We have a fundamentally wrong understanding of how the world works.
Jimmy Carter was one man, surrounded by men & women. The US government is 1000's of men & women. A collective, in other words. Surrounded as he was, by men & women who lacked decency, Jimmy Carter, no matter how decent he was personally, was going to bring forward policies that reflected the people that surrounded him.
Like it or not, the people who seek out power, and position themselves next to power, are for the most part sociopaths. These people define good as "what ever gets me what I want", and define evil as "what ever does not get me what I want".
In a village, or tribal environment, sociopathic behavior stands out, and is sanctioned by the commons. However, when you have large organizations, those who behave in sociopathic ways claw their way to the top.
Bottom line. Jimmy Carter was a decent man, surrounded by Sociopaths. The legacy of his government reflects that.
Power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats. This is why power eventually always ends up int he hands of sociopahts and psychopaths, for they will do Whatever It Takes to get power, while more decent people will not.
In a marathon race, any runner to fails to take advantage of overtaking a runner who is “running out of gas “ would loose. Isn’t the American motto do what it takes to win?
Ethics as a purpose was dethroned in the 1500’s, the cumulative effects are showing up as modernity assumes its place in the current history cycle.
Who's to say what is in a person's heart, who is not, who is mostly decent, who is mostly indecent; what are the parameters of decency? Humans are very complex creatures, and most of them change over time. Jimmy Carter certainly performed many acts of decency during his life. That can be said without equivocation. His motives are his own.
People who seek--and it is a very purposeful act--to have power over others are not like most of the rest of us. Leaders are inherently flawed. As are we, for choosing them.
Sounds like another justification for American perfidy abroad.....couched in the language of 'the inhuman nature of leaders'. As if Nelson Mendalas don't exist....as if to lead inevitably leads to crimes against humanity.
Perhaps there's something wrong with the system that has believed, perhaps since it was created, that it knows better than anyone else what is good for them. Empires may be inherently evil...but I think we judge people by what they do.
Funding the death squads in El Salvador was an evil decision......but one of a kind made often by a country that sees communism behind every revolutionary effort around the world.
Politics TEACHES sociopathy. If you or I entered politics - say to do good - we'd quickly learn to lie and betray our ideals in order to get and keep some power. It we refused to do so, we'd end up like Ralph Nader, whose foray into presidential politics resulted in getting 1% of the popular vote, and may have thrown the election to George W. Bush, who won by 537 votes in Florida, and a majority of 5 Supreme Court justices.
So are you saying no one has the right to run for president unless they belong to one of the two major parties, just in case the handful of votes they pick up moves the meter on the election? So, not a democracy at all, then.
The suppression of all other parties by every possible means (including the ongoing meme that voting for one of them "takes votes" from one of the rightful two parties), has left us with a far right party, and a really far right party, and any policy to the left of them castigated as (gulp!) communism.
Exactly. You've been ruled by grifters and griftests for decades now. The founding fathers fixed your system to guarantee that 'the mob' would never overtake those good old boys and their plantations.
In fact I voted for Nader in the 2000 election, calculating that Alaska, where I lived, would go for Bush, and that my vote would be "wasted," whoever I voted for. And so it went. Had I lived in a state where my vote might have counted, I'd have voted for Gore. Though Bush won Alaska handily, Nader in fact got the highest percentage of votes cast there (over !0%) of any state. I can attribute this perhaps to Alaskan orneriness, where a party calling for the state's secession from the U.S. (the Alaskan Independence Party) regularly gets a significant share of votes cast in state elections.
As young people said to the Ds in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was running, get this into your heads. We're NOT your D voters and we owe you nothing. Offer us someone who isn't corporate sponsored and we just might vote for your candidate. Don't blame us for your failings. Like how as neolibs, you Ds support econopathy and ignore us, the majority working class. For example, the Ds did FOR the unemployed, suffering Rust Belt workers same as they did TO the vultures who caused the '08 crash--NOTHING! Yet who got bailed out? Was anything done to prevent this from happening again? NO!
FL is a particularly grievous example. Gore was ahead there when the vote recount was halted. Where were the D protests to an election most probably stolen? Yeah, peaceful transitions, blah blah. When it seems more like no objections because no matter who wins, corporate oligarchy and 1%er plutocracy rules.
As for Nader, compare him to any of the mediocre at best corporate shill and/or war monger at worst recent D presidents. Whose achievements helped more people and actively reinforced the common good?
More Americanism. You folks justify everything with sweeping generalizations. But of course, if big money rules..........and it does in your pseudo democracy....and if might makes right...........and it does in your interferences around the world.......then sure....
To be political is to be a sociopath.
As a Canadian, I find that reduction amusing. We have some a single payer health care system because of a few politicians elected by the people..........who worked for the people.
It is getting worse here as well though........since the neoliberal global order was set up. Perhaps its Mammon Worship that teacher sociopathy?? We see it smeared across the face of Elon Musk whenever he graces our tely.
Too simple an explanation.......if the world were that black and white, we wouldn't still be here. We all have to learn to stop thinking in terms of two answers, one of them wrong. The Great Mother is far more fecund, diverse and creative than that.
Instead of an offhanded rebuke of my point, how about making an actual argument? I never said that reality is black & white, that's your thing. I can be as nuanced as anyone where appropriate, but I see no need for that here. There is definitely something defective about people who seek power, because to do so requires a huge ego, which alone is evil.
Suggesting that the evil argument is too simple....to black and white as in good versus evil, is an argument Jeff. We need to look at the natural world to see what Richard Wolff has called 'over determination'. Which means there are simply too many variables in any action or event....to reduce something to the 'evil' explanation.
And nuance is always appropriate when discussing something so complex as Power. Leaving it out results in simple think........you need to look for contrary examples.....leaders who refute your generalization. There are more than a few examples in recent history.
Because your argument has consequences: one of them being that everyone should distrust government.......because good government is impossible if only evil people seek power. Just maybe, its your system that's flawed....maybe getting rid of the electoral collage would make it more likely that good people would be elected? Did you consider that before jumping to the conclusion??
And then there's the question of Mammon. Perhaps making large donations to political parties illegal would curb some of the inherent evil you see?
I'm perfectly capable of making an argument....what you presented in your one liner wasn't an argument.......it was a conclusion based on 0 argumentation. Remember, in logic an argument is not a fisticuffs or a fight....its a reasoned series of evidence that leads to a conclusion.
Starting with the conclusion is just unsupported opinion....or prejudice.
I agree that politics teaches sociopathy. We learned that in Political Science 101 in an exercise we did, where we'd split into groups trying to gain power. I was shocked at how politics actually worked (though I was only a naive college freshman at the time). Our group put together a really good and really progressive platform, with excellent arguments to back up all of the planks. None of that meant anything, as the daggers came out as soon as the exercise started. All that mattered was gaining power, and ideologies were forgotten.
I totally disagree with your attitude that voting for a non-establishment candidate throws the election to another establishment candidate. A candidate and their voters who are outside the Democratic and Republican gangs are not throwing an election to anyone. By voting Democratic (or Republican), you support the evil establishment. If you are a progressive or radical, it is YOU who is wasting their vote by doing so. People should vote for candidates in whom they believe, not those they think will prevent an an opponent from getting elected. If people do the latter instead of the former, there is no democracy (not claiming that the U.S. is one, very far from it).
Believe that if you wish..........but I followed the death squads in El Salvador. Many good people died because your decent man couldn't or wouldn't stand up to the sociopaths you blame for the crimes Chris cites.
I suspect there's something deeper at work.........American Exceptionalism...America's inability to imagine that others might know better how to run their country than Americans, American indifference to genocidal military actions.
Look at Gaza now......Israeli's have just destroyed the last working hospital, and taken the chief doctor, STRIPPED NAKED..to a notorious torture prison.....and genocidal Joe is likely going to step up weapons shipments to help in the dirty work....not that he has to fear that Trump will limit such shipments. Your country is pathalogically incapable of international decency...at least that is my fear. Decency stops at your America first borders.
One might be a decent man when selected to run for President.......sounds to me like you don't spend 4 years in that office without compromising a lot of what decency stands for. Watch ROMERO...and imagine yourself, or your daughter, as the young girl who has her tongue cut out, then taken to a garbage dump to be shot by the death squads trained in America....then talk about decency....whatever you imagine that to be.
My point was there are 1000's of people in the US government. The President is only one of them. It is a mistake to think that he actually controlled the government. The people who acted in Jimmy Carters name are the ones who actually committed the crimes of his presidency. To use the "Lord of the Rings" analogy they are "Wormtongues" and whisper in the ear of the King. If I want to control someone, the easiest way is to control what they hear. If you have ever seen this happen in an organization, you know how powerful the Wormtongues are, and how impossible it is to resist them. They mock, degrade and marginalize any dissenting voice, and most people go along because they are scared.
