It's weird how his reputation has flipped from people viewing him as a somewhat shady weirdo to an ineffectual goofball - see the SNL sketch from the '76 election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu2vdE0z7ds
I fear this is indeed a very accurate summary of the problem with democracy.
It reminds me, actually, of the difference between the kinds of films people say they'd like to watch tomorrow (important serious films on important serious topics) and the kinds of films people choose to watch today (mindless mass appeal blockbusters), for any given tomorrow and today.
Back when Netflix operated by mailing you dvds and letting you keep three at a time, you had a queue of movies you wanted to watch, so whenever you sent one back, they would send you the next one on the list. A very common failure mode was when you got to three movies on your list you knew you were supposed to watch, but never wanted to watch today. But you still paid Netflix the monthly fee.
Nevertheless, surely we can agree that this was incalculably better than the post-streaming failure mode of simply "not having a catalogue of high quality movies available."
(Getting kind of far afield from the Carter administration metaphor there, though, I guess)
After reading this review, I don't think Carter had integrity. The hubris of this man with little experience or ability to think he should be the most powerful man in the world is off the charts. He seems to have been blinded by personal ambition like so many of our typical politicians.
It would be one thing if he had proven to have been some Joan of Arc type who had some incredible foresight, spiritual or otherwise, but instead he was just another false prophet, incompetent as shit with no good reason to believe he wouldn't have been. A Jimmy Carter with integrity would have stayed on the peanut farm or in the Navy.
I mean experience in leadership and running a large bureaucracy. Bush Jr. ran an oil company (into the ground, but, hey, starting an independent oil company is a risky venture). He did a better job as a businessman after buying The Texas Rangers, then he was governor of Texas for 8 years. That is more experience than Carter's.
>Eisenhower had *no* experience in civilian government
Sure, but Eisenhower's non-civilian leadership experience is about as impressive as it gets.
I agree with everything you said except "he failed". I'm struggling to see at what he failed at, other than winning re-election, and if succeeding at everything else means losing re-election then that seems worth it (as the review points out).
Carter also has an excellent post-Presidential record—far beyond any other President I can think of.
The development of US air supremacy by 1991 was something of a surprise at the time.
The U.S. POWs in Vietnam were mostly the hundreds of pilots shot down over North Vietnam. That's probably a big reason Congressional Democrats overruled the Nixon Administration's plan to defend post US-pullout South Vietnam by air: it was assumed hundreds of planes would be shot down if the US attempted to thwart with air power a North Vietnamese offensive. But, in retrospect, the year 1972 when the US lost only 300 killed in action in Vietnam while thwarting via air power (helped by the introduction of guided bombs) a North Vietnamese tank offensive, while leaving the South Vietnamese to do the ground fighting, appears to have been a world-historical turning point, but not one widely recognized in Washington in the 1970s.
By the way, the Carter defense department under Harold Brown continued to advance US airpower technology in all sorts of ways (e.g., stealth). Then Reagan came in and poured money on the 1970s advances so by the time of the Gulf War, the U.S. had a military that was both technologically advanced and massive (which no doubt had something to do with the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire).
Also: post-Vietnam syndrome, as they called it then, which I guess is a bit subsumed by what you say. Also: some people did call for more action. Also-also: Iran is 3 times the size of Iraq, and think how big an operation that was (both times).
On the Cold War aspect: the Sovs were in Afghanistan by December 1979, and that borders Iran, so yeah, you can imagine some really unfortunate turns of events if the US had gone into Iran in a serious way. [UPDATE: as noted by another commentor, the northern border of Iran was in fact a border with the USSR, although not Russia, back then. So more so!]
This does not match my recollection of reading Michael Axworthy's A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, which I have checked against Wikipedia.
Russia invaded Persia repeatedly from the 17th to the 19th century, conquering much of the South Caucasus. A Tehran mob massacred the whole Russian embassy staff in 1829. (There is a long history of cleric-inspired mob violence in Tehran.)
In the high imperial era, Russia and the UK collaborated to heavily influence the incompetent Persian government. They divided Persia into two spheres of influence, separated by a neutral zone. (See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Iran_1900-en.png). Russian troops were based there years before WWI started.
During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks sponsored a short-lived Soviet republic in northeastern Iran.
During WWII, the UK and the USSR invaded Iran and deposed Reza Shah in favor of his son (the Shah discussed above).
Immediately after WWII, the USSR sponsored two short-lived puppet states in northeastern Iran.
During the earlier Cold War, Iran was a US ally. The USSR shot down Iranian military aircraft on multiple occasions.
The Islamic Republic supported some of the Afghan mujahedin, fighting against the USSR.
If America had invaded Iran in 1979, we'd have come out victorious only with a lot of losses, and facing a huge vulnerability to the Russians.
Iran's a big country; its capital is far from the coast; and back then it shared a border with the USSR. The Russians would have been happy to see Iranians kill American soldiers, and the Iranians might have needed less Russian help than you'd think.
America's military wasn't the overpowering elite it is today. Chinese troops fought Americans to a draw in the Korean War, and Vietnamese troops wreaked a heavy toll in the Vietnam War, despite both those countries being dirt poor at the time. Modern American military dominance only emerges around the mid-80s, thanks to changes that were only just started in the mid-70s. Changes, in fact, that the Iran hostage rescue failure helped accelerate.
(What changed? The Goldwater-Nichols reforms, the precision weapons shift, National Training Center rotations, etc.)
Today's American military still benefits from the reforms done to win the Cold War, while everyone else's military has downsized because the Cold War ended. But in the 1970s that mismatch wasn't present. Midrange state armies like Iran's were often kept much stronger than now, and American units were vastly weaker than today.
In 1979 America wasn't even sure it would deter Russia from war in Europe, even without taking on a huge extra invasion of Iran.
We didn't have the tools then which we have now. The Iranians were a distributed group. They split the hostages up almost immediately. More than likely, the hostages would have been killed immediately if any invasion happened.
Such a war would probably turn into a drawn out counterinsurgency, with the government of Iran likely reverting to its former self soon after the US left. Not to mention: Thousands of soldiers on the US side would die (and in fact, probably tens of thousands); hundreds of thousands of people on the Iranian side would die; and trillions of dollars would get used up. This is in fact the best case scenario. All of this just to return some ambassadors to safety, who could otherwise be (and in fact, could only be) saved through purely diplomatic means.
Wars are extremely risky, costly and unpredictable. This holds 10x over for a war of invasion.
Thank you for injecting some sense into this discussion. A US invasion of Iran would be a disaster, almost certainly ending, as you say, in a drawn-out insurgency, a humiliating US withdrawal, and the return of a strengthened Islamicist government.
You neglect just who the players were. The Iran government was not your old-school play by the rules government. It was a loosely organized terrorist org which over-ran the foundations of civilization. The staff and ambassadors in an embassy are the very well connected children of very well connected people in the government.
The workers in an embassy aren't typically your average Joe Schmoe. These are the well heeled children of the well connected members of our government.
If something happens to you or I in a foreign country, Meh. But if something happens to say the Ivy League nieces & nephews of congress-critters, vice-deputy-directors of atomic waste disposal at EPA, etc. ... shit is gonna hit the fan and fast.
Except . . . the criticism of Carter was that he didn't do much to free the hostages. And we certainly didn't launch a full-scale invasion of Iran. NavyBlueSmoke and other folks on the right seem to think the shit didn't hit the fan enough.
I had a reader who worked high up in the Pentagon making contingency plans. He'd spent a lot of time war-gaming how to conquer Tehran. He said it was like starting in San Francisco and trying to conquering Denver: a whole lot of mountains and more bad roads in between.
And I'm not even sure where the US forces would have started from in 1979. Oman? The US had fewer bases in the Persian Gulf back then? Or would Turkey have agreed to be a base? Pakistan? Would the Iranians have asked the Soviets for help?
An enjoyable read, and I lived through all that. One correction: Reagan's 49-state victory was in 1984. He won a mere 44 states in 1980. Also, although I suspect this is unknowable, my impression on Inauguration Day was that Iran held the hostages just long enough to not free them during Carter's administration, out of spite, or maybe that Reagan-led tricksiness.
It makes it really really hard to understand what you're saying, I'll say that much, I have to spend about five times as long per length trying to read your comment compared to any other comment
Carter was the peacenik yes. I believe he was so tied to his persona as 'a man of peace' that it became a weapon which could be used against him ... and the country as a whole. Now-a-days, any new president is sure to fire off a salvo of missiles in the first weeks of his term, just to let everyone know there's bite behind the bark. President Trump fired a bunch of rockets, which killed a bunch of Russian mercenaries in Syria, and didn't have to do much more shooting after that to keep the peace. President Biden didn't do this, then Putin got all cocky, now look where we are.
The CIA, and those who lost power in a divided Iran in 53, also exaggerated the American effect. We didn't actually do much - some rent-a-mobs and some political cartoons - but bragged that it was the key tipping point. Impossible to disprove, but unlikely.
Also, the biggest victory for a non-incumbent ever was when Washington was elected unopposed to his first term in 1788!
Otherwise, it depends what you mean by “biggest”. Throwing out uncontested elections or elections before the popular-vote system was used, the biggest popular vote margin ever was for Warren Harding in 1920, who was not an incumbent. (Harding also received the biggest popular vote fraction of any non-unopposed non-incumbent). The biggest Electoral College victory for a non-unopposed non-incumbent, by margin or percentage, was indeed Reagan in 1980. By fraction of states won it’s also Reagan in 1980, *unless you count DC as a state*, in which case it’s FDR in 1932.
You know, I always thought that there was one elector who didn't vote for Washington in 1788, on the grounds that nobody should be elected President unanimously. But I looked it up, and it seems to be just a legend.
My point is, I _did_ look it up, and it I see no evidence that it happened at all.
WP:
"On April 6, 1789, the House and Senate, meeting in joint session, counted the electoral votes and certified that Washington had received electoral votes from each of the 69 electors that had cast votes, and thus had been elected president."
I think you've confused this in part with the election of 1820, when the collapse of the Federalist Party (which had been in decline for some time) left no one to run against incumbent president James Monroe. He received every electoral vote but one—a single faithless elector cast his vote for John Quincy Adams instead. Popular legend holds that the elector did this to deprive Monroe of a unanimous Electoral College victory, on the grounds that such an honor should be reserved for Washington alone. However, there appears to be no historical evidence that that was his motive.
I think we need to hold the line that "sike" is completely incorrect. My immediate reaction reading this was "no way this can get my vote, he spelled "psyche" "sike".
Regardless, the Camp David Accords are a massive success. Beforehand Israel and Egypt had fought several wars with a total of more than 20,000 people dead. Since then the two countries have been at peace.
I enjoyed this review. But sad to see the absence of discussion of the most significant event of the administration—the time he was attacked by a killer rabbit.
Super fun review. The writerly voice seemed familiar, kind of a Freddie DeBoer or Jeff Maurer vibe. This one's my favorite of the reader reviews so far.
Agreed. I'm suspicious of this, though -- there's a kind of possible self-handicapping going on. I can imagine that if I were a better and funnier writer I might choose a topic about which few people know and have little interest so as to play up the humor without sticking my neck out. The "consciousness and the brain" review caused me to go and buy the book, whereas this review upgrades Carter to "the american president I currently have the most good vibes about".
Just a few comments from someone who was a (prevoting age) Atlantan in 1970. First, Carl Sanders wasn't a businessman, he was a lawyer. More importantly, he was the former Governor of Georgia (1962-1966), coming back to try for a discontinuous second term, since Georgia governors at the time were limited to one consecutive term. Carter's attacks on Sanders were grotesque and inaccurate, but he did successfully portray Sanders as a creature of the Atlanta consensus. Sanders was no integrationist, but he was considerably more integrationist than Carter portrayed himself as, and that was an unfortunate path to electoral victory around that time.
By 1976 I was old enough to cast my first Presidential vote (I was in college in the North by then) and was genuinely torn on entering the voting booth... I knew Carter and trusted him not at all, and I thought Ford was second rate. I honestly cannot recall who I voted for... even today. But if I did vote for Carter, it was my only winning Presidential vote of my life. (That's not quite as weird as it sounds, since I've cast a fair number of third-party votes.)
“One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book.”
It's worth mentioning that the senator in question was S. I. Hayakawa, a follower of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics movement. Korzybski's ideas, and the proselytizing community he built around them, were a *very* influential forerunner to LessWrong-style rationalism. (Slogans like “the map is not the territory” originated in General Semantics; Yudkowsky has written about the influence.)
Basically, Jimmy Carter, while in office, had to Read The Sequences.
Hayakawa's book used to be recommended by EY in his Sequences days.
Scott on Korzybski:
"Take General Semantics (please!). I remember reading through Korzybski’s giant blue book of General Semantics, full of labyrinthine diagrams and promises that if only you understood this, you would engage with the world totally differently, you’d be a new man armed with invincible cognitive weapons. And the key insight, maybe the only insight, was “the map is not the territory”, which seems utterly banal."
There is probably much more to say about this, I hope someone else will contribute to the discussion.
Robert A. Heinlein was also a big fan of General Semantics, it features in some of the short stories of his. Another fan from Heinlein's friend group, L. Ron Hubbard, become interested in the idea of "invincible cognitive weapons", and after further study developed the concept in quite unexpected directions [1].
To be fair, AFAIK he was more inspired by Korzybski's self-assured attitude and and the prospect of revolutionizing the science of human mind than any actual contents of General Semantics.
Right, a general question for future minded people in the first half of the 20th Century was language reform, which involved some combination of A. finding a neutral global language of the future to replace national languages (e.g., Esperanto); B. to make the new language more efficient and easier to spell (e.g., the various language reforms backed by Andrew Carnegie and GB Shaw); C. more fundamental reform to make the language harder to mislead while using (General Semantics, I believe, which was big among West Coast sci-fi authors like Heinlein and his friends).
As it turned out, the global language of the future turned out to be plain old English, despite its inefficiencies and complete failure at dissuading lying.
Japanese-American academic S.I. Hayakawa was the main U.S. proponent of General Semantics. Governor Reagan, whose nickname of Ronnie RayGun was not inappropriate (he was connected to sci-fi circles in California -- e.g., one early draft of his Star Wars speech included contributions from Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, etc.), appointed Hayakawa president of San Francisco State during a leftist student strike. Hayakawa cracked down, became a conservative hero, and was elected to the US Senate as a Republican in 1976.
Vaclav Havel's 1965 play, The Memorandum, is the best satire of this language reform movement. It is also a Straussian critique of Communism, of course. It's a very funny play too.
Another Czech-born playwright, Tom Stoppard, wrote a novel language play "Dogg's Hamlet, Kahoot's Macbeth" in which the audience has to learn the new language from observing the action on stage. The audience usually figures it out, which can make for an exhilarating theatrical experience.
Amazing how these movements always start with “let’s invent the new language” rather than “are these claims about how language does and can control thought actually grounded in *any* sort of reality”…
"The World of Null-A, sometimes written The World of Ā, is a 1948 science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was originally published as a three-part serial in 1945 in Astounding Stories. It incorporates concepts from the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. The name Ā refers to non-Aristotelian logic."
There is an awful lot of overlap between SF of the Golden Age up to the Sixties, and academic theories such as Sapir-Whorf; one instance is Jack Vance:
"The Languages of Pao is a science fiction novel by American writer Jack Vance, first published in 1958, based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which asserts that a language's structure and grammar construct the perception and consciousness of its speakers."
That's wild -- I remember reading Null-A as a kid and thinking "this don't make no sense". I wonder now if that's because of the philosophy or because I only had the second book of the trilogy. I'll have to try again sometime.
This was a fun and remarkably lighthearted review compared to almost all the others. It's sorta nice *not* to have an Obligatory Tie to Concerning Modern Events in a book review for once. Which was totally possible - tons of potential threads here to tie to the future. I respect that.
These events were way before my time, so I don't have much to say about the historical substance of the review, except that the "psych!" gag only really works once, maaaaaaaaybe twice, before it's stale.
I do notice that Carter was a rather more interesting and sometimes-effective politician than his modern-day image. (Even just the racism angle is fascinating!) "Forgotten" would definitely be an appropriate appraisal. It's a weakness of the book that it doesn't try to advance *any* theories for the "why" - definitely looks like a question begging for in-depth answers. Book reviewer admitting they don't have any theories either is good epistemic humility, though also a bit disappointing, since that didn't stop any of the other reviewers from shooting off wild hypotheses. Feels like part of the stylistic expectation for an SSC/ACX book review, by Scott or otherwise.
Anyway, this and __The Dawn of Everything__ are now competing for my 2022 contest vote, with no runners-up. Good job.
It gets better, but the lazy stereotypes at the start are fairly annoying:
"the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
and
"But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."
The review, while entertaining, is full of this conceptual and stereotypical laziness common to the rationalist community. A bit too preaching to the choir for me.
I am not qualified to speak about how pervasive spirituality (and spiritual reading of mental phenomena) was, but are you seriously arguing that racism was NOT endemic and culturally hegemonic in the 30s South?
Of course not. But racism was also endemic and culturally hegemonic in the 30s Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, California, etc. People don't act like it's some huge mystery that not every white person from those parts of the country didn't turn out "a huge racist".
I really enjoyed this review and it made me want to buy the book. Someone beat me to the quibble: Carter won 6 states, Mondale won only 1. Also, didn't Carter upgrade the Department of Education to cabinet status?
1980 was my first presidential election. I didn't self-identify with a political party until 1982 (Democrat, but mild and then by 2000 Republican, but mild although full disclosure, my views on immigration and IQ and a few other PC/woke issues whether as Dem or GOP are considered somewhat incendiary). But I grew up way, way overseas, and I took the abandonment of the hostages very seriously. Like, that might have been me. I, too, couldn't see why we didn't charge in and attack and I believed at the time that the Iranians perceived us as weak. The failed rescue mission was horrifying--and I believe led to a reorganization of the DoD and major changes in military prep.
However, three years later, Americans were held hostage in Lebanon for *years*. Well, it's different. They weren't a country. But these weren't government officials but journalists, priests, and college administrators for the AUB--and that's after these terrorists shot Malcolm Kerr (Steve's dad) down in the streets. And no one cared. We didn't get countdowns. No one blamed Reagan. Ever since, it's been clear to me that America will move mountains to get people out if it's simple, but if it's not, then you're fucked (don't go to North Korea, Otto). So I'm very cynical when any politician talks about what "America won't stand for" because hell, we'll stand for a lot.
It's interesting that Carter went through a renaissance in the late 90s, then kind of screwed up his reputation again with his Palestinian views (right or wrong). Then once he got to a certain age he became revered again just for living that long. BTW, does no one ever speculate that his mom, Lillian, who married right after graduation and was a notoriously free spirit wildly out of step with her time and region, might have been pregnant by someone else? Earl and the other three kids all died of pancreatic cancer. Not Jimmy.
No mention of Rosalyn? She was the role model for Hillary Clinton.
Minor nitpick but the attempted Iranian hostage rescue fiasco (Operation Eagle Claw) did reach Iranian airspace (and more). The desert fueling stop where everything went wrong was actually in Iran itself.
Brilliant and hilarious. I was a Democrat at the time and could not really understand the vehemence of the disdain for Carter. I remember talking to my close friend Pauline Kael about this. We both thought the was trying to do the right thing, as the review points out. Doing the right thing was unknown in politics at the time and we were under the influence of the sixties, that great swelling of spiritual self righteousness and drug induced innocence. This is a wise and witty review indeed and strikes the right balance, revealing Carter as a Holy Fool on the one hand and an infantile egomaniac on the other.
> Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist.
Well, this comment can't stand up to even a millisecond of thought. The obvious implication would be that Southern plantation owners would have been among the least racist groups in the US. I don't think that argument has been advanced by anyone concerned with who is or isn't a racist.
How do you write something like this with a straight face?
I think the implication is that Carter, as a young man, worked with them rather than over them. That's left as an implication, working backwards from his later reputation for excessive humility (such as making the band stop playing "hail to the chief" when he enters a room). It puts the cart before the horse, though -- it's more likely he was just temperamentally that way to start with, and if he did work with the field-hands instead of despising them it was due to his character not his proximity. Good catch, for sure.
More to the point, do we actually know that he wasn't/isn't internally racist? He was overtly racist until the literal moment when it changed from being in his interests to not being in his interests (when he no longer needed to appeal to voters in Georgia due to term limits, but wanted to lay the groundwork to appeal to voters nationally). He's had nothing to gain from being racist since then and hasn't done so. He could have any private attitude towards black people whatsoever (or none at all), but just act in his own self interest.
That's entirely possible. I can admit that I'm just making assumptions based on bias: my parents were yellow dog democrats, and against Reagan. I remember Carter seeming like a kindly old man the few television appearances I saw as a child. But then, my parents were also big fans of Robert C Byrd, who had been an actual member of the Klan. Being a kindly old democrat politician doesn't guarantee he wasn't racist.
I wonder if talented politicians have enough of an internal self for that to even mean anything. It's said that "The best way to tell a lie is to first lie to yourself." Actors do this as a matter of method. Many of the best actors tend to be hollow.
I've read enough of The Lyndon Johnson Years to read that LBJ was supposedly a horrible racist in private, at least in his early years. But was he a racist when he pretended to be an anti-racist as POTUS and passed anti-racist legislation?
The main theme of Vonnegut's Mother Night is: You are what you pretend to be. The main character is a US spy in Nazi Germany who becomes a prominent German radio propogandist. He's a spy, so supposedly against the Nazis, but he also turns out to be an effective Nazi propagandist who makes a horrible difference in the world.
Seems to me that the state of one's soul has more to do with what one does than what one's conscience whispers.
The Harvard implicit association test seems to indicate that liberals are more internally racist. The test, of course, assumes it’s own conclusion. If you are measuring bias and if your test measures as more racist people who vote and act less racist then it’s not very scientific, even if it is true. And it could well be true, but in terms of actions it can’t be proven. The test in fact proves the opposite of what it claims.
A better test would be general actions, do elite democrats go to mixed schools, do they racially intermarry, are they likely to live in mixed areas. I don’t know.
This is more an anecdote but a posh English woman I used to work with, and now follow on Instagram, is always posting about BLM and other liberal causes. Often driven by America.

When I knew her she was a potential conservative candidate, but was souring on the party due to its “sexism”. I think she was overlooked for a position. This was in Bath in England, which is 99% white. (That is 98% British or even English white).
And, though still a professional, she left Bath for an even more uniform English village about 30 miles away. She still works in London occasionally, remote work has helped there, and did live in London in her 20s. She’s 40 something now.
Is she really a fan, as she claims, of diversity? This kind of thing; moving away from arge cities to small ones, and from small cities to tiny villages, is fairly new for professionals. Her sons’ school, which is private, is clearly all white, looks white English and elite. The latter is a given.
I can’t look into her soul, but we could look into the statistics for elite democrat voters, into their actions and not their words.
I assume Carter is racist in his heart just the way that he lists after other women in his heart. He’s the one person who is earnest enough to admit to the things that everyone else denies about themself.
It may well have been that the Carters (the entire family) were not as 'racist' as our reviewer paints them. We don't have a good measure of "how racist were the average racists in Plains, Georgia versus the rest of Georgia versus the South versus the North" to say one way or the other.
And the dismissal of the other siblings as being 'your average Southern racist' seems incorrect, given what Wikipedia says about his sister Gloria: "In 1964, Spann resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending", so if she was more racist than Jimmy, Jimmy was very not-racist!
Interesting review. I believe there is an error, however, in your comments about gas lines. There was plenty of gas in the US in the 1970s, as the Shah once pointed out on national television, and as proven by insurance records. The shortages were a consequence of the US government taking over distribution. High prices are one thing, but lines were another. Generally the price will rise to clear the "line" since people would rather pay a higher price than wait.
This is what I remember about the "shortages" caused by the embargos of the early 70s. There may be some other explanation of later "shortages." However, high prices and waiting lines don't generally go together. The price just goes up to the point where the business can sell gas quickly.
I don't doubt the gas lines. I was there. The question is why there were gas lines. Ordinarily, when prices go up, they continue to go up until the "shortage" disappears. In other words, fewer people buy a product at a higher price, or "demand" decreases at the higher price. This is not the case when distribution is messed up. Prices now are over $6 a gallon, I hear. Are people sitting in their cars in line waiting to get gas.
I don’t think you are getting Nathan’s argument. The shortages would not have happened if prices had risen enough. If you are running out of a commodity everyday you raise prices until you don’t.
Yes, but while people may choose "I'm not buying that new fridge, it costs too much, I'll make do with the old one", they don't have the same choice about "I need my car to get to work, and if I don't show up for work, I will lose my job". So if petrol is $6 a gallon, they will pay that if they really need to do so. And they'll pay it at $10 a gallon, and so on as the price increases. At the point where they can't pay such prices, there is a much worse crisis going on for them. 'There is no longer a shortage because prices are so high, nobody who isn't Jeff Bezos can afford them, so nobody is buying the product and we have plenty of it in stock' is not really 'there is no shortage'.
Comparing petrol prices is interesting, because there really isn't an exact equivalent between the USA and elsewhere, but the average price right now seems to be: USA - $5 per gallon, Ireland - $8.56 per gallon:
"To ensure comparability, for the U.S. we report the prices of Mid-grade gasoline as it is closest to the Octane-95 gasoline used in most of the world. Regular gasoline that is the most widely used in the U.S. is about 13 percent cheaper than Mid-grade gasoline.
Also note that there are large differences across U.S. states. Prices in the Western states are about 20 percent higher than the national average and in California they are about 50 percent higher. The prices in the Midwest and the South are about 5-10 percent lower than the national average. In the North East, the prices are about 5 percent higher."
What you're missing, is market rules were off. OPEC (Oil Producing Exporting Countries) is a consortium which conspired to cut supplies to the US in retaliation for the US supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1967. read more here: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/opec-enacts-oil-embargo
Yes, Michael. I was aware of that. We are talking about shortages at the pump. In general prices should rise until the market is at equilibrium, more or less.
I mean, I was sitting in my car to get gas recently, yeah. Not the latest time I got gas, but the second latest (which was actually a higher cost, IIRC). I was buying from the cheapest gas station in town both times, and as it is 2022 anybody can google who currently has the lowest prices. The one with the line was a Wal-Mart closer to the center of town, though, so that could have been it.
This is an incorrect belief about how markets work.
This is easily proven - during the pandemic the last few years, prices on things we were short on did not go infinitely high, people just weren't able to buy them. This applied to toilet paper, graphics cards, materials for making microchips, etc.
This also regularly happens with new video game consoles and whatnot.
The reality is that when you have a shortage, the price might go up, but there's actually a limit to this kind of price flexibility, beyond which point you just end up with shortages.
To review the review as a formal exercise: this was the one I felt best mimicked Scott's voice. But for a few easily-tweaked things, I would likely not have suspected a thing if it had been run in Scott's name as a normal ACX/SSC post. So full marks on the pastiche.
Now for things which look like telltale clues with full hindsight, though
1. Scott wouldn't be quite so dismissive of the "maybe the real problem is Americans being too consumerist" Words of Wisdom. He'd certainly joke about them, or at least about Carter taking them on-board as though they'd been groundbreaking insights rather than old platitudes. But I think he'd have expended more effort getting into the heads of the people who are getting this once-in-a-century chance to directly try to change the mind of an American President who looks like he's genuinely listening, and steelmanning why they would think it worth it to yell those "useless truisms" at him. I think he would have been right. Our Anonymous Pseudo-Scott here seems to chuckle at the platitudes and move on in far too dismissive a way, not just in terms of successful Scott impersonation, but also of the pursuit of intellectual insight.
2. More trivially, I felt that some of the puns felt a bit… perfunctory isn't the right word, because they're good puns as such, but a bit self-conscious. "Scott makes light-hearted puns and remarks about people's weird names, doesn't he? Let me wedge some of those in." This is one of the ones I am least confident would have stood out to me if I'd genuinely had no idea this wasn't by Scott, though.
I think the puns didn't land, despite being pretty good puns. The "depression"/"spiritual crisis" snark, though, did land, for one. (Highly subjective of course!)
Yeah. Didn't land for me because the premise that "Southern Christians in the '60s didn't seek professional mental health services" doesn't ring true. Just sounds like a hackneyed take on Southerners, portraying them all as living a hundred years behind the times.
Some of the early reviews struck me as resembling Scott's voice. This one doesn't. The jokes are jarring; they don't fit the rest of the text somehow. (If the reviewer is reading this, I have no advice on how to fix this, and my own efforts would probably be worse.)
Dubious. There could be something to the fact that they weren't quite so creaky and hoary as they sound today yet, but they were certainly well in circulation among the young left.
They are old truisms, but every generation needs a new coat of paint slapped on to make them take notice of those old truisms.
Preaching about worldliness is indeed old hat, but putting the modern sociological label of "consumerism" on it makes it sound fresh and revelatory. You don't pay attention to the preacher in the pulpit giving a sermon on "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" because they've been doing that since Grandpa's time, but a Berkeley sociologist telling you that you should "achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods"? That's Cutting Edge Research and Modern Science! I mean, it's Berkeley! That's where The Revolution is happening! https://revolution.berkeley.edu/about/
"1970s Berkeley served as ground zero for the Black Arts and Black Power movements, Women’s Liberation, the movement for ethnic studies, the ecology movement, the gay liberation movement, the Disability Rights Movement, and the free school movement. At the same time, the city was also the scene of countless smaller, more personal attempts to remake society from the ground up."
Everyone should have listened to Gil Scott-Heron about how the *real* revolution would be (and still hasn't happened):
'As a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."'
This is an interesting idea, actually. I think it's probably a lot better to have a spiritual crisis. In any event, it's closer to the cognitive view -- that it's your ways of thinking that are getting you down, rather than the dark forces of biochemistry. Most people I meet who say they are "depressed" seem to view it as something they have little or no control over; they hope for a magic pill, but the pill rarely arrives (never, in my limited experience, but Scott says the pills do work for a certain percentage of depressed people, and I have to believe him). If they had a spiritual crisis, they might see the problem as fundamentally caused by faulty ways of viewing the world and themselves, which is usually closer to the truth about "depression."
Yes, I actually agree that the model which local culture applies to phenomena that look like this matters.
The quote also reminded me of a line from Downton Abbey, the immaculately-mannered dowager Countess reminding her family that a lord and lady are never "having difficulties in their marriage", but rather "they are 'unable to see as much of one another as they would like' ".
The focus there is a little more straightforwardly cosmetic, but the 'correct' phrasing still highlights that certain ways of responding to the situation are appropriate and certain others aren't.
Downton Abbey is a work of period fiction. My problem with the comment in the review is that it, too, is a work of period fiction but presented as truth. Or worse, an attempt at humor-through-stereotype.
I'm familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky's post about arguing from fictional evidence. It's wrong. Total bunk.
Fictional evidence is real evidence of what people believe makes sense, in the same way that, paraphrasing Bret Devereaux, Egyptian royal inscriptions are shaky evidence of what Egyptian royalty did, but they are perfect, unshakable evidence of what Egyptian royalty believed Egyptian royalty was supposed to do.
When a character in a popular TV show elaborates a particular way of looking at the world, that's not because the writers were temporarily hallucinating. It's a comment the writers have made about the world.
Maybe they are better evidence of what Egyptian royalty hoped other people would think they did than evidence of what they believed they were supposed to do.
The claim is not that "SCs in the 1960s did not get depressed"; the claim is that they did not identify it as a mental health issue. I'm not from the South, but I'm from the past, and in the 1960s mental health was (VERY stereotypically) Jews in New York sitting on psychiatrist's couches, not routine treatment for depression. (This seems like a direct Scott question and I'm prepared to be Marshall-McCluhan-in-Annie-Halled now.) Note that Thomas Eagleton had to step down as Dem VP candidate in 1972 because he had been hospitalized for MH issues, although that did include some shock treatments (as called then) which is more dramatic than usual.
>The claim is not that "SCs in the 1960s did not get depressed"; the claim is that they did not identify it as a mental health issue
I understand that point. My point is that we get a few statements here asserting "Southerners then were like X", where X is a caricature.
I don't know when "clinical depression" diagnoses became popular; perhaps not before the 1970s. If so, that would likely be true for the US as a whole. I don't believe The South was some exceptional holdout against modern mental healthcare or that there was anything special about Southern Christians in this regard. (Southern California Scientologists would be the exceptional holdout in this regard.)
But the writers on that show aren't from the culture they're describing. How one culture views another typically tells you more about the culture doing the viewing than the one being viewed.
The pills made a huge difference to me, upgrading my mental state from "constant misery" to "emotionally numb". Still doesn't sound great? Trust me, it was a *huge* upgrade, and gave me the mental space needed for the CBT to work.
It's also a very glib writing off of the experience: oh, he was too much of a hick to realise what was *really* going on.
Depression and spiritual crises are not the same thing, though they may share similar mental states. If you have a certain view of your life and your place in God's plan, and then you hit a roadblock, it may be a very salutary experience to re-evaluate your understanding and how much *you* are putting yourself in God's place ('clearly God wants me to be X, Y or Z!' when that is your own ambition talking).
If Carter sat down and seriously thought over his life, his ambitions, his goals, and what he wanted to achieve and how he would achieve it in the wake of getting a reality check, I don't think dismissing that as "the savage natives at times erupt into a bout of what they call 'spiritual crisis' when they consult their ju-jus as to what they should do, when checked in the ordinary course of life" is helpful and indeed smacks of the kind of "colonizer mindset" that would get someone severely rapped over the knuckles if they applied it in other contexts. Did Shakyamuni have a spiritual crisis, or was he only 'really' depressed and if only an educated secular Westerner had been on hand to advise him, we'd never have Buddhism today?
"Did Shakyamuni have a spiritual crisis, or was he only 'really' depressed and if only an educated secular Westerner had been on hand to advise him, we'd never have Buddhism today?"
I remember a webcomic from a few years back where a pebble got lodged in a man's head, causing him to be in pain all the time. He wasn't aware of the pebble, so he tried to do everything he could think of to make the pain go away, eventually devoting his time to meditation and contemplation. One day, the pebble finally fell out, the wound healed, and the pain went away. He believed that his ascetic lifestyle must've been the cause of his relief, and so began erroneously teaching people that they could alleviate their worldly suffering the same way as him. It seemed pretty clear to me that the whole thing was a thinly veiled metaphor for the origins of Buddhism, and just in case someone didn't get it, the writer added a comment sarcastically asking "what do you mean it's about religion?" to the postscript. So yes, I'd imagine a lot of rationalists and materialists probably do believe something akin to "Siddhartha actually just had depression," and just don't say it out loud because doing so would seem disrespectful and presumptuous.
I think the comic was from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but I'm not sure, I can't seem to find it anymore.
The idea sounds plausible to me. Psychiatry and clinical psychology as we know it are young disciplines and had to wrestle with churches about who should be in charge of mental illness in the late 19th century. They won, profiting from the great advances of scientific somatic medicine but since then have been struggling to establish a sound scientific base. A mid 20th century christian fundamentalist may well have stayed with the old ways.
For me, this has been the worst of the guest reviews so far. The repeated attempts at humor by using worn out tropes (sike!) and casual slander (all southerners are racist dontcha know!) got old pretty fast, which is a shame because the subject matter seems to have potential.
Totally true, the South of the 1930s was a paradise of racial harmony! Except for pre-Mandela SA, no society has ever cultivated equality and color blindness as much as Jim Crow South!
I wonder why black people were fleeing North toh. Probably intimated by all the overwhelming love and affection that white Southerners were showing them.
Imitated or intimidated? Anyway, we would not have had Rock'n Roll if a significant amount of white guys had not related well to black musical culture in the south in the first half of 20th century.
LOL, loving the reference to SA. Do you really think FDR and national Democrats didn't know Jim Crow was going on? The entire New Deal edifice was built on national (non-Southern) Democrats accepting, if not courting, the support of Jim Crow Democrats. IOW, the New Deal has the moral authority and provenance of Apartheid SA governments.
I read and rated about ten reviews. I'd love a list of reviews that correlated with the ones I liked, but I didn't read. My 'goal' in reading book reviews is finding more good books I should read.
My criteria for the book reviews is "did I learn something interesting?", and don't intend to read any of the books in question, much like with Scott's own reviews.
I'm surprised. While reading it, I thought it was one of the best reviews so far. Although after seeing the number of serious factual mistakes pointed out in the comments, I'd probably downgrade it to #5 or so.
I think the author of this review got the Camp David Accords wrong. The deal was not peace in exchange for no settlements, it was peace in exchange for the Sinai Peninsula. Putting the emphasis on Israeli settlements (especially with that giant graph) falsely implies that Israel broke its side of the Camp David Accords, when actually Israel evacuated its settlements in the Sinai and handed the area over to Egypt as promised.
You're right. I think he may be confusing them with the 1993 Oslo Accords which did affect the West Bank: the Camp David Accords were about the Sinai, and both sides kept their ends of the bargain.
Came here to say this. Also, the accords paid Israel and Egypt to stop fighting each other; Egypt at the time had the military strength to be a real problem for Israel so to stop the constant skirmishes with hefty payouts was quite a boon for both nations. AFAIK those payments continue to this day. It also meant one could travel directly from Egypt to Israel, something you couldn't do from any other Arab nation. I flew from Cairo to Tel Aviv once back in my younger, braver days.
Yes, exactly. Also, besmirches the review because the strong implication is that the graph and other editorializing about that situation was added by the author as a side note and was not in the book. Therefore it was a digression, but also totally wrong. Camp David Accords do say that the entire West Bank & Gaza will be dealt with when a new (peaceful) Palestinian leadership is democratically elected. This entire portion of the agreement was *rejected* by the UN and the (terrorist / non-peaceful) PLO on the grounds that the PLO were not represented.
hu, if the mistake was in the book itsself, it would be a minor sin not to correct it in the review. If however the book was mute on this or had the correct version, this is a pretty big mistake for a review.
Thanks for pointing it out, I had believed the version as described.
Carter is known for being hypercritical, and in my view, unfairly critical, of Israeli policy, so I wouldn't be surprised if he represents it like this. He later wrote a book called "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid". As the title suggests, in this book Carter argues that the situation in the West Bank is similar to that in apartheid South Africa, and puts the lion's share of the blame for the continued conflict on Israel.
My view is this. There are some similarities and some differences between the situation in the West Bank and apartheid South Africa, and in any case Israel should certainly stop expanding settlements, but Israel doesn't really have good options other than continuing to occupy the West Bank. Unilateral withdrawal led to Islamist takeover in Afghanistan and Gaza, and the same would happen in the West Bank. A conflict-ending negotiated agreement resulting in a two-state solution would be great, but the Palestinian leadership have never been able and willing to give up the "right of return" and deliver a solution to the conflict. There is a book by Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz, The War of Return. https://www.amazon.com/War-Return-Indulgence-Palestinian-Obstructed/dp/1250252768
Good work, AF. I've been scrolling down to see if this came up. It is a huge historical error. Begin pulling Israel out of the Sinai made it seem as though Carter could work miracles. I just went to Wikipedia to learn what I missed about West Bank settlements, and it reminded me that the issue in the West Bank was not suspension of settlements, but creation of self-governing structures. I've looked at the index of "The Outsider" (on Amazon), and there is no subentry on the Sinai under the Camp David entry, while "West Bank settlements" appears in a subentry with ten pages indexed. This makes it seem as though this were Kai Bird's error. (Seems impossible.)
