Golden Record: Jimmy Carter and the Road Not Taken in American Politics

Art by Lynn Lee

The author offers her sincere condolences and profound grief at the passing of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. Like her husband, she was a shining beacon of freedom and goodwill for the US and the world, and she will be dearly missed.

In late summer of 1977, the United States launched the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, each of which carried a copy of a 12-inch gold-plated record that contained a time capsule from the planet Earth—sounds, images, and a message from then-President Jimmy Carter. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first manmade object to reach interstellar space. The record it carries is the first message that humanity sent off into the universe in search of extraterrestrial life. Scientists estimate that the Golden Records may survive for over five billion years—likely far longer than the human species itself. That means that when humanity is long extinct, all that remains of our legacy may be the words of an oft-overlooked one-term president.

Jimmy Carter rarely makes the top of anyone’s list of favorite US presidents. In fact, many Americans likely know next to nothing about him. Among political scholars, he has long been maligned as a ‘failed’ president, having lost reelection and left office with low approval ratings after a series of crises. In recent years, however, many have started to reexamine the Carter presidency in a more forgiving light. A series of in-depth biographies, including the expansive His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter, as well as a new March 2023 testimony from former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes that lends credence to the ‘October surprise’ theory, have spurred new conversations about the former president and his politics. And although he will survive in history as the voice of our message to the stars, seen through the lens of today’s poor political candidate quality and rampant distrust in American government, it’s Jimmy Carter who seems like an emissary from another planet.

Note: Many of the biographical facts of Carter’s life in the following article are drawn from Jonathan Alter’s book, which can be found here.

Thanks, Jimmy: The Legacy of the Carter Presidency

Jimmy Carter’s time in office may not be on the radar of most modern liberals, but it should be. Carter was a champion of many of the causes most important to the American left today: environmentalism, civil rights, feminism, human rights-centered foreign policy, and more. 

Abroad, Carter was one of the first presidents to embrace the central importance of human rights in dealings with enemies and allies alike. His major foreign policy successes included returning the Panama Canal to Panamanian control, signing the SALT II arms treaty, and personally negotiating the Camp David Accords, which ended the long conflict between Israel and Egypt and temporarily defused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

At home, Carter took a hard stance on unpopular topics. Having remained quiet on the topic of civil rights early in his career to appease segregationist voters, he abruptly changed tactics by declaring in his inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Carter delivered on that promise, pursuing policies aimed at promoting equity and developing close relationships with prominent civil rights leaders; between both of Carter’s presidential races, Black voters consistently remained his most loyal supporters. 

One of Carter’s most prescient and controversial policy focuses was environmentalism. He was a proponent of clean energy and threw his weight behind legislation to back it up. His administration released the Global 2000 Report to the President, one of the first prominent pieces on climate change. With the Alaska Lands Act, he signed into being the largest single expansion of protected lands in American history. In 1979, he oversaw the installation of solar panels on the roof of the White House, stating, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

A generation from then, those solar panels have turned out to be all of those things except for the last—most of all, a road not taken. Just a few years later, President Reagan would have the panels removed from the White House after thoroughly beating Carter in the 1980 race. Carter lost reelection in large part due to a combination of unfortunate circumstances that would have been difficult for any president to handle better, chief among them rampant stagflation and the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis. These issues which were largely out of Carter’s control certainly dealt him a substantial blow in the polls, but they weren’t the only things that in later years would lead to Carter being regarded as a failed president.

The Very Model of the Modern Major President

The groundwork for Carter’s problems was laid during his stint as governor of Georgia. As Dr. Robert A. Strong puts it in an essay for the UVA Miller Center, “While most Democratic politicians were ‘good ole boys,’ happy to participate in corrupt county courthouse rings and city machines, adept at backslapping and deal-making, Carter came from the Wilsonian southern tradition, which was far different… He thought political leadership should function for the common good, not to please a set of organized constituencies.” While this is an admirable moral quality, it translated poorly to politics.

