory.
PHOTO BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Portraits of former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter at the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, Georgia
A new generation of leaders
Then comes the final report of the Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, appointed by the Carter presidency, in which it deems “inevitable” the decline of the industrial cities of the Northwestern and Midwestern states. It urges the government to redirect its efforts to help the urban poor to migrate to the southern rim states. For her, this is the big solution. According to Time Magazine, in the eyes of urban policy, the model of the northern metropolis has had its day. It has become obsolete. Think about that for a second.
Jimmy Carter was among a new generation of leaders — many of them elected to represent the well-heeled suburbs — who were urging the Democratic Party to turn its back on the New Deal. The old politics of redistribution then gives way to the new post-materialist politics of the progressive middle class.
Social justice, rather than economic redistribution, is now on the agenda. Many are even against unions.
The old electoral alliance is destroyed.
And Jimmy Carter served as an example for future Democratic presidents. Thus, Bill Clinton championed free trade with Mexico, deregulated the financial sector (with disastrous results in 2008), reversed New Deal social policies, and chose to fight the deficit rather than against unemployment and poverty. Vice President Al Gore even refused to claim that “unions are good for workers” when he addressed the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations. Barack Obama, for his part, bailed out Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis, instead of homeowners. And it was Donald Trump, not Obama, who renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement to ensure that American workers were better protected.
That’s why, when a displaced Buffalo steelworker once said to me, “A Republican administration, a Democratic administration, it’s all the same,” I had no trouble understanding him. He added that local Democratic politicians didn’t even bother to come to a meeting to save the steel mill where he worked: “They didn’t really care what was happening to us. »
There is no doubt that Jimmy Carter was an honest man. One could, however, have wished for more benevolence on his part when he was President of the United States.