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.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

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In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

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It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

Amid this collective myopia, we have not noticed that an economy powered by renewable energy does not guarantee a fairer or more equal society, or one that favours workers over the interests of capital. When you take a look at the dynamics of existing renewable energy production (particularly in the United States) you find that it intensifies and exacerbates all the worst aspects of our highly unequal neoliberal political economy.

To understand these dynamics, we need to look to the Seventies and the rise of neoliberalism. During this crisis decade, power and influence was shifted toward capital and an associated free market ideology. Though often portrayed as anti-government, neoliberals in fact promoted quite an active state, creating the institutional conditions for markets, the extension of private power, and above all the insulation of states from democratic control. One of their greatest influences, Friedrich Hayek, had argued against “central planning” in favour of a different kind of system: “Competition…means decentralised planning by many separate persons.” The expanded Keynesian redistributive state was their prime target, but this critique extended to all kinds of large-scale bureaucratic institutions: unions, universities, and even massive monopolistic corporations of the time, such as General Motors or IBM.

In other words, neoliberals set their sights on the very institutions at the heart of the post-war boom. Their vision of a new competitive market order aimed to demolish these large, rigid institutions in favour of smaller, more flexible production guided by a decentralised price mechanism. It was an ideology that seized the electricity sector at precisely this historical moment. For most of the 20th century, electricity had been provisioned by massive investor-owned and vertically integrated utilities — each given a “natural monopoly” service territory where they controlled the entire grid. State-run public commissions oversaw these utilities to ensure consumer prices and investor returns alike were “fair and reasonable”. Because electricity is in fact a complex infrastructure where supply and demand must always remain in balance to preserve grid stability, utilities centrally planned the grid by necessity.

In the context of the Seventies energy crisis, electric utilities epitomised the kind of inflexible and corrupt institutions targeted for demolition. And, interestingly, an associated environmentalist ideology conformed to this neoliberal critique of “big” and “centralised” utilities. Most prominently, Amory Lovins proposed a “soft energy path” based on small-scale and decentralised energy production and efficiency. Although Lovins promoted any kind of decentralised energy production — including many small-scale forms of coal generation — soon it became clear that renewable energy production from solar panels and wind turbines were the most attractive to environmentalists.

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Advocates imagined a shift to renewable energy aligned with a “small is beautiful” approach, scattered about pastoral rural landscapes, and inspiring ideas of local or community ownership. Against a complex and centrally-planned system, “grassroots” local communities aspired to get off the grid entirely. In short, if most of the 20th century was about large-scale social integration of complex industrial societies, the neoliberal turn represents an anti-social reaction against society itself. For parts of the Right, there was “no such thing” as society, only individuals. But the environmental Left made a comparable turn: large-scale complex industrial society was rejected in favour of a small-scale communitarian localism. In this framework, “communities” could opt out of society and usher in democratic control over energy, food, and life. As the icon of the German Green Party Rudolf Bahro said in the Eighties, “we must build up areas liberated from the industrial system…a new social formation and a new civilisation”.

It should be no surprise that Lovins’s soft energy path ideas gained the ear of proto-neoliberal and deregulator-in-chief, President Jimmy Carter, who invited him to the White House in October 1977. Carter personified this new decentralised energy ideology, wearing cardigan sweaters in his prime time addresses and decorating the White House with solar panels. But while environmentalists often lament the path not taken with Carter’s conservationist ethic, his approach to the energy crisis (among other things) was a political disaster. Ronald Reagan crushed Carter by nine points in 1980 and Carter only carried six out of 50 states. For a country that had just endured a cost-of-living inflationary crisis of its own, Reagan’s message of “Make America Great Again” and solving the energy crisis through increased production resonated much more strongly than Carter’s moralism and calls for sacrifice.

But what is crucial is how this vision of a decentralised renewable-powered utopia actually accompanied a broader project of electricity deregulation started under Carter himself. About a year after meeting with Lovins, Carter signed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies of Act of 1978. Deregulation eventually opened up the field of electricity generation to competition against utilities. The process was slow but by the Nineties it unleashed a totally new frontier of investment in electricity production for capitalists untethered from the utility system: so called “independent power producers” or “merchant generators”. The main beneficiaries of this process were smaller-scale natural gas producers, but it also included a new class of capitalists building renewable energy projects such as solar or wind farms. These producers need not care about the grid as a shared social system, and can focus instead exclusively on their private profits and efforts to outcompete other sellers in wholesale electricity markets.

