Moral Leadership Can't Rest on Coercion

If you asserted that Jimmy Carter was the best person, the most virtuous individual, ever to occupy the White House, I wouldn't necessarily disagree, though maybe Chester A. Arthur is underappreciated. In this particular respect, the incorruptible Carter's just the opposite of Trump. Nevertheless, I found his moral leadership somewhat confounding at the time, and nowhere was this clearer than in the "crisis of confidence" or "malaise" speech that Carter delivered in July 1979. Almost every obituary describes it: Carter's most famous speech.

And looking back on it, it was one of the most absurd moments in presidential history. "All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," Carter said, and I don't think he meant that what was wrong with America could be fixed by executive order or Supreme Court decision. He was saying that no direct action by the US government could address our alleged crisis, which was spiritual, moral, existential. If so, I’ll argue, the President of the United States has no plausible means to address it.

Because let's face it: the power of the government rests on coercion; it rests on vast resources produced by involuntary taxation, on weaponry and internment facilities. If the US government renounced violence, it’d cease to exist. The actions of governments have to be justified by good practical outcomes that outweigh the procedures needed to generate or confiscate the resources necessary to achieve them. That is, all government activity rests on involuntary taxation. The president might be in a reasonably good position to encourage or discourage oil drilling, for example (the malaise speech was delivered to address the "energy crisis"), by adjusting tax policy. But remaking the American people's psyche: I don't think that’s compatible with how the job is funded and the sort of authority it carries.

You can be an exemplar and preacher like Martin Luther King, Jr., calling us to serve, and challenging us to spiritual self-examination and self-transformation. But it’s important that King spoke from outside the government. A president is more in a position to legalize or illegalize various forms of behavior, to try to get re-elected by pushing tax cuts, to twist Senators' arms, or to bomb Iran. That someone who does that also wants to be a preacher, faith-healer, and saint isn’t realistic.

When Joe Biden proposes legislation, it may have significant practical effects. When he talks, as he does incessantly, about who we are and who we should be as Americans, I just snooze off. I don't think he's saying anything, just filling up airtime.

I admit that it wasn't only the sheer fact that the president was preaching morality and purporting to be our wise spiritual and psychological counselor that annoyed America and me in 1979. (The immediate reception of the speech was fairly positive; the long-term reception far less so.) It was the details of what he said, which were, like a lot of moral preaching, especially when it gains an edge of self-help psychology, uselessly amorphous, overweeningly vague.

Carter urged us to transform ourselves profoundly, and he did it in the haziest and most commonplace terms imaginable, a series of little clichés that couldn't have helped anyone accomplish anything, much less driven them into the sort of spiritual self-examination that Carter evidently thought they needed.

The American people face a danger greater than the gas shortage, he urged. "The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation... The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations."

This farrago of nothingness is an excellent example of why lecturing people in a combination of theological and psychological registers has no particular effect, or only irritates the audience in the long run. The key turns out to be a big vague concept having nothing directly to do with anything practical. If we were supposed to do anything after we heard that speech, it was get a lot more confident. Because we were in a "crisis of confidence." He refers to confidence as "an idea," for some reason. Rather, it's a fleeting feeling that might cause you to do all sorts of things. Or nothing at all.

It's as though the treatment for your painful medical condition was a doctor yelling at you to "feel better" or "get healthy." It represents magical thinking, but it's magical thinking with no content: just be more positive that things will turn out okay, and they will! It's as though Carter heard the American people saying, "Mr. President, fix my psychological condition." But all the confidence in the world didn't stop the sandstorm that scuttled Carter's mission to free the hostages in Iran. The helicopters involved had mechanical rather than psychological or spiritual issues.

Maybe the American people could’ve taken a pill to get more confident. Or maybe a football coach of that era, a Bear Bryant or a Woody Hayes, could’ve instilled more confidence in the American people with a rousing halftime speech. Maybe Norman Vincent Peale was still available to help us positivize our thinking. If, after that speech we the American people had become a lot more confident overnight, would that have helped us solve the problems that beset this great nation? Why do you think it would? What we need, Carter said, over and over is "meaning." We need "purpose." So far, there just is nothing there. Criminals and dictators probably have confidence and purpose. And if you think these banks of fog lead to better outcomes somehow, or solve the problems of democracy, tell me how.

Speaking of Woody, it's a little like the ads right now in which coaches such as Doc Rivers and Jim Harbaugh "call time-out on hate." But "hate" isn't anything in particular. It can be appropriate or inappropriate, directed here or there. Fighting for or against a whole human emotion, like hate or confidence, just makes no sense. "We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose," Carter intoned, asserting squarely and insultingly that "we" (for example, "I") have no purpose. But did he propose to give me one? And, if so, was it "confidence"? There just isn't anything there.

In terms of filling us or me with confidence, maybe he could’ve hired a bunch of cheerleaders, established a national energy drink, or given us some better walk-up music. Would that have helped with what ailed America? No idea. But I don't see why we'd expect it to.

I think, for example, that the idea that "Martin marched so Barack could run" was puzzling. King was a preacher of spiritual transformation and non-violence. Barack controlled "the greatest military the world has ever known," a sprawling system of internment facilities, a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal. Unlike Martin, for example, Barack deported millions of people. Martin and Barack shouldn’t have been morally identified at all because they operated on completely different and also completely incompatible bases. One was opposed to violence, the other was its very embodiment.

I know: Lincoln. And it's true that, as banal and empty as Carter's rhetoric was, Lincoln's was soaring, beautiful, and also plain, which is remarkable. It’s possibly relevant, however, that he was inspiring us to burn Georgia from the mountains to the sea as well as to free the slaves. I'm not sure what gave Grant and Sherman their confidence, but I don't think it was rhetoric. Better weaponry and more recruits, maybe. And also I don't know what role, if any, Grant's confidence played in the Union's victory. Maybe his tactics and resources were more relevant.

Carter said we were all "longing for meaning," which irritated rather than inspired me as a 21-year-old in 1979. I was reading a lot of Kierkegaard and Camus, trying to find meaning. But Carter's banalities were the wrong stuff from the wrong guy. You can administer the federal prison system and the military, or you can tell me the meaning of my life. But I'm not going to permit you to do both. And I'm not worried that you will, because when you tried to tell me the meaning of my life, you went with "the idea of confidence."

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell