1º"Jimmy Carter's administration was a turning point for the Democratic Party. Populism, class struggle, and Roosevelt's legacy were out. Rockefeller "slow growth" malthusianism, neoliberalism, austerity, and identity politics were in. Almost all of Carter's administration came out of the Rockefeller funded Trilateral Commission.
Carter called himself a "student of Zbiegnew Brzezinski." He started two proxy wars, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. He armed Osama Bin Laden, and spit in the face of the Iranian people when they rose up to topple the brutal Shah.
Carter brought in Paul Volcker to deregulate the lending of money, overturning state "usury laws" allowing bankers to rip people off like crazy. Carter sent the FBI to go after the labor wing of his own party with ABSCAM. Democrats who were tied to labor unions and believed in economic growth got purged in a series of sting operations.
Carter staged a "National Women's Conference" in 1977, setting the trend of using liberal Identity Politics to cover up for right-wing economic policies.
When the US economy crashed, Carter told newly impoverished Americans that they should "wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat." He gave them a lecture about how "owning things" doesn't give meaning in life, and they shouldn't want to improve their living conditions. The Carter Administration churned out documents about the danger of "overpopulation" and the need to "reduce consumption" in the developing world, while unleashing bankers and international corporations to de-industrialize and loot the USA.
Ronald Reagan trounced him in the 1980 election, saying "Are you any better off than you were four years ago?" Reagan and the right-wing won out because leftist politics had been reduced to a dark, anti-human pessimism.
Jimmy Carter's Rockefeller "leftism" was a total disaster. US intelligence began covertly funding "EuroCommunists" and dissident movements in the Eastern bloc. With Brzezinski at the helm, his administration set the stage for the Color Revolutions of Eastern Europe and the economic genocide of the post-Soviet years. With CIA directed funding and manipulation, left-wing politics was pushed away from Marxism-Leninism, toward becoming a primitivist, chaos celebrating and anti-technology cult that wanted to turn back history.
What Carter stood for is the opposite of the constructive, optimistic 21st Century Socialism we need to get ourselves out of this crisis today.
The immediate results in the late 1970s were so bad, Carter gave Reagan and the Neocons a huge boost. At least they tried to make people think the future was bright and it was "morning in America."
Carter aligned himself with the faction of the US ruling class that has a long-term geopolitical strategy of fomenting chaos and creating proxy wars to destroy Russia and China, while "managing" the human race to gradually transition to lower and lower living standards and stop reproducing.
That faction is very well alive.
Today it is represented by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, the only two people who could ever give Donald Trump a chance of being re-elected after the nightmare of the last 4 years.
Don't pretend Jimmy Carter was a left-wing hero.
He represented a big shift away from the politics of Roosevelt, as well as the revolutionaries like William Z. Foster, Gus Hall, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn and Paul Robeson who made Roosevelt's achievements possible.
We need constructive socialism. We need a government of action that will fight for working families.
Jimmy Carter was the opposite of that.
Its worth mentioning that he refused to bring federal charges against the KKK members who murdered 5 communists in broad daylight in 1979 in Greensboro North Carolina. It was later revealed that his DOJ had infiltrated the KKK and Nazis, and FBI and BAFT agents were in the white supremacist caravan that killed the 5 leader of the CWP."
I would also like to mention it was under Carter that the US fancied itself the world police of the oil in the middle east in order to stop Soviet trade and worker's movements in the middle east as you can see with both his handling of Afganistan and Yemen.