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Profit could also come from the state itself. As research by Sarah Knuth shows, by the Obama years, renewable energy capitalists were showered with lucrative tax credits to incentivise production. The credits allow renewable energy developers to partner with an exclusive class of “tax equity investors”: a special kind of wealthy person whose “tax burden” is so high they use renewable projects to shelter their wealth from public coffers. These tax equity investors represent some of the most powerful and wealthy actors imaginable, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Warren Buffett — whose company Berkshire-Hathaway is one of the biggest investors in renewables — famously said, “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.” Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is simply a continuation of this policy of attempting to achieve climate goals through the tax code (albeit with a “direct pay” provision that will allow some public power entities to take advantage).

This shift away from utilities and toward decentralised merchant generation explicitly undermined the labour unions who had built up their power under the older, established utility system. As James Harrison, the director of renewable energy for the Utility Workers Union of America, told the New York Times, “The clean tech industry is incredibly anti-union… It’s a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organize.” It was, therefore, no surprise that labour unions were on the frontlines fighting deregulation from the beginning in the Nineties. It is much easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than scattered solar and wind farms whose, after all, only provide temporary construction jobs.

Once these installations are built, the jobs disappear and the only plausible economic benefits besides rents flowing to private landowners are marginal increases in local tax revenues. Not only are renewable energy jobs temporary, they are also often simply bad jobs. Labour journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley’s profile of the solar industry has revealed dystopian labour conditions: temp agencies send subcontracted workers from site to site, separated from their family for weeks, and exposed to occupational hazards such as extreme heat, alligators, and snakes.

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Neoliberal electricity restructuring is benefiting Wall Street above all, as well as Big Tech, who see it as a more efficient means to partner with renewable generators and claim green credentials for operations powered by “100% renewable energy” (these accounting fictions are provided by tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates while firms still rely on the fossil- and nuclear-powered grid for their actual electricity). Google has emerged as a fierce proponent of deregulation in the American South fundamentally so it can avoid utilities and partner with more scattered renewable capitalists. Naive environmentalists (who propose an extremely difficult vision of a grid powered by 100% renewable energy) have become unwitting allies of the Googles and Berkshire Hathaways of the world — and fail to recognise their renewable advocacy often enables the further neoliberalisation of electricity.

Seduced by climate rhetoric, the Left has become the unwitting ally of this programme. But the electricity grid is a shared social infrastructure that should be managed by a single entity. In other words, while private investor-owned utilities are often corrupt and negligent, the Left needs to defend and reclaim the general idea of electricity as a utility, or an essential service critical to the public good. A revived electric public utility system could indeed integrate some renewables in sunny and windy regions (on land and offshore), but grid planners will acknowledge some level of “firm” low carbon generation like hydroelectric and nuclear power will be required. But this vision of public energy development won’t come about unless we confront the power of renewable capital, their Wall Street backers and the general neoliberal political economic model that underpins the industry today. Sloganeering around renewable energy as if it’s a good in-and-of-itself may have drawn attention to the climate crisis — but it is no good at creating the politics we need to solve it.

And yet, only 18 years separate the two men’s births; they are of the same generation. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that their political careers seem inextricably bound.

Both presidents were explicitly defined as the antithesis to a tumultuous predecessor, with Carter as the anti-Nixon and Biden as the anti-Trump. Both were elected into eras of high inflation. Both had low approval ratings. And both pursued a foreign policy of restraint that, according to their critics, only emboldened aggressors. Carter’s administration saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan, following the fall of Saigon under Nixon-Ford. Biden’s saw Russia invade Ukraine, following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban a year before.

For all these parallels, though, there is a crucial difference: the composition of their party. While Biden’s party has all but severed its ties with the white working class, Carter was the last president elected by the coalition that grew out of Roosevelt’s New Deal America. The states of the former Confederacy all voted for Carter, as did the Southern evangelical regions that would later become a mainstay of the Republican party. Carter also appealed to white voters in the northeast by promising not to use federal force to change what he called the “ethnic purity” of Irish-American, Italian-American and other neighbourhoods resistant to racial integration.