Carter faced trouble on two fronts of the political battlefield: with the politicians and with the people. He maintained poor relations with fellow political actors starting with his term as a Georgia state senator straight on through his presidency. Carter was blunt, difficult, and infamously stubborn. He openly disdained the traditional political machinery of backroom negotiations and pork barrel legislation, and refused to hand out political favors in exchange for getting his way. Originally a Navy engineering officer who worked with nuclear reactors, Carter also insisted on understanding every bill he put his name behind, sometimes leading to congressmen who were enraged that Carter knew more about their projects than they did. On the broader front, Carter suffered from serious public image issues. Although he was an expert charmer in one-on-one conversations with voters, in interviews and addresses he was often seen as stiff and condescending. He was too quick to admit his own weaknesses, and he was too erudite to be entirely palatable, with complex financial and energy policies and speeches that averaged in around a twelfth-grade reading level, while all his successors would stay between eighth and tenth. His signature media disaster was the infamous “malaise” speech, in which he expressed his concerns over the moral bankruptcy of consumerism and urged Americans to do some soul-searching in order to turn the country from its domestic spiral. Understandably, it didn’t endear him to the public.

There are no two ways about it: Jimmy Carter was a bad politician. But why was that? For the most part, the answer lies in the very thing that made Carter popular among his supporters in the first place: his character. 

Jimmy Carter is something of an enigma. He was a rural white Southerner who was staunchly against segregation and a born-again Baptist who crusaded for separation of church and state. He had been a Naval officer and a farmer, and once rappelled into a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor to help with repairs. In his post-presidency, he founded the Carter Center and spent decades volunteering for Habitat for Humanity and helping to monitor elections. Although some scandal followed his family members, Carter himself has always been regarded even by his harshest critics as having an almost unassailable moral character. 

In the post-Watergate world of 1976, voters liked the squeaky-clean image that Jimmy Carter projected. But once he got into office, their taste for him diminished—not because he was a fraud, but because he was the real deal. When the people go to the ballot boxes, they like to see a “man of the people.” Carter delivered on that. His campaign largely ran on ground-level appearances where Carter made relationships with individual voters. He started the tradition, against the Secret Service’s will, of the president walking to the White House on Inauguration Day instead of riding in a car. But once he walked up those steps, the voters got exactly what they asked for: an uncompromising moralist who expected the American people to rise to his level.

New Horizons and Bad Actors

In his “Crisis of Confidence” speech, frequently dubbed the “malaise” speech, Carter philosophized: 

“We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy… In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption… Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” 

From a modern standpoint, this speech is almost bizarre. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary president standing up to give a sermon on hard work and consumerism, especially not one that places so much responsibility on the people’s shoulders. In fact, in today’s political climate, it’s hard to imagine a politician like Carter at all.

In contrast to Carter’s near-universally praised character, today’s politicians are weak in the ethos department; more importantly, Americans believe they are. Pew Research finds that 63% of Americans today believe that all or most politicians are motivated by selfishness; only 26% believe the quality of political candidates to be very or somewhat good; and the most frequently chosen words to describe the government are “divisive” and “corrupt.” When asked what they thought the biggest problem with politicians today is, 29% of respondents said they believe it’s bad character—and that’s excluding the 33% who believe the biggest problem is corruption or failure to work for the people’s interests. 86% believe that members of Congress are “very” or “somewhat” bad at taking responsibility for their actions.

On both sides of the political aisle, Americans agree that somewhere, somehow, we went wrong with our politicians. In 2020, Pew Research found that 63% of Americans believe that having a president who personally lives a moral, ethical life is “very” important. Why, then, does this preference not seem to be reflected in our elected representatives? Why is our government apparently crowded with politicians that we view as morally reprehensible? The simple answer is that we put them there.

Just What the Voters Ordered

Why do we elect people we don’t like? Part of the answer lies in polarization and identity politics, with voters feeling trapped into supporting the lesser of two evils. However, this isn’t necessarily the root of the issue. Instead, it’s a symptom of a larger issue with how American politics functions: an issue with how the system is designed, and how voters respond to it.

