They say one should never speak ill of the dead, so I won’t… kind of.

Instead, I’ll simply say about the death of Jimmy Carter that it marks the end of the narrative of the activist left-wing president.

When he was elected in 1976, Carter was the first of his kind (and not just in the sense of the Southern woman who said, “Well, it’s nice to have a president that don’t have a accent.”). A man running as a left-wing populist, an activist intent on taking advantage of the confusion and despondency left by the Nixon administration, a politician who intended to take the country by the scruff of the neck and make it do the right thing… According to leftist scribes, academics, and activists.

Though he had ruled almost exclusively through left-wing policies, Franklin D. Roosevelt had run as a patrician benevolently looking after the interests of his social inferiors. Leftist activism was left to subordinates like Harry Hopkins. In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies were a radical effort to transform the U.S. into a centralized, completely controlled nanny state even farther to the left than the current European Union. But he didn’t actually need to run in 1964, simply presenting himself as the inheritor of the mantle of the martyred JFK while mass media destroyed his rival, Barry Goldwater.

The voters utterly rejected LBJ’s policies in 1968 in favor of the moderate Republican Richard M. Nixon. But Nixon threw it all away in 1972 in a scandal that did not need to happen and which he could have simply ignored. Instead, he went after the windmills of big media and imaginary internal enemies.

As the 70s wore on, traditional American conservative politics had evidently succeeded in its latest effort at self-immolation. Jimmy Earl was the benefactor.

But Carter, if anything, was also his own worst enemy. By 1980, his administration had collapsed due to incompetence, low-key scandal, and simple unworthiness to exist.

No matter. Every Democrat candidate following Carter – his own VP Fritz Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barry Obama – has run as a facsimile of the Georgia original. Men of the people who had all the answers to any problem you’d care to mention. Radical, driven, set on “transforming the country.” Into what was never quite made clear.

They failed, of course. Every last one of them. Mondale and Dukakis were whipped unmercifully. Due to personal weakness and scandal, Bill Clinton was forced to govern from the right under the stewardship of Newt Gingrich. Obama’s efforts to carry out “the transformation of the United States” collapsed due to public resistance and his inability to let go of the race card. As for Biden… the less said the better.

American left-wing populist leadership can be bookended by the Iranian Hostage Crisis (1980) and the Afghan Withdrawal (2021). It is a saga of repeated disaster in every visible field: economics, public safety, foreign relations, national defense. It has been about fifty years, and it is over. The single question remaining is how it could possibly have lasted so long. (Although RINOs “reaching across the aisle” works as an explanation there.)

It's interesting that Carter’s death comes only weeks before his polar opposite takes office for the second time for a term that promises to overturn every last thing that the peanut farmer stood for (that is, if Trump’s MAGA supporters can cease howling about drones hiding in the closet).

It’s a telling coincidence, and a meaningful one. The historian John Lukacs once wrote that such historical coincidences mean something “Because we think they do.”

What does this one mean? It means that a new era is opening, one born in reaction to the low, corrupt, intellectually vapid, and ideologically demented one that preceded it. We can’t possibly do worse than Carter and his clones. We need to do a lot better.

Image: AT via Magic Studio