Even before Carter’s election, the future of the Democratic Party had been foreshadowed — in George McGovern’s doomed campaign of 1972 and Nixon’s landslide victory that followed. By the Obama years, the McGovern coalition of college-educated white voters and racial minorities was the Democratic mainstream, growing by absorbing many former liberal Republicans concerned by the rise of conservatism and populism within their party. What had been the obsessions of northeastern liberal Republicans in the 2000s — family planning and environmentalism — became the leading issues of a Democratic Party that caters to rich and professional elites.

This was not inevitable. Until 1975, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, a Catholic as well as a liberal, insisted that human life begins at conception. By 1992, however, a brief period in which Democrats were allowed to disagree about the issue ended: at the Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Pennsylvania Governor, Bob Casey, was denied the right to speak because of his opposition to abortion rights.

Until the Seventies, the environmental movement had been similarly dominated by well-to-do, patrician northeastern voters, whose great cause was wilderness conservation. The New Deal Democrats, by contrast, favoured conservation as well as industrial and infrastructure development. But as wealthy Republicans switched their allegiance, the Democratic position shifted. The party began to call for the removal of more acreage from development and for increasingly draconian laws on what businesses and homeowners can do with their property. Just as its new pro-choice stance drove out many Catholic and evangelical Democrats, so the increasing environmentalism of the party, symbolised by Al Gore’s rise, alienated many former moderate Democrats.

Early in his career, Joe Biden was a New Democrat like Bill Clinton and, to some degree, Jimmy Carter: he was pro-business in economics and culturally moderate. But while Clinton was a socially moderate Southern governor like Carter, the rise of the McGovern coalition continued during his presidency. A 1996 Pew report described the alienation from the Democrats of New Dealers, whom it described as “older, unionist, socially conservative” (and implicitly white): “Clinton’s support is weakest and hostility to him strongest (23% unfavourable) here among all Democratic groups… New Dealers, who often defected to Ronald Reagan, are the Democratic group least satisfied with the quality of the presidential candidates this year. One in three (30%) would prefer a GOP Congress if Clinton is re-elected.”

By the time Obama was elected, this New Deal coalition was finally and fully replaced. Indeed, Trump owed his 2016 primary and presidential victories to his appeal to white working-class voters from traditionally Democratic families, many of them members of union families in the industrial states of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. Rather than mourn their loss, many Democrats saw the expansion of their vote among college-educated Americans and immigrants and started to believe they could dispense with white working-class votes altogether.

Yet in 2020, fearing a second loss to Trump, Democratic elites rallied behind Biden and pressured the progressives and Sanders, in many ways an old-fashioned New Dealer, to drop out of the race. The other great voting bloc in the present-day Democrats — black Americans — was rallied to vote for Biden in the primaries, winning him the presidential nomination. Biden went on to win the presidency and, in the midterm elections two years later, lose the House of Representatives. The great wave of revulsion against Donald Trump that many Democrats had counted on in 2020 and 2022 turned out to be a trickle.

This didn’t dissuade Biden, though. His administration has been the most Left-wing in US history. While Obama sought to make concessions to moderates and conservatives, Biden’s domestic agenda has mirrored the aims of the billionaire-funded progressive non-profits and public-sector unions that now dominate policymaking in the party. In just one term, he attempted to impose an extreme lockdown agenda, meeting resistance in the courts, and ordered his executive agencies to make race and gender inclusion central to all of their activities, whatever they may be. Meanwhile, the border crisis continues to fester, and his much-touted Inflation Reduction Act appears to have done little to stem inflation, instead handing out cash to renewable energy firms and wealthy owners of electric vehicles.

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Why did the Biden administration turn over policymaking to progressives, who make up only a quarter or so of the electorate and half of Democratic voters? One theory is that Biden wanted to forestall a more progressive challenger in the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries. Either way, Biden and his allies are taking no chances with his renomination: the Democrats have made South Carolina, with its large number of black voters who gave Biden the nomination in 2020, the first primary state, replacing Iowa and New Hampshire, whose largely white progressives are to the Left of many black Americans.

Whether this strategy bears fruit remains to be seen, but Biden has advantages that Jimmy Carter lacked. Although Carter responded forcefully to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Republicans portrayed him as weak, and the prolonged American hostage crisis in Iran and the failed mission to rescue the hostages damaged his reputation. To date, however, the mainstreams of both parties have supported Biden’s policies in Ukraine, and few Americans will condemn him for finally ending the war in Afghanistan.

