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:

Our people are losing . . . faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. . . .

. . . too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. . . . There is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.

These trends that Carter described seem mostly to have gotten worse. Compared to our hyperindividualistic, consumption-obsessed era, the United States in 1979 must have looked like a beacon of civic-mindedness and self-restraint. Trust in key institutions — government, churches, public schools, and the news media — has continued to plummet, with Gallup finding institutional trust near its all-time low overall in 2024.

In his malaise address, Carter declared that “energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally” and announced a number of policy proposals to reduce US dependence on foreign oil. But what’s more important to understanding the dire state of American society today are the aspects of Carter administration policy that the speech didn’t discuss.

Carter won the presidency in 1976 with the support of organized labor and with the Democratic Party having pledged support for a number of significant progressive policies, including the creation of a federal Consumer Protection Agency, union-friendly labor law reform, and legislation mandating that the government ensure full employment. But the president and the Democratic-controlled Congress ended up initiating the turn toward anti-worker neoliberalism that Carter’s successors in both parties would carry out for the next four decades.

Despite Democrats’ supermajority, legislation for the Consumer Protection Agency and increased penalties for unfair labor practices failed in Congress due to organized business opposition. Congress did eventually pass, and Carter signed, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 — but only after it had been watered down to a merely symbolic measure, stripping out language that would have required the government to ensure full employment and create public jobs when private sector hiring fell short.

The last two years of Carter’s presidency saw him aggressively attack regulation and the welfare state. Paul Heideman writes:

Confronted with the demand to slash the budget from a wide range of the business community, Carter acquiesced. The austerity so often associated with the [Ronald] Reagan presidency actually began with Carter, under whom spending on welfare, for example, contracted more rapidly than it ever would under Reagan.

Carter also moved to deregulate huge sections of American industry, including the airlines, trucking, and, perhaps most saliently today, banking. Faced with an increasingly dissatisfied business class (despite their recent legislative victories), Carter acted aggressively to placate their concerns, attacking the interests of his own electoral base so ferociously that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was motivated to mount a brief primary challenge to the incumbent president.

If you wanted the malaise Carter so eloquently bemoaned to metastasize, you could do worse than enacting the very policies his own administration implemented: cutting taxes, shrinking the welfare state, deregulating the economy, and turning away from the increasingly besieged labor movement. These measures paved the way for a few at the top to grow fabulously wealthy, while the majority of Americans saw their wages stagnate and their unions destroyed while suffering the consequences of the ultrarich’s reckless, self-serving decisions. Our Second Gilded Age of obscene inequality and atomization is the predictable result of such policies.

Jimmy Carter rightly warned against the country taking a path that would lead to “fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.” It is a bit of tragic irony that he helped lead us further down that road.