Chase the Devil (I)
“I'm gonna put on a iron shirt and chase the devil out of earth
I'm gonna send him to outa space to find another race”
There's a much overlooked, amazingly schizophrenic bit of presidential rhetoric that represents the tragic direction of American politics over the last half-century. It is two speeches given six months apart by Jimmy Carter. The first was given in the summer of 1979, the second, his State of the Union Address the following January. They clearly define the great dichotomy of the United States as republic and empire. The first speech represents the best of the republic, the second the worst of empire. In retrospect, it's clear the republic had entered its final stages, the empire triumphant.
As with its republican forebear Rome, from America's beginning, it's difficult to separate the republic from its imperial ambitions. After all, if you were one of the peoples who migrated from Asia and settled the length and breadth of the North American continent beginning twenty-thousand years before Europe arrived, you could uncontroversially claim the empire began with the landing of the first Europeans, two and half centuries before modern republicanism announced itself in Philadelphia.
From its inception, the United States' expansion was perpetual, first across the continent, then the Caribbean, the Pacific, and finally returning across the Atlantic. With the halting of troops at the end of World War II, America's military boundaries stretched down the middle of Europe to the east and Japan to the west – the US empire, the most expansive in global history. Yet, the geographic boundaries were dwarfed by America’s completely intact industrial might, the only domestically unscathed participant in the war's destruction.
Immediately after the war, the empire was domestically institutionalized with the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, establishing the CIA, the National Security Council, and a perpetual war budget. The American people were removed from imperial decisions, rarely represented on any ballot. Unlike the bloodily brutal British empire it largely replaced, the US empire existed in reality but not in perception. A concept repugnant to the republic's founding identity, empire was a word not used by the National Security State’s officialdom and rarely by academia. The republic had been founded throwing off the British Empire in defense of liberty and self-government, it didn't conquer and shackle – yes, slavery made the claims half-delusional, a delusion clearly documented in Jefferson's original Declaration, where he lays blame for American slavery on the British. Since its post-war creation and despite being responsible for one bloody stupid fiasco after another, the National Security State’s actions have never been seriously politically challenged.
Carter, the first president elected after Vietnam, entered office during a short period of time where the doings of the National Security State, including worming their way into domestic politics, were briefly exposed and thinly debated. In part, Carter, the peanut farming governor from a deep south state, was elected in reaction to the previous decade’s skulduggery. Unfortunately for Carter, Iran, one of the Security State’s earlier initial criminal blunders raised its ugly head.
The American people have always remained blissfully ignorant of the processes putting gasoline in their tanks, not so the National Security State. One great lesson learned from WWII was the Nazi's defeat at Stalingrad attempting to reach the Baku oil fields. If, as the British aristocrat Buzon said, “the Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil” in World War One, World War II saw Hitler defeated, stranded in an oil-less Reich. A modern military, modernity itself, ran on oil. Iran was one of the places around the Gulf holding the world's greatest oil reserves. In 1953, the CIA led a coup against the then democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, replacing him with the Shah, a laughably, bastardized, faux-royalty. A quarter century later, the people of Iran rose up and toppled this American installed Persian “King of Kings.” The revolution renewed the decade's turmoil in global oil markets, creating the second “Oil Shock.” Prices skyrocketed across the globe, most especially in the heart of modernity, the seriously oil addicted United States. Borrowing a phrase from another junkiedom, the US was sick.
By the summer of 1979, oil prices were highest ever, inflation double digits, and the economy slowing. The Carter administration faced an existential crisis. After months of scrambling, Carter addressed the American people on the three corporate broadcast television networks. At the time, a presidential address would always be shown live, simultaneously on all three. At the instigation and shaped by the vision of his young adviser, Patrick Caddell, Carter gave what might be considered the last truly republican address of any president. Seeing the challenges faced on many fronts, he turned to the American people and frankly stated the problems would only be met by the citizenry's own determination. The crisis was not simply economic, but a political crisis. Americans had developed a “crisis of confidence” in their own institutions that could only be addressed with a revival of democratic values.
Carter laid out the problem,
“For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote.”
“Our people are losing faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”
He continues,
“Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide.”
Looking to address this political crisis with a revival of democratic values and process, Carter sought to transform America's energy infrastructure, specifically becoming much less reliant on oil, as the challenge to organize around.
“Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.”
Then he beautifully provides a succinct, simple, powerful definition of the tools and values of democracy, starting with accepting reality,
“First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.”
“One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: 'We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.'"
The speech was a short-lived hit. A dozen years later, in a conversation with Caddell about the speech, I used “malaise,” the degrading term which the speech was subsequently tagged. Pat quickly responded the word was never used in the speech and Carter's poll number rose 15% after the speech. Then, pausing a couple beats, he added with a half grin, “I guess we shouldn't have followed it by firing the Cabinet.” Pat was a funny SOB.
America needed a fundamental restructuring of its energy infrastructure, requiring, as such change still would, a revival and reformation of the republic's democratic values. Outside of conservation, Carter did mention two hard energy points in the speech. First, he called for 20% of American energy needs by 2000 to be met by solar. Today, solar remains in the low single digits of the nation's energy mix. Secondly, he mentions the oil available from American shale, which would take another three decades to become, well let's say sort of, economically viable. When oil reached $150 a barrel in 2008, shale provided a brief, transient respite from a new era of oil price spikes, though not so profitably as the black gold had proved for the previous century and half.
The appeal to Americans to rediscover their democratic roots was brief, quickly buried with Carter's State of the Union Address six months later. In that time, inflation gained pace, the economy continued to slow. Then in November, the Iranian revolutionaries seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 hostages. A month later, the Soviets foolishly invaded and occupied Afghanistan. The notions of democratic revival were instantly subverted by Carter's revival of the National Security State as solution, quashed completely at the end of the year with the election of Ronald Reagan.