And Biden possesses an ally that Carter did not have — the US media. America’s establishment newspapers and networks were often critical of Carter, and even though most journalists were Democrats, the prestige press attempted to treat Republicans fairly. But during the 2020s, America’s mainstream media organisations were radicalised into becoming more or less explicitly partisan Democratic outlets, even in their news coverage — playing up Republican scandals and downplaying anything harmful to Democrats. Biden has held far fewer press conferences than other presidents, raising questions about the effects of age. Yet the press continues to treat him as a leader whom they must shelter and support, rather than a president to be questioned and investigated.

But perhaps the greatest difference between Biden and Carter is also the President’s greatest strength. While Carter had to fight the genial Reagan for his second term, Biden may be engaged in a rematch with the scowling, histrionic Trump, who is leading among Republican voters. Some polls show Trump slightly ahead of Biden, but polls are not votes, and it is hard to imagine significant numbers of voters who went for Biden in 2020 switching to Trump.

Biden, then, unlike Carter, may succeed in becoming a two-term president. What will that mean for the Democrats? Well, there was something poignant about Biden recently letting slip that Carter had asked him to deliver his eulogy. It seemed entirely fitting. If and when Biden does fulfil Carter’s wish, it won’t just be a eulogy to America’s 39th President, but to a Democratic Party that no longer exists.

This photograph is one of several from the Iranian Hostage Crisis that has lodged in the collective consciousness of the modern Middle East. It was a truly historic event – one that would come to sour US-Iran relations far more than the Iranian Revolution that precipitated it. It began on 4 November 1979 when a group of students calling themselves the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took the 52 embassy staff inside hostage. They would keep them captive for 444 days, releasing them, finally, on 20 January 1981 – 40 years ago to the day.

Fast forward four decades and today Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. When he enters the White House, he will find a world cowering from a pandemic and a country strafed by civil unrest. But perhaps his biggest problem will only come into focus when he turns to face the east: Iran.

As Biden knows, the Islamic Republic of Iran poses a problem that has remained unsolved for 40 years. Even today, the Hostage Crisis remains at the heart of the US’s relationship with Iran – or perhaps more correctly, its lack of one. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the so-called Nuclear Deal between Iran and the UN Security Council Powers plus Germany — lies moribund after Donald Trump unilaterally abrogated it in 2018. In the years since, Iranian proxies have wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, while the regime has busied itself killing dissenters. Biden’s options are few. He can’t even speak directly to Tehran. The two countries are implacably opposed. Both carry scars that remain livid on both sides — and they were formed in that embassy all those years ago.

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The hostage crisis occurred amid the turmoil of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when a combination of nationalists, leftists and Islamists overthrew Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, then Shah of Iran, forcing him to flee the country. They then set about fighting over who would take power: a battle the Islamists quickly and comprehensively won. A 76-year-old cleric from the provinces, Ayatollah Khomeini, became Supreme Leader, and brought with him a new system of government, the Velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist), which mandated overarching rule by the religious jurists, or Mullahs, like him.

If 1979 marked a rupture in internal Iranian politics, then the hostage crisis was the Islamic Republic’s march on to the international stage. Despite the Shah’s fall, Washington wanted to salvage its friendship with its foremost Gulf ally and a number of meetings were held with Iran’s interim Prime Minister. Things looked hopeful. But then US President Jimmy Carter allowed the cancer-ridden Shah into the USA for medical treatment. Iranians were enraged. The anti-US protests and chanting that had swelled throughout the year suddenly erupted with the storming of the embassy.

How much did Khomeini know about the attack? He wasn’t forewarned, but undoubtedly then gave the hostage-taking his approval. There is no way that the diplomats could sit there for over a year without his say so. The truth is that it benefited him. Enraging the United States meant weakening moderates in Iran while strengthening his Islamist base, which rejected all ties with the “Great Satan”. It wasn’t just that the US had, along with Britain, organised the overthrowal the Iranian president in 1953, or that the Shah was seen as an American lapdog. It was something even more primeval: the US was the chief source of Gharbzadegi — literally “west-struckness” or westoxification — by which Western ideas and culture had seduced and corrupted Iranians. And there was something else, too: payback. “You have no right to complain,” a hostage-taker told a furious American captive, “you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”

Things got worse. On 24 April 1980, seeing that negotiation was going nowhere, President Jimmy Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a Delta force mission to rescue the hostages. It was a disaster. A combination of poor weather conditions and logistical problems meant the mission was aborted, though not before one of the helicopters crashed into the ground.

