Once and Future Presidents

The contrast this week has been striking. The solemn ceremonies and tearful farewells for ex-President Jimmy Carter over against the threats, bombast, and bloviations from President-elect Donald Trump.

Dig a little deeper and the disparities multiply. Carter as a lad once lifted a penny from the collection plate at church; his father so scolded him that he never stole anything again. Donald Trump watched his father run scams with federal housing funds, and Donald’s own sons worked with him to bilk charities founded in their name. Carter celebrated the end of Jim Crow in Georgia; Trump wished he could replicate it in New York. Carter was faithfully married to one woman for 77 years; Trump has worked through three wives besides the untold pick-ups from his Manhattan clubbing days, a civil conviction for sexual assault, and felony convictions for covering up payoffs to a porn star.

Carter served eight years in the U.S. Navy. Trump ducked behind his bone spurs. At the Naval Academy Carter was taught that honesty is an officer’s highest virtue and observed the lesson to a fault. Trump has lied like no president in history. Carter was born-again twice and ever professed Jesus Christ as savior and guide. Trump has followed—well, who’s the father of lies?

“Character”—Really?

One could go on but it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The slap in the face—one can no longer call it a surprise—is that, when it comes to choosing between the two men, white evangelical Christians have overwhelmingly supported the felon, the con-man, the biblical illiterate and sexual libertine while never giving a majority of their votes to the man who prayed like no other occupant the White House has ever seen.

Sorry to beat a dead horse; we’ve known all this for a while. It’s just that the stark juxtaposition in the news puts the paradox front and center once more. So how do we understand this? What might be the moral of the story? Maybe that character matters less than we might hope, and certainly less than common pieties have long claimed.

First off, to thrive in politics you need political savvy—the ability to read the room, and the compulsion to keep on doing so. Franklin Roosvelt excelled at this; so did Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan learned it in Hollywood, Donald Trump in unreality TV. Hillary Clinton tripped up at this point, and Jimmy Carter flopped. Like Herbert Hoover, a truly epic failure, Carter was an engineer and believed that exact calibrations on paper, along with hard work, would produce self-evident solutions to the question at hand. As a submarine officer, he would read manuals in his berth rather than play cards with the fellas in the mess. Schmoozing seemed a waste of time when there was work to do.

But the work of politics requires connecting with people. That means learning to channel their hopes (Roosevelt) or fears (Trump) and to cast oneself as the champion who can meet them. It’s a kind of charisma and in this profession it counts more than character. Rallying people amidst a crisis is the crucial test and here, where Roosevelt and Reagan succeeded, Carter (inflation, Iran hostages) failed. True, Carter’s failure cost half a million fewer American lives than Trump’s (COVID), but lies, denial, swagger, and a media apparatus to support them can cover a multitude of sins. Honesty leaves you bear.

Whose Christian Ethics?

Secondly, personal character has to match up with your package of policies—better, with the character people project onto your policies. Here Carter did not fail so much as elicit the difference between white Evangelicals’ professed and actual ethics. His agenda was as Christian as can be. Putting racism outside the acceptable bounds of public speech and policy. Setting human rights as the lodestone of foreign policy. Making health care available to the poor and needy. Caring for the environment and giving prescient attention to the causes and costs of climate change. (Remember the solar panels on the White House roof?) Forging a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. Forestalling conflict over the Panama Canal. Bringing China into the council of nations.

Against all this and more the New Christian Right arose boasting of a “moral majority.” Its agenda? At first a defense of racial segregation in the name of “religious liberty” alleged to be under attack in federal court. When that didn’t play well in the polls, an attack on feminism in the name of “sanctity of life.” The life in question was fetal; whatever happened after birth was surrendered to the tender mercies of the “free market” and its supposed punishment of sloth. On the global scene, America first—keeping China ostracized, the Canal American, and Zionism unmitigated. And tear out those solar panels while you’re at it.

Collective Character

Character does matter but more among the target audience, the American people, than with the president. Here Carter read the room wrong and Trump gets it right. “The people of this country are inherently unselfish, open, honest, decent, competent, and compassionate,” Carter offered. It is a bromide repeated regularly by American presidents, Republican and Democratic alike. And it is manifestly untrue, or only half true. Americans can be all these things individually, but they are also recurrently driven by hatred, fear, self-righteousness, scapegoating, narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness, and pursuit of the main chance.

All this Donald Trump understands and works to aggravate. Such religious inspiration as he draws upon roots back to his childhood exposure to Norman Vincent Peale and the gospel of positive thinking—positive thinking about oneself, that is, with the flip side of negativity ready at hand to project on others when things go wrong. By contrast, Carter said many times that he drew his social ethics from Peale’s great contemporary, Reinhold Niebuhr. But Niebuhr would never utter the above-quoted bromide—in fact, made a career out of attacking it, correcting it, and trying to find a way through the very mixed moral quality of the American people.

Whose Immorality?

Some commentators have said that the title of Niebuhr’s most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) should have been Moral Man and Amoral Society. I used to agree. But in view of the last fifty years of U.S. history, I think the original title gets it right. Americans continue to be plagued by original sin—Niebuhr’s starting point. More specifically, they continue to deny and dodge their complicity in slavery and racism, land expropriation and the pillaging of the natural environment, their fantasy that maximizing private interest will produce the greatest general good.

Niebuhr’s dictum is right: Americans are not innocent, pure, nice, and good. Trump knows this and declares it open season for collective sin even if, or because, grace will not abound—grace never having been necessary for himself nor available to others. Carter knew better, tried better, did much better. But a closer reading of Niebuhr might have shown him the full dimensions of what he was up against.