The (Bad) Politics of Sacrifice
The death of Jimmy Carter this week sent me back to his most famous speech, the one that many say doomed his presidency.
It was mid-1979 and the country was still reeling from a persistent spiral of inflation fueled by skyrocketing energy prices. President Carter had spent the previous ten days at Camp David doing focus groups with “regular Americans” and was confident he had found the root cause – and the right solutions – to the energy crisis.
The President noted that fewer people were voting and saving; more people were losing respect for our institutions like churches, schools and the news media. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” he said. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”
During his focus groups, President Carter said, people had told him that if we were going to beat the energy crisis and stomp out inflation, the country needed to be rallied to work toward a “common good, ” and that he needed to call on us to come together, each person bringing our “blood, sweat and tears” to solve our problems. He quoted one of his visitors as saying, “’We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying.’”
So the President issued a call that “demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone.” That’s how we had overcome previous crises, after all: the Great Depression, two world wars – we abandoned “fragmentation and self-interest.” We took up “the path of common purpose.”
In the speech, Carter outlined a number of concrete steps that would increase energy production and limit price gouging, but then he asked people “for your good and for your nation’s security” to “take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day a week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.”
President Carter lived a life committed to self-sacrifice. He figured we were the same. Uh, no.
The speech was an immediate hit – for the first few hours. The President’s approval numbers soared by 11 points overnight.
But within 24 hours everything changed. The speech, originally titled “Crisis of Confidence,” was recast by commentators as the “Malaise” speech, and Carter was accused of blaming Americans, of calling on us to bail him out rather than fixing the energy crisis, somehow, himself.
Less than two decades earlier, President Kennedy had famously challenged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and we had been inspired. In 1979, the response was “how dare you?”
Carter had made a fundamental miscalculation. He assumed most people would be willing to give up a little in the short term in order to ensure a long-term better future for everyone. That’s the way he had lived his life (and continued to live it till last week). And he assumed the citizens he’d brought to Camp David to advise him were representative of the rest of the country. Nope. Most people were just ticked off about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
16 months and one hostage crisis later, Carter was routed for re-election. As Jonathan Alter noted in His Very Best, a biography of President Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”
Rather than embrace the drudgery of common sacrifice, instead we launched into a four-decade celebration of joyous consumption – of energy, food, drugs, stuff.
Politicians noticed, and learned from, what happened to Carter.
After 9/11, President George W. Bush didn’t called for shared sacrifice in the war on terror; he called for sunning and shopping: “Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."
Be honest. Given a choice, would you rather turn down your thermostat or head down to Disney World?
President Bush was reading the country correctly: a story by Ron Lieber in the New York Times this week notes that during the past half century the percentage of young people who believe being “very well off financially” is an “important goal” has doubled; those who want to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” has declined by almost half.
I get it. All of us would rather hear that whatever is wrong in our lives is someone else’s fault.
I regularly make myself the hero of my own story; it’s those other people who thwart what would otherwise be my unquestioned greatness. And none of us wants to hear that we need to sacrifice for the “greater good” – that’s for suckers.
I was right in the middle of reading the Carter speech this week when a tweet war broke out in the MAGA community over immigration. One part of the movement wants to shut down immigration to ensure that only “real Americans” get jobs in America. Another part of the movement wants to ramp up the number of “highly skilled” immigrants (through the so-called “H1B” visa program) claiming there aren’t enough Americans to do those jobs (or maybe Americans just cost more to employ).
This week Vivek Ramaswamy called for sacrifice to improve US employment. It went over about as well as you would expect.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-head of President Trump’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), said increasing the number of H1B’s was necessary because there aren’t enough Americans with the skillset needed to create the future. To change that, he said, Americans will have to do…
“More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall.”
In other words, if Americans wants to be more successful getting the jobs of the future, we are going to need to make some sacrifices.
Ramaswamy went on: “This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken (sic) from slumber before & we can do it again… A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.”
Because of the speed of the news cycle nowadays, it didn’t take 24 hours for Ramaswamy’s argument to be trashed. Within minutes, former presidential candidate Nikki Haley tweeted: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture.” Laura Loomer condemned him and DOGE co-chair Elon Musk for their “hubris and arrogance.” Steve Bannon demanded that the H1B program be “zeroed out.”
It's hard for me to disagree on the “hubris and arrogance” critique – Musk and Ramaswamy give off all the warm fuzzies of a chainsaw.
But I think Ramaswamy, like Carter, is on to something important with his call for a new “Sputnik moment.” Essentially he was arguing that Americans could and should and would fill these jobs – if more of us were willing to work to develop the necessary skills.
Excellence requires hard work and sacrifice.
Democracy requires a sense of shared purpose, a belief in the common good.
We’ve lost our belief in those things.
We need to rediscover them.
And that part is a message I think Jimmy Carter would agree with. The problem: there’s still nobody who wants to hear it.
Notes:
President Carter “Crisis of Confidence” speech July 14, 1979: https://www.cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/crisis_of_confidence.html
JFK’s inaugural address: https://www.ushistory.org/documents/ask-not.htm#google_vignette
Ron Lieber article on materialism: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html
President G.W. Bush’s “Disney World” remarks post 9/11: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html
How the H1B program works: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-1b
Ramaswamy’s tweet: https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?mx=2