Back home, the US media railed against Carter. His 1980 election defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan was largely down to his failure to get them out. Iran had brought down an American president. But before he left office, Carter struck back. He froze billions of dollars of Iranian assets abroad, imposed sanctions and isolated it diplomatically. He threw American weight behind Iranian opposition groups and repositioned US foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counteract the hostile Islamic republic. Both US politics and the geopolitical constellation of the Middle East had been reordered. And it was the hostage crisis, not the revolution, that did it.

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Forty years later, the legacy of the hostage crisis still dominates Middle Eastern politics: the US and Iran have never officially resumed diplomatic relations. Years ago, in the course of researching my book, I interviewed former US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nick Burns, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Burns, under the leadership of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the presidency of George W. Bush, who first tried to heal relations with the Iranians in 2005. It didn’t work that time, but it paved the way for Obama’s success.

Burns explained to me how, as a diplomat, he felt that the US’s relationship with Iran was the oddest it had with any country, and you couldn’t simply chalk it up to bad blood. Washington had a liaison office in Havana and throughout the Cold War had maintained embassies in Moscow and Beijing. American diplomats had even talked on key occasions to the North Koreans. But with Iran? Nothing.

He was hinting at the almost uniquely dysfunctional relationship between Iran and the US since the Hostage Crisis: at heart, it was so bad because they needed each other. For the Islamic Republic, the need to defend Iran from the United States is its ideological lodestone — it can never permit relations to become too warm. Even when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in desperate need of sanctions relief because of Iran’s chronic financial woes, allowed President Hassan Rouhani to speak to Barack Obama (thus ending almost 40 years of silence at the official level) and eventually conclude the Iran Deal, he made it clear that their cooperation would stop there. There would be no détente.

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On the other side, for a certain strand of American politician keen to burnish their hawkish credentials and grab some attention, being tough on Iran is a guaranteed political, and often fund-raising, winner. This is not to draw equivalence between the two sides, but to observe that for four decades Iranian-US relations have been characterised by a unique dialectic that has played an increasingly central role in organising each side’s understanding of the other.

Like unlucky lovers, timing hasn’t been on their side. In 1988, after eight years of horrific war with Iraq, Iran’s leaders were less keen for the country to export its Islamic revolution than to rebuild bombed-out schools. Around a decade later, the reformist President Mohammed Khatami even went on CNN to talk about a “Dialogue among Civilisations”, but found US administrations reluctant to talk. Later, it was Barack Obama who, in his first formal TV interview after taking office declared that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” Unfortunately, squatting in Tehran was the malign and absurd Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t to be.

This relationship, which is far more than a collapsed deal centring on nuclear centrifuges and enriched uranium, is what Joe Biden must now address. And fixing it is what he must do for any deal to last. Iran is a 5,000-year-old civilisation with a well-educated population of over 80 million and huge oil and gas reserves. It dominates the Persian Gulf and controls the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. You cannot adequately deal with the Middle East without it; and you absolutely cannot lock it out of the international order forever.

Yet Trump looked the other way and Obama confined negotiations to the nuclear issues; the Iranians insisted on it. But now that Iran’s need for sanctions relief is even more desperate, Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon. But if Iran moves, he must, too. He must ease sanctions and help to rebuild its shattered economy. Ever since the Hostage Crisis, America and Iran have been waltzing together, locked in each other’s arms, but always out of step. Forty years after the event that changed the history of the Middle East, we must hope that a new President can succeed where every other one before him has failed.

A presidency that has reliably done what sweet-smelling people in big American cities believed could not be done, is about to do it again. Trump is going to go out with a pardon bang. There won’t be enough room in heaven for all the people he’s going to forgive.

First, as he has already demonstrated with the pardoning of Michael Flynn, his dishonest former national security adviser: when his people need help they are going to get it. CNN reported recently that “hundreds of his allies — including some of his closest business associates and many high-profile criminals — are ramping up their efforts to squeeze out the final ounces of his presidential power”.

There is, apparently, a White House spreadsheet keeping track of requests. The President is energised and engaged in this enterprise. He has told advisors not to share any information with Biden’s team that could be used against him in future.