When you blame him for the deaths in El Salvador you are making him into a god. He was not a god. Americans attribute godlike qualities to their President. (I am not American) They need to stop doing this because the President actually has no idea of most of what is being done in his name. Until you grapple with the "Blob" who comprise the actual government and take away the "Blobs" power the crimes will continue.
As a non American, the best thing that could happen to the planet would be to see the United States of America break up and become states who's citizens could actually hold their government to account. Perhaps, if you were 50 states it might be possible to know who is making decisions in your name. When ever power is concentrated, evil takes over.
Well Balkanization is one solution....but I'm not sure we're going to enjoy it.
We see the beginnings of this in many parts of the world....American states rights, Canadian western alienation........but what it is fueling is not representative democracy........or better decisions.
At least in the two countries I've mentioned, it is leading the charge to a more divided, fascistic kind of 'ya can't make me!" rebellion, led by the traditional suspects...white men willing to use violence to get their way.
So yes: the unwillingness to engage, the passivity of the general population, and the fact that in capitalist empires the most venal men rise to the top.........and engage in government for their own purposes.......makes governance hard.
Still: Whitewashing a president.......claiming he was helpless in front of his advisors.....is a cop out. And its a cop out for the simple reason that as long as some powerful people get excused the crimes they allowed under their watch....The System Survives, the Lies continue to work, and a Culpable People can continue to celebrate their pseudo leaders and wash their hands of the crimes committed in their name.
Rationalizations aren't Rational. Excuses don't bring back the Dead. And the Blame Game continues. Americans bash the people fleeing the lands past American regimes decimated........for the false Gods of Corporate Power....
And the Beat Goes On. We won't stop it as long as we continue to Excuse it.
I am a realist. I prefer Balkanization because as a fellow Canadian it is a very real possibility that I wake up one morning with Abrams Tanks in the streets of my city, because some President did not like something. Alternately, that we have a color revolution of our very own. It has not happened until now, because we have always gone along with Washington.
Where there is great power, there is abuse. Capitalism or no capitalism it is unrestrained power that corrupts, and those who are weaker will be abused by those with more power. There is no such thing as benevolent power, only power that is constrained by other powers that limit what it can get away with. For me, the solution is to limit power, hence Balkanization.
My problem with what you say is that I don't see our Governments having absolute power......if anything, the current Liberal government has promised much progress, and made small progress following through with those promises.
We need stronger Canadians policies regarding climate change and transitioning off fossil fuels. From where I sit, it looks like the Conservatives want to do what Trump is proposing, double down on 'drill baby drill'......and take the planet past irreversible tipping points.
Balkanization will speed that process, not turn it around.
My experience is that Bureaucracies make bad decisions. They are easily captured by Interests such as Corporations, or Ideologies.
Climate Change is great example. We are being sold solutions that do not work. Even worse, the solutions being promoted make things worse not better. For instance, a field of solar panels kills the soil under the solar panels. The off gassing of CO2 from the soil exceeds the life time CO2 saved. Even worse, solar panels don't work in January which is our peak load for electricity (My solar arrays today were at 9.6V) which means that we are using Natural Gas or Coal instead.
Going back to Jimmy Carter, one man surrounded by a bunch of people telling them that a particular thing needs to be done, will accept what they are being told, unless they have personal experience that tells them that what they are being told is wrong. This is why concentrating power in anyone's hands is dangerous because it is very easy to manipulate that person. A president surrounded by 1000's of people all of who are seeking to manipulate them to a particular outcome will do a lot of bad things simply because they are human and not able to understand the implications of what is being presented to them.
There is something to be said for your viewpoint. I was raised/educated in Washington DC and the East yet have lived most of my life on the opposite side of the country. I don't think most Americans understand what a closed environment DC is. People who go to DC to live/work/govern quickly become "DCised" and their responses do not reflect the broader country or where they may have come from. It is a power center and it's the power shifts that become most important to the movers and shakers -- it's what consumes them. The rest of the country is lost in their shuffle. The "DC bubble" is real.
Interesting. It makes sense. We are tribal, and adhere to those we view as "us." In Washington, "us" is powerful, and separating oneself means declaring oneself lesser.
Politicians don't run things, the rich & powerful do. Political Science 101; see also Tammany Hall. Politicians merely do their bidding, using the deep state and the police state to enforce what they want and prevent what they don't want.
The only people who belong it power, to the extent that anyone does, are those who don't seek it. The rest, as you point out, are power-mad egotists and/or corrupt grifters.
We often compare the President to the Captain of a ship. Insofar as Carter was responsible for his policies that analogy seems fair. But let’s not forget the deeper truth, that the ship of the US state is guided by the “GPS” of intelligence agencies and hidden powers. These are very difficult for any President to challenge.
I agree with Mr. Hedges’ assessment of Carter’s presidency, but I choose to judge him on his overall record, and while I don’t deify anyone, I believe Carter made the world better rather than worse. That’s more than I can say of any of his successors, and most of his predecessors.
Peter Ustinov got it right when he said: “Carter used the Presidency as a stepping stone to the Ex-Presidency.”
It's come to a place where we can't accept half way measures. We need a full complete change to survive and nobody is agreeing to it. Moderation, 20 year plans to adapt won't make it I'm afraid.
And as is typical of elitists, oligarchs, and plutocrats everywhere, they forget how important the rest of the crew is. They're especially unaware how we oil smeared engine room workers keep the ship moving.
As apologists for econopathy, the politically and economically powerful love to claim a rising tide lifts all boats. They ignore how so many are firmly anchored to the bottom. They also assume they have the best lifeboats reserved when everything goes wrong.
That last is not a metaphor--the few know the econ system is terminal and that climate change is real. They just think they can buy their way out as they have for all else they want, including entire governments. They plan to ride out the devastation on their megayachts and private islands. They're in for a rude awakening when they come for new supplies and maintenance. We left behinds won't have to be helpful.
Thank you for laying out this critique of Carter’s record as president. I generally remember him favorably, but I was born in 1974 and remember him more for his acts after leaving the White House than for his actions and decisions in office.
Given that unfortunate history, and the unapologetic service of every more recent president to Empire, to what extent is Carter’s legacy worthy of any praise?
Setting aside deification (which is too often the reaction of Americans to celebrity), it seems to me that a president with the prescience to put solar panels on the White house in the 1970s is worth celebrating, despite his unfortunately voluminous faults that Hedges appropriately lays out here.
To those who write that Chris' reality check has been mis-timed:
Too soon they say. Dancing on his grave, they say. And I say, bravo Chris for having the guts to remind us of the truth, before the MSM and all the power elites continue the brainwashing of the public. Yes, solar panels on the White House was an excellent move, but does it really cancel out supporting the massacres in East Timor? The support for the dictator in Iran, the Shah and his Savak torturers? .......and everything else on the list that Chris has provided us with?
As to those who say that the whole ship is such a powerful body that the poor sod of a captain has no chance of turning it around. I then ask, why did he not say so during his years of 'penance'? Why did he not tell us about these dark forces that really control the ship of state? I don't suppose he would not have lived to celebrate his 100th birthday if he had dared to do that!
Carter is responsible for Rush Limbaugh and his audio hellspawn because he set the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in motion. People forget that the Reagan Administration pulled the plug a decade later. This is a major reason that American local, state and national politics are so messed up and we have a far right and Christian Nationalist propaganda organ that can spew hate and division that would have made Josef Goebbels green with envy.
Neoliberal "Demcrats" combined with the "New Left" betrayed the New Deal focus on the middle class and working poor. Founding Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter played a big part in this.
How did he "set the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in motion"? I've always blamed Reagan for the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and every other succeeding party, since any Congress could have put it back anytime since.
His appointed FCC chairman did not enforce violations of the Fairness Doctrine. It progressively flatlined during the Reagan Administration and it was not renewed. Reagan takes the hit, but it started years before.
Thank you. That is helpful. So, getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was a bipartisan effort, which is why neither party has restored it. One more indication that the parties are as one, and it serves both their interest that we be at each other's throats.
Chris’s analysis is absolutely correct but fails by omitting one thing. Carter was probably the best it gets. No President in office will be better, all will probably be worse. We have to stop thinking of the American president is a Superman that can deliver his promises, that won’t be led by the nose by his advisors and the unelected permanent state . Carter was particularly naive and wished to please. It’s important to remember the disastrous eagle claw operation that he approved idiotically, after being given military advice, to rescue the Iranian hostages which led to total disaster and failure. I remember him sitting in the situation room grinning inanely surrounded by advisors waiting for the latest news after the failure believing that some form of miracle would happen and the rescue would succeed and salvage his failing presidency, of course it didn’t.
We must remember one president and a band of enthusiastic officers climbing up onto the bridge deck of the Good ship USA believing they are now in control and can turn the ship round, while beneath them decks and decks of saboteurs who have a completely different commitment are ramming spanner’s into the works determined and able to make sure the ship does not deviate from where they want it to go.
