I moved to Albuquerque 25 years ago this summer. Crazy. One of the first places I discovered there was Alpahville Video, your classic arty based movie rental store. It was good. They had all kinds of things. Of course, the rise of Netflix killed it a few years later and what has been better for cinema in the last quarter-century than that company…..Anyway, at the time they had VHS and DVD and I had both players. So I would do what the goddamn algorithms–a technology to create the worst and most boring version of yourself possible–can never do, which is allow you to browse and explore and pick things up and consider and then make a choice.

Well, one day, I was looking at their Asian section and I wanted something that wasn’t Japanese or from one of the relatively few arty Chinese directors whose films were available in the US. I picked up a VHS tape of a film called Turumba, directed by a Filipino guy named Kidhat Tahimik and released in 1981.

What I ended up watching was the best film about globalization I had ever seen or still have ever seen.

The story goes like this–there’s a family in a small town in the Philippines, probably not all that far from Manila, but far enough without a highway, which happens to be under construction. The time is 1970 or so. The family is really artistic. The father teaches music and is the lead cantor at the town’s religious festivals, called Turumba. The grandmother created a really advanced way to make the papier-mache toys popular in the town. Grandma is still around teaching the craft with an emphasis on craft. One day a German woman comes to town and sees the toys. As it turns out, she’s a scout for German manufacturers. She buys everything they have. Those things sell, she orders more, and pretty soon, she’s making big orders. Out goes the craftsmanship and in goes mass produced toys to commemorate the Munich Olympics in 72. Out goes spending time playing music and in goes long days in the nascent factory, not only for the kids (it’s told through the 10 year old or so son of the cantor/head of the household who becomes the factory owner) but for the kids of town. Out goes hanging out at night and in comes electric fans and TVs and cars. Out goes the joy of life and in comes the sadness of capitalism, a sadness that few actually want to reject because of the material upsides.

What makes the film so brilliant is the ambivalence. It isn’t romanticizing the people or place. They already exist in a globalized world. The kid loves his Batman t-shirt. It’s just starting at a given time–a time when globalization already is impacting a community in one way–and demonstrating what happens when that globalization goes into overdrive. It’s also not propaganda. It’s certainly a critique of neocolonialism, yes, but done the right way. The film really is about ambivalence. It’s funny. There are little asides that amuse. It’s filmed like a documentary but is not ham-fisted at all. It’s super cheaply made–the subtitles take up half the screen and Criterion Channel pretty clearly just did the best they could with a VHS copy since I am pretty sure this was never put on DVD. I would absolutely recommend watching this. I was amazed to see it show up and I was so happy. I watched it a couple of times, then the video store closed, and I hadn’t seen in 20 years. It was just as good as I remembered.

This leads to me two additional points. One is that for as wonderful as Criterion Channel is, it’s quite striking how even film buffs just want to watch 80s and 90s big budget films they remembered liking back in college. The monthly programming now is deeply skewed in that direction, with very little on foreign films. This month includes a Nicole Kidman retrospective, a collection of films called “Surveillance Cinema,” which is a way to organize The Truman Show and Minority Report and Gattaca into a respectable Criterion thing; and three Cameron Crowe directed films. There’s also a couple of collections around older Hollywood films, but it’s pretty clear that there really is no market for foreign films, even among cinephiles, in this country. I get that Criterion is responding to the market. The problem is that it is very hard to search for films otherwise unless you are looking for something specific. If you try, you can search by country and if you put in Philippines, a bunch of things come up, but you have to think of that yourself. If I hadn’t seen this film in the Recently Added category, I would probably have never found it.

The other thing rewatching Turumba made me consider is how villages become centers of a specific type of craft. I’ve been in Oaxaca for nearly two months. You might be familiar with the alebrijes that come from here, the fantastically artistic wooden animals. They are cool, I grant you. I have a few. The story of these here seems to be similar–something a few people did, then a British filmmaker brought some of these people abroad, they got popular, and now the economy of two entire towns is making these things. I very slightly know an anthropologist who has written a book on this and I guess I should read it. How do specific towns rearrange their economies to produce what were once crafts for a mass global market?

Anyway, watch this film.

The post LGM Film Club, Part 443: Turumba appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I would guess I don’t fly very much compared to a lot of the LGM community. I’ve probably averaged something like five flights a year in recent years. So I was taken aback last week when flying back from the holidays in Michigan to Colorado by the following experience.

I had the middle seat in a three-seat row. This is because I was too cheap to pay to “upgrade” to an aisle or window seat on the United Airlines flight. (I suppose this kind of thing is economically efficient, but I bet the constant nickel and diming on everything in this world of hypercapitalism is a big reason why everybody is in such a bad mood).

