Good stuff, Noah. IMHO Carter was (still is) seriously underrated.
I personally think another lesson from "these two presidents" is that sheer dumb luck plays a much bigger role in political outcomes than people commonly suspect. Reagan had the good fortune to take office during a time of economic trouble, so there was a pretty strong chance a favorable contrast would have developed by the time he faced the electorate again. Which is exactly what happened. Just the opposite was in the cards for Hoover, Carter, the older Bush and, yes, Trump.*
Incidentally, I met and shook hands with Jimmy Carter (only president I've met) on a flight across the Pacific about seven years ago. So did all my fellow passengers. He walked up and down the aisle to give everyone who wanted a brief, in-person encounter with history. What a gracious man. And an utterly fantastic post-presidency.
*If you want a successful presidency, it's a not a bad idea to take office when the economy is weak (or weakish). And entering the White House when the economy is booming is politically risky in my view.
A great observation from the more thoughtful, non-blob foreign policy wonks is that every country sees world events through the lens of its own domestic politics. It really helps explain why foreign leaders make decisions that seem to not make sense to us.
A very interesting book related to perspective is "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" by Peter Frankopan. It reframes looking at the history of the past 3,000 years by centering the focal point on Turkey, Persia, and India region instead of Western Europe.
A key takeaway for me from the book was that if Cortez, Pissaro et al had not found and taken over the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca gold and silver mines, Western Europe would probably still be a series of rump states trying to trade with the Silk Road region. They had virtually nothing to offer that region other than the vast quantity of gold and silver from Central America. The history of the slave trade around the world was also interesting. It was an eye-opening book.
Exactly the same observation applies to the rise of China. We often hear how it was Western know-how and technology that enabled China to strengthen its economy (presumably without this help, they'd all still be subsisting on 1400 calories a day; so, stupid us for helping them!). Which is hokum*. The reason China began to grow rapidly starting around 1980 is that they switched from a system (Marxist-Maoist central planning) that was mind-bogglingly stupid and inefficient to one that worked** reasonably well (market-oriented, state-guided capitalism).
*Foreign capital and technology transfer obviously haven't hurt China; I'm simply pointing out that, like any other country, the >critical< thing for achieving growth is getting one's own house in order.
**I use the past tense because it's not clear China still operates under a recognizably market-based economy. I seriously doubt PRC growth rates over the next four decades will approach what they've been over the last four. Demographics alone will see to that, but (ultra) heavy-handed dirigisme isn't going to help matters.
There's definitely a little dissonance in the twin narratives that USSR's communist system was destined for collapse and also that foreign pressure brought it down.
It implies some unresolved questions about how stable authoritarian communism is, and how susceptible it is to shocks and outside pressure.
(Comparing Putin's ability to navigate oil shocks... Is kleptocratic oligarchy an inherently more stable system than authoritarian communism? Or is it just that it's easier to keep things orderly if you don't have a series of leaders who die shortly after accession?)
Putin's current shock is only a year now. It took several years to bring down the USSR. I suspect he has this year to get "victory" or it will become very tough for him personally.
The Ukraine war is becoming a very cynical superpower frontline between the US and China assuming China provides some military supplies to Russia. With lots of ammunition and equipment supplied by the NATO countries, Ukraine can bleed Russia and render its military virtually useless. Sanctions will make Russia's economy difficult. In turn, China can keep Russia propped up militarily which will also bleed the NATO countries financial and manufacturing resources. Everybody will figure out how their weapons work and what improvements need to be made.
Stuck in the middle will be the Ukrainians who were callously invaded by a supposed superpower who thought they would have clear victory by May Day 2022.
Interesting post. I’ll ask the question that the last paragraph inevitably raises: if “American policy is driven less by ideology and presidential personality than we think,” then what drives American policy _more_ than we think?
Probably money. Most of us kinda sorta agree that money's a driver, but it's plausible that it's so important that it's still underrated. See Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen's write-ups on this:
I used to work in a scientific instruments company, which meant spending a lot of time with an international sales staff. I would ask those in Eastern Europe “why did the Soviet Union fall?” And the answer was always the same: blue jeans and music videos.