We have to stop believing Presidents can be our salvationists. In our passive observationalist role we will always be betrayed .
I was waiting for Chris Hedges’ evaluation. I think it was fair and objective. We elect presidents but they are actually emperors. I don’t know if the presidents themselves know this before they’re in power but it must become quickly obvious that we have this big thing we have to keep going at any cost. I liked Carter but lionization is not something I do anymore in my old age.
I do not "Deify" anyone. I see Chris's analysis as mostly fair, yet a bit poorly timed. The man passed away only yesterday; how about waiting a week to allow for him to be respectfully mourned? I know-he did some things which were not "nice" or fair. To this nation and to others. But I echo others here who say that his overall legacy, although Chris's thinks it's a form of "penance", shows a man devoted to doing good for others and the world. I won't deify him, but I will remind Mr. Hedges and others that if he were to be our president right now, instead of Felon Trump (soon to be, again) perhaps our nation would be much less falling apart and much more humane overall. I thank Mr. Carter for trying - despite many errors, but trying- to do things to help humanity.
Turn your wrath more now to Trump, Chris, because he truly deserves it. Jimmy Carter was no Felon. Jesus, I believe, would ask us not to judge but look at the better "angels" in other men's nature. Jimmy Carter certainly deserves that.
Sorry but funding the right wing and their death squads in El Salvador did diddly squat for humanity. I've long been horrified by how little most Americans....or Canadians for that matter....know or care about the people of Latin America.
Destroying those kids' futures doesn't seem to matter....but when they show up at your border, oh boy.....does the hatred rise quickly.
. . . or from the presidents who preceded him: Truman (A-bomb, Korean War), Eisenhower (McCarthy, Cold War, Nukes), Kennedy & Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon, who pursued the same aggressive policies.
Carter's "sin" was as a relatively inexperienced backwater governor to have little knowledge of foreign affairs. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and the discrediting of Nixon, who was versed in international politics and had Henry Kissinger as a tutor, Carter took Brzezinski as his foreign affairs guru, without knowing much about him. This refugee Pole was a determined Cold Warrior, who installed an aggressive anti-Soviet policy that resulted in most of the foreign affairs crimes that Hedges accuses Carter of, while the president was focussed on curing domestic ills - like discrimination and government reform. Again with Volker, Carter's inexperience in national finance led to his taking advice from establishment economists in appointing him, and then couldn't get rid of him. Inflation hurts creditors like banks, and benefits debtors, like you and me.
Carter inherited Iran's hostility from previous administrations, and again had to rely on neoliberal "experts," while Nixon, paradoxically, might have handled the Iranian hostage crisis better. Again, Carter was out of his depth in foreign affairs.
Carter's presidency shows that even an honest and principled person can do harm in foreign affairs, but Hedges can't argue that that hollow man, Ron Reagan, did any better. Reagan stole the hostage release from Carter by treasonous under-the-table dealing with the Ayatollah, and then took credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has benefitted us nothing.
The ship of state is simply too large for one person to turn around. Great power conflict is the law of our era, and only the nuclear threat keeps our wars localized. When global war is in abeyance, terrorism takes over. Conflict is what moves history forward - toward what is anyone's guess. Be thankful if you live in the U.S., where privilege is widespread, and we make our own unhappiness.
You also have become quite adept at making the unhappiness of much of the third world. Rationalize it as you wish...........imagining that anything American covert operations have done........or will do, in the rest of the world, is no ones fault because thats the way the world is...........is hogwash.
America could have minded her own business in many cases. Instead, she spent billions and wasted perhaps as many lives........attempting to manage everything for the benefit of her corporations. And still......most of you think Russia is the threat???!!!
As you give Carter a pass for his relative inexperience and supposed naivete, you seem to be discounting the level of intense, overweening drive and ambition it takes to ascend to the most powerful post in world politics.
To quote the character of Carl Van Loon from the film Limitless (I know, stupid blockbuster movie but the sleazy character of Van Loon was spot-on capitalist pirate), "You haven't had to climb up all the greasy little rungs... you haven't had to charm or bribe or threaten your way to a seat at that table."
No one ascends to the presidency in the US without a strong streak of psychopathy. If Carter was as naive and idealistic as you depict him, he would have been dead in a light plane crash or other "mishap" before 1977.
I'm cynical, but you outdo me. My cynicism - or realism - tells me it takes all kinds to make a functioning society, and since leaders are necessary to lead a civilized society, we are lucky that some people are gifted with at least a streak of psychopathy. The alternative to a functioning civilized society is a "War of All against All" (Thomas Hobbes). If Carter was a secret psychopath, he hid it well. And he paid for his viciousness by being replaced by that great humanitarian, Ron Reagan. Nothing he did in the 40 years after he left office suggests a psychopathic personality.
That's not the only alternative. A much better one, for humans and, more importantly, the Earth and the rest of the life here, would be a much smaller human population living naturally and tribally. Humans are so ignorant of natural history and ecology that they think that this grossly overpopulated (by humans) planet with humans killing & destroying everything is the only way to live. Not at all true.
As with so many other problems, starting with environmental ones, human overpopulation is the biggest problem here. In naturally small societies, leaders are accountable to everyone, and sociopaths & psychopaths are not only not allowed to be in power, they're thrown out of the societies (a much better alternative to prison or direct execution).
I also recommend Hedges' book When Atheism Becomes Religion if just for his discussion of idealism vs. cynicism. By Hedges' definition, I really don't mind being called a cynic though, in the typical way that people mean it, I don't think it sums up my perspective. I can't remember who originally coined it but I always liked the term "sunny macabre realist."
As far as Carter's noble deeds after he left office, it brings to mind a quote from Jean Paul takes-one-to-know-one Sartre who was legitimately brave in fighting fascism even as he sexually abused numerous women and girls: "Everything is permitted the hero." A really high-end, functional so-called psychopath knows it takes a whole lot of virtue signalling soap to clean the dirt off their hands either to compensate for ill deeds or to distract future dupes or both.
Not that everyone who dedicates their lives to philanthropy is necessarily a secret psycho but neither does it really prove anything about their character. I worked for years in advocacy for survivors of domestic abuse and can attest that most abusers play the hero role publicly and many tend to gravitate to "rescuing" professions. The irony of this I discovered is that the advocacy arena itself harbors a good supply of covert abusers who wreak havoc behind the scenes. But it makes sense since studies of spousal abusers and killers in prison settings found that these types channel far more psychic energy into "image management" than average. And if someone's going to take the pains to manage their image, why wouldn't they pretend to be spectacular rather than just mediocre specimens?
I admit to being glib about whether Carter and other world leaders are psychopathic because I'm not sure how much I even believe in the common conception of it. Instead of the typical view that psychopathy is inherent and genetic and that psychopaths are totally devoid of empathy, I lean to the arguments that most supposed psychopaths have the capacity for empathy but are just extremely selective in how they apply it and that, due to learned patterns of thinking, develop a kind of "off" switch when it suits them to dehumanize select targets. After all, there's no such thing as a "genetic epidemic" and some argue that rates of various antisocial personality disorders are exploding in the US and other first world countries which goes against the genetic neurodiverse view.
In support of the nurture perspective, there's something in forensic psychology called "neutralization" (https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46) which itself bears a bit of resemblance to something late French political philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (whom I discovered in the bibliography of Hedges' book on the organized atheist cult) calls "instrumentalism."
I keep the quote from Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in Concentration Camps on file because it often seems relevant these days:
"... the totalitarian power demands that its subjects restrict themselves in thought and deed to instrumentality and treat every action as if it were a means to something else rather than as an end in itself. In the realm of material production, the fulfillment of that demand does not yield particularly brilliant results, as expanding bureaucracies and the loss of personal initiative present formidable obstacles. In the domain of moral conduct, however, the demand is far more productive. The question is often asked how 'ordinary people,' 'decent husbands and fathers' could have committed so many atrocities. Where was their conscience in all of this? The answer is by usurping social goals and restricting people to instrumentalist thinking, the totalitarian power manages to have its subjects accomplish whatever tasks they are assigned without its having to disturb the individual's moral structure at all. Guards who committed atrocities never stopped distinguishing between good and evil. Their moral faculty had not withered away. They simply believed the atrocity was in fact a 'good thing,' and thus not an atrocity at all—because the state, custodians of the standards of good and evil— told them so. The guards were not deprived of a moral sensibility but provided with a new one."
Perhaps it was Carter's own parareligious true-believerism in cultish anti-socialism that "neutralized" his conscience and made him somewhat "instrumentalist" towards the atrocities in Argentina and led him to "manufacture consent" towards atrocities in East Timor while in office. In any case, that would be a typical ailment among US elites. According to Chomsky's five filters concept, no one would get anywhere near high office in the US if they didn't suffer from it.