I had just sat down in awkward proximity to the two total strangers on each side of me, when the 30ish woman in the window seat said something to me about my elbow being on the armrest. I don’t remember her exact words, but I was, absurdly in retrospect, embarrassed and slightly flustered, and apologized for not knowing the relevant etiquette. I mean I don’t fly much, relatively speaking, but I’ve still taken hundreds of flights over the last 45 years or so, so I probably shouldn’t have immediately assumed I was in the wrong, but hey that’s how we ended up with January 6th I suppose.

Then this person did something so odd that I still can’t quite believe she did it. She showed me the screen of her phone, which featured a text to someone that read “I”m sitting next to Elbow Guy,” under a photo of my elbow on the armrest! This made me feel even more disconcerted by my apparent faux pas, although a little light went off somewhere in my mind, or in the back of my mind, that maybe this person was a little off her rocker, or “quirky” as we say in Boulder if the person’s net worth is at least eight figures.

Anyway, I later Did My Own Research ™ and discovered that I had a largely if not universally recognized right to BOTH armrests, which if I had done the math at the moment should have been deducible, since if I didn’t then the other two people in the row would each get two armrests, and, along with the privilege of not sitting in the middle, enjoy perfect armrest hegemony.

But the part of this story that still feels disconcerting was the texting of the photo of my elbow, along with my transformation into Elbow Guy. This felt somehow invasive of my privacy/space in some way related to larger issues with the information economy.

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A couple of years ago, I saw the superb Mali Obomsawin play with her jazz band. She is Abenaki. She started talking about land acknowledgements and called them “corny” before going on to say that the real land acknowledgment is knowing that her ancestor was imprisoned in Boston for practicing his religion. That got pretty well at the absurdity of land acknowledgements. What do they actually do? The answer is usually nothing. At first, one might argue they were useful in the sense of reminding folks that the land does have a Native history. But pretty quickly they became a way for whites to engage in performative liberalism without any kind of commitment and then they became a way for corporations and wealthy institutions to give lip service to something progressive while doing absolutely nothing for Native Americans here today, including people of the tribes being mentioned! This has bothered me for years now.

The excellent historian of Native America Kathleen DuVal had an op-ed yesterday in the Times about getting rid of this ridiculousness and focusing on actually working toward justice for the Tribes today.

If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”

The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.

Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.

…

The Native Governance Center notes that land acknowledgments often “become an excuse for folks to feel good and move on with their lives.” The journalists Graeme Wood and Noah Smith have criticized them as “moral exhibitionism” and ethnonationalism. In an interview Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous peoples law and policy program and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, told me that if land acknowledgments “are treated as the only or last step of one’s commitment to Indigenous peoples and nations, then they can become more harmful than beneficial.”

Land acknowledgments tend to reinforce the myth of Native disappearance and irrelevance. In calling attention to dispossession, they often miss the point that Native Americans survived and are having a renaissance in culture and sovereignty. The vanishing-Indian myth has deep roots in American history. As part of taking Indigenous land, 19th-century Americans found it useful to believe that Indians were fading away. They described precolonial North America as a wilderness — “occupied by a few savage hunters,” as President Andrew Jackson put it, who “were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.” Jean O’Brien, a historian and citizen of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, called it a “narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”

Tribes are still here and have had to go to court to defend their remaining sovereignty and property, spending their revenue to buy back land that once was theirs. In 1996 the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians bought back one of their sacred sites, the Kituwah mound, which once sat at the center of the Cherokee Mother Town, and the Osage Nation has saved the only ancient pyramid mound remaining in St. Louis by buying its summit. In its 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the treaty-defined boundaries of the Muscogee, Cherokee, Quapaw, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations remain in full force because Congress never disestablished their reservations. Yet the State of Oklahoma has continued to fight tribal jurisdiction over criminal cases. If tribes didn’t have to spend revenue buying back land and defending their interests in court, they could use more of it on the health, education and criminal justice programs that benefit their citizens and their neighbors.

My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

I know some of these people and respect them very much and I can’t agree more. Have your land acknowledgement if you want, but if you aren’t actively doing something within your power to remedy injustice today, then it’s totally worthless. If you are a university, are you offering free tuition and fees to the Tribes in your area? If you are a professor, are you assigning work by Native scholars or centering Native voices? If you are running a corporation, are you engaging in affirmative action plans for the Tribes? There lots of things we can be doing. But mostly, land acknowledgements exist to make whites feel good about themselves.

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The new class of weight loss drugs also have miracle drug impacts it seems and given that both good health and the lack thereof have enormous economic structures build around them, their impact is likely to be quite dramatic.

