Living through Jimmy Carter’s malaise was formidable. Today, however, may be worse. The national mood is dark and ugly. People who are normally polite to each other are downright rude. Even in an unseasonably warm summer, people seem cold to one another. An April poll from the Wall Street Journal found that 69 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.
On the road, drivers take their lives in their hands, fighting for any tiny advantage, cutting people off in parking lots, racing to red lights, and making hand gestures at the slightest provocation. Road rage is the norm, not the exception.
Church attendance is way down. We are losing our faith in God and instead worshiping the false idols of transgenderism and DEI. Liberals have always been angry and power-crazed, to be sure, but now their megalomania has spread to much of the general population.
It wasn’t always so. I have studied the era of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s and have written frequently about those decades. In conversations with my 92-year-old mother about this current mood swing into the depths, she agrees. She grew up during the Great Depression, her mother cooking on a hot plate in a one-room apartment. One Thanksgiving, they had peanut butter sandwiches.
Her two older brothers went off to war, and her mother was a Rosie the Riveter, and they made many sacrifices. They had Victory Gardens, rationed goods, and went without. Yet, they were happy and optimistic like all Americans.
The difference was leadership and faith. FDR projected religious optimism, as did Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, was a downer. He eschewed earthly pleasures. This, combined with emerging dour economic news, left the country in a state of unease in the 1970s. By 1980, the demoralization complete, America was ready for Reagan’s sunny optimism. It was part of his new, growth-oriented ideology.
Both Presidents Bush never understood the Bully Pulpit, and Barack Obama was too busy preening for the cameras to ever comprehend. The Egotist in Chief left no footprints, an unblemished field of snow. He was skilled in the study of himself, writing not one, but two autobiographies by the age of forty; our first Facebook president.
These presidents left no positive mark on the country.
And now, Joe Biden. A good case can be made that he is the nation’s worst president ever. His legacy? His presidential library will remain unbuilt. He’ll have a presidential bookmobile instead. Nobody will ever quote him, and a planned book about him was canceled due to a lack of interest.
We are living and suffering through the disaster of Biden and Kamala Harris. We have to suffer under their radicalism. Their anti-Americanism. Their dissolution of hope.
Some have called Biden evil. I am not a theologian; I will have to take their word for it.
But the point can easily be taken. We are stuck in the Harris/Biden malaise. By their design, demoralized people are easier to control.
We need the sunny optimism and hope for the future as we had with Reagan, Kennedy, and FDR. God help us if Kamala wins. She will continue the malaise, doing to the national morale what Dr. Kevorkian did to the patients in his waiting room.
Craig Shirley is a biographer of President Ronald Reagan and a presidential historian.
