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Jimmy Carter never gave a "malaise" speech. The speech that has become known by that moniker was actually entitled "Crisis of Confidence." Nowhere in the speech is the word malaise used, but clearly it is not a stretch to say that "malaise" and "crisis of confidence" are at least cousins if not brothers.
The speech is truly extraordinary in both content and style. I think it may be unique among Presidential addresses for its obvious sincerity, its painful candor, its prophetic accuracy, and, alas, its foregone futility. A video and a full transcript are available at this link. I urge you to watch (or at least read) the speech.
Image courtesy blisted.breakthrough.tv
In a real sense, this speech defines Carter in terms of both his strengths and his weaknesses. Remember that Carter was at exactly the same point in his presidency that Obama is today. He had been in office for two and a half years. He had inherited a seemingly unstoppable inflationary spiral, a recession, relatively high unemployment, and an unbalanced budget--all of them fueled in large part by rapidly rising oil prices. People today forget how bad inflation was then. Nixon had fought it with wage and price controls. Ford tried pep talks and WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons. Nothing seemed to work. Mortgage rates were hitting double digits and would peak at 18% in the early 1980s. The financial environment was not conducive to borrowing money to build homes or buy hard goods or open factories. A stagnant economy, combined with rising inflation, was described by a new word--stagflation.
Carter felt the key to solving stagflation was decreasing the nation's dependence on Middle Eastern oil. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) had held the U.S. hostage to rising prices ever since the oil embargo of 1973. But, according to Carter, what was troubling America was "deeper" than inflation or energy:
I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
(snip)
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
(Emphasis added)
What did Carter mean and why did he feel that way? What Carter saw all about him was a sundering of the core unity that had defined the United States almost all his life.
Born in 1924, he was a child of the Great Depression, that defining moment when the working people of the nation shared pain and insecurity and found solace in the government. Consider that Carter was eight years old when FDR was elected and nearly 21 when he died. The nation's feeling of unity had begun in the 1930's, crested in the war years, and still had momentum through the 1950s, thanks to the existential threat of the Soviet Union. But that wave of togetherness finally crashed and ebbed away on the rocky shoals of the 1960s.
Carter noted,
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.
(Emphasis added)
From Carter's perspective, the cocksure nation that had strutted out of WWII was disintegrating into a selfish, bickering, pessimistic rabble that lacked unifying purpose. The metaphorical patchwork quilt was coming apart at the seams of race, class, and ideology. No Great Depression, no "good war", no enemy was forcing us to mend those rents in the fabric of American politics. Yes, Communism still acted as a foil, but the two Cold Warriors had reached an apparent equilibrium. People had grown accustomed to the nuclear Sword of Damocles. After all, MAD was mad and 17 years had elapsed since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Vietnam had divided the country over how real the Red Menace was anyway. In short, no perceived existential threat loomed to unify us.
Carter used the bully pulpit relentlessly, if fruitlessly, to try to rally the country around energy independence, having first declared the energy crisis "the moral equivalent of war" back in April 1977, just three months after his inauguration. This effort marked his fifth major speech on energy. In this passage Carter displays his intelligence and foresight about the implications of fragmentation and the importance of energy independence as a unifier:
In a nation that was 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.
(snip)
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
(Emphasis added)
I don't need to tell you which path the country chose in 1980. I just wish Carter hadn't been so right about the consequences of that choice.
Carter was never able to convince the nation to rally 'round the energy crisis an existential threat. And, instead of his successor following up on the goals Carter had set, Ronald Reagan chose to be the anti-Carter--an energy crisis denier, ridiculing the notion of conservation, raising the speed limit, and encouraging the development of the SUV.
Rather than pursuing unity through energy independence, Reagan chose the short-sighted solution of becoming bosom buddies with Saddam Hussein and the Saudis by selling them arms. The oil cartel fell apart and prices and inflation went down, but at a cost we are still paying. And instead of unity, Lee Atwater begat Karl Rove.
So fragmentation was not only perpetuated but Image courtesy dailygalaxy.com
exacerbated. Even before Reagan, however, the
nation's confidence had suffered yet another blow--the Iran hostage crisis, which began on Nov. 4, 1979, and never ended while Carter was President, effectively distracting the country and the President from focusing on energy.
I was recently reflecting that what the country really needs is an existential threat, an enemy, a challenge to bring us together. Of course, such a crisis is currently rushing at us like an out-of-control Humvee--climate change. But when a third of the people deny it and another third ignore it, it's hard to get unified.
I don't know what it's going take to unify the country again, and I don't think I want to know.
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