Some junk-food companies and alcohol sellers are freaking out about the prospect of reduced appetites or booze cravings. As they should: The average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 is spending about 6 percent less on groceries each month within six months of adoption. That translates to about a $416 reduction in food and drink purchases per household a year. Spending reductions are even greater for high-income households, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and Numerator.

Some categories have been hit harder than others. For example, these households are spending about 11 percent less on chips and other savory snacks and 9 percent less on sweet bakery items. Select healthier foods, such as fresh fruits and yogurts, have gotten a very tiny bump.

There are some potential retail winners. For example, rapid weight loss has encouraged some patients to replace their wardrobes. Theclothingrental company Rent the Runway recently reported that more customers are switching to smaller sizes than at any time in the past 15 years.

Airlines could save significant money on fuel if passengers slim down en masse, a financial firm projected. Life insurers could cash in, too, given the many mortality risks linked with chronic obesity. “Generally, running a life insurance company right before immortality is discovered — cancer vaccines, antiaging therapeutics — is a good business to be in!” said Zac Townsend, CEO of the life insurance company Meanwhile.

Nearly every GLP-1 user I’ve interviewed in the past year has also mentioned spending money on new hobbies, such as pottery classes or pickleball leagues. Some deliberately picked activitiesto replace social engagements that revolve around food or alcohol; others said they simply gained the energy and self-confidence to try new things.

“I am way more active than I have been,” said Mitchell, whom I interviewed for a recent PBS NewsHour story about Ozempic economics. “I took my daughters horseback riding on the beach last Christmas. We’ve been snow tubing, things that I would have never thought to do.”

OK, some of this seems anecdotal. However:

The Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, nearly single-handedly kept its home country’s economy out of recession last year while most of Europe struggled. And because Americans are the primary customers of these meds, U.S. dollars flowed heavily into Denmark, causingthe Danish krone to strengthen relative to other currencies.

To keep the krone’s value steady relative to the euro, the Danish central bank had to cut interest rates. Put another way: Overweight Americans unintentionally helped Danes get cheaper mortgages.

Wow.

In any case, good health is good! And it has good effects!

Obesity is a chronic disease associated with dozens of other ailments, including joint problems and cancers. So helping Americans lose weight has the potential to make the public much healthier — and reduce spending on other (costly) care.

Seven women in Mitchell’s family, for instance, had breast cancer and both of her parents developed forms of dementia. Mitchell herself developed diabetes, too. All of these problems have linkages with obesity. “I don’t want to be sick,” said Mitchell,explaining why she turned to Wegovy after previously trying diets, exercise, therapy and surgery. “After taking care of my parents, I said, ‘I don’t want my children to have to take care of me.’” Her obesity is now in remission and she no longer has diabetes.

Of course, such potential health benefits — and cost savings — will materialize more broadly only if patients keep up with their medications and adopt healthier habits to help maintain lower weights. Which is a big if.

Research suggests most patients who wereprescribed these meds stop taking them within a year. Some stop because they’ve successfully reached their goal weight. But many others report stopping because of costs, unpleasant side effects, drug shortages or squeamishness about needles.

Who knows what will happen with all of this. But it sure is one of the more fascinating things to come along in the last couple of years. I bet RFK will have thoughts……

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Jimmy Carter has died. Carter was a pretty bad president and then one of the two greatest ex-presidents, along with John Quincy Adams. He’s become something of a beloved figure among liberals in the last twenty years or so, both because of his brave stance denouncing Israeli apartheid against Palestinians and because he lives his faith through Habitat and his other actions, with no sense of the hypocrisy so common among evangelicals. But still, Carter really sucked as president.

Born in 1924 in the small southwestern Georgia farming town of Plains, Carter grew up in the region’s small farming elite. His parents owned a lot of land and his father was a successful businessman. This gave the young man a lot of chances that even many Georgia whites did not have. Of course, his father was a staunch segregationist and they were the wealthiest family in a largely African-American area. But Jimmy went to the local public schools and succeeded there. Then he fulfilled his childhood dream of attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It took awhile for a boy from southwest Georgia to make this happen. First, he spent a year at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus and then a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Finally, in 1943, he got accepted to the Naval Academy. He did well, graduating 60th in a class of 820 in 1946. With World War II just having finished, the expanding U.S. military presence around the world required a lot of officers and Carter would spend the next seven years at bases all over the place, both in the U.S. and being deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He started his family at this time too, having married Rosalynn in 1946.