Thanks for this. It helps me clarify aspects of what we call psychopathy. It occurs to me that under your definition, many or most of us are capable of action that could be considered psychopathic. Most of us are capable of turning off our empathy for others, and for adopting ethical standards that are taught to us by teachers, employers, and even by media and entertainment. Thus people in public speak of "good guys" and "bad guys" that they learn from movies based on comic books.
I think Chris Hedges has written quite a bit about culture being one of the vectors of narcissism in the US.
But it was another argument from Hedges' book on organized atheism that really stuck in my brain, which is that, if Darwin and the bible agree on one thing, it's the "original sin" and "primal nature" are exactly the same. thing and something all of us have equal responsibility to keep in check.
it makes sense to me though some get very upset at the idea that we all have at least the capacity (if not the stomach or the will) to do really, really bad things and that we all have to be vigilant about not slip-sliding into rationalization and hypocrisy. For instance, take the social media fad of people humble-bragging about being "empaths." The implication is generally that these sensitive souls were born this way. But what's ironically insensitive and maybe even downright callous about going so far as to codify the self-labeling is that most would never consider that claiming only a select group of people have the extra dollop of this positive trait might be little more than old timey eugenics. In any event, they're not acknowledging the darker "flipside" implication of the same argument: that, if some special souls were born with more of this wonderful thing, this means other more "lowly" (less human?) beings must have been born with a deficit.
According to Todorov (and Hedges and Arendt and Popper, etc.), this is the essence of scientism which in turn is the central earmark of totalitarianism. Plus, as the MacArthur Foundation's infamous "minority report" law and neuroscience project showed, dividing people into moral castes will inevitably end up dehumanizing all the usual targets: minorities, the poor and any potentially insurgent foreign ethnic group that happens to be sitting on a lot of oil, gas or mineral deposits that the west wants. Reading through the citations of some of the project's "genetic crime" theories and studies was quite horrifying because nearly all the founding research was racialized, particularly the MAO-A or "warrior gene" theory.
So maybe the empathic caste concept isn't so groovy after all. GK Chesterton even poked fun of the deceptive and kinder-gentler packaging that eugenics is always first presented in ten years before the rise of Hitler. One of his more famous quotes:
“Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same."
If you read the study on neutralization, I think the authors rather subtly imply the "bad seed" arguments that antisocial traits are inborn are a bit beside the point if people can learn to selectively spellbind themselves out of feeling guilt, shame or stigma. It might take being trained from birth to really internalize the mental trick, a violentizing upbringing and, as you pointed out, some cultural facilitation to produce a proper psychopath. But it appears doable without any real need for genetic influence.
I'm not sure that Chesterton would approve of your citing experts like Todorov and Hitler in support of an argument that could be perhaps more clearly put in simpler language.
Dual citizen writing from Argentina... Thank you. I remember a documentary interview with Derian in which she described a visit to Argentina during the Dirty War and learning of a particular form of torture performed by the Argentine military on female detainees which involved placing live rats in women's vaginas. I don't remember if it was Derian or a different interview subject describing another reported torture technique of electrocuting babies in front of their parents. But I do remember that, in the interview, Derian alludes to reporting details like this to the Carter administration.
I had a sense Derian was trying to convey that it was gruesome details like this that made it all the more unconscionable that the administration pulled its punches in trying to stop the atrocities whether this was due to the influence of Brzezinski or whether Brzezinski was just playing lightning rod. In any event, the declassified documents apparently include a 1979 memo from Brzezinski to Cyrus Vance written two years after Derian's visit to Argentina: “I think to take steps now, which could be interpreted as punitive, would be to invite criticism from moderate and conservative sectors in the U.S. at a time when we need their support on other issues. Moreover, I don’t think it would be effective."
As much as it's choking me, I'll skip the tangent about sociopathy being a prerequisite for high office in some countries. But, speaking of which, during Obama's supposedly kumbaya visit to Buenos Aires during which the agreement with Macri was formed to declassify documents showing US participation in the Dirty War as well as Carter's "too little, too late" response, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo weren't buying it and there were mass demonstrations protesting the insulting irony of Obama timing the visit on the 40th anniversary of the Dirty War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ1p1B4lYWk
This brings to mind a very useful expression in Spanish-- "No odies al chancho sino a quien lo engordó" or "Don't hate the pig but the one who fed it." The Argentine left knows precisely who's filling the trough. But flag burning and all, I should point out we had no fear bringing our dual citizen children to these demonstrations and to meet the Abuelas. At least at that time, it was relatively rare for demonstrations to turn violent and Argentines tend to blame power and politics, not individual North Americans. Plus Argentine progressives reserve a good amount of hatred for their own pigs. Consequently the hostility was against Macri for summoning the swill and against the US administration because many in Argentina sensed Obama's declassification gesture and apology were merely lube for yet more screwing. As predicted, a few months later it was clear the visit was intended to pave the way for the erection of US military bases in Argentina, particularly along the borders of countries which weren't cooperating with US economic schemes. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/argentina-s-new-government-accepts-u-s-military-bases/
Also as much as it chokes me to skip the digression about the role of the US and dark money organizations like the Atlas Network in bringing Trump's more psychotic clone Javier Milei to power in Argentina, suffice it to say it looks like a continuation of Condor-lite and is clearly driven by the same neoliberal cult agenda as all the other international horrors Mr. Hedges lists. But as people increasingly starve in this county and austerity fans the flames of desperation and chaos, I'm not sure how long things will remain "lite" before the country explodes and provides the longed-for excuse to launch another dirty war. Then, depending on which party is in power, the US will respond by doing another ineffectual hand-wringing routine or will feed the pigs (or both).
We need to keep being reminded of the details of America's long history of interference........violent interference at that........in other people's countries.
To know the half of it would keep you busy.........and depressed........for at least a decade.
To radically bastardize Gloria Steinem, the truth will set you free but first it will depress you. Then it will piss off and I guess some point after that comes the setting free part.
I followed what I could while teaching and parenting........but I keep learning more in retirement and must say, I never get over the outrage. Years ago I read a lot of what Derrick Jenson wrote.........his A COUNTRY OF MAKE BELIEVE...galvanized me. He claimed America has always been a fascist state, and had lots of evidence from the last century to corroborate it.
How you folks treated the Wobblies is a case in point...young working class boys hung from bridges and castrated....the treatment of black workers in the thirties....it was all very eye popping....
and I suspect, not much known about in Amerika even today. There's something terminally nasty has been allowed to grow up in the midst of American prosperity...though I know it doesn't infect all Americans. I've come to wonder if its the arch Capitalism that does it??
Or is it that need to feel special, exceptional, good??? Projecting the negative bits that are in all of us, onto the 'other' may be the most sure fire way to take the well paved easy road to Hell. Ask google for a list of countries America is sanctioning now....or has in the past. Ask for the stats on the hunger its self righteousness visits on the children around the world....
It's enough to stop the heart, permanently. I'm not sure either, if its forgivable.
As Milei pushes Argentina towards the "American model" and as things have become more desperate here, I've wondered how long the politically mobilized underclasses will be able to maintain this traditional and rather generous tendency to blame power and not people for the awful policies the US has foisted on Latin America.
In short, like harbingers of doom, the sex tourists have started descending in droves to capitalize on the growing hunger and panic. Unrestrained rage will probably follow. Any Yanks who have Argentina on their bucket lists should book their trips sooner rather than later because that beautiful, generous spirit that made Buenos Aires one of the safest major cities on the continent may soon dry up.
I agree with the assessment of Carter's presidency. He might have done better if he had come into office with more experience of the complexity and duplicity that plague the Federal government. His later life seems like a model of public service.
Wasn't Carter also responsible for the Mx missile program and putting multiple warhead nuclear missiles on trucks moving around the interstate highway system to keep them less vulnerable to Russia?
Chris Hedge's summary of Carter's legacy is, IMO, right on the money. His presidential record was abysmal, and all his later 'good works' do not balance or cancel out that legacy.
We have a fundamentally wrong understanding of how the world works.
Jimmy Carter was one man, surrounded by men & women. The US government is 1000's of men & women. A collective, in other words. Surrounded as he was, by men & women who lacked decency, Jimmy Carter, no matter how decent he was personally, was going to bring forward policies that reflected the people that surrounded him.
Like it or not, the people who seek out power, and position themselves next to power, are for the most part sociopaths. These people define good as "what ever gets me what I want", and define evil as "what ever does not get me what I want".
In a village, or tribal environment, sociopathic behavior stands out, and is sanctioned by the commons. However, when you have large organizations, those who behave in sociopathic ways claw their way to the top.
Bottom line. Jimmy Carter was a decent man, surrounded by Sociopaths. The legacy of his government reflects that.
Power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats. This is why power eventually always ends up int he hands of sociopahts and psychopaths, for they will do Whatever It Takes to get power, while more decent people will not.
