Jimmy Carter Worsened the American Malaise He Decried
In July 1979, Jimmy Carter described a spiritual “crisis of confidence” that could “destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” But the neoliberal policies of his administration helped make the US a more atomized, mean-spirited society.
Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter speaks ca. May 1976 in Los Angeles. (PL Gould / Images / Getty Images)
On July 15, 1979, then president Jimmy Carter went on live television to address the nation. The address he gave that evening — often called the “malaise speech” — is probably one of the best-remembered moments of Carter’s presidency.
The immediate occasion of the speech was ongoing inflation, caused in large part by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) spiking of oil prices. But Carter thought he diagnosed a deeper problem. Americans were not just unhappy with ever-rising gas prices; because of a series of national traumas beginning in the 1960s — the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the Vietnam War, Watergate, persistent inflation — the American public was suffering from “a crisis of confidence” that was “threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”
The address is filled with romantic nostalgia for a simpler time of shared national purpose and optimism. That never really existed, of course. But some of what Carter said rings true:
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