Historical memory of Carter’s presidency is also distorted by a failure to consider his administration’s policies in their proper historical context. The creation of the Education Department, for example, or passage of the oil windfall profits tax, seem liberal only when you forget that the political spectrum drifted rightward for three decades after Carter left office. Judged outside that context, even many of Reagan’s policies today seem liberal.
In truth, the pendulum started swinging to the right before Carter took office, and continued doing so under Carter’s presidency. Reagan didn’t change the pendulum’s direction; he just accelerated its speed.
It’s important to remember Carter was the start of the fall of the party in more ways than he was the last upstanding member.
It’s a combination of the party continuing to move right after him. And him moving left once he got out of office.
So while I’d have taken him over Hillary, Biden, or Kamala…
For his time he was already too far right for the Dem party. And this article does a good job covering it.
So yes he was a liberal to people that know what liberal means, unlike the author of the article.
The title of the article is: ‘Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal,’ yet here they say,
It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat.
So, which is it? Is he a liberal or not? They can’t seem to make up their mind.
Also, the article says that Carter helped usher in the Reagan era, which is true, but the political paradigm that reached its zenith in the 80s under Reagan was neoliberalism.
We here in the US really need to stop using “liberal” to mean left wing. It’s stupid. Let’s join the rest of the world and start using words correctly, maybe open a book that covers a part of the world other than the US.
Liberalism is not necessarily left wing. In fact, I would argue that liberalism is generally center to center-right. Some liberal ideologies are further left than others, for instance social liberalism, but that’s only one kind of liberalism. The dominant form of liberalism over the past forty to fifty years is neoliberalism, and it is definitely a center-right ideology.
So, yes, Jimmy Carter was a liberal, he just wasn’t a social liberal, he was a neoliberal, which is center-right.