In a marathon race, any runner to fails to take advantage of overtaking a runner who is “running out of gas “ would loose. Isn’t the American motto do what it takes to win?
Ethics as a purpose was dethroned in the 1500’s, the cumulative effects are showing up as modernity assumes its place in the current history cycle.
That is a very decent assessment, and well explained. I agree.
Who's to say what is in a person's heart, who is not, who is mostly decent, who is mostly indecent; what are the parameters of decency? Humans are very complex creatures, and most of them change over time. Jimmy Carter certainly performed many acts of decency during his life. That can be said without equivocation. His motives are his own.
People who seek--and it is a very purposeful act--to have power over others are not like most of the rest of us. Leaders are inherently flawed. As are we, for choosing them.
Sounds like another justification for American perfidy abroad.....couched in the language of 'the inhuman nature of leaders'. As if Nelson Mendalas don't exist....as if to lead inevitably leads to crimes against humanity.
Perhaps there's something wrong with the system that has believed, perhaps since it was created, that it knows better than anyone else what is good for them. Empires may be inherently evil...but I think we judge people by what they do.
Funding the death squads in El Salvador was an evil decision......but one of a kind made often by a country that sees communism behind every revolutionary effort around the world.
Politics TEACHES sociopathy. If you or I entered politics - say to do good - we'd quickly learn to lie and betray our ideals in order to get and keep some power. It we refused to do so, we'd end up like Ralph Nader, whose foray into presidential politics resulted in getting 1% of the popular vote, and may have thrown the election to George W. Bush, who won by 537 votes in Florida, and a majority of 5 Supreme Court justices.
So are you saying no one has the right to run for president unless they belong to one of the two major parties, just in case the handful of votes they pick up moves the meter on the election? So, not a democracy at all, then.
The suppression of all other parties by every possible means (including the ongoing meme that voting for one of them "takes votes" from one of the rightful two parties), has left us with a far right party, and a really far right party, and any policy to the left of them castigated as (gulp!) communism.
Exactly. You've been ruled by grifters and griftests for decades now. The founding fathers fixed your system to guarantee that 'the mob' would never overtake those good old boys and their plantations.
In fact I voted for Nader in the 2000 election, calculating that Alaska, where I lived, would go for Bush, and that my vote would be "wasted," whoever I voted for. And so it went. Had I lived in a state where my vote might have counted, I'd have voted for Gore. Though Bush won Alaska handily, Nader in fact got the highest percentage of votes cast there (over !0%) of any state. I can attribute this perhaps to Alaskan orneriness, where a party calling for the state's secession from the U.S. (the Alaskan Independence Party) regularly gets a significant share of votes cast in state elections.
Exactly
sure.
Blame Nader
for the supreme court's
stopping FLA's voter recount
handing the Election to gee duby bush
(AND to the evil dick Cheney) because, as
they said, to do Otherwise was to be mean to
.
the bush campaign.
.
you Can't make
this stuff Up! tho
the supreme ct did
.
out of whole cloth.
As young people said to the Ds in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was running, get this into your heads. We're NOT your D voters and we owe you nothing. Offer us someone who isn't corporate sponsored and we just might vote for your candidate. Don't blame us for your failings. Like how as neolibs, you Ds support econopathy and ignore us, the majority working class. For example, the Ds did FOR the unemployed, suffering Rust Belt workers same as they did TO the vultures who caused the '08 crash--NOTHING! Yet who got bailed out? Was anything done to prevent this from happening again? NO!
FL is a particularly grievous example. Gore was ahead there when the vote recount was halted. Where were the D protests to an election most probably stolen? Yeah, peaceful transitions, blah blah. When it seems more like no objections because no matter who wins, corporate oligarchy and 1%er plutocracy rules.
As for Nader, compare him to any of the mediocre at best corporate shill and/or war monger at worst recent D presidents. Whose achievements helped more people and actively reinforced the common good?
More Americanism. You folks justify everything with sweeping generalizations. But of course, if big money rules..........and it does in your pseudo democracy....and if might makes right...........and it does in your interferences around the world.......then sure....
To be political is to be a sociopath.
As a Canadian, I find that reduction amusing. We have some a single payer health care system because of a few politicians elected by the people..........who worked for the people.
It is getting worse here as well though........since the neoliberal global order was set up. Perhaps its Mammon Worship that teacher sociopathy?? We see it smeared across the face of Elon Musk whenever he graces our tely.
People who seek power are evil, doesn't matter which country.
Too simple an explanation.......if the world were that black and white, we wouldn't still be here. We all have to learn to stop thinking in terms of two answers, one of them wrong. The Great Mother is far more fecund, diverse and creative than that.
Instead of an offhanded rebuke of my point, how about making an actual argument? I never said that reality is black & white, that's your thing. I can be as nuanced as anyone where appropriate, but I see no need for that here. There is definitely something defective about people who seek power, because to do so requires a huge ego, which alone is evil.
Suggesting that the evil argument is too simple....to black and white as in good versus evil, is an argument Jeff. We need to look at the natural world to see what Richard Wolff has called 'over determination'. Which means there are simply too many variables in any action or event....to reduce something to the 'evil' explanation.
And nuance is always appropriate when discussing something so complex as Power. Leaving it out results in simple think........you need to look for contrary examples.....leaders who refute your generalization. There are more than a few examples in recent history.
Because your argument has consequences: one of them being that everyone should distrust government.......because good government is impossible if only evil people seek power. Just maybe, its your system that's flawed....maybe getting rid of the electoral collage would make it more likely that good people would be elected? Did you consider that before jumping to the conclusion??
And then there's the question of Mammon. Perhaps making large donations to political parties illegal would curb some of the inherent evil you see?
I'm perfectly capable of making an argument....what you presented in your one liner wasn't an argument.......it was a conclusion based on 0 argumentation. Remember, in logic an argument is not a fisticuffs or a fight....its a reasoned series of evidence that leads to a conclusion.
Starting with the conclusion is just unsupported opinion....or prejudice.
gore lost Florida because of Eliane Gonzalez. gore did not even carry his home state. gore was joined at the hip to the Clintons, that is fatal
I agree that politics teaches sociopathy. We learned that in Political Science 101 in an exercise we did, where we'd split into groups trying to gain power. I was shocked at how politics actually worked (though I was only a naive college freshman at the time). Our group put together a really good and really progressive platform, with excellent arguments to back up all of the planks. None of that meant anything, as the daggers came out as soon as the exercise started. All that mattered was gaining power, and ideologies were forgotten.
I totally disagree with your attitude that voting for a non-establishment candidate throws the election to another establishment candidate. A candidate and their voters who are outside the Democratic and Republican gangs are not throwing an election to anyone. By voting Democratic (or Republican), you support the evil establishment. If you are a progressive or radical, it is YOU who is wasting their vote by doing so. People should vote for candidates in whom they believe, not those they think will prevent an an opponent from getting elected. If people do the latter instead of the former, there is no democracy (not claiming that the U.S. is one, very far from it).
Wrong. If you’d finally realize how the Dems/DNC work, Repubs work & the rest of our government works… you wouldn’t bring that crap up again
Believe that if you wish..........but I followed the death squads in El Salvador. Many good people died because your decent man couldn't or wouldn't stand up to the sociopaths you blame for the crimes Chris cites.
I suspect there's something deeper at work.........American Exceptionalism...America's inability to imagine that others might know better how to run their country than Americans, American indifference to genocidal military actions.
Look at Gaza now......Israeli's have just destroyed the last working hospital, and taken the chief doctor, STRIPPED NAKED..to a notorious torture prison.....and genocidal Joe is likely going to step up weapons shipments to help in the dirty work....not that he has to fear that Trump will limit such shipments. Your country is pathalogically incapable of international decency...at least that is my fear. Decency stops at your America first borders.
One might be a decent man when selected to run for President.......sounds to me like you don't spend 4 years in that office without compromising a lot of what decency stands for. Watch ROMERO...and imagine yourself, or your daughter, as the young girl who has her tongue cut out, then taken to a garbage dump to be shot by the death squads trained in America....then talk about decency....whatever you imagine that to be.
My point was there are 1000's of people in the US government. The President is only one of them. It is a mistake to think that he actually controlled the government. The people who acted in Jimmy Carters name are the ones who actually committed the crimes of his presidency. To use the "Lord of the Rings" analogy they are "Wormtongues" and whisper in the ear of the King. If I want to control someone, the easiest way is to control what they hear. If you have ever seen this happen in an organization, you know how powerful the Wormtongues are, and how impossible it is to resist them. They mock, degrade and marginalize any dissenting voice, and most people go along because they are scared.
When you blame him for the deaths in El Salvador you are making him into a god. He was not a god. Americans attribute godlike qualities to their President. (I am not American) They need to stop doing this because the President actually has no idea of most of what is being done in his name. Until you grapple with the "Blob" who comprise the actual government and take away the "Blobs" power the crimes will continue.
