There is even a move to re-evaluate his one-term presidency. Ejected from office in 1981 with abysmal polling numbers, the economy in a mess, and his party at war with itself, his years in the White House are now presented by his liberal fans as a triumph of far-sighted policymaking with a surprisingly enduring legacy. The distinguished political journalist Jonathan Alter has hailed Carter’s “visionary domestic achievements”. He appointed more female judges than all his predecessors put together (although, bathetically, he is the only president to serve a full term without being able to appoint a Supreme Court justice). Fifteen pieces of environmental legislation were passed on Carter’s watch, doubling the size of the national parks and providing subsidy for green energy. He liked to think of himself as a scientist (sometimes rather exaggerating his naval officer training to describe himself as a “nuclear engineer”) and recognised the impact on the climate of fossil fuels. He even installed solar panels on the White House roof (President Reagan had them ripped off, shipping one of the panels to the Carter Library, which seems like a rather pointed act of trolling).

In foreign policy, Carter’s crowning achievement was the Camp David accords in 1978 — the peace agreement signed between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a rare moment of hope in the Middle East. The accords were a genuine achievement for a modest man who nevertheless had a deep, if sometimes misplaced, faith in his ability to bring people together.

Even so: poor old Jimmy Carter. For all of these achievements, and for all his manifold personal virtues, he remains the cardigan-wearer who nagged Americans to turn the thermostat down, the lonely fisherman in a pond in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, who was implausibly attacked by a hitherto unknown creature called a “swamp rabbit”. His relations with Congress — which was, after all, controlled by his own party — were probably the worst of any president since Andrew Johnson provoked the House of Representatives into impeaching him in 1868. Tip O’Neill, the long-standing House Speaker couldn’t stand the peanut farmer from Georgia, regarding him as a provincial who thought he was above having to learn Washington’s ways. Carter once invited O’Neill to the White House for breakfast but served him cookies and coffee instead of ham and eggs. In a misguided economy drive, he stopped serving liquor at receptions. Carter gave the impression that the only reason to pass legislation was because it was the Right Thing To Do, which was almost the opposite of how Washington politicians understood it. The result was that, despite big majorities and a relatively successful “batting average” in getting bills through Congress, important legislation on health care, tax and welfare reform failed. Long lines at gas stations were an everyday testimony to Carter’s failure to grip inflation and the energy supply crisis. And with fatal political consequences, he appeared to dither over the American hostages in Tehran.

His appeal in the 1976 election was as the un-Nixon. He grinned rather than grimaced. He was a fair-haired Southerner who promised, like a Boy Scout, to do his best, who would roll up his sleeves and mend the machinery of government. It is true that back when he ran for the Georgia governorship in 1970, Carter had not been above a few pseudo-Nixonian nods and winks to segregationists, but once in office he was clear as a bell in his opposition to racial discrimination. With Carter, there was no profanity, no wiretaps, no hush-money payments, no impeachment — and no White House taping system for the benefit of future historians. So undoubtedly, he was a triumphant success at Not Being Nixon. But that is a low bar.

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We can admire the rise to the presidency of someone so fundamentally honest — not least in the light of some of his successors. But the unfortunate truth is that Jimmy Carter could be excruciatingly inept at the business of politics, which is to say the business of winning power and using it. He was a prophet cast into a nation of sinners, and the trouble is he talked like one.

The best example is his so-called “malaise speech”, a televised address to the American people on July 15, 1979, which he had originally intended to be an address about the OPEC-instigated energy crisis but became instead a meditation on the “crisis of confidence” facing the nation. (He never actually used the word “malaise”, though it suited his opponents’ purposes to imply that he did). If the 1983 Labour Party manifesto was supposedly the “longest suicide note in history”, Carter’s half-hour-long sermon, mixing self-pity and moral exhortation, must have come close. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another politician who more publicly admitted failure.

In the 10 days before his address, Carter had invited a cross-section of Americans to Camp David to listen to their advice. Not just business, religious and political leaders but ordinary citizens too. He sat there in the presidential retreat soaking up their advice and their abuse and then, astonishingly, read out some of their most pungent criticisms on live TV. “Mr President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government,” one of them told him. Another said, “you don’t see the people enough anymore.” He had worked hard to enact his campaign promises, he said. And then added, rather plaintively, “but, I have to admit, with just mixed success”. Oh dear.