Minutes after you posted this on Twitter I commented that "The Boomers will have to die before anyone listens." and my account got locked immediately. (Can you believe that crappy app?) It's true, though. You won't convince that crew anything about Reagan they do not already believe.
I am a Boomer and voted for Reagan in '84 and supported him in '80 when I was too young to vote. I regret that and today I feel Carter is probably the most underrated President ever.
AIUI there was some American involvement in maintaining the oil glut in the mid-to-late 80s through successfully cultivating good enough relations with the Saudis that they could be persuaded not to do strategic production cutbacks to shore up prices as they had done in the 70s. GHWB also deserves some credit for the fall of the USSR, if I remember right, for insisting that the Soviets loosen their grip on Eastern Europe in return for loans to buy grain (which they needed to buy because collectivized agriculture doesn't work, and which they couldn't afford to buy anymore because of the oil glut).
Notably, too, all these decisions have had a bunch of long-term costs: both cozying up to the Saudis and arming the Afghan mujahideen contributed significantly to our Islamist terrorism problem, and the oil glut probably moved the needle in a bad direction on climate change. So if Carter should get more credit than he usually does for the upsides, the same is true of the downsides.
Give Reagan some credit - for being the biggest drug kingpin of his time. Entire black communities have him to thank for their destruction in the crack epidemic his policies caused.
If you're going to quote Wikipedia as a source, you should do a little bit of verification. The Wikipedia entry on deregulation doesn't list "major pieces of deregulatory legislation." It lists "related legislation." Some of these examples expanded regulation, rather than reducing it.
Specifically, the 1977 Emergency Natural Gas Act authorized the President to declare a national emergency and control delivery on natural gas through pipelines. (Come on, the title alone should alert you that this is not deregulation.)
The 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act allowed the federal government to control production and distribution of natural gas, and to set minimum and maximum well prices for natural gas. It's also the law that prohibited using natural gas for electricity generation, thus cementing coal as the dominant fuel for utilities for the next 11 years.
Carter deserves credit for pushing for deregulation of trucking and airlines, against ferocious resistance from industry incumbents. But he did not deregulate energy in any meaningful way.
Are you referring to Section 6 of the Act? It seems to me that this section allows the President to set terms of sale, including prices, when there is a designated emergency. So, the President can supersede regulations of the Federal Power Commission with his own rules. In what sense is this deregulatory?
How you read it is much less relevant than how the players and the courts read it. I have no familiarity with this subject, so I don't know if you're wrong or not. However, the text of the act is not the relevant info...it's how it was used at the time.
Two other issues. First, Carter got clobbered by Iran and looked incredibly weak. Perhaps if the rescue mission had succeeded he'd have looked stronger, but in any event, his response was much less than it might have been. Second, he had a lot of problems with news coverage--remember his defending himself against the killer rabbit?
Yep. Just like Humphrey/Nixon. That said, freeing the hostages (in, say, September of 1980) wouldn't have changed the final outcome (though maybe the margin, and probably some congressional seats). The misery index averaged, what, 19% in 1980? Carter's fate was sealed by surging oil prices and Paul Volcker.
Polling showed the race was tight until the single debate that occurred. The landslide developed at the end. Iran was definitely an albatross for Carter, but a September resolution would have been the opposite.
When the Iran hostage crisis first occurred, many believed they would all be killed, it was just a matter of when. Every single one made it home alive.
1. Great empires generally die by suicide, not murder. Indeed, the oil glut of the mid 80s contributed mightily to the demise of the Soviet Union. But I think at least as important was the legacy of corruption and inefficiency left over from the Brezhnev years. Old Leonid ran what can best be described as a crony communistic economy. Indeed, at the very end the party bosses in the individual republics as well as ordinary citizens had to resort to bartering with one another to keep the economy going, since the currency had become worthless. This was even more true for economic exchanges with other countries.
2. That said, the demise of the USSR and Warsaw Pact owed far more to figures like Sakharov, Walesa, Wojtyła, and Havel than to Reagan.
3. With our withdrawal from Afghanistan a recent, painful memory, does anybody join me in considering that we backed the wrong side during the 1979 Soviet invasion? I certainly thought so at the time.
You are right. It's a very peculiar example :) Allow me to rephrase.