As a non American, the best thing that could happen to the planet would be to see the United States of America break up and become states who's citizens could actually hold their government to account. Perhaps, if you were 50 states it might be possible to know who is making decisions in your name. When ever power is concentrated, evil takes over.
Well Balkanization is one solution....but I'm not sure we're going to enjoy it.
We see the beginnings of this in many parts of the world....American states rights, Canadian western alienation........but what it is fueling is not representative democracy........or better decisions.
At least in the two countries I've mentioned, it is leading the charge to a more divided, fascistic kind of 'ya can't make me!" rebellion, led by the traditional suspects...white men willing to use violence to get their way.
So yes: the unwillingness to engage, the passivity of the general population, and the fact that in capitalist empires the most venal men rise to the top.........and engage in government for their own purposes.......makes governance hard.
Still: Whitewashing a president.......claiming he was helpless in front of his advisors.....is a cop out. And its a cop out for the simple reason that as long as some powerful people get excused the crimes they allowed under their watch....The System Survives, the Lies continue to work, and a Culpable People can continue to celebrate their pseudo leaders and wash their hands of the crimes committed in their name.
Rationalizations aren't Rational. Excuses don't bring back the Dead. And the Blame Game continues. Americans bash the people fleeing the lands past American regimes decimated........for the false Gods of Corporate Power....
And the Beat Goes On. We won't stop it as long as we continue to Excuse it.
I am a realist. I prefer Balkanization because as a fellow Canadian it is a very real possibility that I wake up one morning with Abrams Tanks in the streets of my city, because some President did not like something. Alternately, that we have a color revolution of our very own. It has not happened until now, because we have always gone along with Washington.
Where there is great power, there is abuse. Capitalism or no capitalism it is unrestrained power that corrupts, and those who are weaker will be abused by those with more power. There is no such thing as benevolent power, only power that is constrained by other powers that limit what it can get away with. For me, the solution is to limit power, hence Balkanization.
My problem with what you say is that I don't see our Governments having absolute power......if anything, the current Liberal government has promised much progress, and made small progress following through with those promises.
We need stronger Canadians policies regarding climate change and transitioning off fossil fuels. From where I sit, it looks like the Conservatives want to do what Trump is proposing, double down on 'drill baby drill'......and take the planet past irreversible tipping points.
Balkanization will speed that process, not turn it around.
My experience is that Bureaucracies make bad decisions. They are easily captured by Interests such as Corporations, or Ideologies.
Climate Change is great example. We are being sold solutions that do not work. Even worse, the solutions being promoted make things worse not better. For instance, a field of solar panels kills the soil under the solar panels. The off gassing of CO2 from the soil exceeds the life time CO2 saved. Even worse, solar panels don't work in January which is our peak load for electricity (My solar arrays today were at 9.6V) which means that we are using Natural Gas or Coal instead.
Going back to Jimmy Carter, one man surrounded by a bunch of people telling them that a particular thing needs to be done, will accept what they are being told, unless they have personal experience that tells them that what they are being told is wrong. This is why concentrating power in anyone's hands is dangerous because it is very easy to manipulate that person. A president surrounded by 1000's of people all of who are seeking to manipulate them to a particular outcome will do a lot of bad things simply because they are human and not able to understand the implications of what is being presented to them.
There is something to be said for your viewpoint. I was raised/educated in Washington DC and the East yet have lived most of my life on the opposite side of the country. I don't think most Americans understand what a closed environment DC is. People who go to DC to live/work/govern quickly become "DCised" and their responses do not reflect the broader country or where they may have come from. It is a power center and it's the power shifts that become most important to the movers and shakers -- it's what consumes them. The rest of the country is lost in their shuffle. The "DC bubble" is real.
Interesting. It makes sense. We are tribal, and adhere to those we view as "us." In Washington, "us" is powerful, and separating oneself means declaring oneself lesser.
Politicians don't run things, the rich & powerful do. Political Science 101; see also Tammany Hall. Politicians merely do their bidding, using the deep state and the police state to enforce what they want and prevent what they don't want.
he was a member of the council of foreign relations. if he was surrounded it was because he jumped in the middle of the gangster mob
Trilateral Commission
The only people who belong it power, to the extent that anyone does, are those who don't seek it. The rest, as you point out, are power-mad egotists and/or corrupt grifters.
As president, Carter was far from ideal or even desirable, except in comparison with the series of monsters who followed him.
Or even preceded him in my lifetime, with the possible exception of JFK.
We often compare the President to the Captain of a ship. Insofar as Carter was responsible for his policies that analogy seems fair. But let’s not forget the deeper truth, that the ship of the US state is guided by the “GPS” of intelligence agencies and hidden powers. These are very difficult for any President to challenge.
I agree with Mr. Hedges’ assessment of Carter’s presidency, but I choose to judge him on his overall record, and while I don’t deify anyone, I believe Carter made the world better rather than worse. That’s more than I can say of any of his successors, and most of his predecessors.
Peter Ustinov got it right when he said: “Carter used the Presidency as a stepping stone to the Ex-Presidency.”
It's come to a place where we can't accept half way measures. We need a full complete change to survive and nobody is agreeing to it. Moderation, 20 year plans to adapt won't make it I'm afraid.
I have long said that the time for a mild-manners, rule-following, norms respecting milquetoast like Sanders is long past.
What is needed is more in the line of a Huey P. Long. "I used to get things done by saying please. Now I dynamite 'em out of my path." — Huey Long
And as is typical of elitists, oligarchs, and plutocrats everywhere, they forget how important the rest of the crew is. They're especially unaware how we oil smeared engine room workers keep the ship moving.
As apologists for econopathy, the politically and economically powerful love to claim a rising tide lifts all boats. They ignore how so many are firmly anchored to the bottom. They also assume they have the best lifeboats reserved when everything goes wrong.
That last is not a metaphor--the few know the econ system is terminal and that climate change is real. They just think they can buy their way out as they have for all else they want, including entire governments. They plan to ride out the devastation on their megayachts and private islands. They're in for a rude awakening when they come for new supplies and maintenance. We left behinds won't have to be helpful.
Thank you for laying out this critique of Carter’s record as president. I generally remember him favorably, but I was born in 1974 and remember him more for his acts after leaving the White House than for his actions and decisions in office.
To be fair, most of his successors from each of the corporate political parties could be described at least as authoritarians, if not outright fascists. I wrote a piece at the beginning of this year exploring that unfortunate pattern. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/fears-of-a-fascist-future-overlook?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
Given that unfortunate history, and the unapologetic service of every more recent president to Empire, to what extent is Carter’s legacy worthy of any praise?
Setting aside deification (which is too often the reaction of Americans to celebrity), it seems to me that a president with the prescience to put solar panels on the White house in the 1970s is worth celebrating, despite his unfortunately voluminous faults that Hedges appropriately lays out here.
To those who write that Chris' reality check has been mis-timed:
Too soon they say. Dancing on his grave, they say. And I say, bravo Chris for having the guts to remind us of the truth, before the MSM and all the power elites continue the brainwashing of the public. Yes, solar panels on the White House was an excellent move, but does it really cancel out supporting the massacres in East Timor? The support for the dictator in Iran, the Shah and his Savak torturers? .......and everything else on the list that Chris has provided us with?
As to those who say that the whole ship is such a powerful body that the poor sod of a captain has no chance of turning it around. I then ask, why did he not say so during his years of 'penance'? Why did he not tell us about these dark forces that really control the ship of state? I don't suppose he would not have lived to celebrate his 100th birthday if he had dared to do that!
Thanks, again, for cutting through the unreality of the MSM.
Carter is responsible for Rush Limbaugh and his audio hellspawn because he set the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in motion. People forget that the Reagan Administration pulled the plug a decade later. This is a major reason that American local, state and national politics are so messed up and we have a far right and Christian Nationalist propaganda organ that can spew hate and division that would have made Josef Goebbels green with envy.
We got Donald Trump.
Neoliberal "Demcrats" combined with the "New Left" betrayed the New Deal focus on the middle class and working poor. Founding Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter played a big part in this.
How did he "set the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in motion"? I've always blamed Reagan for the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and every other succeeding party, since any Congress could have put it back anytime since.
His appointed FCC chairman did not enforce violations of the Fairness Doctrine. It progressively flatlined during the Reagan Administration and it was not renewed. Reagan takes the hit, but it started years before.
Thank you. That is helpful. So, getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was a bipartisan effort, which is why neither party has restored it. One more indication that the parties are as one, and it serves both their interest that we be at each other's throats.
