Jimmy Carter - love him or hate him - Why?
- I hate Jimmy
- I love Jimmy
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Think the Reagan-was-a-dunce canard is partisan hooey? Then you are either a person with a brain, or a right-wing ideologue. You cannot be both, obviously.
Also think Carter was a wimp? This is where the brains and the right-wing nutbars are separated. You are in the latter camp.
I never thought I’d link to a Christian publication, but to my surprise the review of a book called Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s in “Christianity Today” is perceptive and astute. The characterization of Carter by right-wing ideologues as weak and ineffectual has always been just so much empty partisan claptrap, but what I (an objective centrist, not that you asked) find confounding is that moderate righties (i.e. those with brains) tend to echo that line as well.
[quote]When comparing the 1970s with the Reagan 1980s, we often forget how many of the characteristic trends and symbols of the Eighties originated in the Carter era, a point rarely made or pursued by Troy. Usually regardless of federal attitudes or policies, America was simply becoming more socially conservative in these years. The drug war, most famously directed against cocaine and crack cocaine under Reagan, originated in the anti-PCP (“angel dust”) panic of 1977-78, and was in full flood by the early 1980s. Already under Carter, American society was becoming much more penally oriented, with the dramatic upsurge of incarceration rates, and the restoration of capital punishment. Fears of rape and child sexual abuse, which so reshaped attitudes towards gender and sexuality, again originated in the late 1970s. Increasingly, the roots of domestic Reaganism seem rooted in the debates and conflicts of 1977, in that year’s attacks on feminism and electoral attempts to reverse gay rights. Even the AIDS scare, so often cited as the symbolic end of the sexual revolution, was closely prefigured by the herpes panic of 1980-82. Of course herpes was nothing like so lethal in its effects as AIDS, but looking back at the herpes literature now, we must be struck by how precisely it pioneers the rhetoric of the AIDS years, with the language of epidemic, plague, and scarlet letters. Reagan succeeded so thoroughly because he inherited a country alarmed by the extent of recent social revolutions, a country seeking an opportunity to be “scared straight.”
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In awarding Reagan the palm as “inventor” of the 1980s, Troy exaggerates the ability of any president to overcome underlying circumstances and trends.
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In short, Gil Troy has written a valuable and enjoyable book; but I reject his subtitle.
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Here, here…very well said. My impression is that the evidence of Reagan’s concise intelligence is so definitive that the left-wing cracks ring hollow across the board, and that only the most addle-brained of lefty demagogues find them amusing.
I don’t see the same contrition on the right about Carter, however. What gives?