Carter became interested in submarines and eventually qualified for command of ships. In 1952, he started working in the Navy’s growing nuclear submarine program. He was based out of Schenectady but spent time at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington as well. When a partial meltdown took place at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories in 1952, U.S. experts went to help, including Carter. He was exposed to radiation while disassembling the reactor. He was in protective gear and didn’t suffer any negative health consequences, but this permanently affected his position on nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

In 1953, Carter started training to serve on a nuclear submarine. But he was tiring of military life and when his father died, Carter and Rosalynn chose to return home to Plains. At first, he and his family, now consisting of three small boys, lived in public housing in Plains, making him the only president to have lived in public housing. But he soon took over the family farm and his father’s peanut operations. Being a scientific man, he made this a going concern.

One thing that always drives me nuts about how conservatives talk about Carter is their dismissal of him as a “dumb peanut farmer.” Sure, and a Naval officer who worked on nuclear submarines.

One of the critical questions about Carter is how he more or less overcame the racism so central to his growing up. That he followed someone as utterly awful as Lester Maddox as governor makes his rise and career even more interesting. Carter’s early political career is one of racial moderation but not a lot of racial courage either. He mostly kept quiet about his belief that segregation should be abolished. That doesn’t mean his positions weren’t known. When the White Citizens’ Council approached him to join them, he refused and then they boycotted his peanut warehouse. There was room for moderation among whites on segregation and that’s where Carter firmly remained. Not every white was a WCC or KKK member, even if very very few took any real risks on promoting desegregation.

In 1961, Carter became the chairman of the Sumter County School Board and here he did vocally approve of integration. When he ran for state senate the following year, the Democratic Party machine wanted him to lose, so they fixed the election with the aid of the county sheriff. Carter challenged the result, the fraud was uncovered, and Carter won the next election.

But Americus was a place of racial violence. That was hitting a peak in the early 1960s and Carter basically did not speak out about it out of fear of alienating the segregationists he needed for his political career. This was the politics of the racial moderate. For an ambitious politician from southwestern Georgia, this was not unexpected. He certainly could have been a whole lot worse.

Carter was a very hard worker and very ambitious. These traits served him well. He rose rapidly within the Georgia Democratic Party, taking speed-reading courses so he could digest more material. He got a position on the state Democratic Executive Committee and became chairman of the West Georgia Central Planning and Development Commission, overseeing the distribution of state and federal grants. This made him regionally powerful and also put him in conflict with established interests who disliked the anti-corruption politics of the newcomer.

All of this was intended to set him up to run for governor in 1966. Carter was something of a late entry, but his political enemy, the Republican Bo Callaway, whom he had clashed with on the planning commission, ran on a pro-segregation platform. Democrats feared losing the state for the first time since Reconstruction and Carter decided to take him on. He ran as a moderate and came in third in a three-way primary, behind the loathsome violent racist Lester Maddox and the old New Deal liberal Ellis Arnall. Maddox won the run-off and then the general.

Carter was devastated—coming in third was not his plan and seeing Maddox take power was definitely not his plan. But he ran again in 1970, this time a more experienced party leader and a savvier politician. He managed, somehow, to court both the black vote and the segregationist vote. He met with Andrew Young and Martin Luther King, Sr. while also inviting George Wallace to come make a speech in Georgia. Overall, this was a more conservative campaign than four years earlier. He attacked his liberal primary opponent for being a northern-style progressive and, toward the end of his campaign, actually disseminated racist ads showing his opponent with black basketball players. Such was the reality of Georgia politics in 1970.

The moment he took office, Carter completely turned his back on the segregationists. They were angry. In his inaugural address, he said the time for racial discrimination was over. That was fine, but he wasn’t a particularly effective governor for reasons that repeated themselves in his presidency. He didn’t like working with the legislature, in no small part because he hated the glad-handling that required, which he associated with corruption. He also felt government was too big and while there may have been good reasons behind his goal of streamlining government, reducing departments, and placing greater power in the governor’s office, this would also serve some less than progressive ends in the White House.

On race, Carter appointed a lot of African-Americans to offices, the first governor of Georgia to do so since Reconstruction. On the other hand, he opposed busing as a strategy to integrate schools, co-sponsoring an anti-busing resolution with George Wallace at the National Governors Association annual meeting in 1971, and he supported the death penalty, which of course was disproportionally applied to black people.

Carter would also embrace really bad positions for political reasons. For example, when William Calley, architect of the My Lai Massacre that killed over 500 innocent Vietnamese, was convicted of his crimes, he led a statewide initiative that created something called American Fighting Man’s Day and had Georgians drive with their light on during the day for a week as a symbol of their support for the war criminal.

