Learning from Jimmy Carter

David Super

     Perhaps this is an odd place to write about the only president since Andrew Johnson never to have nominated a Supreme Court justice.  Nonetheless, two major gaps in the public discussion of him deserve attention.  One is President Carter’s pivotal role in anti-poverty law.  And the other is why Jimmy Carter could never come close to becoming president today – and what that says about our system.

     President Carter’s Better Jobs and Income Program would have integrated and rationalized many of the most important income support programs that then (and now) comprise a crazy-quilt of eligibility criteria, benefit structures, and administrative agencies for different populations and goals.  Like President Nixon’s Family Assistance Program, it was essentially a guaranteed income program, offering public service jobs to those that could work and income support for those that could not. 

     President Carter framed the problem of poverty among those capable of working as a failure of the job market:  too few low-skilled jobs and bad pay at those that did exist.  This is the only politically viable framing in this country.  (Despite his commitments to human rights, he recognized that that framing of domestic poverty would never convince enough people.)  Unfortunately, progressives have been unwilling to persevere with this framing, occasionally invoking it, then surging off to something more radical, then abandoning low-income people altogether for a while when that fails.  The combination of consistent messaging by conservatives and chaotic messaging by progressives has worked about as well in this sphere as in countless others.

     President Carter’s plan also rejected our entrenched distinctions between categories of people deemed deserving of help (families with children) and those deemed undeserving (childless adults).  In this respect, he went far beyond President Nixon’s plan.  As history has shown countless times, once one accepts that some people who have done nothing wrong still deserve to suffer, it is an easy matter for that category to be expanded again and again. 

     Alas, many progressives rejected President Carter’s proposals, insisting that something better was attainable.  They joined forces with conservatives and white supremacists to kill President Carter’s plan just as they had to kill President Nixon’s.  The result was that anti-poverty programs remained inscrutable and indefensible when President Reagan assumed office, and he took full advantage of these defects to slash them.  One is tempted to wonder how 1970s progressives could have been so short-sighted – yet 2022 progressives made precisely the same mistake in rejecting the Build Back Better agreement President Biden negotiated with Senator Joe Manchin.

     One crucial part of President Carter’s initiative did survive:  the Food Stamp Act of 1977.  The program’s previous version was long on paternalism and largely inaccessible to low-wage workers; President Ford had exploited these defects to propose steep cuts.  The Food Stamp Act of 1977 rationalized the program and focused it on what it could do best:  increase low-income people’s ability to purchase food.  Remarkably, this proposal sailed through Congress on a bipartisan basis, apparently striking both the right and the left as not being important enough to kill.  The simplified administrative and benefits structure, and measures specifically designed to welcome low-wage workers, led to a dramatic increase in overall participation and in the percentage of households that were working. 

     This presented President Reagan with a much more defensible program.  He nonetheless proposed massive cuts, and ultimately the program’s liquidation into a block grant.  But with the program now free of many of the qualities President Reagan attacked in cash welfare programs – disincentives to work and to form two-parent families – it became possible to mobilize significant Republican pushback against the Reagan cuts.  Republican senators widely regarded as quite conservative, such as Bob Dole and Thad Cochran, rejected proposals to destabilize the program’s structure, blocking some proposals and replacing others with simple benefit cuts that could be, and were, restored in later years.  Without the changes wrought by the Food Stamp Act of 1977, rallying Republican support would have been far more difficult.  Ultimately, food stamps might have succumbed to the same one-two punch that killed Aid to Families with Dependent Children:  President Reagan threw working people off the program in the name of targeting resources on “the truly needy” and then Speaker Newt Gingrich denounced the program for only serving the idle and ended it altogether. 

     Jimmy Carter won the presidency with 50.1% of the popular vote and a solid but not overwhelming majority in the electoral college.  His was probably the last presidential election decided by moderate Main Street Republicans, well-informed voters who are basically conservative but favor moderation and will cross party lines in exceptional cases (which, for some of them included, President Ford’s pardon of President Nixon).  Since then, the number of such Republicans have declined, many have become semi-permanent members of the Democratic coalition, and many others have become more reliable Republican voters.  Unfortunately, progressives still overwhelmingly target this largely extinct group with their political messaging and when thinking about what progressive ideas could be sold politically.  President Trump’s two victories ought to demonstrate that this group is no longer significant as he surely would be far more troubling to them than was President Ford. 

     The Jimmy Carter of 1976 could never have come close to winning the Democratic nomination.  As governor of Georgia, he had come out of a party still deeply attached to white supremacy and had had to work closely with many of the worst politicians of the era – including his lieutenant governor, the venomous Lester Maddox.  These associations, and the compromises he inevitably made to govern, would today draw a torrent of criticism from progressive purists.  If Senator Manchin’s pragmatic compromises to win elections in deep-red West Virginia were unacceptable, surely Governor Carter’s would be even more so.  In a country that has repeatedly demonstrated its lack of a stable progressive majority, however, this sort of purity test dramatically narrows the path to electoral victories. 

     I am not particularly arguing that Jimmy Carter should be the model for the kind of president progressives should seek.  Although he had remarkably bad luck as president, he also had difficulty mastering the intricacies of Washington politics.  Yet the very kinds of leaders that master the practical politics necessary to govern are also the ones most likely to have made compromises that many progressives will deem disqualifying.  Ideally, we should address the totality of their record and the totality of their political skills without overweighting any particular shortcomings, even glaring ones.  Broad progressive acceptance of that approach, however, seems a long way off. 

     @DavidASuper1 @DavidASuper.bksy.social