And then came the main body of the homily. The President paused, looked earnestly into the camera, and told Americans that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America”. There was a challenge “more serious than energy or inflation”, one that was a “fundamental threat to American democracy”. That challenge was a “crisis of confidence”.

A few weeks before this weirdly compelling, disconcerting TV appearance, Carter had met the cultural historian Christopher Lasch, whose book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations had been published earlier that year. Lasch argued that the decline of paternal authority and excessive consumption had fundamentally altered American culture since the Fifties. A new personality type consistent with “pathological narcissism” had been normalised. Lasch’s ideas were imprinted all over Carter’s speech. We used to be a nation that “was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and… faith in God,” said the President. Now, “too many of us… tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” In a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, the President was blunt: “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

So, what was to be done? Well that, in the end, was up to the viewers. It was hard being President, Carter was saying, and try as he might, there wasn’t much he could do about so fundamental a dislocation in American culture. Since we, the people, were the ones who had lost confidence, it was the people, ultimately, who had to get us out of the mess.

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The only other speech in the canon of American presidential rhetoric comparable to Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech is Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865. At his moment of victory, with the Confederacy on the point of total destruction, Lincoln did the most extraordinary thing — he blamed everyone, Northerners as well as Southerners, himself just as much as his enemies on the battlefield, for the sin of slavery that had caused the war. Self-abasement can work as a political strategy, but to put it mildly, it’s a brave choice.

As Carter’s present-day defenders are quick to point out, the “crisis of confidence” speech initially seemed to go well. He had a polling bump. The White House received warm messages of support from citizens who were heartened to hear a president speaking the truth. But over time, the speech was reframed, as speeches always are, by the wider reputation of the speaker. For Carter’s enemies — and there were many — the speech made their case for them. “You see paralysis and stagnation and drift,” Carter said, truthfully. “You don’t like it, and neither do I.”

His great Capitol Hill rival Ted Kennedy didn’t hide his disdain: “Now, the people are blamed for every national ill, scolded as greedy, wasteful, and mired in malaise.” The youngest Kennedy brother’s decision to challenge the President in the Democratic primaries wounded Carter badly. But waiting in the wings was Carter’s ultimate nemesis, Ronald Reagan. There are some, said Reagan pointedly, in his twinkly way, who claim “that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us”. They say, “we must cut our expectations, conserve and withdraw, that we must tell our children not to dream as we once dreamed.”

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Unsurprisingly, in the midst of inflation and unemployment, Reagan’s feel-good let-it-rip optimism crushed Carter’s earnest calls for restraint and faithfulness. In an era of close elections and intense bipartisanship, it can be startling to look at the electoral college map for 1980. Reagan carried 44 states. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

Carter was unlucky in some respects. He faced a series of interlocking economic challenges that would have daunted any occupant of the White House. But in other ways, he had a golden opportunity when he came into office in 1977. America was not at war, there was unified control of Congress, and while he faced his fair share of crises at home and abroad, there was nothing on the scale of the dramas that others faced: no big terrorist attack, no threat of a nuclear exchange, no great civil unrest, no pandemic. How on earth, then, did he end up mournfully speaking to the voters about their lack of confidence?

With Christopher Lasch’s words in his mind, Carter was not necessarily wrong about the culture of narcissism. Donald Trump, after all, is the apotheosis of pathological narcissism, his election a dystopian fulfilment of Lasch’s worst nightmare. But Carter was very mistaken if he thought that such a profound psychological and cultural shift could be combatted by earnest exhortations from the Oval Office. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning,” he said. Fair enough, but sometimes the larger interests of a political project require politicians to hold back the unvarnished truth. His political opponents’ characterisation of his speech as entirely negative were unfair — he ended with a painfully sincere plea for Americans to “join hands” and commit to the “rebirth of the American spirit”. But what might work in a Sunday School didn’t work in a big and complex polity, at least not when Reagan was more than willing to give messages of happiness and reassurance. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

At least for me, the cause of Trump Anxiety Disorder is not so much Trump himself, but what his rise, and seeming untouchability, tells us about the impossibility of politics. He exposes our collective powerlessness when we cannot agree on what is true and what is not. This is why Trump’s indictment for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their votes is bad news for sufferers: it is another test of whether there are consequences for saying that black is white, and just like the two impeachments, it might well fail.