Either way, a reviewer's job is to note errors and not to introduce them, and the reviewer here has certainly not succeeded on one of those fronts. I don't think this review took on a very challenging task--it primarily presented a narrative summary with some speculative elaboration, whereas other reviews have undertaking effortful analysis of complex topics. I think failing to flag the most important feature of what I felt was Carter's greatest accomplishment--either as part of the book's narrative or as missing from the narrative--is disqualifying as a contest issue. But as someone who lived through those years, but who missed details due to living abroad, the review narrative was nevertheless engaging.
Ah OK, so it's an error mostly by Carter and not by the reviewer. I agree with the reviewer that the increase in the population of Israeli settlers has been a bad thing, but it's misleading to bring this up but not in the Sinai in a discussion of Camp David, and as far as the Palestinian issue is concerned extremely one-sided and again misleading to talk about this and not anything the Palestinians have done, as if Israel could just stop building settlements and then the conflict would be over.
Yeah that's correct. In the Camp David Accords, Israel gave the Sinai to Egypt and got peace back. There is some language that "there should be transitional arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza for a period not exceeding five years" but this is aspirational; at the time the PLO had not recognized Israel and wanted to remove it. The UNGA didn't like this. The Israel-Egypt peace treaty, a binding treaty, said Israel gives Egypt the Sinai and gets peace.
I certainly think the Israeli settlements have been a big mistake, but Camp David didn't discuss them. Israel did continue settlements, which is a bad policy and does not make things easier though, sure. It's more than a bit facile and one-sided though to pretend this is the only obstacle to the two-state solution (which I'd like to see, but it really takes two to tango) as this author does, far from it. Perhaps Carter sees it like this; he is known for being hypercritical of Israel's policies in his later years in ways I think are unfair. The accusations that he hates Israel / hates Jews are silly, I think it's more of a leftist / Third World-ist thing, and he's certainly not a BDS person or anything like that.
Both the book and the review apparently overlook the massive extent to which Carter was a budget hawk. That may have played as large a role In his 1880 loss as anything else.
You completely glossed over Jimmy's lovable lout-brother Billy. The perennially drunken gas-station owner / sudden red-neck playboy. Billy's antics were fun-luvn' hill-billy hick, competing in all manner of red-neck antics, belly-flop contests etc. You'd never forget your first taste of his self-branded Billy-Beer ... ick, nasty fizzy yellow water, not fit for even cleaning something. I wonder now, if Billy wasn't encouraged to keep the spotlight off Jimmy.
I lived through this as a teen. Gas went from 30 cents to 50, then to a dollar, then a buck fifty. There's nothing like gasoline going 5x on you. Cars back then were serious gas guzzlers too, which didn't help. Of course if you're a teen, you need a muscle car, which is what all my friends had. If you're in line for 20 minutes to get gas, you turned off your car. Since its hot, and we're in California, we'd all get out of the car ... and push it ahead as the line moves. And we'd talk with the others who were doing the same thing.
Carter paid heavily for the hostage crisis. I think he paid an even higher price for not immediately invading Iran. I do believe Carter meant well, but in trying too hard to be 'a man of peace' his anti-aggressive stance became a weapon which could be used against him, and the whole country. This weakness, in addition to the sting from the recent capitulation of the Vietnam war. President Carter's pardoning draft dodgers. Congress ending the draft system, only to reinstate the draft under the new name of The Selective Service Act, years of a really bad economy, race riots following the recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X ... [got bogged down in the sadness, where was I] all this contributed to the general national malaise and most of it rested on the shoulders of the suddenly very sad and tired looking President Carter.
Even on a good day, Carter was no match for Reagan. Reagan was a showman, communicator, unifier. If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California. Reagan—like Clinton has—a magnetic personality. His language was fun, jocular, friendly, and as I said before unifying.
That says he applied to join but was turned down. Which strikes me as a lot more believable - surely evidence that he'd been a member would have sunk his 1980 campaign.
Fun fact - the only US president to ever be the president of a labor union is the president that most significantly broke the power of labor unions in the United States (with the air traffic controllers strike).
> If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California.
I think you missed the part where Reagan ran for Governor of California as a member of the Democratic Party, only joining the Republican Party later in life before his run for the Presidency. A man of many Parties!
Reagan was elected Governor of California as a Republican in 1966, running against the incumbent Democratic Party Governor, Pat Brown. He had been an enthusiastic New Deal Democrat during the 40s, but became increasingly conservative over the course of the 50s and officially became a Republican in 1962.
You might be conflating his election as Governor with Earl Warren, who was elected Governor of California on a Republican ticket in 1942 but ran for and won the Democratic and Progressive party nominations as well as the Republican nomination when he ran for reelection in 1946.
Excellent article as always - I learned a lot. This is really pedantic and I apologize for that, but in the first pictures of Jimmy Carter (the one in his Naval Whites), you said he was a Lieutenant. His rank is actually "Midshipman First Class" via his shoulder boards. That rank is specific to the Naval Academy NROTC.
Service academies are direct reporting units (DRUs) and distinct from ROTC. Carter was an Annapolis grad, don't besmirch his experience by conflating that with the part-timers (/s).
The one line summary of Carter's presidency: great guy, terrible politician.
The lesson of his administration to me is this: the president should be an extremely effective _implementer_ of values which are decided upon by other people, namely the American people themselves. He should not be obsessively focused on embodying these values himself, unless this is absolutely necessary for their implementation.
Carter's mistake was in not understanding that "good leadership" of the largest, most powerful political entity in the world is very different from "good leadership" on a personal, local level. Ulysses S. Grant made similar mistakes.
I learned a lot from this review and love the racy and gently ironic style, though on occasion reviewer got carried away by their own flights of ebullience - like '(and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox' I mean is that really an awesome name?
As a Brit and youth CND campaigner at the time, I was vaguely aware that the Iran hostage crisis did for Carter, and Reagan was a dead-eyed warmongering ex-actor and stooge of the arms industry. Didn't appreciate his homely charisma until much later!
> The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing.
Rationing and price controls are the cause of the queues.
Canada didn't have price controls, and thus just got higher petrol prices but neither queues nor queuing related violence.
Price controls I get, but why would rationing create queues? Rationing, like price signals, attempts to match demand to supply; price controls prevent prices from doing their job so demand outstrips supply, leading to queues.
Yeah, the fact that the reviewer didn't seem to understand that continuing price controls when oil prices increased due to constrained supply caused the shortages, rationing, and long lines is, along with all the other factual mistakes noted by others, an indication either the book is terrible, or the reviewer is ignorant of Carter, or both.
Not necessarily weird; if he'd delivered his rebukes about consumerism in the lingo of the time, which was all about overpopulation and declining resources and pollution and the environment, it would read differently. Asking a rabbi and a Berkley sociologist for advice could be seen as looking for fresh voices outside the entrenched establishment and being willing to break the old ways of doing things.
I think Carter was hobbled personally by two things, quite apart from the crises of the day; his lack of charisma and extrovert appeal, and his sincere faith. While he may have been classically liberal, as a Southern Baptist he was not perceived as being one of the liberal denominations. Carter the East Coast Episcopalian would have been seen more in the light of George Bush the elder, where Carter the Southern Baptist was the hick from the sticks with his snake-handling ways (no, Southern Baptists are not snake-handlers but we're talking popular impressions and indeed prejudices). Episcopalian Carter could have smoothed over his religiosity as part of a tradition of service and duty to the greater good (as Hillary Clinton tried with her Methodism*: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-private-faith-of-hillary-clinton) and an upper-middle class/upper class background of gentlemanly good tone, whereas Southern Baptist Carter was too painfully 'accept the Lord into your heart' just like the yokels.
*E.g, “I always resonated to the fact that it was both revelatory and Scripture-based but that you were invited to use your power of reason to think through your faith and to work through what it meant to you and how you would live it in your daily life,” she told me."
'Resonating to facts' must be modern American jargon, but imagine Carter dressing up his approach to his personal faith in the 70s therapy-speak of the day instead of referencing Scripture about lusting in your heart, and the image we have of him might have been very different.
Except that America was happy to elect Reagan as a replacement, Reagan who made no secret of his Christianity and who came with big endorsements from The Moral Majority.
Carter was dealt a bum hand, sure (economy, Iran, peak crime) but was also, perhaps, not the sort of person who should become president, insofar as the primary jobs of a president are
[a] telling stories (to get the masses on your side)
[b] twisting arms (to get Congress on your side)
Carter was, apparently, not especially good at either of these.
That's the Shakespeare view.
Alternatively you can view him as trapped between two worlds, the death of the Metasizing Nanny State (Nixon creating the EPA) and the birth of the Neoliberal state (Reagan and everything since), and that perhaps no-one could have handled that transition successfully. Reagan was lucky enough to get into power *after* enough people had been persuaded that the change was necessary; Carter was unlucky enough to have to be the one to make the first round of changes and try to justify them, even as he spoke using an obsolete language and justifications.
That's the ontological tragedy view.
Rarely do both tragedies line up exactly, but I think they do in Carter's case.
> When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
This is something I appreciate in a book review. You find something interesting that the book didn't explain, and if you can't explain it yourself, you leave the reader with multiple possibilities. I find both plausible.
A third possibility is not domestic versus foreign but short-term vs interminable. Carter apparently hid his opposition to discrimination until he was elected governor. We are told that he could negotiate effectively with foreign leaders, but they must have mostly returned to their countries shortly. He negotiated with senators over a treaty; once the treaty was ratified, the Senate's leverage was gone.
However, had he attempted serious negotiation with congressmen on normal issues, it might have continued exhaustingly through almost every working day of his presidency. Maybe the thought of it made him anxious.
The more general case would be people who can pull themselves together for a burst of effort under pressure, but will not change their basic habits of largely avoiding high-pressure interactions.
Or maybe it's just a case of 'cutting his cloth according to his measure'; he's not stupid, he's had some experience both in the armed forces and politics, he knows you have to do deals. As President of the United States, he has more influence over US senators than over diplomats from or leaders of a foreign country. He has to do more horse-trading and concessions with foreign leaders, because there's always the chance that the minute they get back to their own country they will turn around and do the exact opposite of what they agreed.
For the senators, well, as another president said "I've got a pen and I've got a phone":
There's a gap in this review which I would like to see addressed: Carter as a 70s Democrat. There's a couple of lines which are dropped in and not expanded on, such as the following:
"It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
And then we move on after that glib characterisation of three people with no development, *How* were they "as racist as you'd expect"? My memories of the time are that the one sibling of his I'd ever heard of was Billy, who was - let's say - "colourful" which the media loved and ate up (he was a drunk who did embarassing/amusing things until he sobered up, including various attempts to cash in on his brother's importance as president - Hunter Biden without the crack and no foreign companies willing to pay huge bribes for access). I don't remember anything about him being a "racist as you'd expect", unless we consider that was just the times back then, baby, you expect a 70s Southerner to be a racist and it was unremarked upon because it was unremarkable.
His other siblings were Gloria, whom Wikipedia tells me "She was noted as one of the first women inducted into Harley-Davidson’s 100,000 Mile Club, was named Most Outstanding Female Motorcyclist in 1978 and worked as an activist for motorcycle rights", I don't see how racism fits in there unless you mean "motorcycle clubs - bikers - racism and crime" and which seems to be contradicted by "In 1964, Spann [her married name] resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending" and Ruth, again from Wikipedia "She was a Christian evangelist ...In 1977, she became friends with pornographer Larry Flynt and managed to briefly convert him to Christianity". Whatever your opinion of her healing ministry, she at least did have a Proper University Qualification (master's in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for the practice, even if she was only a Georgia shit-kicker talking about Jesus to the rubes.
So, I'd appreciate a little fleshing-out of "pooh, they were white Southerners, of *course* they were racists", please!
The interesting, perhaps ghoulish, fact is that Carter's father and siblings all died of pancreatic cancer while his mother died of breast cancer, so his continuing long life is really extraordinary. Perhaps that is one reason he might feel singled out or specially favoured?
I think the problem in this review, as with the 70s coverage of Carter as a weirdo, is the struggle to believe that actually yes, he does have a sincere Christian faith and when he talked about God and sin he meant it, and means it. For people who don't have a religious faith, this does seem prime weirdo territory. I wonder, though, if the same thing were cast in what is acceptable to modern tastes - the therapeutic approach, the post-MeToo scenario, the context of 'rape culture' - such revelations as "I've struggled with lust" would be acclaimed as doing work on problematic behaviour and an example of emotional openness that was the antithesis of 'toxic masculinity'.
There's been some discussion on here about "why do the Republicans have the lock on religious voters, why can't the Democrats appeal to Christian values?" and I think Carter's presidency is one explanation why: he's the last openly Christian Democrat (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are all "yeah I'm a Real Catholic" but they have no problems at all going along with the party line on gay marriage, abortion, etc. etc. etc.) and as this review says, was considered a weirdo at the time. The next Southerner elected as president would be Bill Clinton, a very different type: not alone with buckets of charisma unlike Carter, but someone who had no problems with lust: presidential blowjobs are more preferred to painful sincerity about male sexuality?
He also embodies the pragmatism some wish the current Democrats could emulate in order to Get Things Done, go along with your political opponents, make some compromises, and get your policies passed rather than be held hostage to the pure progressive wing who would rather no bread than half a loaf:
"In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue."
Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Having been defeated by fraud the first time, he decides to do what it takes to get elected, and if that means getting down-and-dirty, so be it? Then he gets elected and can implement his true policies. The complaint seems to be the same as the progressive purity demands: he gets elected as a fake racist, then throws that off. Again, would it be preferable had he stuck to his anti-racist guns and let a *real* racist get elected?
"His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way."
I don't think, after the Beer Summit, any modern presidency has room to throw stones here:
The reviewer seems to find Carter unsympathetic, and I do understand why. But I also think if you don't remember the 70s even a little bit, it's hard to understand the atmosphere of the times. Carter was unlucky in that his presidency coincided with the fuel crisis etc. Biden is running into the same problem, and we see his approval ratings sinking like a stone.
But the 70s were also the hey-day of psychotherapy and all kinds of radical inner wellness movements, philosophies, and cults. Indeed, it degenerated into navel-gazing of the most self-obsessed kind. Do you EST? Have you tried TM? There's a selection of gurus, be there genuine Indian ones or Western psuedo-scientific ones, to pick and choose from. Scientology is quasi-respectable (and the 70s are when they engage in a genuine attempt at 'domestic terrorism' and other unsavoury activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White).
In that light, Carter's interview with "Playboy" (and have you considered the openness it must have taken for a Southern Baptist running for President to do an interview with what, despite the jokes about "I read it for the articles", is basically a skin mag?) is painfully honest, because the 70s were all about radical openness and interior transformation. But because this is driven by sincere Christian belief, rather than West Coast therapeutic culture, of course the media perceive him as a weirdo. He's not expressing himself in the acceptable shibboleths of the day.
I don't have much of an opinion on Carter one way or the other; yes, he wasn't inspirational or ground-breaking, but personally I think I prefer someone who wants to keep the spending on his own office down, rather than taking the opportunity to soak the taxpayers for expensive refurbishments https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/lulu-lytle-carrie-symonds-downing-street/, or uses interns as private sexual accommodations. But then, I'm old-fashioned like that.
"Is it to tell blunt truths to the American public and push us to acknowledge our country’s flaws? Or is it to implement policies that lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives? While the best leaders may do some of both, ultimately the latter is what really matters. "
Reading this, it's funny how it's the exact opposite of the argument of Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias. He contrasts leaders who actually improve the wisdom of their populace with those who merely 'gratify their' (usually ignorant) wishes. Moral improvement is the important thing, because mere GDP can be (will be?) pointed towards evil and or stupid things:
"[A]s to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that."
Does this competition have a working definition of a book review? Some of these reviews seem more like précis, and some more like critiques. Are we just walking through what the book says or are we interrogating it?
1) The United States never cheated the Panamanians out of "their canal". There was no canal when the US intervened on the behalf of Panamanian rebels to to secure Panamanian independence from Colombia in order to eliminate Colombia's veto of the construction of a canal, nor was there a canal after that until the United States actually built one at the US's own expense.
2) I want you to imagine that, on November 3rd, 2020, Donald Trump used his power as President to stop all counting of the vote in the northeast and west coast states, on the grounds that the election was being stolen. On January 3, 2021, the 117th Congress takes its seats, and no Congressmen from those northeast or west coast states are seated, because the votes in those states haven't been counted, so nobody was elected. On January 6th, this rump Congress declares that Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 231-124, with 183 votes not cast (the states where Trump stopped the counting). Then Trump holds a referendum on whether he should be dictator with the power to unilaterally amend the Constitution, with separate polling places for voting "Yes, Trump should be dictator" and "No, I don't want Trump to be dictator". The claimed result of this blatantly rigged referendum is that Trump was elected dictator with 99.9% of the vote.
Would you then say that a subsequent military coup that removed Trump from power overthrew the "democratically-elected government" of the United States? Or would you say that Trump had already made sure there was no democratically-elected government that could be overthrown, whatever one's opinion of the people who then overthrew the Trump regime?
Decent summary of Carter's political life. I amazed that it (or the book?) fails to mention the infamous "attack rabbit" and "Mush From the Wimp" events.
In any case, my memory of his presidency is that it was one catastrophe after another, and that everyone hated him. (Living as I did in Tip O'Neill country, that's pretty much expected.)
I enjoyed reading this piece, but in no way can I describe it as a review. It's something completely different - as others have suggested, perhaps a precis?
Maybe the norms of book reviewing have shifted over time and I have simply failed to notice?
It reminds me of the opening of Susanna Clark's novel 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel' where one of the title characters (who is a genuine magician) attends a meeting of a Society of Magicians. He is somewhat flabbergasted to find they not only perform no magic whatsoever, but also think it odd that anybody might expect them to do so; magic having died out as a result of neglect and disinterest some hundreds of years previously. They just talk and 'theorise' about magic.
Is there no genuine book reviewing left? Isn't anybody interested in book reviews, as in the real reviewing of books?
I thought that was what this contest was about!
But maybe book reviewing has quietly died out without me noticing?
It seems to me that Scott's book reviews tend more towards being précis, so I'm not surprised that the finalists of this competition tends towards that pattern as well.
I was going to leave it there, but it occurs to me that Scott does something other than just a simple précis. There's always something added that creatively comes back to say something about the book. There's always sufficient 'reviewing' - at least to my mind
I suppose that's true. I tend to think of Scott's reviews as having a much more substantive summary of the text than most other reviews, but you're right that he always brings in some sort of analysis.
Funnily enough, I just re-read the review and there's more similarity to Scott's style of pseudo-précis than I first thought. I think I should take back some of my "It's not a review!" criticism.
I thought it was accepted (and in fact expected) that a *good* book review uses the book itself as a jumping off point for a summary of the entire field, skewed by the particular interests of the reviewer.
Kirkus Reviews may mainly provide precis, but I expect eg NYRB to provide real essays.