Chris’s analysis is absolutely correct but fails by omitting one thing. Carter was probably the best it gets. No President in office will be better, all will probably be worse. We have to stop thinking of the American president is a Superman that can deliver his promises, that won’t be led by the nose by his advisors and the unelected permanent state . Carter was particularly naive and wished to please. It’s important to remember the disastrous eagle claw operation that he approved idiotically, after being given military advice, to rescue the Iranian hostages which led to total disaster and failure. I remember him sitting in the situation room grinning inanely surrounded by advisors waiting for the latest news after the failure believing that some form of miracle would happen and the rescue would succeed and salvage his failing presidency, of course it didn’t.
We must remember one president and a band of enthusiastic officers climbing up onto the bridge deck of the Good ship USA believing they are now in control and can turn the ship round, while beneath them decks and decks of saboteurs who have a completely different commitment are ramming spanner’s into the works determined and able to make sure the ship does not deviate from where they want it to go.
We have to stop believing Presidents can be our salvationists. In our passive observationalist role we will always be betrayed .
I was waiting for Chris Hedges’ evaluation. I think it was fair and objective. We elect presidents but they are actually emperors. I don’t know if the presidents themselves know this before they’re in power but it must become quickly obvious that we have this big thing we have to keep going at any cost. I liked Carter but lionization is not something I do anymore in my old age.
I do not "Deify" anyone. I see Chris's analysis as mostly fair, yet a bit poorly timed. The man passed away only yesterday; how about waiting a week to allow for him to be respectfully mourned? I know-he did some things which were not "nice" or fair. To this nation and to others. But I echo others here who say that his overall legacy, although Chris's thinks it's a form of "penance", shows a man devoted to doing good for others and the world. I won't deify him, but I will remind Mr. Hedges and others that if he were to be our president right now, instead of Felon Trump (soon to be, again) perhaps our nation would be much less falling apart and much more humane overall. I thank Mr. Carter for trying - despite many errors, but trying- to do things to help humanity.
Turn your wrath more now to Trump, Chris, because he truly deserves it. Jimmy Carter was no Felon. Jesus, I believe, would ask us not to judge but look at the better "angels" in other men's nature. Jimmy Carter certainly deserves that.
Sorry but funding the right wing and their death squads in El Salvador did diddly squat for humanity. I've long been horrified by how little most Americans....or Canadians for that matter....know or care about the people of Latin America.
Destroying those kids' futures doesn't seem to matter....but when they show up at your border, oh boy.....does the hatred rise quickly.
. . . or from the presidents who preceded him: Truman (A-bomb, Korean War), Eisenhower (McCarthy, Cold War, Nukes), Kennedy & Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon, who pursued the same aggressive policies.
Carter's "sin" was as a relatively inexperienced backwater governor to have little knowledge of foreign affairs. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and the discrediting of Nixon, who was versed in international politics and had Henry Kissinger as a tutor, Carter took Brzezinski as his foreign affairs guru, without knowing much about him. This refugee Pole was a determined Cold Warrior, who installed an aggressive anti-Soviet policy that resulted in most of the foreign affairs crimes that Hedges accuses Carter of, while the president was focussed on curing domestic ills - like discrimination and government reform. Again with Volker, Carter's inexperience in national finance led to his taking advice from establishment economists in appointing him, and then couldn't get rid of him. Inflation hurts creditors like banks, and benefits debtors, like you and me.
Carter inherited Iran's hostility from previous administrations, and again had to rely on neoliberal "experts," while Nixon, paradoxically, might have handled the Iranian hostage crisis better. Again, Carter was out of his depth in foreign affairs.
Carter's presidency shows that even an honest and principled person can do harm in foreign affairs, but Hedges can't argue that that hollow man, Ron Reagan, did any better. Reagan stole the hostage release from Carter by treasonous under-the-table dealing with the Ayatollah, and then took credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has benefitted us nothing.
The ship of state is simply too large for one person to turn around. Great power conflict is the law of our era, and only the nuclear threat keeps our wars localized. When global war is in abeyance, terrorism takes over. Conflict is what moves history forward - toward what is anyone's guess. Be thankful if you live in the U.S., where privilege is widespread, and we make our own unhappiness.
You also have become quite adept at making the unhappiness of much of the third world. Rationalize it as you wish...........imagining that anything American covert operations have done........or will do, in the rest of the world, is no ones fault because thats the way the world is...........is hogwash.
America could have minded her own business in many cases. Instead, she spent billions and wasted perhaps as many lives........attempting to manage everything for the benefit of her corporations. And still......most of you think Russia is the threat???!!!
Incredible.
Thank you, Mr. Crosman, I think you nailed it.
As you give Carter a pass for his relative inexperience and supposed naivete, you seem to be discounting the level of intense, overweening drive and ambition it takes to ascend to the most powerful post in world politics.
To quote the character of Carl Van Loon from the film Limitless (I know, stupid blockbuster movie but the sleazy character of Van Loon was spot-on capitalist pirate), "You haven't had to climb up all the greasy little rungs... you haven't had to charm or bribe or threaten your way to a seat at that table."
No one ascends to the presidency in the US without a strong streak of psychopathy. If Carter was as naive and idealistic as you depict him, he would have been dead in a light plane crash or other "mishap" before 1977.
I'm cynical, but you outdo me. My cynicism - or realism - tells me it takes all kinds to make a functioning society, and since leaders are necessary to lead a civilized society, we are lucky that some people are gifted with at least a streak of psychopathy. The alternative to a functioning civilized society is a "War of All against All" (Thomas Hobbes). If Carter was a secret psychopath, he hid it well. And he paid for his viciousness by being replaced by that great humanitarian, Ron Reagan. Nothing he did in the 40 years after he left office suggests a psychopathic personality.
That's not the only alternative. A much better one, for humans and, more importantly, the Earth and the rest of the life here, would be a much smaller human population living naturally and tribally. Humans are so ignorant of natural history and ecology that they think that this grossly overpopulated (by humans) planet with humans killing & destroying everything is the only way to live. Not at all true.
As with so many other problems, starting with environmental ones, human overpopulation is the biggest problem here. In naturally small societies, leaders are accountable to everyone, and sociopaths & psychopaths are not only not allowed to be in power, they're thrown out of the societies (a much better alternative to prison or direct execution).
Thanks for the response and insights. You might find this article from the LA Times on Carter's shrewdness interesting: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-22/paradox-jimmy-carter-presidency
I also recommend Hedges' book When Atheism Becomes Religion if just for his discussion of idealism vs. cynicism. By Hedges' definition, I really don't mind being called a cynic though, in the typical way that people mean it, I don't think it sums up my perspective. I can't remember who originally coined it but I always liked the term "sunny macabre realist."
As far as Carter's noble deeds after he left office, it brings to mind a quote from Jean Paul takes-one-to-know-one Sartre who was legitimately brave in fighting fascism even as he sexually abused numerous women and girls: "Everything is permitted the hero." A really high-end, functional so-called psychopath knows it takes a whole lot of virtue signalling soap to clean the dirt off their hands either to compensate for ill deeds or to distract future dupes or both.
Not that everyone who dedicates their lives to philanthropy is necessarily a secret psycho but neither does it really prove anything about their character. I worked for years in advocacy for survivors of domestic abuse and can attest that most abusers play the hero role publicly and many tend to gravitate to "rescuing" professions. The irony of this I discovered is that the advocacy arena itself harbors a good supply of covert abusers who wreak havoc behind the scenes. But it makes sense since studies of spousal abusers and killers in prison settings found that these types channel far more psychic energy into "image management" than average. And if someone's going to take the pains to manage their image, why wouldn't they pretend to be spectacular rather than just mediocre specimens?
I admit to being glib about whether Carter and other world leaders are psychopathic because I'm not sure how much I even believe in the common conception of it. Instead of the typical view that psychopathy is inherent and genetic and that psychopaths are totally devoid of empathy, I lean to the arguments that most supposed psychopaths have the capacity for empathy but are just extremely selective in how they apply it and that, due to learned patterns of thinking, develop a kind of "off" switch when it suits them to dehumanize select targets. After all, there's no such thing as a "genetic epidemic" and some argue that rates of various antisocial personality disorders are exploding in the US and other first world countries which goes against the genetic neurodiverse view.
In support of the nurture perspective, there's something in forensic psychology called "neutralization" (https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46) which itself bears a bit of resemblance to something late French political philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (whom I discovered in the bibliography of Hedges' book on the organized atheist cult) calls "instrumentalism."
I keep the quote from Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in Concentration Camps on file because it often seems relevant these days:
"... the totalitarian power demands that its subjects restrict themselves in thought and deed to instrumentality and treat every action as if it were a means to something else rather than as an end in itself. In the realm of material production, the fulfillment of that demand does not yield particularly brilliant results, as expanding bureaucracies and the loss of personal initiative present formidable obstacles. In the domain of moral conduct, however, the demand is far more productive. The question is often asked how 'ordinary people,' 'decent husbands and fathers' could have committed so many atrocities. Where was their conscience in all of this? The answer is by usurping social goals and restricting people to instrumentalist thinking, the totalitarian power manages to have its subjects accomplish whatever tasks they are assigned without its having to disturb the individual's moral structure at all. Guards who committed atrocities never stopped distinguishing between good and evil. Their moral faculty had not withered away. They simply believed the atrocity was in fact a 'good thing,' and thus not an atrocity at all—because the state, custodians of the standards of good and evil— told them so. The guards were not deprived of a moral sensibility but provided with a new one."
