What Jimmy Carter Taught Us About Civic Populism 

Since former President Jimmy Carter’s death on Dec. 29, commentators have focused on two supposedly defining features of his presidential tenure: his successes in promoting peace and human rights internationally, and his failures in leading the American people through the economic and cultural wilderness of the late 1970s.

This conventional wisdom ignores one of the most important and ironic legacies of Carter’s career: the powerful brand of civic populism he brought to the presidency, but later abandoned in favor of the “expert-knows-best” technocratic culture that had already come to dominate much of Washington.

Today, political and cultural elites tend to associate “populism” with the demagogic appeals to right-wing, anti-immigrant, and nationalist sentiments permeating the last few election cycles. In the words of New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohen, the current era of U.S. politics is “defined by Donald Trump’s brand of conservative populism.” Such interpretations elide the actual history of populism in America. In the process, they encourage a reflexive aversion among anti-Trump elites to any genuine engagement with those who deeply (or even vaguely) sympathize with him—an aversion that millions of voters noticed and punished at the polls.

Anti-Trumpists eager to formulate a compelling alternative should study the deeper history of American populism. They would find that populism, in the main, has not been a politics of grievance and demagoguery. It has more often been a politics of hope, collaboration, and innovation among diverse Americans committed to expanding their collective power in public life. Such populism is best described as “civic.” It is an alternative to today’s partisan politics, putting “the people” rather than strategists, technocrats, or business moguls at the center of the action.

Civic populism is still alive in neighborhoods and self-organizing communities addressing problems and advancing goals their governments will not or cannot address. We should celebrate and build on these examples, bringing the politics Carter left behind back to the fore of American democracy.  

A brief history of populism

The language of populism originated in the Gilded Age from the 1870s to the 1890s, an era of business consolidation and monopoly capitalism. These trends were accompanied by falling commodity prices and predatory lending schemes that threatened the livelihood of small farmers. In response, many such farmers—often in interracial groups—organized cooperatives across the South and Midwest with millions of members in more than 40,000 local alliances. While building and operating their own granaries, mills, and equipment exchanges, they also published over 1,000 newspapers promoting the ideal of a “cooperative commonwealth.” That ideal resonated beyond rural America, attracting artisans, blue collar workers, and small business owners in groups like the Knights of Labor as well as leaders of diverse women’s groups who viewed concentrated economic power as a threat to family health and their own standing as equals.

The movement culminated in the short-lived People’s (or Populist) Party, which between 1892 and 1900 mounted significant challenges to the two-party system. Despite some regional successes in forging cross-racial alliances, and others’ in creating strategic partnerships with urban labor unions and immigrant communities, racial and cultural differences hobbled the party. By 1904 it had ceased to be a national force. Yet populism as a movement of self-directed, commons-building work enlisting the civic energies of everyone and viewing democracy as a way of life, not simply a trip to the ballot box, persisted in the twentieth century.

Various progressive impulses and reforms of the Roosevelt and Wilson eras, New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and above all, the Black Freedom Struggle built on and descended from this civic populist legacy. All of these movements had what Melvin Rogers, a leading theorist of Black politics, calls an “aspirational” view of citizenship: dynamic, pluralist, and created by the people themselves through their own collaborative relationships. Such citizenship is radically different from the constitutional version denied to so many throughout history: It can be supported by the state, but never taken away.

Jimmy Carter’s style of populism

Jimmy Carter campaigned for president as a populist outsider to Washington. A peanut farmer who grew up among African Americans, he was deeply religious, civic minded, and a champion of empowering communities. Upon taking office as Georgia’s governor, he shocked southern politicians by declaring that racial discrimination must end.

An evangelical, Carter forged an alliance with Geno Baroni, Director of the Urban Task Force of the U.S. Catholic Conference and founder of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. After serving as the liaison between leaders of the 1963 March on Washington and Catholic Bishops, Baroni argued for a “new populism” that would bridge growing divides between racial and ethnic groups in cities and towns nationwide. His forceful paper, “Neighborhood Revitalization,” drafted for a 1976 conference convening multiracial neighborhood leaders and politicians from both parties, galvanized the neighborhood movement across the country.

Baroni argued that federal, state, and municipal policies had “nearly destroyed” the organic “human associations” which, for residents, “make urban life possible.” Challenging orthodoxy, he insisted that policymakers in both parties were to blame. “We have failed to recognize that people live in neighborhoods, not cities,” he argued, and “have transferred so much authority and decision-making power to various levels of government that the vitality and problem-solving capacity of our neighborhoods are steadily disappearing.” Baroni concluded with an old and venerable adage: “Power must be returned to the people.”

After helping Carter connect with white ethnic and working-class communities in industrial states, thus helping secure him the presidency, Baroni was appointed Assistant Secretary for Neighborhood Development in the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. With initial support from the president and the ardent backing of First Lady Roslyn Carter, Baroni transformed several federal programs, eschewing block grants to cities and states and instead directing resources to community organizations focused on self-help and capacity-building work with their immediate neighbors.

The First Lady remained a champion of Baroni’s approach, but most of the President’s Ivy League advisors deemed him a sentimental idealist with an exaggerated view of the people’s potential. In his 1978 State of the Union address, Carter subtly channeled their condescension. To mitigate the sense of distance and disaffection—growing even then—between citizens and government, he proposed “what Abraham Lincoln sought… a government for the people.” As political theorist Sheldon Wolin keenly observed soon after, this formulation was a tellingly technocratic revision of Lincoln’s ideal, omitting the latter’s equal commitment to a government of and by the people. In Carter’s streamlined framework, the people are passive: government provides solutions and benefits, the president is manager-in-chief, and citizens mere clients and customers. Ironically, Carter lost the 1980 election in a landslide to an opponent, Ronald Reagan, who ran (disingenuously, it turned out) as a champion of neighborhood revitalization—a theme Carter, the former civic populist, ignored.

That pattern has now been repeated over more than four decades. Despite moments of affirming strong citizenship—Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant” State of the Union in 1995, Barack Obama’s 2008 “Yes We Can” campaign—Democrats have foundered on the technocratic paradigm ever since. Too often, Democrats propose government for the people but not of, by, or even with the people. When seeking solutions beyond government, Democrats and Republicans alike have turned to markets—a decades-long preference for neoliberalism over civic populism that has eroded their standing among once reliable constituencies.

Indeed, both Trump and Harris voters expressed deep dissatisfaction with the direction our nation is heading. But there are also stirrings suggesting that Americans’ ancient impulses for self-organizing, public-minded work remain potent. 

For instance, hundreds of poor and working-class communities cooperate to create common goods and build civic capacity through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s oldest and largest community organizing network (and one with which Baroni had close ties). Meanwhile, the National Civic League’s “Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map” lists thousands of local democracy groups, many created recently. All provide foundations for a revival of civic populism as a public philosophy and political ethos that generates hope, generosity, and empowerment rather than the resentment, polarization, and nihilism our current ideological climate breeds. As democracy researcher Will Friedman has found, the more people hear about and discuss such stories of citizen-led, civic-minded work, the more they believe change—of the kind that benefits all—is possible.

Toward the end of his presidency, Carter hinted at a renewed appreciation for such work. As he declared in his farewell address of December 14, 1981: “I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office, to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of President, the title of citizen.” Carter spent his post-presidential years advancing important causes he thought governments were ignoring. 

But we do not need to be Jimmy Carter, or even Geno Baroni, to embrace civic populism in our communities. We need only to draw on the best of our traditions—above all, the tradition of seeking and bringing out the best in our fellow citizens. “We the people” made America. We need to continue the work.