In a way, that's the problem with this 'review'. The reviewer picked a topic that they seemed to have little prior knowledge of, which rather constrains the ability to summarise the entire field. Their only option is to regurgitate what they read in the book.
What *I* am seeing in the comments is that (as expected from a political topic, even on ACT, yay!) an awful lot of people are angry that the review did not cover their particular political peeve in the "appropriate" (reverential/mocking/angry) tone. There's a difference between "you don't know what you're talking about" followed by a careful summary of a set of factual differences, vs followed by a page full of rage-filled opinion-based invective.
Basically exactly the same sort of responses as, for example, when Ukraine becomes the subject.
I don't get a chance to read a lot of these reviews by the blog's readers (don't have the time, etc.), so I can't compare this one with the others But I'll say it's very well-written. The summary you provide is as good a primer on Carter's presidency as any, and I might bookmark it for future reference. Thanks for writing it!
That episode (Marge goes to Prison?) was my introduction to Jimmy Carter. I remember asking my parents why he was such a monster and got a resounding 'oh he wasn't *that* bad'
I thought the joke was that he's not actually a monster at all. History's greatest monster would be both very evil and very good at getting things done.
Now that’s a great review! Especially because the book doesn’t actually sound that good and the subject is definitely terrible and yet the review is great to read.
One quibble: it’s not “sike”, it’s “psych”. Spelling it phonetically looks illiterate.
I suspect that “sike” is something like misheard lyrics to a song? Or, the new generation trying to make a new word? Or spelling a word like “lite”? Even Urban Dictionary has a nod to the fact that it’s the ignorant who use “sike”: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Psych
It is probably impossible to figure out the right usage frequency, but Google Ngram viewer of course has “psych” at orders of magnitude higher frequency than “sike” (but this is because “psych” is also legitimately used in other contexts, and we would need a good AI to differentiate the meanings…
Nonetheless, “sike” would flag someone as less than literate, as @Polynices indicated. That’s going to be the same student in my class who confuses every set of confusable words, gets their grammar wrong, etc.
The amount of times I've seen "rogue" spelled as "rouge", I begin to suspect that eventually this will be the accepted new spelling.
There's also an amount of "heard it spoken but never saw it written down" spellings such as "per say" for "per se" and so on. Somebody who sees it written as "sike!" thinks "oh, that's how you spell it" and it gets passed on that way. Especially if they don't understand or know the derivation of the term and so have no idea that "psych-out" or "psyching someone out" is the basis of it.
I’m not disagreeing that is how people end up spelling things out that way. People also write text abbreviations in formal emails to employers. We spend a great deal of time at my university trying to get students to understand what impression that might make on someone who is actually educated and literate. What I tell my students, which remains true, is that all of these errors are a one-way filter: if they are read by someone else in the set that is either similarly disposed / uneducated / ignorant, they will be in luck — won’t matter; on the other hand, if they get sent to someone who is not in that group, they reveal themselves to be “not the right fit”. There are precious few jobs or occasions where speaking patois, cant, or other nonstandard versions are a positive qualification (perhaps a handful of cutting edge, front-line marketing / influencer jobs).
I'm the kind of person who agrees with you, but the statement about a one-way filter may not in fact be true. Note the articles about younger people who insist that YOU MUST NOT END A TEXT WITH A PERIOD (because it sounds...angry, I think?) The next step is/will be hiring managers who think that "sike" is correct and "psych" is hopelessly old-fashioned...boomer.
This is pretty far off topic, but sure… we track what employers are looking for, and if norms ever changed, we would change advice. My guess is that one never goes wrong with excellent diction or grammar, until it becomes pedantic. At the risk of too much digression readers might be interested in this:
Carter was the first President of whom I have any memory. I find it interesting that neither Afghanistan nor the Olympics were mentioned - my family was as miserable as anyone else under the OPEC oil shock, (yes, I remember sitting in a turned off car with no ac waiting for our turn at the pump) but it was the international humiliations of Iran, Panama, and the Olympics that really soured them on Carter.
Of note, beyond the split screen tv broadcasts of Carter leaving the White House and the Iranians releasing the hostages, (my family voted for Regan but thought that humiliation was too much) I also recall the near daily recitals of inflation and job losses on the news - on all three news stations! (Two on the upper dial and the one on the lower - we never did get NBC to come in clear.)
The willingness of news media to attack a Democrat had cooled quite a bit by the time Clinton was in office.
Finally, regarding Carters civil service reform - I would be willing to read a review that looked at the positive and negative tradeoffs of that choice.
This review takes the commonly-asserted - but, I think, poorly-supported - position that the Mossadegh government overthrown by the 1953 US-backed Iranian coup had been democratically elected.
There are three votes relevant here. The first is the nomination of Mossadegh as Prime Minister by the legislature in 1951. This was, as far as I can tell, in procedural accordance with democratic norms ... but its legitimacy suffers a bit because Mossadegh's predecessor, Razmara, was assassinated by a gunman linked to Mossadegh's party, whom Mossadegh pardoned after gaining power. This demonstration of force, and impunity in the use of it, may have made the voters understandably reluctant to oppose him.
The second vote is the 1952 Iranian legislative election. This was certainly not in accordance with democratic norms: Mossadegh arranged for the electorates with the greatest support for his party to be counted first, and then halted the vote before the remaining ones could be counted, leaving him with a majority in a rump legislature (rather than a minority in a complete one).
Mossadegh's tame legislature granted him, then extended, emergency powers to wield executive authority without oversight by parliament - which was, in fact, permitted by the constitution. After a year, however, further extension of this authority required the constitution to be revised, so in 1953 he held a referendum to dissolve parliament, and grant himself dictatorial power, indefinitely. This third vote was held without a secret ballot, so "yes" and "no" voters could be publicly identified. It passed with 99.94% of the vote. And *then* came the coup.
The way so many Western authors ostentatiously describe Mossadegh's government as "democratically-elected" seems to me to be a case of politicised rhetoric: Mossadegh was a left-wing dictator, so the far left feel they need to voice their support for him. The Shah's government was not democratic either but, given time and Western pressure, and in the absence of the Iranian revolution, it might have become so, as happened in e.g. Chile, Greece and South Korea.
I’m very curious about this comment/story. This sort of thing seems like it would be subject of active debate, but it doesn’t seem to be as the commentor states. I assume that’s for one of two reasons: (1) the story is correct, which is decidedly inconvenient for the establishment historical narrative, so it is ignored. Or (2) the story is so obviously false that historians don’t even bother with by it. Any ideas?
There was tons of critique of "why not racist" statement already. I will just note that if there were any racism in Carter at the time, military service would likely help with it.
Quote from "Black like me", (the scene happens deep in South):
> An army officer hurried to get at there arof the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon. I have learned that men in uniform, particularly officers, rarely descend to show discrimination, perhaps because of the integration of the armed forces.
Oil like electricity is oxygen to the first world economy. We're not going to stop use immediately. OPEC reduced oil supplies 5% every month, until they cut supplies completely.
When prices sky-rocketed, when lower income elderly froze to death in their homes, then it mattered.
Re Carter's obsession with micromanagement: I was working in the Executive Office of the President early in Reagan's presidency and I was told that Carter also involved himself in wrangling over slots for the White House tennis courts. The professional staff, regardless of their politics, are fond of presidents who are good at delegating (Reagan himself was a superb delegator) and not fond of micromanagers.
My impression at the time was that Jimmy Carter tended to be an unlucky President. Weird stuff seemed to happen to him that nobody foresaw: e.g., even though nobody believed it, he really was attacked by giant swimming rabbit (we have a photo of the incident); or, on a more consequential scale, the Ayatollah became the ruler of Iran.
Another impression I have is that Carter's last two years in office were kind of proto-Reagan Revolution Lite: e.g., he raised defense spending, he appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair, etc. You can see a lot of the projects of the Reagan Administration in embryonic form in Carter's embattled 1979-1980 years.
I remember for some reason a newspaper column claiming that some Dem politician had said to Carter, sitting in the Oval Office, "Your problem, Mr. President, is that you used up all your damn luck just getting here."
EDIT: Hah! Bill Safire, talking of Robert Strauss, but the quoted article is from 1994.
Carter hadn't made himself a big man in American life before the campaign of 1976, the way Reagan was a major figure in 1980 or even Gerald Ford was a moderate figure when he became VP. So Carter was lucky to be elected.
He then wasn't a bad president, but he didn't seem to get many lucky breaks. And he wasn't a sympathetic enough character that enough people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt over his bad luck.
Can't remember which one because it's been a long time since I read it, but there's a Walker Percy novel from the 60s or early 70s in which the narrator refers often to the "malaise" in American society. I've often wondered if that was the root source of the association of the word with Carter's "malaise speech". (Percy was also a white, religious, not-racist Southerner who grew up during The Depression.)
I think the novel is Love in the Ruins, but maybe it is The Moviegoer.
Right, the book is Walker Percy's "Love In the Ruins" from 1971. It's a very soft dystopian sci-fi novel set in, I believe, 1983 (my guess, based on Perry Como now being 70 in the book). America hasn't fallen apart, it's just that the trends of the late 1960s have continued onward and the US is becoming ever more dilapidated and divided.
When I reread it in 2020 I noticed what I hadn't when I read it in 1976: Percy foresaw Red Tribe and Blue Tribe pretty accurately. The narrator lives in a golf course development (very Red) and teaches at a research university (very Blue).
This review is interesting and also hilarious. My favorite part is where Carter is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor and develops super powers. I did not know this about him! I am glad for this review bc now I feel I do not have to read the book.
So as far as behavior towards different groups, I think that is just about expectations. I have a bad habit of this.
I can be a bit of a jerk/asshole/high expectations with family/friends. And moreso with coworkers. And very much so with bosses.
But clients and strangers and children always find me super personable and helpful and charming. Because I don’t actually expect full partnership from them. A coworker should be someone rowing the boat with me, and a boss someone better at rowing the boat than me. I got no time for slackers.
But the client/stranger is more like the water.
Maybe something like this is why Carter worked poorly with congress but well with foreigners?
This review was interesting but the rather glib style kept irritating me. At the same time, I found myself thinking that this anonymous review reads a lot like the work of one Scott Alexander.
The statement that people under 70 mostly know Carter from his post-presidency struck me as kind of weird. I’m 56 and I remember Carter’s presidency pretty well, and also his “I’ll never lie to you” campaign promise.
I had not known, though, that Carter ran for governor of Georgia posing as a quasi-racist. That’s rather interesting. Nor had I known (unless I’ve just forgotten) that S.I. Hayakawa made Carter read a semantics textbook. (The review does not mention the Senator’s name, but surely it must have been Hayakawa; how many semantics professors could there possibly have been in the Senate, even in the ‘70s?)
Oil prices did not spike in the late 1970s, at least not compared to gold. They actually went down from from 1976 to 1981. Nixon taking the US off the (last remnants of the) gold standard is what caused the dollar-denominated price of oil to spike because of inflation.
I think you have it backward. Because of rampant inflation in the US gold and other things went way up. Other countries did not experience a huge spike in gold prices (or other products.)
The potshots at Israel were gratuitous and factually wrong.
Not only did the 1978 accords not discuss whether Jews would live in Gaza or the West Bank at the end of the peace process, but some of those spikes in Jews living in the West Bank were Jews relocated after being ripped out of Gaza in 2005 so that Gaza would be Judenrein to the Palestinians’ satisfaction. That experiment continues to be telling.
Israel and Egypt both complied with the deal that Carter brokered, establishing a peace that has remained cold but effective. The deal fractured the united anti-Israel Arab front, opening the door for later peace deals. It removed the Suez Canal, a key artery of international trade, from the list of hotspots. It began the unwinding of a conflict that had threatened to turn the Cold War hot.
To conclude that Carter’s deeply held beliefs meant he couldn’t get things done while minimizing things he got done that were viewed as impossible and only happened because of his deeply held beliefs is a weird move.
If you quizzed me before I read this I would have guessed that Reagan was the one who deregulated the airline and trucking industries. There's this image of Reagan being the deregulator and Carter being the big government democrat. But actually Reagan was an intensification of a trend that began earlier. Sort of like FDR. Hoover initiated unprecedented amounts of government intervention in the economy, which was intensified later by FDR, and people only remember the contrast so Hoover got this false reputation as laissez-faire.
> A prominent rabbi tells Carter that the real problem is Americans’ “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence.” A Berkeley sociologist adds that Carter needs to “come down from the mountain with some hard truths” to help the American people “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods.” Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up.
I find that dismissive tone kinda narrow-minded and out of place?
US Americans are consuming more resources than any other large country and are responsible for A) a huge chunk of direct pollution on the planet and B) a wasteful consumerist culture emulated on the whole globe. If US as the trendsetter would have focused on sustainability as a mainstream goal since the 1970s it would have been a huge blessing!
The “civil service reform” mentioned in passing was what basically eliminated merit in federal hiring for the sake of affirmative action and racial balancing. That’s what was meant by supporting “racial equality” according to liberals by the time Carter was president, not fighting segregation.
If this sort of thing interests you, let me also suggest Reaganland which, in spite of the name, is essentially a panoramic history of America during the Carter years. One can view it in a sense as an answer to the question “why did the country so angry with Nixon and so in love with Carter flip to Reagan within 4 years?”
Like all Rick Perlstein’s writing, he’s fundamentally a Democrat, but too honest to let that modify much of his writing. You get a book that’s more “America in the late 70s” and less just Jimmy Carter, which some may find a more interesting starting point.
Quite a few inaccuracies that others have pointed out. I'll add the summary of the Camp David accords.
The deal was Egyptian recognition of Israel and Peace in return for the land of the Sinai peninsula, plus all kinds of technical demilitarization and oversight. The only settlements mentioned specifically where those in Sinai, and they were dismantled (e.g. Yamit). There was some non-specific lip-service parts regarding the West Bank-Gaza and Palestinians. As they were non-specific they could not be broken.
As for his negotiation prowess, it has been said that JC almost tanked the deal because he insisted that the peace deal be regional and included Syria.
The camp david's treatment is so bad I don't know if to believe the rest of the piece.
for example, it doesn't mention Israel evicted the entire Sinai peninsula, a territory more than 2 time the current size of Israel, including a city that was built there.
This is a concise, well-written, informative, and hard-hitting review on an interesting topic. However, I don't plan to vote for it, for two reasons. First, the reviewer (or maybe in part the author?) has obvious political leanings and lets them color the discussion without acknowledgement. Second, the reviewer isn't really adding much to the discussion. The review closely and successfully emulates the tone, structure, and style of SSC's Hoover review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) but doesn't deliver a similar level of interest or payoff.
Still, a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. As always, many thanks for contributing!
As someone who lived through the Carter administration I'm solidly in the "he's an underrated president" camp. He didn't do things out of political expediency. He appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman even after Volcker told him (in the job interview) that he would raise interest rates (a lot) to try to kill inflation (in an election year). Volcker did not expect to be appointed as Fed chairman after being that up-front with Carter - but Carter did appoint him. And interest rates soared during an election year which certainly didn't help Carter's re-election campaign. But it was the right thing to do.
Had we listened to Carter and taken heed to his warnings we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. We'd likely be way ahead of where we are now on alternative energy and tackling climate change.
Also, if you're looking for a better picture of what motivated Carter and understand him you should read his autobiography "A Full Life". You can get it straight from the horse's mouth.
It's weird how his reputation has flipped from people viewing him as a somewhat shady weirdo to an ineffectual goofball - see the SNL sketch from the '76 election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu2vdE0z7ds
Amusingly, Carter was the kind of moral and ethical president we say we want, but can't stand if we get one.
I think it says something pretty bad about moralizing incompetents, rather.
I fear this is indeed a very accurate summary of the problem with democracy.
It reminds me, actually, of the difference between the kinds of films people say they'd like to watch tomorrow (important serious films on important serious topics) and the kinds of films people choose to watch today (mindless mass appeal blockbusters), for any given tomorrow and today.
Back when Netflix operated by mailing you dvds and letting you keep three at a time, you had a queue of movies you wanted to watch, so whenever you sent one back, they would send you the next one on the list. A very common failure mode was when you got to three movies on your list you knew you were supposed to watch, but never wanted to watch today. But you still paid Netflix the monthly fee.
This was 100% me and Hamlet. Which I still think is super overrated.
Nevertheless, surely we can agree that this was incalculably better than the post-streaming failure mode of simply "not having a catalogue of high quality movies available."
(Getting kind of far afield from the Carter administration metaphor there, though, I guess)
Your library doesn’t have Hoopla or (even more so) Kanopy available for free?
After reading this review, I don't think Carter had integrity. The hubris of this man with little experience or ability to think he should be the most powerful man in the world is off the charts. He seems to have been blinded by personal ambition like so many of our typical politicians.
It would be one thing if he had proven to have been some Joan of Arc type who had some incredible foresight, spiritual or otherwise, but instead he was just another false prophet, incompetent as shit with no good reason to believe he wouldn't have been. A Jimmy Carter with integrity would have stayed on the peanut farm or in the Navy.
I mean experience in leadership and running a large bureaucracy. Bush Jr. ran an oil company (into the ground, but, hey, starting an independent oil company is a risky venture). He did a better job as a businessman after buying The Texas Rangers, then he was governor of Texas for 8 years. That is more experience than Carter's.
>Eisenhower had *no* experience in civilian government
Sure, but Eisenhower's non-civilian leadership experience is about as impressive as it gets.
I agree with everything you said except "he failed". I'm struggling to see at what he failed at, other than winning re-election, and if succeeding at everything else means losing re-election then that seems worth it (as the review points out).
Carter also has an excellent post-Presidential record—far beyond any other President I can think of.
The development of US air supremacy by 1991 was something of a surprise at the time.
The U.S. POWs in Vietnam were mostly the hundreds of pilots shot down over North Vietnam. That's probably a big reason Congressional Democrats overruled the Nixon Administration's plan to defend post US-pullout South Vietnam by air: it was assumed hundreds of planes would be shot down if the US attempted to thwart with air power a North Vietnamese offensive. But, in retrospect, the year 1972 when the US lost only 300 killed in action in Vietnam while thwarting via air power (helped by the introduction of guided bombs) a North Vietnamese tank offensive, while leaving the South Vietnamese to do the ground fighting, appears to have been a world-historical turning point, but not one widely recognized in Washington in the 1970s.
By the way, the Carter defense department under Harold Brown continued to advance US airpower technology in all sorts of ways (e.g., stealth). Then Reagan came in and poured money on the 1970s advances so by the time of the Gulf War, the U.S. had a military that was both technologically advanced and massive (which no doubt had something to do with the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire).
The Cold War. The Us did not go to war outside of the Western Hemisphere against a non-communist foe during the Cold War.
Also: post-Vietnam syndrome, as they called it then, which I guess is a bit subsumed by what you say. Also: some people did call for more action. Also-also: Iran is 3 times the size of Iraq, and think how big an operation that was (both times).
On the Cold War aspect: the Sovs were in Afghanistan by December 1979, and that borders Iran, so yeah, you can imagine some really unfortunate turns of events if the US had gone into Iran in a serious way. [UPDATE: as noted by another commentor, the northern border of Iran was in fact a border with the USSR, although not Russia, back then. So more so!]
And Iran is a historic ally of Russia/USSR going back a very long time.
This does not match my recollection of reading Michael Axworthy's A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, which I have checked against Wikipedia.
Russia invaded Persia repeatedly from the 17th to the 19th century, conquering much of the South Caucasus. A Tehran mob massacred the whole Russian embassy staff in 1829. (There is a long history of cleric-inspired mob violence in Tehran.)