Carter seems like an unusual presidential candidate, or more accurately, an unusual person to actually win the nomination. He was always very ambitious. He tried to align with conservative forces at the national level so he could balance the McGovern ticket and become the VP candidate in 1972. That obviously did not work. He did the work to raise his profile, but it was still low. In 1973, Carter appeared on What’s My Line, where the panelists had to guess his occupation. It took a long time before Gene Shalit (who still lives!) figured it out. Carter was just a medium-sized state first term governor with no national profile. That was not going to stop him.

Carter announced his presidential candidacy in December 1974. No one cared. By January 1976, he had just 4 percent support among Democrats in polling. But, with overall disgust at Washington after Watergate, Carter managed to rise fast in early 1976. He won in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He was the moral outsider moderate, not Nixon, not Wallace, and not McGovern. It worked. The darkhorse won the candidacy, naming the liberal Walter Mondale as his vice-president. He had a big lead early in the general, but Ford nearly came back to win; in fact, Ford won more states. But Carter became president, the most unlikely person to win a presidential election since Warren Harding.

Unfortunately, Carter really sucked at being president.

The problem with Carter’s presidency is that he was bad at the job. Really, he was bad at it in many ways. The ultimate micromanager, he could get distracted with trivia. His distrust of established politicians meant that he found himself surrounded by economic advisors who told him repeatedly to triangulate between the parties, alienating everyone. He had opportunities to change the nation’s trajectory by passing groundbreaking legislation with large congressional majorities, especially in his first two years, but he just wouldn’t do it. His moralistic take on the world had some value in a post-Nixon era, but also blinded him to the complexity of many problems and the kind of deals one had to make in order to succeed.

Simply put, Carter is as close to a libertarian as we have ever had as president. That’s a tough one for us to swallow perhaps. We may want to see him as a great liberal. But he wasn’t a liberal at all, especially not on economic issues. He truly believed that nation needed to move on from the New Deal state. He distrusted government programs to help the poor. Although Congress was filled with liberals, he surrounded himself with the new neoliberals who told him repeatedly that inflation mattered much more than either building an effective political coalition or taking brave stances to use his power to create a more equal world. He loved deregulation and repealed many of the protections for consumers that had come into the law over the few decades before this. He fought for lower taxes over economic stimulus, consistently undermining his own Democratic Congress. Moreover, he was a true believer in all of this stuff. It wasn’t political expediency, which you might understand. No, he had a vision for the economy was antithetical to contemporary liberalism. Just because he was a good man personally and a Democrat and a great ex-president does not make any of this untrue.

Now, to be fair, these were tough times. The corporate lobby was now well-organized and seeking to roll back the labor and environmental and consumer regulations Americans had passed in the previous few decades and especially the last ten years. The real impact of that was in the future, but looking back, it was clear where this was headed. The economy was really tough. The nation had not dealt well with the oil crisis and the Vietnam War.

Inflation was a very real problem. Already an issue when he took office, the OPEC oil boycott meant that inflation jumped from 5.8% in 1976 to 13.2% in 1980. That would have caused massive problems for any president. Capital mobility and deindustrialization were beginning to sweep the nation and no one had any answers for communities such as Youngstown. That city’s famed Black Monday, where the first of the big steel plants shut down, took place in the first months of the Carter administration. What to do about Youngstown and other places would be a big theme of this administration. But Carter’s own reticence to take aggressive action on the economy and deindustrialization continues to reverberate today. Basically, Carter didn’t care much about cities like this and effectively offered them nothing to ease their burden.

But even outside of the big issues of the time, Carter wasn’t very good at being president. He always had a more than a bit of the anti-politics politics that drives ideas today like jungle primaries and his lack of attention to partisanship meant that he blew many easy chances to create positive legislation. His micromanaging was legendary and took him away from the things he needed to be focusing on. He started his administration by taking on some western water projects that he thought was pork, which was probably fine in theory, but this is what he chose to spend his first political capital on and all it did was infuriate leading members of Congress from both parties who benefitted from them. As they say in the West, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. If Carter had bothered talking to western politicians about this, he would have known better but that was not his style. Instead, he just made enemies of people who led powerful congressional committees and who started looking at the westerner Ronald Reagan shortly after.

None of this is to say Carter didn’t do some good things. His second day in office, Carter pardoned all Vietnam draft evaders, a clearly morally correct policy and one over which he took a political hit. Carter was also the greatest environmental president we have ever had. It’s worth noting what a missed opportunity the nation had to get serious about its environmental problems and move forward into a clean energy future that could have significantly mitigated the impact of climate change.

Nothing says more about these missed opportunities than Carter having solar panels placed on the roof of the White House and Reagan then having them removed. Carter taking on the energy crisis like it was a war was a great policy, but it’s also not one Americans wanted to hear. Americans want their president to kick some ass. Telling them to turn down their heat and put on a sweater is more or less the opposite of that. Creating the Department of Education was probably a good thing, even though the position is one of the weakest in the Cabinet, which at a time when Linda McMahon is about to lead it is probably a good thing, even if local control over education is in the end creates a lot of problems.

