A period of pervasive American self-doubt after Vietnam and Watergate.
We will shortly have fuller obituaries for Jimmy Carter, from me and others, covering various aspects of his career. His death marks the passing of his era. Go down the list of prominent political leaders and figures of that period — think of Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Ed Muskie, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, John Rhodes, Cyrus Vance, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Warren Burger, William Brennan, Bill Buckley, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly. The last survivors are the era’s rising young men, such as Joe Biden and Jerry Brown — now octogenarians.
My first memory of the Carter era, indeed my first political memory, was going with my parents to vote in 1976. I was five. Our polling place in suburban Nanuet, N.Y., was the local Presbyterian church (since bulldozed), which was the only time I set foot in a Protestant church until well into adulthood. Still in the bicentennial spirit, they had set up a toy voting machine where I went and voted for Ford, just as my parents did. This being New York, not Illinois, I assume my vote was not counted.
The Carter presidency itself marked a period of pervasive American self-doubt after Vietnam and Watergate. Even as a kid, I knew that there were lines at the gas station, and you couldn’t go to the grocery store without hearing grumbling about inflation. To this day, in one of those ways that childhood impresses visual memories, when I hear the word “inflation” I picture a bottle of Pepsi with a 1970s label. I didn’t connect these things to politics as I would today, but I knew they weren’t normal and that gas prices were connected to the Middle East and somebody called “OPEC.” The Iranian hostage crisis was the first news story I really followed, and it was a count of days of “America held hostage” that we seemed powerless to stop. International Communism was on the march, and appeared ascendant, with none of our public angst. Even the FBI thought our government was so corrupt that it ran “Abscam,” a sting operation in which phony sheikhs tried to bribe members of Congress and ended up nabbing six members of the House and one senator.
The pervasive sense that events were spinning out of the control was not Republican propaganda. (Where would one even go to find a big conservative megaphone in the late ’70s, before Fox News and Rush Limbaugh? The closest beachhead in popular culture was Firing Line.) The president himself gave a prime-time address to the nation complaining of a national “crisis of confidence” that he was admittedly powerless to combat. There are those today who will still defend that speech, ranging from David French in the New York Times to Peter Van Buren and Sean Scallon in the American Conservative. It would have been one thing to defend Carter’s argument as if it were an op-ed. As a speech by the nation’s leader, however, it is properly remembered as an emblem of despair. We were told during the Carter years that the presidency itself was too big for one man, a complaint that looked ridiculous within a few years of his replacement by Ronald Reagan.
The anything-goes liberal activism of the ’70s was visibly running out of steam. Carter’s own liberalism was tempered by a number of policy decisions that bore conservative fruit over the following decade. The Supreme Court, while still a long way from embracing constitutional originalism (which lacked even a name at the time), was in the early stages of a revival of seriousness about the role of written rules, with a majority of the Court appointed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: Chief Justice Warren Burger and associate justices William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell Jr., Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens. While Rehnquist was the only consistently conservative jurist of the bunch, the Court took some important steps, such as ending the freestanding rules for creating new rights to sue not written by Congress, reversing a prior moratorium on the death penalty, and placing some constitutional outer limits on “remedial” race discrimination. It was the start of a long turn.
Outside of D.C., there were signs across the country of the gathering of a conservative reaction to a long orgy of liberal excess. The late ’70s saw California’s passage of the anti-tax Proposition 13, in June 1978, bringing tax cuts to the fore as a potent political issue. It witnessed Falwell’s formation of the Moral Majority, the rise of an ecumenical Catholic–Evangelical alliance in the pro-life movement, and Schlafly’s successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which expired without ratification in 1982. Across the Atlantic, John Paul II became pope, in October 1978, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979. The American turn to Reagan did not come out of the blue.
The Carter years represent a number of other turning points in American culture that were only indirectly connected to politics. Carter was the first president in the age of exit polls to win a national election while losing voters ages 30 and up (the second would be Barack Obama in 2012). The leading edge of the Baby Boom generation (including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush) turned 30 in 1976 — that year, Trump was profiled in the New York Times for the first time, in which he was compared to Robert Redford. The movement of the Boomers out of “youth culture” and into the age of having children and buying homes was a key undercurrent in the shift in the nation’s culture and politics. Not for nothing did the late ’70s feature nostalgia products such as the back-to-the-Fifties film Grease (released in 1978), the TV show Happy Days (which hit the airwaves in 1974 but peaked in popularity between 1976 and 1979), and the back-to-the-Sixties Broadway show Beatlemania (which debuted in 1977).
The release of Star Wars in May 1977 marked the start of Hollywood’s turn away from the gritty antihero and unhappy-ending films of the decade’s first half (such as the Godfather films, Chinatown, Rocky, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) to splashy, brightly lit family blockbusters reviving traditional clashes between good and evil. The subversive comedy of Saturday Night Live, which hit television screens in 1975, was already beginning to focus on recurring characters with popular catchphrases that could be converted into mass-market films.
The music scene of the late ’70s was massively diverse and defies easy categorization. The popular imagination focused on the rise of disco and punk, but it was also an era that produced pop country and the early underground birth of rap, as well as the rise of the hard rock sounds of AC/DC and Van Halen, the pop breakthrough of Billy Joel’s The Stranger, and the heyday of the California sound of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. All of that existed alongside the still vibrant classic rock titans: During the Carter presidency, Led Zeppelin released In Through the Out Door, The Who released Who Are You, The Rolling Stones released Some Girls, and The Kinks released Low Budget. The latter two albums in particular are period pieces of Carter-era malaise on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, there was simultaneously a mass market for big, theatrical music such as the Grease soundtrack and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, or the Sixties R & B revival of the SNL-launched Blues Brothers.
The Carter-era sports scene witnessed a social revolution of sorts in baseball with the dawn of free agency. The Yankees, in 1977, used the signing of Reggie Jackson to return to dominance. As Jonathan Mahler’s book The Bronx is Burning vividly detailed, they did so against a backdrop of blackouts, looting, arson, and the Son of Sam serial killer in a city that seemed, like the nation, to be ungovernable and out of control. That same year, Ed Koch defeated Mario Cuomo in the city’s mayoral election.
While the 1970s seemed a golden age for baseball, and looks like that in retrospect, it was also the period in which it was losing its hegemony over American professional team sports. The NFL rose dramatically in popularity throughout the 1970s following the AFL-NFL merger, the creation of the Super Bowl and Monday Night Football, and the christening of the Dallas Cowboys as “America’s Team.” The arrival in the NBA in 1979 of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird heralded the arrival of a third contender to American sports supremacy.
The defining sporting events that marked the close of the Carter years were the Winter and Summer Olympics of 1980. The summer games were a loss: Carter insisted on boycotting the Moscow Olympics over the invasion of Afghanistan. But that only raised the stakes of the winter games, held in Lake Placid, N.Y. The emotional highlight of those games came when the amateur U.S. hockey team toppled the mighty, Red Army–funded, and essentially professional Soviet squad in the “Miracle on Ice.” Maybe it was seeing Americans as scrappy underdogs on their own soil that made the game — and Mike Eruzione’s winning goal and Al Michaels’s “Do you believe in miracles?” call — so inspiring. Maybe it was just that the country needed to see the simple Star Wars–style good-and-evil battle in reality to be reminded that a decade of grime, antiheroes, malaise, and paralysis was over. The era that followed was to be a very different one in the national mood. And now, at last, as 2024 rumbles to a close and Biden prepares to leave office, we can wave goodbye as the Carter era fades into our history books.