Jefferson Cowie
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jefferson Cowie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That's exactly right. When we think about decades, I think it can be a little misleading, especially when it comes to something like the 70s, because I see the 70s less as a period of 10 years than I do a break between epochs.
You have a sort of post-war era of relative affluence, a shared affluence, and rising expectations, and then the 70s are a period of rupture, and then we have sort of the birth of the Reagan era, free market, neoliberal kind of new consensus.
Right, so I think that's a really powerful way to think about it, that the 1970s are sort of half post-60s and half pre-80s. And Carter is that sort of hinge right there in the center of that. And when Carter runs for the presidency, you know, his tagline is, I'm not going to lie to you.
You know, that's the kind of salve that the American people are looking for at that particular juncture after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and the failures in Vietnam and the Church Committee in the mid-70s, which revealed all the shenanigans that the Americans had been up to abroad.
So you have this earnest guy coming from the rural South, and the South is sort of on the rise as a Sunbelt creation. And I think he becomes a sort of repository of a certain kind of political virtue.
He's a complete outsider, and that's what's refreshing about him. It's not just that he's from the South. He's just completely outside the beltway, right? He just has no connections, which ends up becoming one of his failures, is that he doesn't really know how to run Washington.
Carter runs just when George Wallace, who is this kind of, you know, this segregationist, snarling governor of Alabama, getting tremendous traction in 68 and 72. And so the South becomes really important. There's this sort of political churn there, and Carter emerges as somebody who could win the South as a racial progressive.
That's a really important dimension of who he was, because a lot of people were really worried about the direction of the South, which was a core part of the Democratic Party at that time. And we forget that. You know, it's lost to the Democratic Party now. But at the time, the Democratic Party completely depended upon the South and was losing it after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
To say he's an insider, I think, I mean, we're talking about who he is as a candidate, right? He shows up in Iowa. Nobody really knows. You know, the famous line is Jimmy who? The Atlanta paper, I think, said, Jimmy who is running for president of what? He's not Muskie. He's not Humphrey. He's not any of these people who had absolute complete name recognition.
He was doing full-on retail politics in the primaries. So he was just out there at the plant gates and in the neighborhoods.
Right, and he was facing off an attack from the right from Ronald Reagan, and a lot of people at the 76th Republican Convention kind of felt the wrong guy won the convention. Like, Reagan's star was rising, but Ford inherited the mantle. So they're in a transition from a sort of traditional liberal Republican position to a much more conservative politics.
Yeah. And Borden Bernstein, after the stories on Watergate and All the President's Men, kind of create a template for a lot of hungry journalists. If you want to make it, those are the guys to emulate. Find the nasty, dark secret in the American state and reveal it. That's really central to sort of that kind of investigation. There's a lot of hope. You know, we see it as a dark decade.
But the first half, it's cynical about the federal government, but I think there's a lot of political hope for what might come next, that the whole idealism of the 60s might find some sort of institutional presence in the 70s. You're talking about the Bee Gees, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Right. So I presume you're leading us up to the crisis of confidence speech, which was supposed to be an energy speech. The energy crisis is defining the decade. We're literally running out of gas, right, which is a great metaphor and a reality. And it's causing stagflation, both high unemployment and high inflation, which are not supposed to go up at the same time. So nothing's working right.
And he's given speech after speech on the energy crisis. And then he disappears for 10 days and nobody knows where he is. People are worried about his health. But he's been at Camp David and he's been traveling and talking to regular people and community leaders and religious leaders and scholars and stuff about what's wrong with America.
And he comes out and gives this speech in 1979 where he basically says, the problem is us. The problem is we're too materialistic. We're too self-absorbed. We've lost our way. It was very much a sermon, like you're saying. It was very much a kind of come to Jesus sort of moment. And it was a very risky political move.
Yes. And there were a couple of contradictions. One is you were just talking about the post-World War II boom. Essentially, the promise was you work hard and we're going to give you lots of stuff. Right. And he now suddenly... Jimmy Carter's, you know, in the Oval Office saying, you like stuff too much and you need to stop buying stuff because that's bad for our spirit.
That's a really interesting question. I mean, counterfactuals are so dangerous. He basically spent his entire presidency fighting first inflation and the oil crisis, and then the hostage crisis. And so all of that is tied up with Middle East and energy policy. And it would have been a completely different game. You also have to see Carter moving away from traditional Democratic norms.
He's not a new dealer. He's not a great society guy. He has a few things he wants to do, like national health insurance and things like that, that he's not going to be able to do because of inflation. So maybe that would have gone in a positive direction. It's very hard to tell.
It's hard to imagine somebody else doing the Camp David Accords. I mean, he so profoundly believed in peace. You know, he's coming off this realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and Nixon or trying to rebuild a world order and moving chess pieces around the global board.
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