On the first page of the indictment, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith succinctly sums up the case he wants to make: “Despite having lost [the 2020 election], the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.” But did he? Trump’s defenders argue that he sincerely believed there had been election rigging on a scale that altered the outcome. Of course, the indictment provides evidence that Trump was repeatedly told none of this was true by Justice Department officials, White House aides, Republican governors and even his own Vice President, who he accused — on Christmas Day, no less — of being “too honest”. But so what? Wasn’t he just Trump being Trump?

One of the problems here is the cognitive dissonance between the deadly serious charges laid against the former president and the manifest lunacy and incompetence of his carnival of co-conspirators, a cast of characters who could be from an Ealing Comedy. It includes Rudy Giuliani, the hair-dye-drizzled host of a press conference that was supposed to be in the Four Seasons Hotel but ended up in a garden supply centre instead, and the lawyer Sidney Powell, so bonkers that even Trump apparently called her “crazy”. With friends like these, Trump was just being what Trump has always been — narcissistic, reckless, gullible, mendacious, believing that the world was what he wanted it to be. He and his acolytes never wink and admit they’re playing a game, but their very outlandishness makes them harder to take seriously.

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By Adam Smith

The indictment hedges against the defence that Trump was just being Trump by freely acknowledging that, like every American citizen, he had the right to lie. It focuses instead on what he did — trying to overturn the election by appointing fake electors and such like — not on what he thought. But, his defenders will argue, if the election really had been stolen, his efforts to prevent the ratification of Biden’s victory, even down to encouraging an armed crowd to go to the Capitol on January 6, were entirely reasonable. His lawyers will insist that their client was acting on the basis of “advice of counsel” from the constitutional lawyer John Eastman, presumed to be one of Trump’s as-yet-unnamed co-conspirators. Eastman apparently provided advice that Vice President Pence could delay the formal counting of the Electoral College votes on January 6. Assuming a trial does eventually take place, all it will take is for a single juror to think that, on balance, Trump was just “exploring options” and trying to make sure the election was “fair”, and he will be acquitted.

This leaves the United States in a horrible impasse. There is no outcome that will not intensify the stress on the American political system; the stakes have now been raised once again. “To support Trump is to support sedition and violence,” ran a typical piece in the liberal Atlantic. “We face in Trump a dedicated enemy of our Constitution, and if he returns to office, his next ‘administration’ will be a gang of felons, goons, and resentful mediocrities, all of whom will gladly serve Trump’s sociopathic needs while greedily dividing the spoils of power.” The Trumpites respond in kind. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who back in January 2021 blamed Trump for the violence at the Capitol, tweeted: “Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him.”

As an author of books about the American Civil War, I find this language eerily familiar. Especially disconcerting is the way that each side mirrors the claims of the other, believing that their opponents pose an existential threat to the republic. In the 1850s, a majority of Northerners came to believe that Southern slaveholding politicians and their allies represented a grave threat to their system of government, while white Southerners feared that they were losing their country. In fact, the differences between the politics of the mid-19th century and today are profound, and the tendency of today’s liberals to compare themselves to anti-slavery campaigners is often self-serving. But what matters is how people think and speak.

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There is no precedent for a president being indicted for these kinds of crimes. None has ever before tried to overturn an election, however ineptly. But in another sense, politics in the US has often, rhetorically, been on the precipice. And while the specifics of the Capitol riot of January 6 were entirely new, the resort to violence was definitely not. The January 6 rioters liked to think of themselves as part of a revolutionary tradition that went back to 1776: that violence against the government is legitimate and sanctioned by the Founding Fathers. They were not entirely wrong about that. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, a sentiment that was entirely characteristic of him.

