1980 was the first election I was eligible to vote, and I knew I wasn’t going to vote for Jimmy Carter. Not because I was a Republican or because I was wary of his Southern Baptist faith, but because I was a teenager who knew everything and who uncritically believed the news stories about him. My dad tried really hard to provide the context for some of the issues but I didn’t care. I obviously wasn’t going to vote for that Reagan asshole, and so I voted for John Anderson.
I didn’t really like Anderson, though, but I just couldn’t imagine wanting 4 more years of Carter. Which was nonsensical on my part since Reagan was going to be a lot worse, but I also knew that my third party vote in Connecticut would have no impact on the eventual outcome. And that turned out to be true, although I now understand the fake allure of the third party candidate—but that’s a post for another day.
My colleague JamieO has written an excellent, and fair, assessment of Carter’s life and legacy. LINK. Carter’s death has got me thinking about the transition from his administration to the Reagan administration, and all of the missed opportunities.
I think especially about the meanness that Reagan brought to the White House. Yes, Richard Nixon was a real SOB but there’s a difference between someone who is just nasty and someone who looks at opportunities to actively hurt other people–think about his indifference to people suffering with HIV/AIDS, or how he demonized Black women with the awful “welfare queen” trope, or about how he destroyed Carter’s green energy initiatives, or his ruthless attack on freedom of speech by eliminating the Fairness Doctrine.
Think also about his reckless, illegal foreign policy actions, which were right up there with Nixon’s. And think about how Reagan lied to the hostages in Iran, telling them that Carter didn’t care about them, a lie they believed and led to the hostility they showed to Carter when he visited them.
Elaine Shannon, who was working for Newsweek then, recounts:
As Newsweek correspondent, I flew with President Carter to Weisbaden [sic] on Jan. 20, 1981, to greet liberated US hostages. He returned deeply troubled. Hostages weren’t glad to see him. Aides said hostages had been falsely told he hadn’t tried to free them.
Wh at I remember vividly, to this day, is Jimmy Carter’s downcast look. He’d been defeated, but there was something else in his eyes. That’s why we in the press pool asked his aides, why so sad? Their reply, above.
Reagan did it to poison the well re: the Democrats. Carter was massively unpopular, but that wasn’t enough for the Reagan team: the Democrats had to be painted as the enemy of democracy and freedom. Lying to the hostages about Carter’s attempts to help them was so deliberately cruel to them and to Carter.
The sheer cruelty of that makes me so angry. It’s the seed of the current iteration of the GOP: the cruelty is the point. More and more I see the 1980 election as one of the seminal elections in our history. There is no Trump presidency without the Reagan presidency and its small meanness, its embrace of racism and white supremacism, and its contempt for anything that makes life better for anyone else.
The flags will be at half staff in honor of Carter during VP Trump’s inauguration, and this shift in tone will also be on display as the nation has once again has chosen the stupid, venal, lying grifter over the decent man whose presidency did its best to help vulnerable Americans.
Here’s a good song about history repeating. Happy New Year, y’all.