Perhaps it was Carter's own parareligious true-believerism in cultish anti-socialism that "neutralized" his conscience and made him somewhat "instrumentalist" towards the atrocities in Argentina and led him to "manufacture consent" towards atrocities in East Timor while in office. In any case, that would be a typical ailment among US elites. According to Chomsky's five filters concept, no one would get anywhere near high office in the US if they didn't suffer from it.
Thanks for this. It helps me clarify aspects of what we call psychopathy. It occurs to me that under your definition, many or most of us are capable of action that could be considered psychopathic. Most of us are capable of turning off our empathy for others, and for adopting ethical standards that are taught to us by teachers, employers, and even by media and entertainment. Thus people in public speak of "good guys" and "bad guys" that they learn from movies based on comic books.
I think Chris Hedges has written quite a bit about culture being one of the vectors of narcissism in the US.
But it was another argument from Hedges' book on organized atheism that really stuck in my brain, which is that, if Darwin and the bible agree on one thing, it's the "original sin" and "primal nature" are exactly the same. thing and something all of us have equal responsibility to keep in check.
it makes sense to me though some get very upset at the idea that we all have at least the capacity (if not the stomach or the will) to do really, really bad things and that we all have to be vigilant about not slip-sliding into rationalization and hypocrisy. For instance, take the social media fad of people humble-bragging about being "empaths." The implication is generally that these sensitive souls were born this way. But what's ironically insensitive and maybe even downright callous about going so far as to codify the self-labeling is that most would never consider that claiming only a select group of people have the extra dollop of this positive trait might be little more than old timey eugenics. In any event, they're not acknowledging the darker "flipside" implication of the same argument: that, if some special souls were born with more of this wonderful thing, this means other more "lowly" (less human?) beings must have been born with a deficit.
According to Todorov (and Hedges and Arendt and Popper, etc.), this is the essence of scientism which in turn is the central earmark of totalitarianism. Plus, as the MacArthur Foundation's infamous "minority report" law and neuroscience project showed, dividing people into moral castes will inevitably end up dehumanizing all the usual targets: minorities, the poor and any potentially insurgent foreign ethnic group that happens to be sitting on a lot of oil, gas or mineral deposits that the west wants. Reading through the citations of some of the project's "genetic crime" theories and studies was quite horrifying because nearly all the founding research was racialized, particularly the MAO-A or "warrior gene" theory.
So maybe the empathic caste concept isn't so groovy after all. GK Chesterton even poked fun of the deceptive and kinder-gentler packaging that eugenics is always first presented in ten years before the rise of Hitler. One of his more famous quotes:
“Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same."
If you read the study on neutralization, I think the authors rather subtly imply the "bad seed" arguments that antisocial traits are inborn are a bit beside the point if people can learn to selectively spellbind themselves out of feeling guilt, shame or stigma. It might take being trained from birth to really internalize the mental trick, a violentizing upbringing and, as you pointed out, some cultural facilitation to produce a proper psychopath. But it appears doable without any real need for genetic influence.
I'm not sure that Chesterton would approve of your citing experts like Todorov and Hitler in support of an argument that could be perhaps more clearly put in simpler language.
Dual citizen writing from Argentina... Thank you. I remember a documentary interview with Derian in which she described a visit to Argentina during the Dirty War and learning of a particular form of torture performed by the Argentine military on female detainees which involved placing live rats in women's vaginas. I don't remember if it was Derian or a different interview subject describing another reported torture technique of electrocuting babies in front of their parents. But I do remember that, in the interview, Derian alludes to reporting details like this to the Carter administration.
I had a sense Derian was trying to convey that it was gruesome details like this that made it all the more unconscionable that the administration pulled its punches in trying to stop the atrocities whether this was due to the influence of Brzezinski or whether Brzezinski was just playing lightning rod. In any event, the declassified documents apparently include a 1979 memo from Brzezinski to Cyrus Vance written two years after Derian's visit to Argentina: “I think to take steps now, which could be interpreted as punitive, would be to invite criticism from moderate and conservative sectors in the U.S. at a time when we need their support on other issues. Moreover, I don’t think it would be effective."
As much as it's choking me, I'll skip the tangent about sociopathy being a prerequisite for high office in some countries. But, speaking of which, during Obama's supposedly kumbaya visit to Buenos Aires during which the agreement with Macri was formed to declassify documents showing US participation in the Dirty War as well as Carter's "too little, too late" response, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo weren't buying it and there were mass demonstrations protesting the insulting irony of Obama timing the visit on the 40th anniversary of the Dirty War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ1p1B4lYWk
This brings to mind a very useful expression in Spanish-- "No odies al chancho sino a quien lo engordó" or "Don't hate the pig but the one who fed it." The Argentine left knows precisely who's filling the trough. But flag burning and all, I should point out we had no fear bringing our dual citizen children to these demonstrations and to meet the Abuelas. At least at that time, it was relatively rare for demonstrations to turn violent and Argentines tend to blame power and politics, not individual North Americans. Plus Argentine progressives reserve a good amount of hatred for their own pigs. Consequently the hostility was against Macri for summoning the swill and against the US administration because many in Argentina sensed Obama's declassification gesture and apology were merely lube for yet more screwing. As predicted, a few months later it was clear the visit was intended to pave the way for the erection of US military bases in Argentina, particularly along the borders of countries which weren't cooperating with US economic schemes. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/argentina-s-new-government-accepts-u-s-military-bases/
Also as much as it chokes me to skip the digression about the role of the US and dark money organizations like the Atlas Network in bringing Trump's more psychotic clone Javier Milei to power in Argentina, suffice it to say it looks like a continuation of Condor-lite and is clearly driven by the same neoliberal cult agenda as all the other international horrors Mr. Hedges lists. But as people increasingly starve in this county and austerity fans the flames of desperation and chaos, I'm not sure how long things will remain "lite" before the country explodes and provides the longed-for excuse to launch another dirty war. Then, depending on which party is in power, the US will respond by doing another ineffectual hand-wringing routine or will feed the pigs (or both).
We need to keep being reminded of the details of America's long history of interference........violent interference at that........in other people's countries.
To know the half of it would keep you busy.........and depressed........for at least a decade.
To radically bastardize Gloria Steinem, the truth will set you free but first it will depress you. Then it will piss off and I guess some point after that comes the setting free part.
I followed what I could while teaching and parenting........but I keep learning more in retirement and must say, I never get over the outrage. Years ago I read a lot of what Derrick Jenson wrote.........his A COUNTRY OF MAKE BELIEVE...galvanized me. He claimed America has always been a fascist state, and had lots of evidence from the last century to corroborate it.
How you folks treated the Wobblies is a case in point...young working class boys hung from bridges and castrated....the treatment of black workers in the thirties....it was all very eye popping....
and I suspect, not much known about in Amerika even today. There's something terminally nasty has been allowed to grow up in the midst of American prosperity...though I know it doesn't infect all Americans. I've come to wonder if its the arch Capitalism that does it??
Or is it that need to feel special, exceptional, good??? Projecting the negative bits that are in all of us, onto the 'other' may be the most sure fire way to take the well paved easy road to Hell. Ask google for a list of countries America is sanctioning now....or has in the past. Ask for the stats on the hunger its self righteousness visits on the children around the world....
It's enough to stop the heart, permanently. I'm not sure either, if its forgivable.
As Milei pushes Argentina towards the "American model" and as things have become more desperate here, I've wondered how long the politically mobilized underclasses will be able to maintain this traditional and rather generous tendency to blame power and not people for the awful policies the US has foisted on Latin America.
In short, like harbingers of doom, the sex tourists have started descending in droves to capitalize on the growing hunger and panic. Unrestrained rage will probably follow. Any Yanks who have Argentina on their bucket lists should book their trips sooner rather than later because that beautiful, generous spirit that made Buenos Aires one of the safest major cities on the continent may soon dry up.
What a fine antidote to the mainstream canonization of Carter.
I agree with the assessment of Carter's presidency. He might have done better if he had come into office with more experience of the complexity and duplicity that plague the Federal government. His later life seems like a model of public service.
You nailed it again, Chris! Thank you.
Wasn't Carter also responsible for the Mx missile program and putting multiple warhead nuclear missiles on trucks moving around the interstate highway system to keep them less vulnerable to Russia?
Chris Hedge's summary of Carter's legacy is, IMO, right on the money. His presidential record was abysmal, and all his later 'good works' do not balance or cancel out that legacy.