Political violence has, in truth, been at least as quintessentially a part of the American political tradition as the supposedly miraculous peaceful transition of power: from the rural rebellions of the 1790s and the white suppression of black voters during Reconstruction to the long tradition of labour and civil rights resistance. When in the aftermath of the January 6th riot, Joe Biden issued a statement claiming: “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are,” he was only half right. It is true that the US has a long tradition of peaceful, ordered, rational politics, but Trump keeps me awake because he is the latest, and perhaps the most dangerous, reminder of America’s darker, and no less potent, political tradition.

In an important book published in 2020, the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman identified four recurrent threats to American democracy: political polarisation, excessive executive power, conflict over who belongs in the political community, and high levels of economic inequality. What is new about the current state of the US, Mettler and Lieberman argue, is that for the first time all four of these threats are in play at the same time.

In the 1790s, there was intense political polarisation, with Jefferson’s and Adam’s supporters each convinced that the triumph of the other would mark the end of the brief experiment in republican government. In the Thirties, mass unemployment and widespread poverty raised profound questions about the viability of the American system. At various times, in the 1890s and again in the Sixties, conflict over who should be included in the political nation threatened to tear the country apart. And anxiety over excessive executive power — a tyrant in the White House — roiled politics in the eras of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

But in all these previous moments of crisis, there were also steadying forces. In the Sixties and Seventies, for example, racial conflict and fears of an over-mighty presidency were contained because the two parties did not represent alternative sides in the conflict. Today, extreme partisan polarisation of a kind not seen since the 1790s makes the instability caused by the other three threats exponentially worse.

Mettler and Lieberman gamely end their book on a positive note by quoting Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg urging Americans in the middle of the Civil War to “be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” and that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”. Fair play to them: it is always worth returning to Lincoln, for he made the case for democracy as an ongoing struggle better than anyone else has ever done. But at Gettysburg in 1863, there were still another two years of bloody war ahead, a war that was the ultimate example of the breakdown of normal politics. It is not an encouraging precedent.

But what makes America an old country is not just institutional continuity, but a politics shaped by a fixation with its own evermore distant moment of creation. For all the rhetoric of being a “new nation”, a tiny number of bewigged, silk-stockinged, well-fed gentlemen — many of them slaveholders and all of them dead — still have a powerful political voice. In America, we are so used to every political issue becoming a constitutional question, and to the sterile self-referential debates about the “original construction” of 18th-century documents, that we can easily forget how weird it all is. In Britain, debates about gun control or abortion never, so far as I know, centre on the views of the Second Marquess of Rockingham or William Pitt the Younger. To appropriate a famous metaphor, US political history sometimes seems like a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

For the sons and grandsons of the founding generation, the defining fact of public life was the precious burden they had inherited. An example was Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the frontier of European settlement in 1809 and grew up with the stories of old men who had fought in the Revolutionary War, or who claimed to have done. In one of his first public lectures, given in 1838 at a “young men’s lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, the future president laid out the intimidatingly high stakes for his generation. “We find ourselves,” he told the young men, “under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” They could take no credit for this; it was no more than good fortune. “We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment” of these blessings, he pointed out, “they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” Americans — of course, he meant white, male Americans — had inherited the earth and therefore it was theirs to lose.

Very few people in American history have done anything other than venerate the constitutional settlement of 1787. And the few dissenters — such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who branded the constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because of its protection of slaveholders — have been regarded as shocking iconoclasts.

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This underlying conservatism, the pose of moving forward while looking back, is characteristic of nations founded in revolution. You see similar traits in the political culture of Cuba or the old Soviet Union. After all, if you believe your revolution inaugurated a new order in which despotism had been banished by the bright light of freedom, then any further revolution would be revanchism of the most insidious kind. As the novelist James Fenimore Cooper explained in the early 19th century: “Here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving.”

Yet, at key moments in its history, the fixation on its founding moment has paradoxically enabled creative transformation. This was even true of the nation’s only true existential crisis to date, the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s, which subsequently became known as the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison rejected the constitutional settlement, but Lincoln, who also hated slavery, saw the matter differently. Even as a young man in 1838, when he urged his generation to let “support of the Constitution and Laws” become the “political religion of the nation”, Lincoln had understood the danger to the revolutionary settlement as coming more from enslavers than from radical abolitionists. The example uppermost in his mind was the recent murder in Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, by a mob backed by the city’s mayor. A quarter of a century later, President Lincoln led an administration that raised mass armies, waged industrial-scale war, and emancipated four million enslaved people, all in the name of preserving the founders’ legacy.

