Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us

Halfway into his presidency, Jimmy Carter’s back was against the wall. It was July 1979, the height of the energy crisis, and the beleaguered president went on national television to deliver not a speech, but a kind of sermon.

The address — called “Crisis of Confidence” — challenged Americans to acknowledge personal failings that he believed were compounding very real public problems.

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” said Mr. Carter, who died Sunday. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

The dangers of a society’s growing ever more covetous of bigger and better and more seemed obvious enough to Mr. Carter, who grew up in rural Georgia and lived in public housing as a young adult. By appealing to our better angels, he believed he could inspire in all of us a sense of thrift that would help heal America’s ills: environmental degradation, dependence on foreign energy, the power of special interests and political extremism.

For a fleeting moment, Americans listened. Mr. Carter’s approval ratings jumped 11 points within hours.

But partisans smeared the address — they almost immediately called it the “malaise speech” — and pilloried Mr. Carter, saying he was blaming Americans for problems that they hadn’t created and that presidents were supposed to solve.

Everything that happened after the speech — from persistent inflation to the Iranian hostage crisis — wiped away any warm feelings the voters had. He lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Ronald Reagan 16 months later, at the dawn of a decade that glamorized materialism like few if any that had come before it.

The decades that followed have shown that Mr. Carter had the diagnosis right. Materialism has become epidemic — endemic, even. We mostly fail to ask ourselves one searching, overarching question: How much is enough?

Mr. Carter misread the nation in thinking that we would look within and without and then answer. In fact, there is little about our patterns since his address to suggest that we wish to earn, own and consume less, or that we have awakened to the fact that having, buying and using more may fail to make us happier.

Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half.

Research by Tim Kasser and Jean Twenge showed that materialism among 12th graders increased over time, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Generation X, and then stayed at those historically high levels among millennials.

“There was a trend underway at the time Carter was making this speech, and it basically just amplifies in the next 10 years rather than being suppressed,” said Mr. Kasser, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College and the author of “The High Price of Materialism.”

The lingering belief that Mr. Carter’s presidency was a failed one casts its own cloud over the “Crisis of Confidence” speech, but whatever ailed the American psyche was mostly not his fault. A nation’s character, like its economy, is never the province of a single leader. Nevertheless, Mr. Carter’s words were easy political pickings.

Mr. Reagan used Mr. Carter’s call for moderation as a kind of anvil to define the sitting president. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”

As Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best,” his excellent biography of Mr. Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”

Mr. Carter’s wise counsel made him an easy mark for anyone inclined to criticize him as a finger-wagging scold.

“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound moralizing and patronizing,” said Alison Hulme, associate professor of social and cultural change at the University of Northampton in England and the author of “A Brief History of Thrift.”

And so we got the opposite of what Mr. Carter wished for. Yuppies arrived in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought us Hummers to guzzle the gas that people had waited in line for 15 years earlier. In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted us to get back to our daily routines and fly to Disney World after the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Obama administration couldn’t bear to slice away at a whopping tax break that makes it much easier for affluent families to spend $400,000 per child on college.

Since then, the rise of social media has been marked, among other dreadful things, by lifestyle braggadocio and algorithms fine-tuned to serve scarily relevant ads. And then a man who named a gold-tinged tower after himself became our president.

Rarely has there been an acute need for collective financial sacrifice during these last few decades, or much of any other kind of national sacrifice for that matter. When a test has arrived, we haven’t exactly passed with flying colors.

A considerable minority of Americans resented staying home and wearing masks during the early, uncertain stages of the coronavirus pandemic, amid ongoing protestations of a so-called loss of freedom.

“The tying together of rights with consumption is absolutely rife,” said Dr. Hulme, whose academic research focuses on both of those topics. “This drives me insane,” she added.

Mr. Kasser watched these developments with a sense of foreboding, because his research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability. The pandemic only turned up the heat on a roiling cauldron of social problems: growing economic inequality, horrific episodes of racism, worsening political divides and a deep mistrust in the legitimacy of our elections.

“And it’s not like advertising let up,” he said.

We will be tested again. Next time it may be a climate-related catastrophe, driven in part by the very patterns of consumption that Mr. Carter warned against in his speech. He called for turning down the thermostat in the winter and for 20 percent of the nation’s energy to come from solar power by 2000 — all these years later, we’ve done neither.

“I think in Carter’s mind there was some hope,” said Kevin Mattson, a professor of history at Ohio University and the author of a book about Mr. Carter’s speech, “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” “But I think there is profound doubt that we can muster the strength to do something about a problem that could destroy the planet.”

It seems unlikely that politicians today would give a speech anything like Mr. Carter’s address. That would violate the vague but powerful principle that American exceptionalism should not be questioned — that the answer to every national problem of any import is blunt-force innovation.

But it really isn’t always the answer, and Mr. Carter knew it. After voters determined that he was not the kind of president they wanted, he demonstrated a mostly humble form of public service: As he maintained an international diplomatic profile, he led Bible study sessions and built houses with Habitat for Humanity.

“Maybe seeing the kind of work that he did after his presidency is another sign of hope,” Professor Mattson said. “That someone can make an impact by being a citizen activist rather than by being president.”

We as individuals cannot block the sun or bridge the racial wealth gap. But we can do something — 5 or 10 or 20 percent more than we have done before. Individually, it won’t move the needle much, but change can be catching.

“I think of the knock-on effects it can have,” Dr. Hulme said. “It’s more about a kind of culture change that can potentially lead to larger groups of people questioning their own lifestyle.”

One way to begin is with a redefinition of thrift, a word that comes from similar root words as thrive. What if we cast it, as the author Ramit Sethi does, as a relentless focus on spending well on a few things that make us happiest and then radically paring back on the things that matter less?

“I want people to change the way they live because it might be nicer for them,” Dr. Hulme said.

Eventually, we’re going to have to try. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.