Jimmy Carter’s warning should sound familiar to voters today. The nation, the president declared 45 years ago Monday, faced “a fundamental threat to American democracy.”
Carter uttered those words in a July 15, 1979, address that Americans mostly remember as his “malaise” speech, when he called out a “crisis of confidence” in a nation reeling from high inflation and gasoline shortages.
Nearly a half-century later, when President Biden and fellow Democrats (and some Republicans) warn of a threat to democracy, they have someone specific in mind: former president Donald Trump. They cite, among other things, his attempt to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss, and his comment that he won’t be a dictator if he wins this year’s election “except for Day One.”
The political backdrop of Carter’s speech was a presidency reeling from “a genuine political despair, perhaps unmatched in any modern White House, except in those very last days of Nixon,” The Washington Post reported that summer. “It is a despair that Carter may have been so severely crippled by the latest gasoline crisis — and by a public perception that he is not coping with it — that he may be kept from reelection.”
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Carter didn’t actually use the word “malaise” in his speech, but that was certainly the vibe of the primetime address. Some people had already invoked the term: Carter’s domestic adviser Robert Strauss said in a July 10 PBS interview that when an incumbent president faces “the kind of problems he’s facing, with a bit of malaise around the country, if you will, a good deal of it, and frustration, I think it’s natural that he would be down in the polls.”
Originally, Carter had planned to focus on the energy crisis in his speech, at a time when angry Americans were standing in long lines to fill up their gas tanks. But he wasn’t happy with the draft that speechwriters had come up with, so the White House canceled an address scheduled for July 5. He spent the next 10 days at Camp David, Md., meeting with mayors and governors (including Arkansas governor and future president Bill Clinton), business and labor leaders, and private citizens. “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government,” one governor told him.
Carter wound up delivering a much more sweeping speech on July 15. Sitting at an Oval Office desk in a blue suit and a striped tie, he started off with his hands folded, but occasionally clenched his fist for emphasis. Carter told the 100 million TV viewers that he had tried, with limited success, to put his campaign promises into law.
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“I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation,” he said. “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.”
He called it “a crisis of confidence,” saying, “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”
Against the backdrop of polls showing Americans had lost confidence in the president’s ability to lead, Carter said that they were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”
Carter identified an erosion of trust that continues to this day: “As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.”
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The Post wrote that almost two-thirds of the address “amounted to something of a sermon” and that the president was “clearly trying to overcome his public image as a weak leader.”
Carter, a former Georgia governor and peanut farmer who had run for president as a Washington outsider in 1976, tried to rekindle that insurgent spirit as he argued the government’s failure to deliver was endangering democracy.
“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action,” he said, adding, “Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide.”
Carter blamed national traumas including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Watergate scandal.
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News stories the next day painted Carter’s speech as a gambit to revive his sagging presidency. The Boston Globe noted one inherent problem with Carter’s message: “The president attacked, as ineffective, the government he has headed for 2½ years.”
Carter didn’t help his standing in the aftermath of the speech when he fired several members of his Cabinet a few days later. The president admitted in a meeting of more than 300 White House staffers that asking for the Cabinet resignations “may have been a mistake.”
Just like Biden, Carter — perceived as a struggling president and weak candidate — began facing calls for his replacement from worried Democrats in advance of the next year’s election. “The jump-ship impulse among Democrats spread from the back benches of the House to the front benches of the Senate,” Newsweek reported, “where liberal George McGovern of South Dakota pronounced Edward M. Kennedy ‘the most logical candidate’ for 1980.”
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Kennedy wound up mounting a primary challenge to Carter. Carter prevailed, but he was no match for Ronald Reagan, who projected sunny optimism and said, “I find no national malaise.” Reagan won in a landslide.
Five years later, the Republican president still found it helpful to use Carter’s speech as a punching bag.
“The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange was in 1980, and the mood sure was different then,” he said in 1985 remarks to brokers and staff at the exchange. “But in the last five years, we’ve moved from malaise to hope, confidence and opportunity.”
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