The Enigma of Jimmy Carter

After going over some of the links in this post, I got to thinking about the enigma of Jimmy Carter. He stays in the spotlight long after his presidency. Some people think this is diastrous, and some think it is a good thing. I think there are three points of view which, together, come close to explaining my current understanding of the effect of Jimmy Carter's policies on the world.

Oprah Winfrey's buddy, affectionately known as Rabbi Shmuley, comes close to explaining why Carter so often choses the side of tyrannical dictators.

Carter wants to do what's just. His heart's in the right place. He just can't figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.

CARTER SUBSCRIBES to what I call the Always Root for the Underdog school of morality. Rather than develop any real understanding of a conflict, immediately he sides with the weaker party, however wicked or immoral.

Early on, Carter seemed to have a fairly healthy understanding of the nature of oppression. He deserves some credit for his early emphasis on human rights. President Obama could learn something from Carter's early positions. Since the end of his presidency, Carter has done good work with Habitats for Humanity. He has also helped resolve a few disputes between countries which were relatively evenly matched in power.

But moralistic purist that he was even during his presidency, Carter soon started choosing to support on the International Stage the weaker of two political entities in any contest, rather than choosing between weak populations and their tyrannical governments.

When Carter helped depose the Shah of Iran and put into power the Ayatollahs, there were some legitimate concerns about the Shah's human rights record. Carter decided that America could no longer support the Shah because the Shah engaged in some oppression of his opposition. But Carter failed to foresee the exponentially harsher human rights violations by the Ayatollahs whom he helped install, and who later turned on him. And he had NO influence with the Ayatollahs once they were in power. Carter's actions helped set in motion today's militant Islamist campaigns.

Carter really went off the rails in support of tyrants vs. their people in later years, perhaps because he thought more and more of power imbalances in terms of contests between the governments of countries rather than in terms of struggles between governments and their populations.

See what you think of James Taranto's take in February of 2008:

. . . The idea is that America (or another Western country, usually Israel) is not perfect, and therefore has no business passing judgment on the affairs of its adversaries. All nations, like all men, are predisposed to sin, and the greatest national sin of all is for a dominant power to exhibit pride. By this reasoning, it is morally worse for an American leader to call (say) the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq "evil" than it is for those regimes to undertake actions that deliberately hurt or endanger innocent people.

When applied to public as opposed to private morality, this kind of above-it-all attitude, this self-regard masquerading as humility, provides an excuse for inaction in the face of evil. To be sure, sometimes inaction is a wise course, because available actions would only make matters worse. But this is a practical question--one of consequences, not intention.

To make the perfect the enemy of the good, to make a principle of responding to evil with inaction, is a dangerous way to approach the world. That should have been the lesson of the Carter presidency. . . .

It may not be too late for President Obama to learn this lesson. But it would be a hard lesson for him to absorb, because of his education.

Even though Carter frames his positions in terms of Christian doctrine, his tendency to conflate power (leading to pride) and evil is similar to the intellectual approach taken by many who were influenced by the Academic Left. Including President Obama.