When the USSR meltdown is used as lemma for demonstrating the US superior policymaking, and undeniable proof in favour of liberal-democracy and capitalism, then i guess it does steal the thunder of this line of narative. Not US per se.
The USSR looks like it did the bulk of the war winning if you construct your assessment by the most ludicrously pro-USSR metrics you can come up with (i.e. treat the land war in Europe as the entire war). There's an entire air war they barely participated in, same with the war on Japan, same with the war on the sea.
Thanks for your glimpse of reality. I'm old enough that I was an adult then. I think Carter's main problems (besides sheer bad luck) were a) his mediocre elocution, in contrast to Reagan's beautiful voice, b) the Iran hostage hysteria, and c) the vicious regionalism of the Democratic party, whose NE wing despised Carter and contributed to his reelection defeat.
Another great article. I learn something every time I read you. I wish my old colleagues at Hillsdale College would read this, but even if they did, tribal doctrine would prevent them believing it. Ave Reagan.
Might as well induce some cognitive dissonance at least. Let the forwarding commence.
Good stuff, Noah. IMHO Carter was (still is) seriously underrated.
I personally think another lesson from "these two presidents" is that sheer dumb luck plays a much bigger role in political outcomes than people commonly suspect. Reagan had the good fortune to take office during a time of economic trouble, so there was a pretty strong chance a favorable contrast would have developed by the time he faced the electorate again. Which is exactly what happened. Just the opposite was in the cards for Hoover, Carter, the older Bush and, yes, Trump.*
Incidentally, I met and shook hands with Jimmy Carter (only president I've met) on a flight across the Pacific about seven years ago. So did all my fellow passengers. He walked up and down the aisle to give everyone who wanted a brief, in-person encounter with history. What a gracious man. And an utterly fantastic post-presidency.
*If you want a successful presidency, it's a not a bad idea to take office when the economy is weak (or weakish). And entering the White House when the economy is booming is politically risky in my view.
Much better than the time I met George W Bush and he told me he couldn’t remember being 21 (I was 21 at the time).
I don't think poor W remembers much of his 20s. Or 30s.
People always want to make the
US responsible, but frankly we're not that powerful. The USSR collapsed all on it's own, American help didn't really have much to do with it.
A great observation from the more thoughtful, non-blob foreign policy wonks is that every country sees world events through the lens of its own domestic politics. It really helps explain why foreign leaders make decisions that seem to not make sense to us.
A very interesting book related to perspective is "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" by Peter Frankopan. It reframes looking at the history of the past 3,000 years by centering the focal point on Turkey, Persia, and India region instead of Western Europe.
A key takeaway for me from the book was that if Cortez, Pissaro et al had not found and taken over the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca gold and silver mines, Western Europe would probably still be a series of rump states trying to trade with the Silk Road region. They had virtually nothing to offer that region other than the vast quantity of gold and silver from Central America. The history of the slave trade around the world was also interesting. It was an eye-opening book.
Foreign politics is domestic politics!
That's not really a unique or insightful observation to credit to foreign policy wonks. People have been saying that for centuries.
And yet, it seems lost on the vast majority of wonks.
Exactly the same observation applies to the rise of China. We often hear how it was Western know-how and technology that enabled China to strengthen its economy (presumably without this help, they'd all still be subsisting on 1400 calories a day; so, stupid us for helping them!). Which is hokum*. The reason China began to grow rapidly starting around 1980 is that they switched from a system (Marxist-Maoist central planning) that was mind-bogglingly stupid and inefficient to one that worked** reasonably well (market-oriented, state-guided capitalism).
*Foreign capital and technology transfer obviously haven't hurt China; I'm simply pointing out that, like any other country, the >critical< thing for achieving growth is getting one's own house in order.
**I use the past tense because it's not clear China still operates under a recognizably market-based economy. I seriously doubt PRC growth rates over the next four decades will approach what they've been over the last four. Demographics alone will see to that, but (ultra) heavy-handed dirigisme isn't going to help matters.
LOL. Even the Russians don't believe that...
The Russians have lots of self delusions
There's definitely a little dissonance in the twin narratives that USSR's communist system was destined for collapse and also that foreign pressure brought it down.
It implies some unresolved questions about how stable authoritarian communism is, and how susceptible it is to shocks and outside pressure.