In the high imperial era, Russia and the UK collaborated to heavily influence the incompetent Persian government. They divided Persia into two spheres of influence, separated by a neutral zone. (See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Iran_1900-en.png). Russian troops were based there years before WWI started.
During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks sponsored a short-lived Soviet republic in northeastern Iran.
During WWII, the UK and the USSR invaded Iran and deposed Reza Shah in favor of his son (the Shah discussed above).
Immediately after WWII, the USSR sponsored two short-lived puppet states in northeastern Iran.
During the earlier Cold War, Iran was a US ally. The USSR shot down Iranian military aircraft on multiple occasions.
The Islamic Republic supported some of the Afghan mujahedin, fighting against the USSR.
If America had invaded Iran in 1979, we'd have come out victorious only with a lot of losses, and facing a huge vulnerability to the Russians.
Iran's a big country; its capital is far from the coast; and back then it shared a border with the USSR. The Russians would have been happy to see Iranians kill American soldiers, and the Iranians might have needed less Russian help than you'd think.
America's military wasn't the overpowering elite it is today. Chinese troops fought Americans to a draw in the Korean War, and Vietnamese troops wreaked a heavy toll in the Vietnam War, despite both those countries being dirt poor at the time. Modern American military dominance only emerges around the mid-80s, thanks to changes that were only just started in the mid-70s. Changes, in fact, that the Iran hostage rescue failure helped accelerate.
(What changed? The Goldwater-Nichols reforms, the precision weapons shift, National Training Center rotations, etc.)
Today's American military still benefits from the reforms done to win the Cold War, while everyone else's military has downsized because the Cold War ended. But in the 1970s that mismatch wasn't present. Midrange state armies like Iran's were often kept much stronger than now, and American units were vastly weaker than today.
In 1979 America wasn't even sure it would deter Russia from war in Europe, even without taking on a huge extra invasion of Iran.
We didn't have the tools then which we have now. The Iranians were a distributed group. They split the hostages up almost immediately. More than likely, the hostages would have been killed immediately if any invasion happened.
Wow. Carter might be an unsung hero.
Such a war would probably turn into a drawn out counterinsurgency, with the government of Iran likely reverting to its former self soon after the US left. Not to mention: Thousands of soldiers on the US side would die (and in fact, probably tens of thousands); hundreds of thousands of people on the Iranian side would die; and trillions of dollars would get used up. This is in fact the best case scenario. All of this just to return some ambassadors to safety, who could otherwise be (and in fact, could only be) saved through purely diplomatic means.
Wars are extremely risky, costly and unpredictable. This holds 10x over for a war of invasion.
Thank you for injecting some sense into this discussion. A US invasion of Iran would be a disaster, almost certainly ending, as you say, in a drawn-out insurgency, a humiliating US withdrawal, and the return of a strengthened Islamicist government.
You neglect just who the players were. The Iran government was not your old-school play by the rules government. It was a loosely organized terrorist org which over-ran the foundations of civilization. The staff and ambassadors in an embassy are the very well connected children of very well connected people in the government.
I'm afraid I don't see how either of those points bears on the question of the wisdom of a US invasion of Iran.
The workers in an embassy aren't typically your average Joe Schmoe. These are the well heeled children of the well connected members of our government.
If something happens to you or I in a foreign country, Meh. But if something happens to say the Ivy League nieces & nephews of congress-critters, vice-deputy-directors of atomic waste disposal at EPA, etc. ... shit is gonna hit the fan and fast.
Except . . . the criticism of Carter was that he didn't do much to free the hostages. And we certainly didn't launch a full-scale invasion of Iran. NavyBlueSmoke and other folks on the right seem to think the shit didn't hit the fan enough.
I had a reader who worked high up in the Pentagon making contingency plans. He'd spent a lot of time war-gaming how to conquer Tehran. He said it was like starting in San Francisco and trying to conquering Denver: a whole lot of mountains and more bad roads in between.
And I'm not even sure where the US forces would have started from in 1979. Oman? The US had fewer bases in the Persian Gulf back then? Or would Turkey have agreed to be a base? Pakistan? Would the Iranians have asked the Soviets for help?
Yes, so much so that I ban them.
This feels like a bit much...
I could imagine intelligent and valuable contributors making that joke, at some point in their lives
Ofc it's your show
This used to say “temporarily “. Should I read the alteration to mean it is permanent?
It was a one day ban, just to discourage this in the future. The fact that you can post now means it's over.
An enjoyable read, and I lived through all that. One correction: Reagan's 49-state victory was in 1984. He won a mere 44 states in 1980. Also, although I suspect this is unknowable, my impression on Inauguration Day was that Iran held the hostages just long enough to not free them during Carter's administration, out of spite, or maybe that Reagan-led tricksiness.
Why are all comments like this littered with random capitalizations?
Who said I disagreed with you?
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord
In certain circles of the internet, the concept of Fnords is reasonably well-known.
As much as you stress the importance of speaking in ways that are easy to understand, your writing doesn't, ah,
-- well, it could be better in that regard.
It makes it really really hard to understand what you're saying, I'll say that much, I have to spend about five times as long per length trying to read your comment compared to any other comment
Agreed. Also, the lack of paragraphs doesn't help.
"Why are all comments like this littered with random capitalizations?"
It's the Fnords 😁
MOD DECISION: Banned
In the subthread below (for me).
Carter was the peacenik yes. I believe he was so tied to his persona as 'a man of peace' that it became a weapon which could be used against him ... and the country as a whole. Now-a-days, any new president is sure to fire off a salvo of missiles in the first weeks of his term, just to let everyone know there's bite behind the bark. President Trump fired a bunch of rockets, which killed a bunch of Russian mercenaries in Syria, and didn't have to do much more shooting after that to keep the peace. President Biden didn't do this, then Putin got all cocky, now look where we are.
It's more about making people think your response is unpredictable.
Another correction: the CIA coup in Iran was in 1953, not 1951.
The CIA, and those who lost power in a divided Iran in 53, also exaggerated the American effect. We didn't actually do much - some rent-a-mobs and some political cartoons - but bragged that it was the key tipping point. Impossible to disprove, but unlikely.
Also, the biggest victory for a non-incumbent ever was when Washington was elected unopposed to his first term in 1788!
Otherwise, it depends what you mean by “biggest”. Throwing out uncontested elections or elections before the popular-vote system was used, the biggest popular vote margin ever was for Warren Harding in 1920, who was not an incumbent. (Harding also received the biggest popular vote fraction of any non-unopposed non-incumbent). The biggest Electoral College victory for a non-unopposed non-incumbent, by margin or percentage, was indeed Reagan in 1980. By fraction of states won it’s also Reagan in 1980, *unless you count DC as a state*, in which case it’s FDR in 1932.
You know, I always thought that there was one elector who didn't vote for Washington in 1788, on the grounds that nobody should be elected President unanimously. But I looked it up, and it seems to be just a legend.
You're thinking of James Madison.
Actually, I think it was Monroe.....but alas, I'm too lazy to look it up.
My point is, I _did_ look it up, and it I see no evidence that it happened at all.
WP:
"On April 6, 1789, the House and Senate, meeting in joint session, counted the electoral votes and certified that Washington had received electoral votes from each of the 69 electors that had cast votes, and thus had been elected president."
I think you've confused this in part with the election of 1820, when the collapse of the Federalist Party (which had been in decline for some time) left no one to run against incumbent president James Monroe. He received every electoral vote but one—a single faithless elector cast his vote for John Quincy Adams instead. Popular legend holds that the elector did this to deprive Monroe of a unanimous Electoral College victory, on the grounds that such an honor should be reserved for Washington alone. However, there appears to be no historical evidence that that was his motive.
Was going to mention the correct spelling of 'psych,' but evidently 'sike' is now common. Ugh.
Huh, as in psych out, TIL
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psych#English
I thought it was a typo for 'Yikes!'
Eww! I also thought "yuk, that's wrong and unfortunate". I guess now it's just unfortunate.
I think we need to hold the line that "sike" is completely incorrect. My immediate reaction reading this was "no way this can get my vote, he spelled "psyche" "sike".
For the ignorant among us, what's 'psych' or 'sike' as an exclamation?
Interjection
psych
(slang) Indicating that one's preceding statement was false and that one has successfully fooled one's interlocutor.
Synonym: sike
Here, have fifty dollars. Psych! That was two dollars!
(dated, slang) An interjection of surprised happiness.
Psych! I just found my missing bracelet!
The Camp David Accords never mention settlements. They discuss self-government of the Palestinians.
Regardless, the Camp David Accords are a massive success. Beforehand Israel and Egypt had fought several wars with a total of more than 20,000 people dead. Since then the two countries have been at peace.
Thank you.
The Shah was in no sense new. He already had considerable power under a constitutional monarchy.
I enjoyed this review. But sad to see the absence of discussion of the most significant event of the administration—the time he was attacked by a killer rabbit.
It also didn't mention that he celebrated his 75th wedding anniversary last year.
Super fun review. The writerly voice seemed familiar, kind of a Freddie DeBoer or Jeff Maurer vibe. This one's my favorite of the reader reviews so far.
Agree!
Agreed
Agreed. I'm suspicious of this, though -- there's a kind of possible self-handicapping going on. I can imagine that if I were a better and funnier writer I might choose a topic about which few people know and have little interest so as to play up the humor without sticking my neck out. The "consciousness and the brain" review caused me to go and buy the book, whereas this review upgrades Carter to "the american president I currently have the most good vibes about".
I was convinced I was reading Jeff Maurer trying for a PG rating
Indeed, scores extremely high for readability.
Just a few comments from someone who was a (prevoting age) Atlantan in 1970. First, Carl Sanders wasn't a businessman, he was a lawyer. More importantly, he was the former Governor of Georgia (1962-1966), coming back to try for a discontinuous second term, since Georgia governors at the time were limited to one consecutive term. Carter's attacks on Sanders were grotesque and inaccurate, but he did successfully portray Sanders as a creature of the Atlanta consensus. Sanders was no integrationist, but he was considerably more integrationist than Carter portrayed himself as, and that was an unfortunate path to electoral victory around that time.
By 1976 I was old enough to cast my first Presidential vote (I was in college in the North by then) and was genuinely torn on entering the voting booth... I knew Carter and trusted him not at all, and I thought Ford was second rate. I honestly cannot recall who I voted for... even today. But if I did vote for Carter, it was my only winning Presidential vote of my life. (That's not quite as weird as it sounds, since I've cast a fair number of third-party votes.)
“One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book.”
It's worth mentioning that the senator in question was S. I. Hayakawa, a follower of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics movement. Korzybski's ideas, and the proselytizing community he built around them, were a *very* influential forerunner to LessWrong-style rationalism. (Slogans like “the map is not the territory” originated in General Semantics; Yudkowsky has written about the influence.)
Basically, Jimmy Carter, while in office, had to Read The Sequences.
This has such a "and the name of that bus driver? Albert Einstein!" sound to it I had to look it up.
How great is the GS/LW overlap and is there anything notable to be gained from Korzybski's work?
Hayakawa's book used to be recommended by EY in his Sequences days.
Scott on Korzybski:
"Take General Semantics (please!). I remember reading through Korzybski’s giant blue book of General Semantics, full of labyrinthine diagrams and promises that if only you understood this, you would engage with the world totally differently, you’d be a new man armed with invincible cognitive weapons. And the key insight, maybe the only insight, was “the map is not the territory”, which seems utterly banal."
There is probably much more to say about this, I hope someone else will contribute to the discussion.
Robert A. Heinlein was also a big fan of General Semantics, it features in some of the short stories of his. Another fan from Heinlein's friend group, L. Ron Hubbard, become interested in the idea of "invincible cognitive weapons", and after further study developed the concept in quite unexpected directions [1].
To be fair, AFAIK he was more inspired by Korzybski's self-assured attitude and and the prospect of revolutionizing the science of human mind than any actual contents of General Semantics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics:_The_Evolution_of_a_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics:_The_Modern_Science_of_Mental_Health
Right, a general question for future minded people in the first half of the 20th Century was language reform, which involved some combination of A. finding a neutral global language of the future to replace national languages (e.g., Esperanto); B. to make the new language more efficient and easier to spell (e.g., the various language reforms backed by Andrew Carnegie and GB Shaw); C. more fundamental reform to make the language harder to mislead while using (General Semantics, I believe, which was big among West Coast sci-fi authors like Heinlein and his friends).
As it turned out, the global language of the future turned out to be plain old English, despite its inefficiencies and complete failure at dissuading lying.
Japanese-American academic S.I. Hayakawa was the main U.S. proponent of General Semantics. Governor Reagan, whose nickname of Ronnie RayGun was not inappropriate (he was connected to sci-fi circles in California -- e.g., one early draft of his Star Wars speech included contributions from Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, etc.), appointed Hayakawa president of San Francisco State during a leftist student strike. Hayakawa cracked down, became a conservative hero, and was elected to the US Senate as a Republican in 1976.
Vaclav Havel's 1965 play, The Memorandum, is the best satire of this language reform movement. It is also a Straussian critique of Communism, of course. It's a very funny play too.
Another Czech-born playwright, Tom Stoppard, wrote a novel language play "Dogg's Hamlet, Kahoot's Macbeth" in which the audience has to learn the new language from observing the action on stage. The audience usually figures it out, which can make for an exhilarating theatrical experience.
Fun fact: Havel's younger brother Ivan, a computer scientist, helped him with the invented languages, which are based on ideas from coding theory.
Amazing how these movements always start with “let’s invent the new language” rather than “are these claims about how language does and can control thought actually grounded in *any* sort of reality”…
For the record, Esperanto is older than 20th century and Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
It inspired the SF writer A.E. van Vogt to write a series of novels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A
"The World of Null-A, sometimes written The World of Ā, is a 1948 science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was originally published as a three-part serial in 1945 in Astounding Stories. It incorporates concepts from the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. The name Ā refers to non-Aristotelian logic."
There is an awful lot of overlap between SF of the Golden Age up to the Sixties, and academic theories such as Sapir-Whorf; one instance is Jack Vance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Pao
"The Languages of Pao is a science fiction novel by American writer Jack Vance, first published in 1958, based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which asserts that a language's structure and grammar construct the perception and consciousness of its speakers."
Another, of course, is Samuel Delany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
I do think there may be an overlap between such theories/SF/rationalists and rationalist-adjacent, because we do love our SF 😀
That's wild -- I remember reading Null-A as a kid and thinking "this don't make no sense". I wonder now if that's because of the philosophy or because I only had the second book of the trilogy. I'll have to try again sometime.
So that makes Carter the forerunner of Carrick Flynn, who some of the rationalists wanted elected because he shared their views on Important Issues?
At least Carter did do his homework!
This was a fun and remarkably lighthearted review compared to almost all the others. It's sorta nice *not* to have an Obligatory Tie to Concerning Modern Events in a book review for once. Which was totally possible - tons of potential threads here to tie to the future. I respect that.
These events were way before my time, so I don't have much to say about the historical substance of the review, except that the "psych!" gag only really works once, maaaaaaaaybe twice, before it's stale.
I do notice that Carter was a rather more interesting and sometimes-effective politician than his modern-day image. (Even just the racism angle is fascinating!) "Forgotten" would definitely be an appropriate appraisal. It's a weakness of the book that it doesn't try to advance *any* theories for the "why" - definitely looks like a question begging for in-depth answers. Book reviewer admitting they don't have any theories either is good epistemic humility, though also a bit disappointing, since that didn't stop any of the other reviewers from shooting off wild hypotheses. Feels like part of the stylistic expectation for an SSC/ACX book review, by Scott or otherwise.
Anyway, this and __The Dawn of Everything__ are now competing for my 2022 contest vote, with no runners-up. Good job.
It gets better, but the lazy stereotypes at the start are fairly annoying:
"the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
and
"But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."
The review, while entertaining, is full of this conceptual and stereotypical laziness common to the rationalist community. A bit too preaching to the choir for me.
>common to the rationalist community
seems to be the _exact_ same error.
I am not qualified to speak about how pervasive spirituality (and spiritual reading of mental phenomena) was, but are you seriously arguing that racism was NOT endemic and culturally hegemonic in the 30s South?
Of course not. But racism was also endemic and culturally hegemonic in the 30s Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, California, etc. People don't act like it's some huge mystery that not every white person from those parts of the country didn't turn out "a huge racist".
... to the same extent? Seriously?
Yes, thanks. I was looking for the first semi-negative review. The early stuff turned me off and I then mostly stopped reading.. I skimmed a bit.
I really enjoyed this review and it made me want to buy the book. Someone beat me to the quibble: Carter won 6 states, Mondale won only 1. Also, didn't Carter upgrade the Department of Education to cabinet status?
1980 was my first presidential election. I didn't self-identify with a political party until 1982 (Democrat, but mild and then by 2000 Republican, but mild although full disclosure, my views on immigration and IQ and a few other PC/woke issues whether as Dem or GOP are considered somewhat incendiary). But I grew up way, way overseas, and I took the abandonment of the hostages very seriously. Like, that might have been me. I, too, couldn't see why we didn't charge in and attack and I believed at the time that the Iranians perceived us as weak. The failed rescue mission was horrifying--and I believe led to a reorganization of the DoD and major changes in military prep.
However, three years later, Americans were held hostage in Lebanon for *years*. Well, it's different. They weren't a country. But these weren't government officials but journalists, priests, and college administrators for the AUB--and that's after these terrorists shot Malcolm Kerr (Steve's dad) down in the streets. And no one cared. We didn't get countdowns. No one blamed Reagan. Ever since, it's been clear to me that America will move mountains to get people out if it's simple, but if it's not, then you're fucked (don't go to North Korea, Otto). So I'm very cynical when any politician talks about what "America won't stand for" because hell, we'll stand for a lot.
It's interesting that Carter went through a renaissance in the late 90s, then kind of screwed up his reputation again with his Palestinian views (right or wrong). Then once he got to a certain age he became revered again just for living that long. BTW, does no one ever speculate that his mom, Lillian, who married right after graduation and was a notoriously free spirit wildly out of step with her time and region, might have been pregnant by someone else? Earl and the other three kids all died of pancreatic cancer. Not Jimmy.
No mention of Rosalyn? She was the role model for Hillary Clinton.
Minor nitpick but the attempted Iranian hostage rescue fiasco (Operation Eagle Claw) did reach Iranian airspace (and more). The desert fueling stop where everything went wrong was actually in Iran itself.
“as you can tell from the name ‘Plains,’”
Very unfortunate missed opportunity to pull out the old “in accordance with nominative determinism,”
Brilliant and hilarious. I was a Democrat at the time and could not really understand the vehemence of the disdain for Carter. I remember talking to my close friend Pauline Kael about this. We both thought the was trying to do the right thing, as the review points out. Doing the right thing was unknown in politics at the time and we were under the influence of the sixties, that great swelling of spiritual self righteousness and drug induced innocence. This is a wise and witty review indeed and strikes the right balance, revealing Carter as a Holy Fool on the one hand and an infantile egomaniac on the other.
Minor correction: looks like the Shah/Concorde lunch story is an apocryphal tale, not something that actually happened (at least with regularity).
> Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist.
Well, this comment can't stand up to even a millisecond of thought. The obvious implication would be that Southern plantation owners would have been among the least racist groups in the US. I don't think that argument has been advanced by anyone concerned with who is or isn't a racist.
How do you write something like this with a straight face?
I think the implication is that Carter, as a young man, worked with them rather than over them. That's left as an implication, working backwards from his later reputation for excessive humility (such as making the band stop playing "hail to the chief" when he enters a room). It puts the cart before the horse, though -- it's more likely he was just temperamentally that way to start with, and if he did work with the field-hands instead of despising them it was due to his character not his proximity. Good catch, for sure.
