There’s a certain symmetry between the recent passing of former President Jimmy Carter and the impending departure of current President Joe Biden from the White House.
Carter was a friend and hero to Biden. He was a fine and decent man; a Naval Academy grad in 1946 who worked on developing our nuclear submarine program and a good ex-president, exemplary in some ways. He built a lot of homes for Habitat for Humanity and taught Sunday School for the good people of Plains, Georgia, for decades.
However, President Carter must have given Biden a signed playbook from his failed term in the White House to follow because everything Biden did failed, just as it did a half-century ago under Carter.
Being a charitable Christian doing good deeds for poor people and teaching bible study does not necessarily qualify a person to be president of the United States of America. Being the former does not directly correlate with the requirement for success for the latter.
High inflation, high gasoline prices, failed efforts in the Middle East ― hostages in Iran under Carter; troops recklessly withdrawn from Afghanistan under Biden ― these are just a few of the disasters du jour shared by both administrations.
However, there was one terrific result that occurred after the Carter administration was stomped out of office by Ronald Reagan in 1980 by the widest margin ever for a defeated incumbent: 28 years of conservative political rule during which America was prosperous and at peace, for the most part, domestically and around the world.
Call it “Pax Americana.” It could happen again starting on Jan. 20 at noon, Eastern Standard Time.
The boomer generation, the largest baby cohort in American history at the time, grew up with long hair, hippies, drugs and “Make Love, Not War” and “Flower Power” slogans in the 1960s. If any generation was primed to be liberal Democrats for the rest of their lives, it was the baby boomers.
Instead, they wound up being the most conservative and entrepreneurial generation in modern American history.
How could that possibly have happened?
Younger generations see what is happening around them while growing up ― and it sticks with them for a lifetime.
During the Carter years, these impressionable youth saw long lines at gas stations to fill up their tank on odd or even days, parents thrown out of work due to exorbitantly high rates of 12% inflation and interest rates approaching 21%, and Muslim ayatollahs holding 52 American hostages for 444 days, making America the laughingstock of the world.
They thought to themselves: “This is crazy! I don’t ever want to go through any of this again!”
The 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971. All of a sudden, young people 18 and older who had seen the mayhem of reckless policies under Jimmy Carter voted against such madness, even if they were not sure about Reagan.
America has always been center-right politically since its founding. The young people of the ’60s reverted to the mean of American political belief and stayed in the rather center-right slice of the political spectrum pie as they progressed through life.
They saw mature, serious leaders supporting freedom, free enterprise, free speech, prosperity and the rule of law ― and decided to keep voting for them.
“Government is not the solution to the problem,” Reagan said. “Government is the problem!”
Millions of young boomers agreed with Reagan and voted for his vice president, George H.W. Bush. As they approached middle age, they voted for Bill Clinton ― who was not a progressive socialist lefty ― and then George W. Bush with the dark memories of Carter’s failures still fresh in their heads.
We may have the massive failures of Biden to thank if the next 28 years mirror the three decades after Carter left office.
Young people, African Americans and Hispanics were turned off by the inflation, illegal immigration and rampant, indiscriminate crime and violence allowed under Biden. They had nowhere else to go but to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. They didn’t hear anything that would reverse those trends coming out of the mouth of Kamala Harris during her incomprehensible, ill-fated Potemkin village of a campaign.
If America elects conservative Republicans for the next 28 years, we can finally thank Biden for doing something positive for this country. Just like millions could thank Carter for doing the same.