The outcome of the Civil War, with the breaking of the power of the slaveholding class, the formal commitment to equal rights, and the strengthening of the potential power of the federal government, is sometimes referred to as America’s “Second Founding”. This is a helpful formulation in many ways, and yet at the time what seemed more important was not the replacement but the preservation of the founders’ legacy. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War, fundamentally re-cast the relationship between the national government and its citizens. The 14th amendment defined citizenship for the first time — in a way that included black people — and other subsequent transformations in American government such as the growth of the welfare state and the enforcement of civil rights in the 20th century depended upon it.

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Had America been more like France, the post-Civil War constitutional settlement might have been called the “Second American Republic”. But America is not France, as Americans never ceased to point out — fear of swivel-eyed, guillotine-wielding Jacobinism was the 19th-century equivalent of 20th-century America’s obsession with communists. No one of any significance in the post-Civil War United States called for an entirely new constitution. Having just waged an unimaginably bloody war to preserve the constitution, the last thing they were going to do was discard it. And so, the constitutional innovations of the post-Civil War years were achieved not in spite of the fundamentally conservative nature of American political culture, but because of it. Only by presenting transformation as a validation of the founding could real change happen.

The same was true in the US’s other revolutionary decade, the Thirties, when, in the face of terrifying levels of mass unemployment, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration massively expanded the federal government’s role in national life in order, once again, to keep the revolutionary settlement intact. The imagined approval of the bewigged gentlemen of the founding era was as important to Roosevelt as it had been to Lincoln, but, lo and behold, they turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic to change, so long as it was in the interests of preservation.

Today, however, such flexibility seems hard to imagine. The Declaration of Independence was signed 12 score and seven years ago. That’s at least eight generations of political leaders. But curiously, the more the founding moment recedes in time, the greater its ossifying grip on American politics seems to be. If America is an old country, it is showing its age: it’s crotchety, stuck in its ways, telling endless stories about the past. Institutional arthritis prevents the natural flexing that’s needed to deal with a rapidly changing society.

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It is now more than half a century since a significant constitutional amendment was passed (the 26th amendment allowing the reduction of the voting age to 18 was ratified in 1971, although there was also an uncontroversial amendment ratified in 1992 which delayed raises in congressional salaries until after the next election). With politics so polarised, and the parties so evenly balanced, any fundamental institutional reform now seems impossible.

In the Nineties, no one could imagine it being acceptable in the modern age for a president to be elected with only a minority of the popular vote because of the workings of the Electoral College. But then it happened in 2000, and again in 2016, and, after each, calls for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College went nowhere. The Senate ensures that voters in rural, sparsely populated states such as Wyoming are vastly more powerful in Washington than the voters of, say, California. And whatever the defence of this constitutional curiosity might be, the point is that it is practically impossible to change. With a majority on the Supreme Court now committed to the eccentric doctrine of judicial originalism, the ghostly chaps in silk stockings seem more than ever the pale-faced opponents of institutional innovation.

Obviously, the US is, despite its growing inequality, a remarkably successful, wealthy society. It is still capable of policy innovation, and even (contrary to what you might think if you don’t have a sense of historical and comparative perspective) one of the more successful multi-racial societies in human history. But at the same time, it is, to put it mildly, difficult to address issues of structural inequality when meaningful reform of the institutional structure is effectively off the table. How many presidents can be elected with fewer votes than their opponents before the system cracks? For how long can the Supreme Court retain authority if the perception continues that it makes hugely consequential decisions while being unrepresentative and unaccountable?

But the founding fathers have been flexible fellows in the past, and with their imagined blessing huge changes have been wrought. Perhaps even the oldest and crankiest country can rediscover its youthful capacity for reform, especially if it does so while insisting that it is doing so in order that the important things remain the same.