More to the point, do we actually know that he wasn't/isn't internally racist? He was overtly racist until the literal moment when it changed from being in his interests to not being in his interests (when he no longer needed to appeal to voters in Georgia due to term limits, but wanted to lay the groundwork to appeal to voters nationally). He's had nothing to gain from being racist since then and hasn't done so. He could have any private attitude towards black people whatsoever (or none at all), but just act in his own self interest.
That's entirely possible. I can admit that I'm just making assumptions based on bias: my parents were yellow dog democrats, and against Reagan. I remember Carter seeming like a kindly old man the few television appearances I saw as a child. But then, my parents were also big fans of Robert C Byrd, who had been an actual member of the Klan. Being a kindly old democrat politician doesn't guarantee he wasn't racist.
I wonder if talented politicians have enough of an internal self for that to even mean anything. It's said that "The best way to tell a lie is to first lie to yourself." Actors do this as a matter of method. Many of the best actors tend to be hollow.
I've read enough of The Lyndon Johnson Years to read that LBJ was supposedly a horrible racist in private, at least in his early years. But was he a racist when he pretended to be an anti-racist as POTUS and passed anti-racist legislation?
The main theme of Vonnegut's Mother Night is: You are what you pretend to be. The main character is a US spy in Nazi Germany who becomes a prominent German radio propogandist. He's a spy, so supposedly against the Nazis, but he also turns out to be an effective Nazi propagandist who makes a horrible difference in the world.
Seems to me that the state of one's soul has more to do with what one does than what one's conscience whispers.
From HPMOR: "I regret to inform you, Tom, that anyone who can bring himself to act the part of Voldemort is Voldemort."
The Harvard implicit association test seems to indicate that liberals are more internally racist. The test, of course, assumes it’s own conclusion. If you are measuring bias and if your test measures as more racist people who vote and act less racist then it’s not very scientific, even if it is true. And it could well be true, but in terms of actions it can’t be proven. The test in fact proves the opposite of what it claims.
A better test would be general actions, do elite democrats go to mixed schools, do they racially intermarry, are they likely to live in mixed areas. I don’t know.
This is more an anecdote but a posh English woman I used to work with, and now follow on Instagram, is always posting about BLM and other liberal causes. Often driven by America.

When I knew her she was a potential conservative candidate, but was souring on the party due to its “sexism”. I think she was overlooked for a position. This was in Bath in England, which is 99% white. (That is 98% British or even English white).
And, though still a professional, she left Bath for an even more uniform English village about 30 miles away. She still works in London occasionally, remote work has helped there, and did live in London in her 20s. She’s 40 something now.
Is she really a fan, as she claims, of diversity? This kind of thing; moving away from arge cities to small ones, and from small cities to tiny villages, is fairly new for professionals. Her sons’ school, which is private, is clearly all white, looks white English and elite. The latter is a given.
I can’t look into her soul, but we could look into the statistics for elite democrat voters, into their actions and not their words.
I assume Carter is racist in his heart just the way that he lists after other women in his heart. He’s the one person who is earnest enough to admit to the things that everyone else denies about themself.
Exactly ... far too many northerners project their own racism on the far less racist southerners.
It may well have been that the Carters (the entire family) were not as 'racist' as our reviewer paints them. We don't have a good measure of "how racist were the average racists in Plains, Georgia versus the rest of Georgia versus the South versus the North" to say one way or the other.
And the dismissal of the other siblings as being 'your average Southern racist' seems incorrect, given what Wikipedia says about his sister Gloria: "In 1964, Spann resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending", so if she was more racist than Jimmy, Jimmy was very not-racist!
Interesting review. I believe there is an error, however, in your comments about gas lines. There was plenty of gas in the US in the 1970s, as the Shah once pointed out on national television, and as proven by insurance records. The shortages were a consequence of the US government taking over distribution. High prices are one thing, but lines were another. Generally the price will rise to clear the "line" since people would rather pay a higher price than wait.
This is what I remember about the "shortages" caused by the embargos of the early 70s. There may be some other explanation of later "shortages." However, high prices and waiting lines don't generally go together. The price just goes up to the point where the business can sell gas quickly.
Oh no, I sat in gas lines quite a bit. The OPEC embargos led by the Saudis with held production to increase the price.
I don't doubt the gas lines. I was there. The question is why there were gas lines. Ordinarily, when prices go up, they continue to go up until the "shortage" disappears. In other words, fewer people buy a product at a higher price, or "demand" decreases at the higher price. This is not the case when distribution is messed up. Prices now are over $6 a gallon, I hear. Are people sitting in their cars in line waiting to get gas.
OPEC oil embargoes reduced supply, prices rose, stations ran out.
I don’t think you are getting Nathan’s argument. The shortages would not have happened if prices had risen enough. If you are running out of a commodity everyday you raise prices until you don’t.
Yes, but while people may choose "I'm not buying that new fridge, it costs too much, I'll make do with the old one", they don't have the same choice about "I need my car to get to work, and if I don't show up for work, I will lose my job". So if petrol is $6 a gallon, they will pay that if they really need to do so. And they'll pay it at $10 a gallon, and so on as the price increases. At the point where they can't pay such prices, there is a much worse crisis going on for them. 'There is no longer a shortage because prices are so high, nobody who isn't Jeff Bezos can afford them, so nobody is buying the product and we have plenty of it in stock' is not really 'there is no shortage'.
Comparing petrol prices is interesting, because there really isn't an exact equivalent between the USA and elsewhere, but the average price right now seems to be: USA - $5 per gallon, Ireland - $8.56 per gallon:
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Ireland/gasoline_prices/
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/USA/gasoline_prices/
"To ensure comparability, for the U.S. we report the prices of Mid-grade gasoline as it is closest to the Octane-95 gasoline used in most of the world. Regular gasoline that is the most widely used in the U.S. is about 13 percent cheaper than Mid-grade gasoline.
Also note that there are large differences across U.S. states. Prices in the Western states are about 20 percent higher than the national average and in California they are about 50 percent higher. The prices in the Midwest and the South are about 5-10 percent lower than the national average. In the North East, the prices are about 5 percent higher."
Sure but the shortages would have been at home (the petrol free parked car not travelling) not at the pumps.
What you're missing, is market rules were off. OPEC (Oil Producing Exporting Countries) is a consortium which conspired to cut supplies to the US in retaliation for the US supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1967. read more here: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/opec-enacts-oil-embargo
Yes, Michael. I was aware of that. We are talking about shortages at the pump. In general prices should rise until the market is at equilibrium, more or less.
I mean, I was sitting in my car to get gas recently, yeah. Not the latest time I got gas, but the second latest (which was actually a higher cost, IIRC). I was buying from the cheapest gas station in town both times, and as it is 2022 anybody can google who currently has the lowest prices. The one with the line was a Wal-Mart closer to the center of town, though, so that could have been it.
This is an incorrect belief about how markets work.
This is easily proven - during the pandemic the last few years, prices on things we were short on did not go infinitely high, people just weren't able to buy them. This applied to toilet paper, graphics cards, materials for making microchips, etc.
This also regularly happens with new video game consoles and whatnot.
The reality is that when you have a shortage, the price might go up, but there's actually a limit to this kind of price flexibility, beyond which point you just end up with shortages.
To review the review as a formal exercise: this was the one I felt best mimicked Scott's voice. But for a few easily-tweaked things, I would likely not have suspected a thing if it had been run in Scott's name as a normal ACX/SSC post. So full marks on the pastiche.
Now for things which look like telltale clues with full hindsight, though
1. Scott wouldn't be quite so dismissive of the "maybe the real problem is Americans being too consumerist" Words of Wisdom. He'd certainly joke about them, or at least about Carter taking them on-board as though they'd been groundbreaking insights rather than old platitudes. But I think he'd have expended more effort getting into the heads of the people who are getting this once-in-a-century chance to directly try to change the mind of an American President who looks like he's genuinely listening, and steelmanning why they would think it worth it to yell those "useless truisms" at him. I think he would have been right. Our Anonymous Pseudo-Scott here seems to chuckle at the platitudes and move on in far too dismissive a way, not just in terms of successful Scott impersonation, but also of the pursuit of intellectual insight.
2. More trivially, I felt that some of the puns felt a bit… perfunctory isn't the right word, because they're good puns as such, but a bit self-conscious. "Scott makes light-hearted puns and remarks about people's weird names, doesn't he? Let me wedge some of those in." This is one of the ones I am least confident would have stood out to me if I'd genuinely had no idea this wasn't by Scott, though.
I thought every attempt at humor here fell flat whereas Scott tends to always nail it. Pastiche is the right word.
I think the puns didn't land, despite being pretty good puns. The "depression"/"spiritual crisis" snark, though, did land, for one. (Highly subjective of course!)
Yeah. Didn't land for me because the premise that "Southern Christians in the '60s didn't seek professional mental health services" doesn't ring true. Just sounds like a hackneyed take on Southerners, portraying them all as living a hundred years behind the times.
Some of the early reviews struck me as resembling Scott's voice. This one doesn't. The jokes are jarring; they don't fit the rest of the text somehow. (If the reviewer is reading this, I have no advice on how to fix this, and my own efforts would probably be worse.)
If the reviewer is reading this, I'll throw in that I liked the humor and the review is one of my favorites so far.
likewise, I really liked the jokes.
Perhaps they weren't considered useless truisms back then, but rather new and profound insights?
Dubious. There could be something to the fact that they weren't quite so creaky and hoary as they sound today yet, but they were certainly well in circulation among the young left.
They are old truisms, but every generation needs a new coat of paint slapped on to make them take notice of those old truisms.
Preaching about worldliness is indeed old hat, but putting the modern sociological label of "consumerism" on it makes it sound fresh and revelatory. You don't pay attention to the preacher in the pulpit giving a sermon on "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" because they've been doing that since Grandpa's time, but a Berkeley sociologist telling you that you should "achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods"? That's Cutting Edge Research and Modern Science! I mean, it's Berkeley! That's where The Revolution is happening! https://revolution.berkeley.edu/about/
"1970s Berkeley served as ground zero for the Black Arts and Black Power movements, Women’s Liberation, the movement for ethnic studies, the ecology movement, the gay liberation movement, the Disability Rights Movement, and the free school movement. At the same time, the city was also the scene of countless smaller, more personal attempts to remake society from the ground up."
Everyone should have listened to Gil Scott-Heron about how the *real* revolution would be (and still hasn't happened):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
'As a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis."'
This is an interesting idea, actually. I think it's probably a lot better to have a spiritual crisis. In any event, it's closer to the cognitive view -- that it's your ways of thinking that are getting you down, rather than the dark forces of biochemistry. Most people I meet who say they are "depressed" seem to view it as something they have little or no control over; they hope for a magic pill, but the pill rarely arrives (never, in my limited experience, but Scott says the pills do work for a certain percentage of depressed people, and I have to believe him). If they had a spiritual crisis, they might see the problem as fundamentally caused by faulty ways of viewing the world and themselves, which is usually closer to the truth about "depression."
Yes, I actually agree that the model which local culture applies to phenomena that look like this matters.
The quote also reminded me of a line from Downton Abbey, the immaculately-mannered dowager Countess reminding her family that a lord and lady are never "having difficulties in their marriage", but rather "they are 'unable to see as much of one another as they would like' ".
The focus there is a little more straightforwardly cosmetic, but the 'correct' phrasing still highlights that certain ways of responding to the situation are appropriate and certain others aren't.
Downton Abbey is a work of period fiction. My problem with the comment in the review is that it, too, is a work of period fiction but presented as truth. Or worse, an attempt at humor-through-stereotype.
I'm familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky's post about arguing from fictional evidence. It's wrong. Total bunk.
Fictional evidence is real evidence of what people believe makes sense, in the same way that, paraphrasing Bret Devereaux, Egyptian royal inscriptions are shaky evidence of what Egyptian royalty did, but they are perfect, unshakable evidence of what Egyptian royalty believed Egyptian royalty was supposed to do.
When a character in a popular TV show elaborates a particular way of looking at the world, that's not because the writers were temporarily hallucinating. It's a comment the writers have made about the world.
Maybe they are better evidence of what Egyptian royalty hoped other people would think they did than evidence of what they believed they were supposed to do.
But where is even the fictional evidence that "Southern Christians in 1966 don't get depressed?" This fiction seems to originate in this very review.
Mental health care existed in Georgia in the 1960s. There's probably plenty of fiction about it.
The claim is not that "SCs in the 1960s did not get depressed"; the claim is that they did not identify it as a mental health issue. I'm not from the South, but I'm from the past, and in the 1960s mental health was (VERY stereotypically) Jews in New York sitting on psychiatrist's couches, not routine treatment for depression. (This seems like a direct Scott question and I'm prepared to be Marshall-McCluhan-in-Annie-Halled now.) Note that Thomas Eagleton had to step down as Dem VP candidate in 1972 because he had been hospitalized for MH issues, although that did include some shock treatments (as called then) which is more dramatic than usual.
>The claim is not that "SCs in the 1960s did not get depressed"; the claim is that they did not identify it as a mental health issue
I understand that point. My point is that we get a few statements here asserting "Southerners then were like X", where X is a caricature.
I don't know when "clinical depression" diagnoses became popular; perhaps not before the 1970s. If so, that would likely be true for the US as a whole. I don't believe The South was some exceptional holdout against modern mental healthcare or that there was anything special about Southern Christians in this regard. (Southern California Scientologists would be the exceptional holdout in this regard.)
But the writers on that show aren't from the culture they're describing. How one culture views another typically tells you more about the culture doing the viewing than the one being viewed.
The pills made a huge difference to me, upgrading my mental state from "constant misery" to "emotionally numb". Still doesn't sound great? Trust me, it was a *huge* upgrade, and gave me the mental space needed for the CBT to work.
It's also a very glib writing off of the experience: oh, he was too much of a hick to realise what was *really* going on.
Depression and spiritual crises are not the same thing, though they may share similar mental states. If you have a certain view of your life and your place in God's plan, and then you hit a roadblock, it may be a very salutary experience to re-evaluate your understanding and how much *you* are putting yourself in God's place ('clearly God wants me to be X, Y or Z!' when that is your own ambition talking).
If Carter sat down and seriously thought over his life, his ambitions, his goals, and what he wanted to achieve and how he would achieve it in the wake of getting a reality check, I don't think dismissing that as "the savage natives at times erupt into a bout of what they call 'spiritual crisis' when they consult their ju-jus as to what they should do, when checked in the ordinary course of life" is helpful and indeed smacks of the kind of "colonizer mindset" that would get someone severely rapped over the knuckles if they applied it in other contexts. Did Shakyamuni have a spiritual crisis, or was he only 'really' depressed and if only an educated secular Westerner had been on hand to advise him, we'd never have Buddhism today?
"Did Shakyamuni have a spiritual crisis, or was he only 'really' depressed and if only an educated secular Westerner had been on hand to advise him, we'd never have Buddhism today?"
I remember a webcomic from a few years back where a pebble got lodged in a man's head, causing him to be in pain all the time. He wasn't aware of the pebble, so he tried to do everything he could think of to make the pain go away, eventually devoting his time to meditation and contemplation. One day, the pebble finally fell out, the wound healed, and the pain went away. He believed that his ascetic lifestyle must've been the cause of his relief, and so began erroneously teaching people that they could alleviate their worldly suffering the same way as him. It seemed pretty clear to me that the whole thing was a thinly veiled metaphor for the origins of Buddhism, and just in case someone didn't get it, the writer added a comment sarcastically asking "what do you mean it's about religion?" to the postscript. So yes, I'd imagine a lot of rationalists and materialists probably do believe something akin to "Siddhartha actually just had depression," and just don't say it out loud because doing so would seem disrespectful and presumptuous.
I think the comic was from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but I'm not sure, I can't seem to find it anymore.
The idea sounds plausible to me. Psychiatry and clinical psychology as we know it are young disciplines and had to wrestle with churches about who should be in charge of mental illness in the late 19th century. They won, profiting from the great advances of scientific somatic medicine but since then have been struggling to establish a sound scientific base. A mid 20th century christian fundamentalist may well have stayed with the old ways.
For me, this has been the worst of the guest reviews so far. The repeated attempts at humor by using worn out tropes (sike!) and casual slander (all southerners are racist dontcha know!) got old pretty fast, which is a shame because the subject matter seems to have potential.
Totally true, the South of the 1930s was a paradise of racial harmony! Except for pre-Mandela SA, no society has ever cultivated equality and color blindness as much as Jim Crow South!
I wonder why black people were fleeing North toh. Probably intimated by all the overwhelming love and affection that white Southerners were showing them.
Imitated or intimidated? Anyway, we would not have had Rock'n Roll if a significant amount of white guys had not related well to black musical culture in the south in the first half of 20th century.
LOL, loving the reference to SA. Do you really think FDR and national Democrats didn't know Jim Crow was going on? The entire New Deal edifice was built on national (non-Southern) Democrats accepting, if not courting, the support of Jim Crow Democrats. IOW, the New Deal has the moral authority and provenance of Apartheid SA governments.
You shifted really quickly from "not all Southerners are racist" to "well, Democrats are racists too."
MOD DECISION: This is obnoxious, major warning (50% of ban)
Yes I agree.
I read and rated about ten reviews. I'd love a list of reviews that correlated with the ones I liked, but I didn't read. My 'goal' in reading book reviews is finding more good books I should read.
My criteria for the book reviews is "did I learn something interesting?", and don't intend to read any of the books in question, much like with Scott's own reviews.
I'm surprised. While reading it, I thought it was one of the best reviews so far. Although after seeing the number of serious factual mistakes pointed out in the comments, I'd probably downgrade it to #5 or so.
I think the author of this review got the Camp David Accords wrong. The deal was not peace in exchange for no settlements, it was peace in exchange for the Sinai Peninsula. Putting the emphasis on Israeli settlements (especially with that giant graph) falsely implies that Israel broke its side of the Camp David Accords, when actually Israel evacuated its settlements in the Sinai and handed the area over to Egypt as promised.
You're right. I think he may be confusing them with the 1993 Oslo Accords which did affect the West Bank: the Camp David Accords were about the Sinai, and both sides kept their ends of the bargain.
+1
Came here to say this. Also, the accords paid Israel and Egypt to stop fighting each other; Egypt at the time had the military strength to be a real problem for Israel so to stop the constant skirmishes with hefty payouts was quite a boon for both nations. AFAIK those payments continue to this day. It also meant one could travel directly from Egypt to Israel, something you couldn't do from any other Arab nation. I flew from Cairo to Tel Aviv once back in my younger, braver days.
Military aid to Egypt continues to be fixed by law as a proportion of Military aid to Israel.
You can still fly direct on Air Sinai. I recall reading that it's mandated to keep those flights going in some treaty.
Yes, exactly. Also, besmirches the review because the strong implication is that the graph and other editorializing about that situation was added by the author as a side note and was not in the book. Therefore it was a digression, but also totally wrong. Camp David Accords do say that the entire West Bank & Gaza will be dealt with when a new (peaceful) Palestinian leadership is democratically elected. This entire portion of the agreement was *rejected* by the UN and the (terrorist / non-peaceful) PLO on the grounds that the PLO were not represented.
hu, if the mistake was in the book itsself, it would be a minor sin not to correct it in the review. If however the book was mute on this or had the correct version, this is a pretty big mistake for a review.
Thanks for pointing it out, I had believed the version as described.