Much of what Carter faced was an era where he was pretty clear-minded about America’s limitations, governing a nation angry at having those limitations exposed. Americans wanted to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, not having gas rationing plans, which Carter presented to Congress in 1979. His famous “malaise” speech from later that same year, based on our energy issues, but talking about the overall position of the United States at that time, was widely attacked. One might argue that Carter simply lacked the political skills to be an effective president. Terrible at messaging these issues and too honest for a cynical media, he struggled to connect with Americans. Perhaps a different politician could have taken on these issues more effectively, but we will ever know. In any case, he had so alienated Congress by that point that in May 1979, the House voted against giving Carter the authority to create a gas rationing plan; Carter responded by calling the vote “embarrassing” which did not help him mend those needed relations.

On other environmental issues, Carter was really great. His choice to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Eula Bingham, was outstanding and this was the only administration in which OSHA was really moving toward the activist force it could be. His 1978 declaration of a federal emergency at Love Canal and the Superfund program that followed was brilliant.

On public lands, Carter was outstanding. His most important action was signing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, providing protection to 157 million acres of land, 43 million of which were in national parks, the creation of two national monuments, and over 12 million additional acres designated as wilderness, a process that followed Carter using the Antiquities Act to protect 56 million acres as national monuments in 1978, which led him to be burned in effigy in Fairbanks.

On some foreign policy issues, Carter deserves a good bit of credit. The negotiations that led to the SALT II treaty with the Soviets, fixing nuclear missile counts and limiting new development was a very positive step toward peace in the Cold War. The Ford administration had started this process, but Carter is who nailed it down with Brezhnev. The agreement was signed in 1979 and it seemed that Soviet-American relations were improving. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shortly after, relations suffered badly and the Senate refused to ratify SALT II.

On the other hand, Carter, bringing his moralism into foreign policy, decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics. This was a shame. The only people who suffered in this boycott was the athletes who had trained for the Olympics their whole life. The Soviet response to boycott in 1984 meant that you had back-to-back games tainted with political posturing. Carter redoubled efforts to influence Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which might make sense from a geopolitical perspective but the Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq regime was pretty awful. No good choices there. But a lot of that funding went to Islamist resistance groups, which did not exactly end well for the U.S. or for the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Still, Carter always defended this decision.

Fundamentally, Carter bringing human rights and moralism into foreign policy was simply hard to do, especially in the aftermath of Kissinger. It was a welcome change, but it was also applied with massive inconsistency. That’s what we see in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Carter wanted to use U.S. influence for a free Rhodesia and to end apartheid in South Africa, but he faced too many big obstacles, including growing fascism among white South Africans, the election of Margaret Thatcher (and Britain was more influential in South Africa anyway), and the fact that conservatives in Congress such as Jesse Helms liked apartheid. Carter was mostly good, but then he would say nothing against the horrors of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines because they were too important an ally. These inconsistencies were noted at the time.

Carter faced the Latin American dictatorships and responded with at least some level of disapproval, telling the Argentine junta to quit throwing people out of airplanes. He didn’t respond well to the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but at least he didn’t instantly move toward murderous militarism in the same way as Reagan would. He also worked out the treaty with Panama to return the Panama Canal to that nation in 1999. That undermined an increasingly problematic site of protest by anti-colonial forces that reminded the world of American imperialism. It also led to a massive right-wing backlash, becoming the culture war issue of the 1980 election and leading to the defeat of several long-time politicians who supported it, such as Frank Church in Idaho. This is one of those issues that is almost impossible to wrap your head around today—why did returning the Panama Canal to Panama cause such a widespread reaction. But that’s OK, in 50 years, people will wonder the same thing about Critical Race Theory and the modern Republican Party. Amazingly, we are now talking about taking over the Panama Canal today because our next president is not only a zillion years old, but is partly a response to Carterism anyway.

Of course, Carter’s signature achievement was his work toward peace in the Middle East. The Camp David Accords did not in fact bring peace to the region, but Israel and Egypt have more or less gotten along ever since and that reduced overall tensions tremendously. Unfortunately, the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat and the rise of Hosni Mubarak placed sharp limitations on Egyptian governance and the recent history of Israel is of a nation turning far to the right. But getting those two nations to sit down and work out an agreement was an actual foreign policy achievement far greater than nearly any president has had in foreign policy.