(Comparing Putin's ability to navigate oil shocks... Is kleptocratic oligarchy an inherently more stable system than authoritarian communism? Or is it just that it's easier to keep things orderly if you don't have a series of leaders who die shortly after accession?)
Putin's current shock is only a year now. It took several years to bring down the USSR. I suspect he has this year to get "victory" or it will become very tough for him personally.
The Ukraine war is becoming a very cynical superpower frontline between the US and China assuming China provides some military supplies to Russia. With lots of ammunition and equipment supplied by the NATO countries, Ukraine can bleed Russia and render its military virtually useless. Sanctions will make Russia's economy difficult. In turn, China can keep Russia propped up militarily which will also bleed the NATO countries financial and manufacturing resources. Everybody will figure out how their weapons work and what improvements need to be made.
Stuck in the middle will be the Ukrainians who were callously invaded by a supposed superpower who thought they would have clear victory by May Day 2022.
The truth is that the USSR would have collapsed the same way even if Carter had been reelected. Reagan had nothing to do with it.
CARTER 👏 WAS 👏 A 👏 NEOLIB 👏👏
Indeed.
Interesting post. I’ll ask the question that the last paragraph inevitably raises: if “American policy is driven less by ideology and presidential personality than we think,” then what drives American policy _more_ than we think?
Probably money. Most of us kinda sorta agree that money's a driver, but it's plausible that it's so important that it's still underrated. See Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen's write-ups on this:
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/big-money-not-political-tribalism-drives-us-elections
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2817705
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-2020-election-in-three-graphs
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/affluent-authoritarianism-mcguire-and-delahunts-new-evidence-on-public-opinion-and-policy
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/big-money-drove-the-congressional-elections-again
I used to work in a scientific instruments company, which meant spending a lot of time with an international sales staff. I would ask those in Eastern Europe “why did the Soviet Union fall?” And the answer was always the same: blue jeans and music videos.
Minutes after you posted this on Twitter I commented that "The Boomers will have to die before anyone listens." and my account got locked immediately. (Can you believe that crappy app?) It's true, though. You won't convince that crew anything about Reagan they do not already believe.
I am a Boomer and voted for Reagan in '84 and supported him in '80 when I was too young to vote. I regret that and today I feel Carter is probably the most underrated President ever.
AIUI there was some American involvement in maintaining the oil glut in the mid-to-late 80s through successfully cultivating good enough relations with the Saudis that they could be persuaded not to do strategic production cutbacks to shore up prices as they had done in the 70s. GHWB also deserves some credit for the fall of the USSR, if I remember right, for insisting that the Soviets loosen their grip on Eastern Europe in return for loans to buy grain (which they needed to buy because collectivized agriculture doesn't work, and which they couldn't afford to buy anymore because of the oil glut).
Notably, too, all these decisions have had a bunch of long-term costs: both cozying up to the Saudis and arming the Afghan mujahideen contributed significantly to our Islamist terrorism problem, and the oil glut probably moved the needle in a bad direction on climate change. So if Carter should get more credit than he usually does for the upsides, the same is true of the downsides.
Give Reagan some credit - for being the biggest drug kingpin of his time. Entire black communities have him to thank for their destruction in the crack epidemic his policies caused.
Speaking of straw men...
If you're going to quote Wikipedia as a source, you should do a little bit of verification. The Wikipedia entry on deregulation doesn't list "major pieces of deregulatory legislation." It lists "related legislation." Some of these examples expanded regulation, rather than reducing it.
Specifically, the 1977 Emergency Natural Gas Act authorized the President to declare a national emergency and control delivery on natural gas through pipelines. (Come on, the title alone should alert you that this is not deregulation.)
The 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act allowed the federal government to control production and distribution of natural gas, and to set minimum and maximum well prices for natural gas. It's also the law that prohibited using natural gas for electricity generation, thus cementing coal as the dominant fuel for utilities for the next 11 years.
Carter deserves credit for pushing for deregulation of trucking and airlines, against ferocious resistance from industry incumbents. But he did not deregulate energy in any meaningful way.
The Emergency Natural Gas Act of 1977 gave President Carter the authority to deregulate natural gas prices. So that's definitely a deregulatory act.
