That 70s Feeling
I’ve been looking at our politics lately and thinking about the 1970s.
Not just because that decade ended in an intractable conflict with Iran that contributed to the downfall of a president, although that parallel certainly could come to pass. It’s more how the cracks that the war is revealing in the Republican coalition are reminiscent of the fractures in the Democratic coalition of the late 70s.
Like today’s Republicans, those Democrats struggled to stay in power as the country was moving away from them and found there was little they could do to maintain their grip. And they were led by someone who rose to power as a free agent only to find himself alone when the public turned on him.
In fact, from the standpoint of the relationship to their respective political parties, there are striking parallels between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump.
Carter and Trump both emerged as national figures at the end of a long regime cycle that had defined politics for decades. Carter was the last in a string of New Deal/Great Society Democrats that originated with FDR’s first election in 1932. Trump will be the last Republican of the Reagan era that began triumphantly with Carter’s downfall.
But neither one advocated their party’s core beliefs. In fact, both ran for president by opposing their party and how it represented itself, with Carter positioning himself to the right of New Deal liberals and Trump heralding a racist populism that Republicans had tried hard to keep under wraps for years.
Both were long-shot insurgents. Both defeated established, well-known, mainstream contenders. Both ran persona-driven rather than party-driven campaigns, basing their claim to the presidency on exceptional personal qualities that they sold as a solution to our problems: Carter asking voters, “why not the best?” and Trump asserting that “I alone can fix” what’s wrong in America.
Neither was a serious figure in their party before being nominated. Three years before becoming president, Carter appeared as a “mystery guest” on the game show What’s My Line and nobody on a celebrity panel recognized him. Calling his campaign a sideshow, Huffington Post relegated Trump to their entertainment section when he ran in 2016.
Both won narrow victories, with Carter barely defeating the unelected incumbent Gerald Ford and Trump failing to win the popular vote in his first two tries, then winning it by a hair in his third.
And both were accidental presidents—or at least presidents who were elected in reaction to historical firsts. Carter owed his election to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation two years earlier. Trump’s ugly appeal was certainly heightened by the election and re-election of the first Black president.
Each of these circumstances was enough for the outsider insurgent to reassemble a coalition that had been disappearing.