It’s hard to say much positive at all about Carter’s response to the Iran hostage crisis. To be fair, there weren’t a lot of great cards to play. But the rescue operation was an unmitigated disaster and Carter deserved the blame he received for it. Early on, I don’t think you can criticize Carter too harshly. He announced sanctions and proclaimed he would not order a military action that would “cause bloodshed.” But as his 1980 reelection campaign struggled against the rise of Ronald Reagan, Carter ordered an invasion of Iran to rescue the hostages. Operation Eagle Claw was one of the worst disasters in American foreign policy history. First, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explicitly told Carter that this was a terrible idea, but Zbigniew Brzezinski was a more influential advisor—and he wanted a military solution. The actual operation of the mission was a complete disaster, with botched preparations, the waste of fuel, and then desert sand blasted into the refueling tanker, leading to two planes going down in the Iranian desert. Vance resigned in disgust. This both showed American incompetence and gave the Iranian regime endless propaganda with their own people and globally. Coming on the heels of Vietnam and the oil crisis, this was a huge blow to American prestige and self-confidence.

Of course, the media also savaged Carter in horrendously unfair ways. He was seen by the Beltway elite as a redneck outsider who didn’t share their values or interests. His infamous Playboy interview when he said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” led to a lot of chortling among the media. His evangelicalism was funny to them. Nothing sums up how awful Carter fared with the Beltway hacks that make up our mainstream media then and now than the infamous rabbit incident. Carter was a man with a farm in rural Georgia. He was used to dealing with animals and knew how to handle a rabbit. But these Beltway hacks found it hilarious. What a buffoon, that Carter! He had a difficult brother that was a media joke. Good thing the media handles problematic family members of Democratic presidents reasonably today! He also had his young daughter Amy in the White House with him and she received way too much media attention for a girl that age. I don’t have much positive to say about how the media has evolved over time, but largely leaving the underage children of presidents alone is a good thing, even if you are unfortunate enough to have Donald Trump as your father. Presidential children of age who are trying to implement fascism, well, that’s another thing entirely.

But it was really on the economy that Carter’s presidency floundered. A believer that inflation was caused by monopolies, he believed strongly in deregulation. Carter’s emphasis on deregulation wasn’t entirely out of order; after all, he did help create the modern microbrewery movement through it. And while the Airline Deregulation Act did usher in an era of cheap airfare, it also laid the groundwork for the almost comically terrible experience of flying today. But overall, his emphasis on deregulation as opposed to better regulation played no small role in the neoliberal era that has snowballed into the all-out war on the regulatory state today. He had no vision for fighting inflation except for softer versions of the pro-corporate policies that Reagan would later pursue, while not offering any sort of message that Regan would be so effective at. But his austerity programs and desire to cut social programs led to a lot of disturbance among Democratic leaders. As Tip O’Neill said in 1979, “Can you reelect the president on austerity?” The answer was no.

Perhaps nowhere did Carter show his massive limitations of imagination and governance than on the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. That bill, which would have created true full employment, initially with the right to sue the government if you could not find a job, was an attempt to rebuild the liberal coalition by appealing to the best of the New Deal job programs and to the black community, which suffered so badly from underemployment. The bill’s sponsors thought Carter was on board with them during the 76 campaign, but they were wrong.

Carter surrounded himself with neoliberal economic advisors who prioritized inflation over every other goal and governed significantly to the right of his quite liberal Congress, infuriating the left. Carter sent Charles Schultze, his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, to torpedo Humphrey-Hawkins. Schultze effectively shut down any provision that would actually create full employment or commit the government to putting money into job creation. The final bill, a mere shell of the original, committed the government more to fighting inflation than to helping the poor.

What happened with Humphrey-Hawkins repeated itself over and over during the Carter administration, infuriating unions and the left. As Jefferson Cowie tells in his great book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, near the end of Carter’s administration, a journalist asked International Association of Machinists president Wimpy Winpisinger how Carter could revive his reputation in the labor movement. Wimpy answered, “Die.”

Of course, Winpsinger didn’t want Carter to die, but that’s how far Carter’s reputation had fallen on the labor left by 1980. Carter’s response to the decline of the steel industry was almost nonexistent. He was more focused on propping up foreign steel suppliers to fight inflation than worried about the jobs lost in the U.S. The Japanese and European steel companies dumped their extra supplies on the U.S. market, undermining the ability of American firms to compete in their home markets. This undermined his own base voters in critical northern states and, taken aback by the closures, he simply struggled to even articulate a coherent response and nothing that happened undermined his belief that growing imports would only help the U.S., both in domestic and foreign policy. Carter shrugging his shoulders at Youngstown and other sites of deindustrialization infuriated working class voters.

In short, Carter had the congressional majorities to rebuild the New Deal coalition. Instead, he pandered to conservatives on economics, defied his own congressional caucus, and proceeded to fail entirely in stopping the Republican Party in 1980. I don’t know if reestablishing New Deal politics would have stopped the rise of Reagan and the right, but it couldn’t have ended worse than Carter’s actual policies did. Again and again, Carter sent bills to Congress that no one liked. His alienated his own party, Republicans didn’t support the bills either, and he simply would not build political coalitions to help himself out. You can’t help those who won’t help themselves and Jimmy Carter would not help himself.

By 1980, Carter was heavily damaged goods. The growing right certainly wasn’t going to vote for him over Reagan. Yet, he had strongly alienated his fellow Democrats, both in Congress and the base, which was still pretty strongly union-based at this time. His racial moderation wasn’t going to appeal to southern whites and he lost the chance to really lock in high participation from African-American communities by his economic policies that did not take the fight against poverty seriously. It’s fair to say that Ted Kennedy’s primary run against Carter was stupid and just hurt the president, but then Carter had pretty much asked for a liberal challenger. In fact, I don’t really have a problem with Kennedy deciding to challenge Carter, but Kennedy himself ran an awful campaign, so he damaged Carter without actually beating him, the worst of both worlds. Who knows if Kennedy would have defeated Reagan, but this was still the pre-serious part of his career, so I am skeptical.

In the general, Carter actually started out ahead of Reagan in polling, but by the fall, it was clear that Reagan was going to win. He did, going away. Carter only won his home state of Georgia, Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, and DC. The electoral college total was an awful 489-49. Reagan won 50.1% of the popular vote to 41% for Carter and 6.6% to John Anderson. What a disaster.

After Carter lost, he had every right to be bitter and withdraw into private life. In 1981, there wasn’t too much of a precedent for what ex-presidents did, by which I mean that they did all sorts of things. Some were old and died soon after. LBJ went back to Texas, relaxed a bit, and started teaching at the University of Texas occasionally. Eisenhower golfed. Hoover stewed in endless bitterness at FDR. Nixon sought to rehab his reputation.

Carter chose none of these paths. Rather, he went into a life of public service unprecedented among an ex-president since John Quincy Adams. This started with the founding of the Carter Center in 1982, which I think is the first serious foundation founded by an ex-president. Carter made the most of it, fighting for worldwide democracy and human health.

Carter is most famous for his work with Habitat for Humanity, which seems like such an institution now that one forgets how central Carter was to its growth. He and Rosalynn started working with Habitat on a 1984 project in Americus, near Plains. Soon after, he led his own Habitat group to New York and a long collaboration had begun. Now, while we can that this sort of voluntarism has a downside because the government should be taking care of housing for the poor, of course the government is very much not doing that. Carter, believing in living his faith, helped spur a new path of voluntarism and this was a tremendously positive thing.

Carter’s work on tropical diseases is even more important. It’s hard to state just how horrific diseases such as Guinea worm and river blindness are. In 1986, the Carter Center decided to take on Guinea worm. That year, 3.5 million people suffered from the disease, spread through 21 countries. Today, it is almost completely eliminated. This is how you do a post-presidency. Carter long said he wanted to outlive Guinea worm. He may not quite have done so, and it could come back without continued vigilance, but what an amazing accomplishment. Moreover, through the whole thing, although Carter has no small ego himself, he handled himself with such grace and class and modesty. Bill Clinton, who always had a complicated relationship with Carter, could have learned more than a few things from the man about personal behavior, both during and after his presidency.

Carter also continued to take brave and bold stances on the issues he most cared about. He had no reason to take controversial positions. But he felt it was the right thing to do. That was especially true with his advocacy to peace in the Middle East. His continued efforts for peace in the Middle East were always incredibly noble, if out of fashion with an Israel no longer interested in a two-state solution or peace with the Palestinians. He spent a decent amount of time in North Korea, talking to that nation about giving up their nuclear program and in 1994, persuaded Kim Il-Sung to agree to a freeze, although of course that didn’t last. His election monitoring in politically troubled countries, particularly in Africa, was crucial work as well. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Unlike Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize for not being George W. Bush, Carter truly earned his Nobel.

Up to the end, Carter spoke out. He criticized Trump for ending the Iran nuclear deal, a true foreign policy disaster, showed up around the nation for various events, often revolving around the Carter Center, and bemoaned the state of the government. He was a moral voice. He wasn’t a good president, not by a long shot, and recent efforts to revive his reputation aren’t very convincing. He was outstanding in some areas, but the number of unforced errors severely undermined him. But he was absolutely a good man. We will all miss him. But definitely not for his presidency, which was bad.

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