As Carter observed in that same “Crisis of Confidence” speech:

“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.”

Over forty years later, this description remains depressingly accurate. Part of the reason our government is morally deficient is that it’s designed to incentivize the very characteristics we dislike. It’s the same system Jimmy Carter seemed so poorly prepared to manipulate: a world of back-room deals, special interest-funded candidates, and inflammatory rhetoric being prioritized over substantive discourse. Since the year 2000, the cost of election in the United States (adjusted for inflation) has skyrocketed. This sets a high barrier to entry, and means that the most important qualifying skill to win office is the ability to schmooze donors and special interests. Rampant polarization means that voters feel trapped into voting for candidates they have a low opinion of to avoid the victory of someone they find even worse.

These are problems with the way our system of government is designed, and they aren’t new. In the past twenty years, however, we’ve been feeling their effects more and more. Fixing these issues requires reforming campaign finance laws, the Electoral College, and even the very design of some of our institutions. These changes are monumental, slow, and in many cases must be implemented from the top. But not all of them. Grassroots campaign organizing and growing a more informed electorate are vital steps that need to be taken at the bottom of the pyramid. Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem.

A more widespread and nebulous reason behind our lack of politicians who are up to snuff character-wise is the very problem that led voters to abandon Jimmy Carter: we don’t actually want them. 

Americans’ thirst for a moral leader in the White House is largely changeable. Research by Gallup has shown that voters are less likely to view moral character as an important presidential quality when a president of their party is under scrutiny, and more likely to tout its importance when a president of the opposite party is under scrutiny. This shows that for many Americans, holding a strict standard for the character of their leaders is less important than rooting for the home team. 

Voters put Jimmy Carter in office because they liked the way his squeaky-clean smile looked on their ballot. Once he was in office, though, he committed a mortal sin—he asked too much of them. Carter maintained a high technical understanding of the policies he supported, and he wanted Americans to, as well. He spoke to them as adults, not children. And, most importantly, he addressed what he saw as the moral challenges faced by the nation, and placed due responsibility on the American people to step up and solve them.

We have so many dishonest people in politics partly because we vote for them for being dishonest. We are drawn to leaders who offer a shiny turn of phrase and hollow identification with groups we support over meaningful and nuanced stances. We like leaders who promise to win, without mentioning having to compromise. Most of all, we like leaders who promise us incredible results, while asking nothing of us. 

Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech contained two notable political gaffes: acknowledgement of his own failures as a leader, and honest reflection on the failures and responsibilities of the American people. The fact that these are political non-starters doesn’t reflect badly on Carter, though—it reflects badly on us. Jimmy Carter may have been a bad politician, but that’s only because we’ve created a bad system of politics.

A Present from a Small Distant World

Carter represents an archetype of politician that could have become the norm in America—but we rejected him. Instead of stepping up to the plate, in 1980 Americans chose a path that led to where we are today. Carter’s road is a road not taken. But it’s never too late to change course.

The malaise speech, for all its infamy, was right; America really is facing a crisis of confidence, and it has been for a long time. We cannot put all the responsibility on our leaders and a system that has failed us. We have also failed each other. If we really want to create a better nation for our children, we can’t just show up at the ballot box. We need to organize, to fight for reform, to keep ourselves educated and informed. Electing leaders who promise to better the country isn’t enough. We have to better it ourselves. Instead of focusing on electing representatives who are more like us, we should be electing leaders who we want to be more like. This seems like an insurmountable challenge, and indeed it means a radical change in not just our institutions but in our national identity and norms. We may never accomplish it. But bettering our civilization beyond the imaginings of our early years is what we should all aspire to. 

Five billion years from now, when humanity is almost certainly extinct, Jimmy Carter’s words on the Golden Record will be the legacy of the United States. They can be, like many of Carter’s other words, a source of irony, a glimpse of a better path we did not choose. Or, perhaps, they can memorialize our will to change the world for the better. Whatever the case, what remains of us will be this message of Carter’s hope and firm belief:

“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”