Carter is known for being hypercritical, and in my view, unfairly critical, of Israeli policy, so I wouldn't be surprised if he represents it like this. He later wrote a book called "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid". As the title suggests, in this book Carter argues that the situation in the West Bank is similar to that in apartheid South Africa, and puts the lion's share of the blame for the continued conflict on Israel.
My view is this. There are some similarities and some differences between the situation in the West Bank and apartheid South Africa, and in any case Israel should certainly stop expanding settlements, but Israel doesn't really have good options other than continuing to occupy the West Bank. Unilateral withdrawal led to Islamist takeover in Afghanistan and Gaza, and the same would happen in the West Bank. A conflict-ending negotiated agreement resulting in a two-state solution would be great, but the Palestinian leadership have never been able and willing to give up the "right of return" and deliver a solution to the conflict. There is a book by Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz, The War of Return. https://www.amazon.com/War-Return-Indulgence-Palestinian-Obstructed/dp/1250252768
Good work, AF. I've been scrolling down to see if this came up. It is a huge historical error. Begin pulling Israel out of the Sinai made it seem as though Carter could work miracles. I just went to Wikipedia to learn what I missed about West Bank settlements, and it reminded me that the issue in the West Bank was not suspension of settlements, but creation of self-governing structures. I've looked at the index of "The Outsider" (on Amazon), and there is no subentry on the Sinai under the Camp David entry, while "West Bank settlements" appears in a subentry with ten pages indexed. This makes it seem as though this were Kai Bird's error. (Seems impossible.)
Either way, a reviewer's job is to note errors and not to introduce them, and the reviewer here has certainly not succeeded on one of those fronts. I don't think this review took on a very challenging task--it primarily presented a narrative summary with some speculative elaboration, whereas other reviews have undertaking effortful analysis of complex topics. I think failing to flag the most important feature of what I felt was Carter's greatest accomplishment--either as part of the book's narrative or as missing from the narrative--is disqualifying as a contest issue. But as someone who lived through those years, but who missed details due to living abroad, the review narrative was nevertheless engaging.
Ah OK, so it's an error mostly by Carter and not by the reviewer. I agree with the reviewer that the increase in the population of Israeli settlers has been a bad thing, but it's misleading to bring this up but not in the Sinai in a discussion of Camp David, and as far as the Palestinian issue is concerned extremely one-sided and again misleading to talk about this and not anything the Palestinians have done, as if Israel could just stop building settlements and then the conflict would be over.
Yeah that's correct. In the Camp David Accords, Israel gave the Sinai to Egypt and got peace back. There is some language that "there should be transitional arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza for a period not exceeding five years" but this is aspirational; at the time the PLO had not recognized Israel and wanted to remove it. The UNGA didn't like this. The Israel-Egypt peace treaty, a binding treaty, said Israel gives Egypt the Sinai and gets peace.
I certainly think the Israeli settlements have been a big mistake, but Camp David didn't discuss them. Israel did continue settlements, which is a bad policy and does not make things easier though, sure. It's more than a bit facile and one-sided though to pretend this is the only obstacle to the two-state solution (which I'd like to see, but it really takes two to tango) as this author does, far from it. Perhaps Carter sees it like this; he is known for being hypercritical of Israel's policies in his later years in ways I think are unfair. The accusations that he hates Israel / hates Jews are silly, I think it's more of a leftist / Third World-ist thing, and he's certainly not a BDS person or anything like that.
Both the book and the review apparently overlook the massive extent to which Carter was a budget hawk. That may have played as large a role In his 1880 loss as anything else.
1880? Was he an immortal? :)
Ha! Typo, obviously--1980.
You completely glossed over Jimmy's lovable lout-brother Billy. The perennially drunken gas-station owner / sudden red-neck playboy. Billy's antics were fun-luvn' hill-billy hick, competing in all manner of red-neck antics, belly-flop contests etc. You'd never forget your first taste of his self-branded Billy-Beer ... ick, nasty fizzy yellow water, not fit for even cleaning something. I wonder now, if Billy wasn't encouraged to keep the spotlight off Jimmy.
I lived through this as a teen. Gas went from 30 cents to 50, then to a dollar, then a buck fifty. There's nothing like gasoline going 5x on you. Cars back then were serious gas guzzlers too, which didn't help. Of course if you're a teen, you need a muscle car, which is what all my friends had. If you're in line for 20 minutes to get gas, you turned off your car. Since its hot, and we're in California, we'd all get out of the car ... and push it ahead as the line moves. And we'd talk with the others who were doing the same thing.
Carter paid heavily for the hostage crisis. I think he paid an even higher price for not immediately invading Iran. I do believe Carter meant well, but in trying too hard to be 'a man of peace' his anti-aggressive stance became a weapon which could be used against him, and the whole country. This weakness, in addition to the sting from the recent capitulation of the Vietnam war. President Carter's pardoning draft dodgers. Congress ending the draft system, only to reinstate the draft under the new name of The Selective Service Act, years of a really bad economy, race riots following the recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X ... [got bogged down in the sadness, where was I] all this contributed to the general national malaise and most of it rested on the shoulders of the suddenly very sad and tired looking President Carter.
Even on a good day, Carter was no match for Reagan. Reagan was a showman, communicator, unifier. If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California. Reagan—like Clinton has—a magnetic personality. His language was fun, jocular, friendly, and as I said before unifying.
>If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party
I don't believe Reagan was ever in the Communist Party. If you have evidence he was, bring it.
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAreagan.htm
That says he applied to join but was turned down. Which strikes me as a lot more believable - surely evidence that he'd been a member would have sunk his 1980 campaign.
In the early days, it wasn't recognized as the terrorist group it really was
Reminds me of Mike Duncan's saying that no line - not the picket line, nor the barricade line - foments revolutionary feeling like the bread line.
Fun fact - the only US president to ever be the president of a labor union is the president that most significantly broke the power of labor unions in the United States (with the air traffic controllers strike).
Which you can interpret in multiple ways…
Like: he knew better than anyone else just how self-serving/incompetent/corrupt running a labor union is ?
Nobody ever talks about Barack Obama's brother either.
> If you don't know, a young Reagan left the Communist Party, and worked his way all the way to the Republican Party. He led the Screen Actor's Guild, and became the Governor of California.
I think you missed the part where Reagan ran for Governor of California as a member of the Democratic Party, only joining the Republican Party later in life before his run for the Presidency. A man of many Parties!
Reagan was elected Governor of California as a Republican in 1966, running against the incumbent Democratic Party Governor, Pat Brown. He had been an enthusiastic New Deal Democrat during the 40s, but became increasingly conservative over the course of the 50s and officially became a Republican in 1962.
You might be conflating his election as Governor with Earl Warren, who was elected Governor of California on a Republican ticket in 1942 but ran for and won the Democratic and Progressive party nominations as well as the Republican nomination when he ran for reelection in 1946.
Excellent article as always - I learned a lot. This is really pedantic and I apologize for that, but in the first pictures of Jimmy Carter (the one in his Naval Whites), you said he was a Lieutenant. His rank is actually "Midshipman First Class" via his shoulder boards. That rank is specific to the Naval Academy NROTC.
Service academies are direct reporting units (DRUs) and distinct from ROTC. Carter was an Annapolis grad, don't besmirch his experience by conflating that with the part-timers (/s).
- a USAFA grad
The one line summary of Carter's presidency: great guy, terrible politician.
The lesson of his administration to me is this: the president should be an extremely effective _implementer_ of values which are decided upon by other people, namely the American people themselves. He should not be obsessively focused on embodying these values himself, unless this is absolutely necessary for their implementation.
Carter's mistake was in not understanding that "good leadership" of the largest, most powerful political entity in the world is very different from "good leadership" on a personal, local level. Ulysses S. Grant made similar mistakes.
Very enjoyable read, thanks!
I learned a lot from this review and love the racy and gently ironic style, though on occasion reviewer got carried away by their own flights of ebullience - like '(and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox' I mean is that really an awesome name?
As a Brit and youth CND campaigner at the time, I was vaguely aware that the Iran hostage crisis did for Carter, and Reagan was a dead-eyed warmongering ex-actor and stooge of the arms industry. Didn't appreciate his homely charisma until much later!
> The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing.
Rationing and price controls are the cause of the queues.
Canada didn't have price controls, and thus just got higher petrol prices but neither queues nor queuing related violence.
Price controls I get, but why would rationing create queues? Rationing, like price signals, attempts to match demand to supply; price controls prevent prices from doing their job so demand outstrips supply, leading to queues.
The rationing wasn’t limiting the amount you could get, just the days you could get it. Thus people wouldn’t just leave and come back tomorrow.
Odd days and even days!
Price controls without rationing would've led to dry pumps, and nobody would wait in line for those.
Yeah, the fact that the reviewer didn't seem to understand that continuing price controls when oil prices increased due to constrained supply caused the shortages, rationing, and long lines is, along with all the other factual mistakes noted by others, an indication either the book is terrible, or the reviewer is ignorant of Carter, or both.
Great review. Weird President.
Not necessarily weird; if he'd delivered his rebukes about consumerism in the lingo of the time, which was all about overpopulation and declining resources and pollution and the environment, it would read differently. Asking a rabbi and a Berkley sociologist for advice could be seen as looking for fresh voices outside the entrenched establishment and being willing to break the old ways of doing things.
I think Carter was hobbled personally by two things, quite apart from the crises of the day; his lack of charisma and extrovert appeal, and his sincere faith. While he may have been classically liberal, as a Southern Baptist he was not perceived as being one of the liberal denominations. Carter the East Coast Episcopalian would have been seen more in the light of George Bush the elder, where Carter the Southern Baptist was the hick from the sticks with his snake-handling ways (no, Southern Baptists are not snake-handlers but we're talking popular impressions and indeed prejudices). Episcopalian Carter could have smoothed over his religiosity as part of a tradition of service and duty to the greater good (as Hillary Clinton tried with her Methodism*: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-private-faith-of-hillary-clinton) and an upper-middle class/upper class background of gentlemanly good tone, whereas Southern Baptist Carter was too painfully 'accept the Lord into your heart' just like the yokels.
*E.g, “I always resonated to the fact that it was both revelatory and Scripture-based but that you were invited to use your power of reason to think through your faith and to work through what it meant to you and how you would live it in your daily life,” she told me."
'Resonating to facts' must be modern American jargon, but imagine Carter dressing up his approach to his personal faith in the 70s therapy-speak of the day instead of referencing Scripture about lusting in your heart, and the image we have of him might have been very different.
Except that America was happy to elect Reagan as a replacement, Reagan who made no secret of his Christianity and who came with big endorsements from The Moral Majority.
Carter was dealt a bum hand, sure (economy, Iran, peak crime) but was also, perhaps, not the sort of person who should become president, insofar as the primary jobs of a president are
[a] telling stories (to get the masses on your side)
[b] twisting arms (to get Congress on your side)
Carter was, apparently, not especially good at either of these.
That's the Shakespeare view.
Alternatively you can view him as trapped between two worlds, the death of the Metasizing Nanny State (Nixon creating the EPA) and the birth of the Neoliberal state (Reagan and everything since), and that perhaps no-one could have handled that transition successfully. Reagan was lucky enough to get into power *after* enough people had been persuaded that the change was necessary; Carter was unlucky enough to have to be the one to make the first round of changes and try to justify them, even as he spoke using an obsolete language and justifications.
That's the ontological tragedy view.
Rarely do both tragedies line up exactly, but I think they do in Carter's case.
> When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.
This is something I appreciate in a book review. You find something interesting that the book didn't explain, and if you can't explain it yourself, you leave the reader with multiple possibilities. I find both plausible.
A third possibility is not domestic versus foreign but short-term vs interminable. Carter apparently hid his opposition to discrimination until he was elected governor. We are told that he could negotiate effectively with foreign leaders, but they must have mostly returned to their countries shortly. He negotiated with senators over a treaty; once the treaty was ratified, the Senate's leverage was gone.
However, had he attempted serious negotiation with congressmen on normal issues, it might have continued exhaustingly through almost every working day of his presidency. Maybe the thought of it made him anxious.
The more general case would be people who can pull themselves together for a burst of effort under pressure, but will not change their basic habits of largely avoiding high-pressure interactions.
Or maybe it's just a case of 'cutting his cloth according to his measure'; he's not stupid, he's had some experience both in the armed forces and politics, he knows you have to do deals. As President of the United States, he has more influence over US senators than over diplomats from or leaders of a foreign country. He has to do more horse-trading and concessions with foreign leaders, because there's always the chance that the minute they get back to their own country they will turn around and do the exact opposite of what they agreed.
For the senators, well, as another president said "I've got a pen and I've got a phone":
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-a-phone-obama-goes-it-alone
There's a gap in this review which I would like to see addressed: Carter as a 70s Democrat. There's a couple of lines which are dropped in and not expanded on, such as the following:
"It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect."
And then we move on after that glib characterisation of three people with no development, *How* were they "as racist as you'd expect"? My memories of the time are that the one sibling of his I'd ever heard of was Billy, who was - let's say - "colourful" which the media loved and ate up (he was a drunk who did embarassing/amusing things until he sobered up, including various attempts to cash in on his brother's importance as president - Hunter Biden without the crack and no foreign companies willing to pay huge bribes for access). I don't remember anything about him being a "racist as you'd expect", unless we consider that was just the times back then, baby, you expect a 70s Southerner to be a racist and it was unremarked upon because it was unremarkable.
His other siblings were Gloria, whom Wikipedia tells me "She was noted as one of the first women inducted into Harley-Davidson’s 100,000 Mile Club, was named Most Outstanding Female Motorcyclist in 1978 and worked as an activist for motorcycle rights", I don't see how racism fits in there unless you mean "motorcycle clubs - bikers - racism and crime" and which seems to be contradicted by "In 1964, Spann [her married name] resigned from the Baptist Church the Carters belonged to after the church voted not to lift its ban on blacks from attending" and Ruth, again from Wikipedia "She was a Christian evangelist ...In 1977, she became friends with pornographer Larry Flynt and managed to briefly convert him to Christianity". Whatever your opinion of her healing ministry, she at least did have a Proper University Qualification (master's in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for the practice, even if she was only a Georgia shit-kicker talking about Jesus to the rubes.
So, I'd appreciate a little fleshing-out of "pooh, they were white Southerners, of *course* they were racists", please!
The interesting, perhaps ghoulish, fact is that Carter's father and siblings all died of pancreatic cancer while his mother died of breast cancer, so his continuing long life is really extraordinary. Perhaps that is one reason he might feel singled out or specially favoured?
I think the problem in this review, as with the 70s coverage of Carter as a weirdo, is the struggle to believe that actually yes, he does have a sincere Christian faith and when he talked about God and sin he meant it, and means it. For people who don't have a religious faith, this does seem prime weirdo territory. I wonder, though, if the same thing were cast in what is acceptable to modern tastes - the therapeutic approach, the post-MeToo scenario, the context of 'rape culture' - such revelations as "I've struggled with lust" would be acclaimed as doing work on problematic behaviour and an example of emotional openness that was the antithesis of 'toxic masculinity'.
There's been some discussion on here about "why do the Republicans have the lock on religious voters, why can't the Democrats appeal to Christian values?" and I think Carter's presidency is one explanation why: he's the last openly Christian Democrat (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are all "yeah I'm a Real Catholic" but they have no problems at all going along with the party line on gay marriage, abortion, etc. etc. etc.) and as this review says, was considered a weirdo at the time. The next Southerner elected as president would be Bill Clinton, a very different type: not alone with buckets of charisma unlike Carter, but someone who had no problems with lust: presidential blowjobs are more preferred to painful sincerity about male sexuality?
He also embodies the pragmatism some wish the current Democrats could emulate in order to Get Things Done, go along with your political opponents, make some compromises, and get your policies passed rather than be held hostage to the pure progressive wing who would rather no bread than half a loaf:
"In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue."
Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Having been defeated by fraud the first time, he decides to do what it takes to get elected, and if that means getting down-and-dirty, so be it? Then he gets elected and can implement his true policies. The complaint seems to be the same as the progressive purity demands: he gets elected as a fake racist, then throws that off. Again, would it be preferable had he stuck to his anti-racist guns and let a *real* racist get elected?
"His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way."
I don't think, after the Beer Summit, any modern presidency has room to throw stones here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy#%22Beer_Summit%22
The reviewer seems to find Carter unsympathetic, and I do understand why. But I also think if you don't remember the 70s even a little bit, it's hard to understand the atmosphere of the times. Carter was unlucky in that his presidency coincided with the fuel crisis etc. Biden is running into the same problem, and we see his approval ratings sinking like a stone.
But the 70s were also the hey-day of psychotherapy and all kinds of radical inner wellness movements, philosophies, and cults. Indeed, it degenerated into navel-gazing of the most self-obsessed kind. Do you EST? Have you tried TM? There's a selection of gurus, be there genuine Indian ones or Western psuedo-scientific ones, to pick and choose from. Scientology is quasi-respectable (and the 70s are when they engage in a genuine attempt at 'domestic terrorism' and other unsavoury activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White).
In that light, Carter's interview with "Playboy" (and have you considered the openness it must have taken for a Southern Baptist running for President to do an interview with what, despite the jokes about "I read it for the articles", is basically a skin mag?) is painfully honest, because the 70s were all about radical openness and interior transformation. But because this is driven by sincere Christian belief, rather than West Coast therapeutic culture, of course the media perceive him as a weirdo. He's not expressing himself in the acceptable shibboleths of the day.
I don't have much of an opinion on Carter one way or the other; yes, he wasn't inspirational or ground-breaking, but personally I think I prefer someone who wants to keep the spending on his own office down, rather than taking the opportunity to soak the taxpayers for expensive refurbishments https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/lulu-lytle-carrie-symonds-downing-street/, or uses interns as private sexual accommodations. But then, I'm old-fashioned like that.
Billy Carter almost certainly got a lot of money from the Libyan government, just FYI...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Carter
More of a précis than a review. Saved me reading the actual book though.
Yeah, but I only want reviews of books I should read.
"Is it to tell blunt truths to the American public and push us to acknowledge our country’s flaws? Or is it to implement policies that lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives? While the best leaders may do some of both, ultimately the latter is what really matters. "
Reading this, it's funny how it's the exact opposite of the argument of Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias. He contrasts leaders who actually improve the wisdom of their populace with those who merely 'gratify their' (usually ignorant) wishes. Moral improvement is the important thing, because mere GDP can be (will be?) pointed towards evil and or stupid things:
"[A]s to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm
Interestingly, much of the "Reagan Revolution" of deregulation began under Carter.
Does this competition have a working definition of a book review? Some of these reviews seem more like précis, and some more like critiques. Are we just walking through what the book says or are we interrogating it?
1) The United States never cheated the Panamanians out of "their canal". There was no canal when the US intervened on the behalf of Panamanian rebels to to secure Panamanian independence from Colombia in order to eliminate Colombia's veto of the construction of a canal, nor was there a canal after that until the United States actually built one at the US's own expense.
2) I want you to imagine that, on November 3rd, 2020, Donald Trump used his power as President to stop all counting of the vote in the northeast and west coast states, on the grounds that the election was being stolen. On January 3, 2021, the 117th Congress takes its seats, and no Congressmen from those northeast or west coast states are seated, because the votes in those states haven't been counted, so nobody was elected. On January 6th, this rump Congress declares that Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 231-124, with 183 votes not cast (the states where Trump stopped the counting). Then Trump holds a referendum on whether he should be dictator with the power to unilaterally amend the Constitution, with separate polling places for voting "Yes, Trump should be dictator" and "No, I don't want Trump to be dictator". The claimed result of this blatantly rigged referendum is that Trump was elected dictator with 99.9% of the vote.
