By Francis Wilkinson / Bloomberg Opinion
President Jimmy Carter’s life mapped the American Century. His funeral Thursday at the National Cathedral in Washington suggests that century, like Carter’s life, is ended.
The U.S. can still do an impressive state funeral. America looked, for about two hours, like a self-respecting nation that takes itself seriously. The service members bearing the flag-draped casket of the former commander-in-chief were crisply synchronized. The orchestra was nimble and rich, the choir heavenly, the dignitaries of the highest quality. But the flags outside the cathedral, flapping in the wild Washington wind, recalled the fire tornado devouring one of the nation’s largest cities. And inside the cathedral, between Barack Obama and Melania Trump, in a pew in the second row, sat the president-elect, Donald Trump.
Trump took a chance in attending. The Carter funeral might have been a bookend to the 2018 funeral of Sen. John McCain, which was partly planned, and wholly perceived, as the war hero’s rebuke to Trump. McCain’s daughter Meghan gave a weepy, defiant eulogy that jabbed at the then-president, who was not invited to attend. “The America of John McCain does not need to be made great again,” she said, “because it is already great.”
The memorial for Honest Jimmy offered an opportunity for even more dramatic contrasts. Vice President Al Gore, who ceded the presidency rather than rock the republic, stood shoulder to shoulder with Vice President Mike Pence, who safeguarded the constitutional order against the the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Predictably, the eulogies extolled Carter’s “honesty and truth-telling.”
But Trump, who has a narcissist’s preternatural instinct for public regard, correctly gauged that, odd man out though he was, he would nonetheless reign supreme. Even as the funeral ostensibly celebrated Carter’s truthfulness, Trump’s presence, like his triumph in November, confirmed the nation’s embrace of lies and dishonor.
Carter came to power in 1977 to rectify previous dishonors: the contemporaneous, cataclysmic American defeats in Vietnam and at the Watergate Hotel. Those defeats, and the rot that each exposed, undermined Americans’ trust in institutions and in one another. Carter thought he could reclaim trust with honesty. He failed.
The path did not get easier from there.
The devolution of the U.S. from a high-trust to a low-trust society could prove to be a world-historical event. “While generalized social trust had been deteriorating, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement pushed distrust to truly pathological levels,” wrote Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama last fall. “The damage that this deranged man has done to the United States has already occurred, and will weigh on the country for years to come.”
The destruction is not measured solely in moral and social degradation. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller notes that trust is a powerful economic lubricant. Right-wing conspiracy theorists, Shiller writes, throw sand in the gears by claiming the government is “not simply incompetent, but actively working against them, falsifying election outcomes, lying about statistics, engaging in politicized prosecutions, manipulating the public health system, and conspiring to change the country’s demographics by opening the southern border to illegal immigrants.”
Declines in public trust correlate to declines in public value. “There is substantial evidence that if an atmosphere filled with lies or presumed lies spreads throughout a society, the effect might reduce economic growth rates,” Shiller writes. “Years of incremental damage would result in a substantially lower level of economic well-being than would otherwise have existed.”
The assault on well-being is not limited to the United States. Trump seemed to find it amusing last week to threaten to deploy American power, amassed by previous generations, to undermine democratic allies, including, incredibly, Canada. It’s a destabilizing game that will destroy international trust and all its attendant benefits.
“I’ll never lie to you,” Carter once told Americans. To denizens of the American Century, the statement was a declaration, a challenge, a vow, a hope, an ideal, a wish, a promise. In the MAGA era, the line reads like an inscrutable hieroglyph from a lost civilization.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for The Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.
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