In a world obsessed with greatness, Jimmy Carter showed America the power of good | Opinion
Jimmy Carter was a virtue signaler.
That term and its sneering connotations didn’t exist back in the late 1970s, when Carter — who died Sunday at the age of 100 — was president. But it’s true all the same. And that’s admirable.
He wanted to be good. Or, at least, he wanted to be seen as good.
When you’re a public figure, one of the most famous men in the world, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference.
So he taught Sunday school. He confessed to Playboy magazine that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust.” When the nation faced a seemingly intractable energy crisis in 1979, he spent days meeting privately with ordinary citizens to find out what they wanted and needed — the kind of Pollyanna Frank Capra fantasy you only see in movies — then gave a speech telling Americans what they really needed was a little faith.
“We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation,” he said in a televised address.
He got mocked for that. Eventually. Critics called his address the “Malaise Speech,” even though he never actually used that word.
When Islamic revolutionaries captured American hostages in Iran, and when a rescue attempt went badly awry, Carter didn’t spread the blame around. “The responsibility is fully my own,” he told the nation. It’s almost impossible to imagine.
The nation believed him. When 1980 came around, voters rejected Carter for Ronald Reagan, an aging Republican who ran for the White House under the slogan, “Let’s make America great again.”
Sometimes, you suspect, Americans would rather be great than good.
Greatness is tough. Goodness is weak. Which tells you how a lot of people perceived Carter and his presidency.
But here’s the crazy thing. When Jimmy Carter left the White House, he didn’t go into hibernation. He didn’t start painting pictures, or delivering speeches for tens of thousands of dollars a pop, or make big Hollywood deals like so many of his successors. He didn’t even plot a path back to power or scheme for revenge.
Instead, he tried to do good.
He built houses for Habitat for Humanity. He used his platform to seek out peace deals where they could be found. He helped eliminate Guinea worm disease in West Africa. He went abroad to monitor elections, to ensure that democracy around the globe was being protected as well as any world-famous private citizen could protect it.
He even, late in life, broke with his church when it backtracked on equality for women.
“I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He lived virtuously, in other words.
Or tried to, anyway. Who can really know a man’s heart?
These days, of course, the idea of virtue in public life seems to be on life support. Soft-hearted liberals who want to help people are sneered at as virtue signalers — as though it is better, more laudable, more authentic to wallow in vice, to celebrate and signal meanness and bullying.
It’s more fun to own the libs, right?
Jimmy Carter — it’s easy to forget this — was once America’s most-famous evangelical Christian. When he left the White House, the evangelical movement left Democrats for Republicans, pretty much once and for all. That hasn’t been good for Democrats, Republicans or the country.
It’s also easy to forget that he helped heal us. He came to the presidency in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, after Vietnam and Watergate.
“I’ll never lie to you,” he told the nation. Let’s be honest here: He didn’t always keep that promise perfectly. And he could be egotistical. He was a politician after all.
But he at least aspired to virtue. He asked the rest of us to do the same. America moved on. And now — after a long and honorable life — so has Jimmy Carter.
This story was originally published December 29, 2024 at 6:08 PM with the headline "In a world obsessed with greatness, Jimmy Carter showed America the power of good | Opinion."