Would you then say that a subsequent military coup that removed Trump from power overthrew the "democratically-elected government" of the United States? Or would you say that Trump had already made sure there was no democratically-elected government that could be overthrown, whatever one's opinion of the people who then overthrew the Trump regime?
Decent summary of Carter's political life. I amazed that it (or the book?) fails to mention the infamous "attack rabbit" and "Mush From the Wimp" events.
In any case, my memory of his presidency is that it was one catastrophe after another, and that everyone hated him. (Living as I did in Tip O'Neill country, that's pretty much expected.)
I enjoyed reading this piece, but in no way can I describe it as a review. It's something completely different - as others have suggested, perhaps a precis?
Maybe the norms of book reviewing have shifted over time and I have simply failed to notice?
It reminds me of the opening of Susanna Clark's novel 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel' where one of the title characters (who is a genuine magician) attends a meeting of a Society of Magicians. He is somewhat flabbergasted to find they not only perform no magic whatsoever, but also think it odd that anybody might expect them to do so; magic having died out as a result of neglect and disinterest some hundreds of years previously. They just talk and 'theorise' about magic.
Is there no genuine book reviewing left? Isn't anybody interested in book reviews, as in the real reviewing of books?
I thought that was what this contest was about!
But maybe book reviewing has quietly died out without me noticing?
It seems to me that Scott's book reviews tend more towards being précis, so I'm not surprised that the finalists of this competition tends towards that pattern as well.
I hadn't thought of that. Good point.
I was going to leave it there, but it occurs to me that Scott does something other than just a simple précis. There's always something added that creatively comes back to say something about the book. There's always sufficient 'reviewing' - at least to my mind
I suppose that's true. I tend to think of Scott's reviews as having a much more substantive summary of the text than most other reviews, but you're right that he always brings in some sort of analysis.
Funnily enough, I just re-read the review and there's more similarity to Scott's style of pseudo-précis than I first thought. I think I should take back some of my "It's not a review!" criticism.
I thought it was accepted (and in fact expected) that a *good* book review uses the book itself as a jumping off point for a summary of the entire field, skewed by the particular interests of the reviewer.
Kirkus Reviews may mainly provide precis, but I expect eg NYRB to provide real essays.
In a way, that's the problem with this 'review'. The reviewer picked a topic that they seemed to have little prior knowledge of, which rather constrains the ability to summarise the entire field. Their only option is to regurgitate what they read in the book.
I think that's a little harsh.
What *I* am seeing in the comments is that (as expected from a political topic, even on ACT, yay!) an awful lot of people are angry that the review did not cover their particular political peeve in the "appropriate" (reverential/mocking/angry) tone. There's a difference between "you don't know what you're talking about" followed by a careful summary of a set of factual differences, vs followed by a page full of rage-filled opinion-based invective.
Basically exactly the same sort of responses as, for example, when Ukraine becomes the subject.
I don't get a chance to read a lot of these reviews by the blog's readers (don't have the time, etc.), so I can't compare this one with the others But I'll say it's very well-written. The summary you provide is as good a primer on Carter's presidency as any, and I might bookmark it for future reference. Thanks for writing it!
I did not expect this piece to be at all interesting. And the first sentence just reinforced my impression.
But as it turned out, once I started reading it, I couldn't stop. Very engaging.
I loved this. I finally have enough knowledge to understand the Jimmy Carter jokes on the Simpsons!
He's history's greatest monster!
That episode (Marge goes to Prison?) was my introduction to Jimmy Carter. I remember asking my parents why he was such a monster and got a resounding 'oh he wasn't *that* bad'
I thought the joke was that he's not actually a monster at all. History's greatest monster would be both very evil and very good at getting things done.
Now that’s a great review! Especially because the book doesn’t actually sound that good and the subject is definitely terrible and yet the review is great to read.
One quibble: it’s not “sike”, it’s “psych”. Spelling it phonetically looks illiterate.
I suspect that “sike” is something like misheard lyrics to a song? Or, the new generation trying to make a new word? Or spelling a word like “lite”? Even Urban Dictionary has a nod to the fact that it’s the ignorant who use “sike”: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Psych
It is probably impossible to figure out the right usage frequency, but Google Ngram viewer of course has “psych” at orders of magnitude higher frequency than “sike” (but this is because “psych” is also legitimately used in other contexts, and we would need a good AI to differentiate the meanings…
Nonetheless, “sike” would flag someone as less than literate, as @Polynices indicated. That’s going to be the same student in my class who confuses every set of confusable words, gets their grammar wrong, etc.
The amount of times I've seen "rogue" spelled as "rouge", I begin to suspect that eventually this will be the accepted new spelling.
There's also an amount of "heard it spoken but never saw it written down" spellings such as "per say" for "per se" and so on. Somebody who sees it written as "sike!" thinks "oh, that's how you spell it" and it gets passed on that way. Especially if they don't understand or know the derivation of the term and so have no idea that "psych-out" or "psyching someone out" is the basis of it.
I’m not disagreeing that is how people end up spelling things out that way. People also write text abbreviations in formal emails to employers. We spend a great deal of time at my university trying to get students to understand what impression that might make on someone who is actually educated and literate. What I tell my students, which remains true, is that all of these errors are a one-way filter: if they are read by someone else in the set that is either similarly disposed / uneducated / ignorant, they will be in luck — won’t matter; on the other hand, if they get sent to someone who is not in that group, they reveal themselves to be “not the right fit”. There are precious few jobs or occasions where speaking patois, cant, or other nonstandard versions are a positive qualification (perhaps a handful of cutting edge, front-line marketing / influencer jobs).
I'm the kind of person who agrees with you, but the statement about a one-way filter may not in fact be true. Note the articles about younger people who insist that YOU MUST NOT END A TEXT WITH A PERIOD (because it sounds...angry, I think?) The next step is/will be hiring managers who think that "sike" is correct and "psych" is hopelessly old-fashioned...boomer.
This is pretty far off topic, but sure… we track what employers are looking for, and if norms ever changed, we would change advice. My guess is that one never goes wrong with excellent diction or grammar, until it becomes pedantic. At the risk of too much digression readers might be interested in this:
https://hbr.org/2012/07/i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo
Also "chaise lounge".
Also “Straight jacket”, “free reign”.
Carter was the first President of whom I have any memory. I find it interesting that neither Afghanistan nor the Olympics were mentioned - my family was as miserable as anyone else under the OPEC oil shock, (yes, I remember sitting in a turned off car with no ac waiting for our turn at the pump) but it was the international humiliations of Iran, Panama, and the Olympics that really soured them on Carter.
Of note, beyond the split screen tv broadcasts of Carter leaving the White House and the Iranians releasing the hostages, (my family voted for Regan but thought that humiliation was too much) I also recall the near daily recitals of inflation and job losses on the news - on all three news stations! (Two on the upper dial and the one on the lower - we never did get NBC to come in clear.)
The willingness of news media to attack a Democrat had cooled quite a bit by the time Clinton was in office.
Finally, regarding Carters civil service reform - I would be willing to read a review that looked at the positive and negative tradeoffs of that choice.
This review takes the commonly-asserted - but, I think, poorly-supported - position that the Mossadegh government overthrown by the 1953 US-backed Iranian coup had been democratically elected.
There are three votes relevant here. The first is the nomination of Mossadegh as Prime Minister by the legislature in 1951. This was, as far as I can tell, in procedural accordance with democratic norms ... but its legitimacy suffers a bit because Mossadegh's predecessor, Razmara, was assassinated by a gunman linked to Mossadegh's party, whom Mossadegh pardoned after gaining power. This demonstration of force, and impunity in the use of it, may have made the voters understandably reluctant to oppose him.
The second vote is the 1952 Iranian legislative election. This was certainly not in accordance with democratic norms: Mossadegh arranged for the electorates with the greatest support for his party to be counted first, and then halted the vote before the remaining ones could be counted, leaving him with a majority in a rump legislature (rather than a minority in a complete one).
Mossadegh's tame legislature granted him, then extended, emergency powers to wield executive authority without oversight by parliament - which was, in fact, permitted by the constitution. After a year, however, further extension of this authority required the constitution to be revised, so in 1953 he held a referendum to dissolve parliament, and grant himself dictatorial power, indefinitely. This third vote was held without a secret ballot, so "yes" and "no" voters could be publicly identified. It passed with 99.94% of the vote. And *then* came the coup.
The way so many Western authors ostentatiously describe Mossadegh's government as "democratically-elected" seems to me to be a case of politicised rhetoric: Mossadegh was a left-wing dictator, so the far left feel they need to voice their support for him. The Shah's government was not democratic either but, given time and Western pressure, and in the absence of the Iranian revolution, it might have become so, as happened in e.g. Chile, Greece and South Korea.
I’m very curious about this comment/story. This sort of thing seems like it would be subject of active debate, but it doesn’t seem to be as the commentor states. I assume that’s for one of two reasons: (1) the story is correct, which is decidedly inconvenient for the establishment historical narrative, so it is ignored. Or (2) the story is so obviously false that historians don’t even bother with by it. Any ideas?
Wikipedia endorses almost all of it.
This review is amazing. I must learn the author’s name.
There was tons of critique of "why not racist" statement already. I will just note that if there were any racism in Carter at the time, military service would likely help with it.
Quote from "Black like me", (the scene happens deep in South):
> An army officer hurried to get at there arof the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon. I have learned that men in uniform, particularly officers, rarely descend to show discrimination, perhaps because of the integration of the armed forces.
Oil like electricity is oxygen to the first world economy. We're not going to stop use immediately. OPEC reduced oil supplies 5% every month, until they cut supplies completely.
When prices sky-rocketed, when lower income elderly froze to death in their homes, then it mattered.
Re Carter's obsession with micromanagement: I was working in the Executive Office of the President early in Reagan's presidency and I was told that Carter also involved himself in wrangling over slots for the White House tennis courts. The professional staff, regardless of their politics, are fond of presidents who are good at delegating (Reagan himself was a superb delegator) and not fond of micromanagers.
My impression at the time was that Jimmy Carter tended to be an unlucky President. Weird stuff seemed to happen to him that nobody foresaw: e.g., even though nobody believed it, he really was attacked by giant swimming rabbit (we have a photo of the incident); or, on a more consequential scale, the Ayatollah became the ruler of Iran.
Another impression I have is that Carter's last two years in office were kind of proto-Reagan Revolution Lite: e.g., he raised defense spending, he appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair, etc. You can see a lot of the projects of the Reagan Administration in embryonic form in Carter's embattled 1979-1980 years.
I remember for some reason a newspaper column claiming that some Dem politician had said to Carter, sitting in the Oval Office, "Your problem, Mr. President, is that you used up all your damn luck just getting here."
EDIT: Hah! Bill Safire, talking of Robert Strauss, but the quoted article is from 1994.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Src38A0Qa8YC&pg=PA2321&lpg=PA2321&dq=you+used+up+all+your+damn+luck+just+getting+here.+carter&source=bl&ots=2czWlM0BXF&sig=ACfU3U1LJxuLSIsJaKS9ZfWRxKiEchNAIQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiG_JTZle34AhWFpokEHcwHCpAQ6AF6BAgdEAM#v=onepage&q=you%20used%20up%20all%20your%20damn%20luck%20just%20getting%20here.%20carter&f=false
That's a good line.
Carter hadn't made himself a big man in American life before the campaign of 1976, the way Reagan was a major figure in 1980 or even Gerald Ford was a moderate figure when he became VP. So Carter was lucky to be elected.
He then wasn't a bad president, but he didn't seem to get many lucky breaks. And he wasn't a sympathetic enough character that enough people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt over his bad luck.
In discussions of Carter's foreign policy I typically hear of the fall of the Shah alongside Somoza.
Andrew Bacevich is still a fan of the "malaise" speech and would promote it in the pages of The American Conservative.
Can't remember which one because it's been a long time since I read it, but there's a Walker Percy novel from the 60s or early 70s in which the narrator refers often to the "malaise" in American society. I've often wondered if that was the root source of the association of the word with Carter's "malaise speech". (Percy was also a white, religious, not-racist Southerner who grew up during The Depression.)
I think the novel is Love in the Ruins, but maybe it is The Moviegoer.
Right, the book is Walker Percy's "Love In the Ruins" from 1971. It's a very soft dystopian sci-fi novel set in, I believe, 1983 (my guess, based on Perry Como now being 70 in the book). America hasn't fallen apart, it's just that the trends of the late 1960s have continued onward and the US is becoming ever more dilapidated and divided.
When I reread it in 2020 I noticed what I hadn't when I read it in 1976: Percy foresaw Red Tribe and Blue Tribe pretty accurately. The narrator lives in a golf course development (very Red) and teaches at a research university (very Blue).
This review is interesting and also hilarious. My favorite part is where Carter is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor and develops super powers. I did not know this about him! I am glad for this review bc now I feel I do not have to read the book.
So as far as behavior towards different groups, I think that is just about expectations. I have a bad habit of this.
I can be a bit of a jerk/asshole/high expectations with family/friends. And moreso with coworkers. And very much so with bosses.
But clients and strangers and children always find me super personable and helpful and charming. Because I don’t actually expect full partnership from them. A coworker should be someone rowing the boat with me, and a boss someone better at rowing the boat than me. I got no time for slackers.
But the client/stranger is more like the water.
Maybe something like this is why Carter worked poorly with congress but well with foreigners?
This was hilarious. Thank you!
This review was interesting but the rather glib style kept irritating me. At the same time, I found myself thinking that this anonymous review reads a lot like the work of one Scott Alexander.
The statement that people under 70 mostly know Carter from his post-presidency struck me as kind of weird. I’m 56 and I remember Carter’s presidency pretty well, and also his “I’ll never lie to you” campaign promise.
I had not known, though, that Carter ran for governor of Georgia posing as a quasi-racist. That’s rather interesting. Nor had I known (unless I’ve just forgotten) that S.I. Hayakawa made Carter read a semantics textbook. (The review does not mention the Senator’s name, but surely it must have been Hayakawa; how many semantics professors could there possibly have been in the Senate, even in the ‘70s?)
Oil prices did not spike in the late 1970s, at least not compared to gold. They actually went down from from 1976 to 1981. Nixon taking the US off the (last remnants of the) gold standard is what caused the dollar-denominated price of oil to spike because of inflation.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/oil-gold-ratio/
Adjusted for inflation, gold prices spiked in 1980. So the price of basically everything went down if you measure the price in gold.
I think you have it backward. Because of rampant inflation in the US gold and other things went way up. Other countries did not experience a huge spike in gold prices (or other products.)
The gold prices I found were adjusted for inflation.
Gold? Who cares? The relevant question is whether the price of oil went up in US dollars adjusted for inflation.
The potshots at Israel were gratuitous and factually wrong.
Not only did the 1978 accords not discuss whether Jews would live in Gaza or the West Bank at the end of the peace process, but some of those spikes in Jews living in the West Bank were Jews relocated after being ripped out of Gaza in 2005 so that Gaza would be Judenrein to the Palestinians’ satisfaction. That experiment continues to be telling.
Israel and Egypt both complied with the deal that Carter brokered, establishing a peace that has remained cold but effective. The deal fractured the united anti-Israel Arab front, opening the door for later peace deals. It removed the Suez Canal, a key artery of international trade, from the list of hotspots. It began the unwinding of a conflict that had threatened to turn the Cold War hot.
To conclude that Carter’s deeply held beliefs meant he couldn’t get things done while minimizing things he got done that were viewed as impossible and only happened because of his deeply held beliefs is a weird move.
If you quizzed me before I read this I would have guessed that Reagan was the one who deregulated the airline and trucking industries. There's this image of Reagan being the deregulator and Carter being the big government democrat. But actually Reagan was an intensification of a trend that began earlier. Sort of like FDR. Hoover initiated unprecedented amounts of government intervention in the economy, which was intensified later by FDR, and people only remember the contrast so Hoover got this false reputation as laissez-faire.
> A prominent rabbi tells Carter that the real problem is Americans’ “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence.” A Berkeley sociologist adds that Carter needs to “come down from the mountain with some hard truths” to help the American people “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods.” Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up.
I find that dismissive tone kinda narrow-minded and out of place?
US Americans are consuming more resources than any other large country and are responsible for A) a huge chunk of direct pollution on the planet and B) a wasteful consumerist culture emulated on the whole globe. If US as the trendsetter would have focused on sustainability as a mainstream goal since the 1970s it would have been a huge blessing!
The “civil service reform” mentioned in passing was what basically eliminated merit in federal hiring for the sake of affirmative action and racial balancing. That’s what was meant by supporting “racial equality” according to liberals by the time Carter was president, not fighting segregation.
The review claims the book won a Pulitzer, but everything I Google says the author did win a Pulitzer, but not for this book.
I'm a big fan of Pulitzer prize winners, so this stuck out for me.
If this sort of thing interests you, let me also suggest Reaganland which, in spite of the name, is essentially a panoramic history of America during the Carter years. One can view it in a sense as an answer to the question “why did the country so angry with Nixon and so in love with Carter flip to Reagan within 4 years?”
Like all Rick Perlstein’s writing, he’s fundamentally a Democrat, but too honest to let that modify much of his writing. You get a book that’s more “America in the late 70s” and less just Jimmy Carter, which some may find a more interesting starting point.
Quite a few inaccuracies that others have pointed out. I'll add the summary of the Camp David accords.
The deal was Egyptian recognition of Israel and Peace in return for the land of the Sinai peninsula, plus all kinds of technical demilitarization and oversight. The only settlements mentioned specifically where those in Sinai, and they were dismantled (e.g. Yamit). There was some non-specific lip-service parts regarding the West Bank-Gaza and Palestinians. As they were non-specific they could not be broken.
As for his negotiation prowess, it has been said that JC almost tanked the deal because he insisted that the peace deal be regional and included Syria.
The camp david's treatment is so bad I don't know if to believe the rest of the piece.
for example, it doesn't mention Israel evicted the entire Sinai peninsula, a territory more than 2 time the current size of Israel, including a city that was built there.
I was amused to observe that this review has escaped onto the most influential social media site: tumblr (sadly, whoever posted did not attribute)
https://st-just.tumblr.com/post/689537177529483264/not-to-be-a-carter-apologist-or-anything-but
Review-of-the-review: 8/10
This is a concise, well-written, informative, and hard-hitting review on an interesting topic. However, I don't plan to vote for it, for two reasons. First, the reviewer (or maybe in part the author?) has obvious political leanings and lets them color the discussion without acknowledgement. Second, the reviewer isn't really adding much to the discussion. The review closely and successfully emulates the tone, structure, and style of SSC's Hoover review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) but doesn't deliver a similar level of interest or payoff.
Still, a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. As always, many thanks for contributing!
As someone who lived through the Carter administration I'm solidly in the "he's an underrated president" camp. He didn't do things out of political expediency. He appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman even after Volcker told him (in the job interview) that he would raise interest rates (a lot) to try to kill inflation (in an election year). Volcker did not expect to be appointed as Fed chairman after being that up-front with Carter - but Carter did appoint him. And interest rates soared during an election year which certainly didn't help Carter's re-election campaign. But it was the right thing to do.
Had we listened to Carter and taken heed to his warnings we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. We'd likely be way ahead of where we are now on alternative energy and tackling climate change.
Also, if you're looking for a better picture of what motivated Carter and understand him you should read his autobiography "A Full Life". You can get it straight from the horse's mouth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html