Return of the malaise
Jimmy Carter’s sobering “malaise speech” was no cure for America’s intoxication with the presidency
Forty years ago today, a U.S. president did something unthinkable. Amid a deepening energy crisis and a general gloom was descending on the nation, President Jimmy Carter delivered a nationally televised speech telling Americans they should step up, do the work, and maybe even sacrifice a little. The root cause of America’s problems, Carter said, was a “moral and spiritual crisis” that “all the legislation in the world [couldn’t] fix.”
At the time, the nation had the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, the Vietnam tragedy and a constitutional crisis sparked by Watergate in its rearview mirror. The nation also was grappling with 11 percent inflation, rising unemployment, and lines for the gas pump that stretched for blocks. To hear Carter say it, the nation was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.” Americans had lost their mojo.
To restore the lost confidence, Carter proposed new policies and programs, but also asked Americans to have skin in the game: don’t take unnecessary trips; use carpools or public transportation; obey the speed limit; dial down thermostats to save fuel. For the first time, the most powerful man in the world was telling people who elected him get your house in order. Asking Americans to self-reflect while exposing the limits of presidential power and prestige was a bold gamble. Days later, the speech would be branded as the “malaise speech;” months later, world events would disrupt the Carter White House and, sixteen months later, Carter would lose his re-election campaign to a candidate who promised to be a strong leader and make America great again (no, not that guy, this one).
Carter’s pull-your-own-weight message and one-term in office confirmed a crucial imperative to subsequent occupants of the Oval Office: presidents should do everything and be everywhere because that’s what the American people wanted. In short, look and sound godly. In the post-Carter presidency, the chief executive should be the essential Magic 8-ball to American life…the outlook for the next four years, fantastic!
But the last 20 years have underscored that a president is remarkably limited in what he can do, whether or not he presides over a divided government. Nowadays, a president will put his shoulder into and achieve one big win during his tenure. Even though the constitution was designed so that the government operates with painstaking slowness, presidents found a way to look and feel outsized. They do this by fermenting a hypnotic batch of performative politics, hyper-partisanship, and executive supremacy. As a result, we get a god to revere but settle for the impact of a televangelist.
Americans have long had a deep fondness for the presidency. And how could they not? Breaking up the monopolies, rallying a nation through a depression; winning a pair of world wars; enacting and enforcing historic civil rights laws; landing a man on the moon, and vanquishing a mortal enemy after a half-century cold war is a pretty good track record.
But at some point in the last 20 years, when the right and left began to define victory in the culture war through fealty to the president, things changed and that deep fondness morphed into an obscene fetish. Directly and indirectly, Americans have invested more hope, expected more celebrity and ceded more power in the presidency. We’ve gone from George Washington declaring that America is all about “the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government” to “I alone can fix it” today.
But beyond having greater moral authority, at least with one half of the electorate, the president has much more policymaking power too. Congress has surrendered considerable power over the years. So much that the president has blank check power to wage war whenever and wherever; near unilateral authority over trade and tariffs and broad authority to declare a national emergency.
But for as powerful as we desire or allow the president to be, what has it gotten us? Obama deciding divisive, pressing policy issues by signing executive actions on DACA, carbon dioxide emissions, the Paris Agreement, and Iran’s nuclear program only to have all of them effortlessly undone by Trump? Or Trump signing an executive action to fund a border wall, despite its likely unconstitutionality, after deriding Obama’s use of executive actions? Or presidential candidates promising to restore executive actions undone by Trump and to work tirelessly, not to legislate, but to pass a gun control executive action? Or a future presidential candidate vowing to double the number of executive actions of the last president “if Congress doesn’t act”? Or party loyalists trained to defend policy decisions made by the president they support and attack the same policy decisions when they’re made by the president they oppose?
Forty years later, same malaise, new strain.
Today, the presidency seems omnipotent, partly because so much power has been carelessly ceded to him. The presidency also seems omnipresent because of skillful manipulation of mass communication. Both of these things are driving us crazy and made worse when presidential omnipotence and omnipresence belongs to the guy you didn’t vote for. But settling for presidential half-measures that rightly should be decided by Congress or choosing to live with policy paralysis because one side wants to prevent the other side from gaining power or sheepishly pining for the next election to “take back the White House!”, we make ourselves stupid. And that suits the president seeking more power to do very little just fine.
“Our people are losing [faith], not only in government itself,” Carter said in his now-infamous speech, “but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.” Carter is right today as he was 40 years ago about the first part of his statement. Whether the second part is true depends entirely on us.