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Does this matter? Not much. After all, previous presidents have behaved in a manner that Donald Trump would find hard to match. President Andrew Johnson pardoned, in 1868, all soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the 70s, Peter Yarrow of the folk rock band Peter Paul and Mary had been convicted of indecent behaviour with a girl of 14. Jimmy Carter pardoned him.

Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger who had been in prison for selling cocaine. Roger repaid Bill rather poorly: less than a month later, he was arrested for driving drunk and disturbing the peace.

No, the problem here is not the badly behaved outsiders. It’s the administration folk. The convention is that they are not treated leniently by the outgoing president, because of the risk that the pardons pervert the entire system of law. Someone working for the president could act criminally in pursuit of the White House agenda so long as the president approved.

An unlawful president could encourage or force his people to commit crimes with the firm promise of pardon. As one commentator put it: “That creates a system of rule by decree. Laws would be completely at the discretion of the president — a recipe for autocracy.”

There is an example of this under Trump: he is alleged to have told Department of Homeland Security officials to shut down the Mexican border entirely to migrants. If they got in legal trouble, he would pardon them. He denies it and so do they; but the risks are obvious.

Even more obvious is the risk that the President takes a truly nuclear option and pardons himself.

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For prosecutors, The Donald is a target-rich environment. Huge! So many irons in so many fires! So much money! So little propriety! “If he is on-site for your big day, he will likely stop in & congratulate the happy couple.” With those words the Bedminster Golf Club owned by President Trump tried in 2017 to drum up wedding business. There is no word on whether the ploy worked. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine that it did not.

But either way, was it ok? This is a business owned by the President, using his public role to benefit himself financially.

Or what about the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to New York in 2018, during which his entourage stayed at the Trump hotel in Manhattan? They spent enough to put the property, which had been loss making, into the black for the financial quarter of the visit. Perhaps there was nowhere else to stay. But what about the 67 trademarks that have been granted to the Trump Organization from foreign governments during his presidency? China alone has granted 46 of them — more than any other country.

Or the scrapping of a bipartisan plan to relocate the FBI out of its prime central Washington location to the suburbs? The Bureau currently lives blocks away from the President’s D.C. hotel; vacating the building might have allowed a competitor hotel to move in. Hotel developers had bid on the site. President Trump was personally involved in a meeting about the building location just weeks before the announcement that it wouldn’t be relocated.

In September this year a non-profit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington set out these and other conflicts of interest and called them corruption. They put a number on it: 3403 such breaches of conventional norms during the presidency up to that point.

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And of course, we have not considered his taxes (or lack of them) or the pay-off allegedly made to a porn star before the 2016 election that, if it had been made in pursuit of winning that election, was an expense he ought to have reported.

By the way, the tax liability is hugely important and quite simple. Mr Trump appears to have claimed in the past that certain properties he owned were far more valuable when using them as collateral for loans than when valuing them for tax purposes. He has firmly denied any wrongdoing of any kind, but the way he ran his businesses creates a suspicion of fraud on a scale that would be seriously criminal if it were true.

Here we get to the guts of the pardon issue. The only pardon that really matters is the pardon Mr Trump issues to himself and his immediate family. Nobody knows if this is legal. Nobody knows if it’s possible. But plenty think he might try it.

And if he does? Yes, there are all manner of precedents that risk being set. A nation that simply ignores — or allows to be ignored — the suggestion of huge abuse of power by its commander-in-chief does not exactly radiate civic health. This is plainly in a different league to Bill’s let-off for Roger Clinton.

But there again, perhaps it would allow something useful to happen. Perhaps a pardon would triage the whole case against Mr Trump. People could get over the Bedminster Golf Course Wedding Offer — and focus instead on the things that could not be pardoned.

Because state crimes (not being the bailiwick of the Federal government) cannot be pardoned by any president, and the tax fraud case, if it were ever brought, would come in New York State. Other states could follow suit. Mr Trump (again I stress he denies all wrongdoing) would be in deep legal trouble — without all the fuss about the Saudis paying money to his hotels getting in the way. His self-pardon would do no more than clear the barnacles off the boat.

His advisers may feel that complexity is his friend as it has been during his whole business life. He will be chased by all manner of worthy seekers after justice. But will he ever be caught? I wouldn’t bet on it.