Are you referring to Section 6 of the Act? It seems to me that this section allows the President to set terms of sale, including prices, when there is a designated emergency. So, the President can supersede regulations of the Federal Power Commission with his own rules. In what sense is this deregulatory?
Every source I've read indicates that the act was a move toward removing price ceilings at the wellhead, e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151601651.pdf and http://naturalgas.org/regulation/history/
How you read it is much less relevant than how the players and the courts read it. I have no familiarity with this subject, so I don't know if you're wrong or not. However, the text of the act is not the relevant info...it's how it was used at the time.
Two other issues. First, Carter got clobbered by Iran and looked incredibly weak. Perhaps if the rescue mission had succeeded he'd have looked stronger, but in any event, his response was much less than it might have been. Second, he had a lot of problems with news coverage--remember his defending himself against the killer rabbit?
Carter got sandbagged by Reagan on Iran.
Yep. Just like Humphrey/Nixon. That said, freeing the hostages (in, say, September of 1980) wouldn't have changed the final outcome (though maybe the margin, and probably some congressional seats). The misery index averaged, what, 19% in 1980? Carter's fate was sealed by surging oil prices and Paul Volcker.
Polling showed the race was tight until the single debate that occurred. The landslide developed at the end. Iran was definitely an albatross for Carter, but a September resolution would have been the opposite.
When the Iran hostage crisis first occurred, many believed they would all be killed, it was just a matter of when. Every single one made it home alive.
Three related points:
1. Great empires generally die by suicide, not murder. Indeed, the oil glut of the mid 80s contributed mightily to the demise of the Soviet Union. But I think at least as important was the legacy of corruption and inefficiency left over from the Brezhnev years. Old Leonid ran what can best be described as a crony communistic economy. Indeed, at the very end the party bosses in the individual republics as well as ordinary citizens had to resort to bartering with one another to keep the economy going, since the currency had become worthless. This was even more true for economic exchanges with other countries.
2. That said, the demise of the USSR and Warsaw Pact owed far more to figures like Sakharov, Walesa, Wojtyła, and Havel than to Reagan.
3. With our withdrawal from Afghanistan a recent, painful memory, does anybody join me in considering that we backed the wrong side during the 1979 Soviet invasion? I certainly thought so at the time.
This is such a refreshing article. Well done.
The conclusions are important in spite of going against the general feeling and opinion.
1. Changes at state level take a long time to become observable.
2. The larger the economy, the longer new policies take to get reflected in the state of economy, foreign and state relationships.
3. Policies take much longer than 4 years to become visible by regular citizens.
4. Does this mean that electing leaders based on 4 year mandates is playing whack-a-mole ?
5. USSR steals again the American thunder:
USA didn't win the 2nd world war, USSR did.
USA didn't trigger the collapse of USSR. It's the correlation of mutiple international events that over almost a decade led to the collapse of USSR.
5. WRT to collapse of USSR It's an odd way to frame it to say the USSR stole the American thunder.
You are right. It's a very peculiar example :) Allow me to rephrase.
When the USSR meltdown is used as lemma for demonstrating the US superior policymaking, and undeniable proof in favour of liberal-democracy and capitalism, then i guess it does steal the thunder of this line of narative. Not US per se.
"USA didn't win the 2nd world war, USSR did."- Where do you think the red army got (virtually) all its radios and trucks from?
For that matter, the Royal Navy blockade was also a major factor.
The USSR looks like it did the bulk of the war winning if you construct your assessment by the most ludicrously pro-USSR metrics you can come up with (i.e. treat the land war in Europe as the entire war). There's an entire air war they barely participated in, same with the war on Japan, same with the war on the sea.
Sounds as if you've read the Alter and Eizenstat books. Both good IMO.
Thanks for your glimpse of reality. I'm old enough that I was an adult then. I think Carter's main problems (besides sheer bad luck) were a) his mediocre elocution, in contrast to Reagan's beautiful voice, b) the Iran hostage hysteria, and c) the vicious regionalism of the Democratic party, whose NE wing despised Carter and contributed to his reelection defeat.
Another great article. I learn something every time I read you. I wish my old colleagues at Hillsdale College would read this, but even if they did, tribal doctrine would prevent them believing it. Ave Reagan.
Might as well induce some cognitive dissonance at least. Let the forwarding commence.