Jimmy Carter is criminally underrated

the forgotten glories of the man from Plains

"You wouldn't have Amazon, FedEx, or budget airfare without Jimmy Carter.”

That’s Gene Healy, libertarian OG and Vice President of the Cato Institute. We just sat down with him to talk about the recently deceased man from Plains.

The standard history of the Carter presidency is that it was an unmitigated disaster, that the naive, God-fearing, moral-to-a-fault peanut farmer got chewed up by the Washington establishment.

That story doesn’t match the hard history. Carter’s sweaty aw-shuck manner masked some enormously consequential policy victories, chiefly the mass deregulation of dozens of industries that proceeded to boom under his successor and the imposition of a humble foreign policy that made him one of just a handful of presidents to avoid starting any new wars. And Carter is alone in modern history as a man who actively rejected the cult of the presidency, the imperial theatrics of the office that perpetuate an unhealthy popular perception of the president as a God, as a Savior.

-gkp