‘The Bond of our Common Humanity...’

Remarkable audio from Jimmy Carter's grandson on why the former president believed that unifying forces would ultimately prove stronger than ‘the divisiveness of our fears and our prejudices.’

Five days after Donald Trump won re-election, Joshua Carter spoke on how his grandfather, Jimmy Carter, viewed the strengths and weaknesses of modern American democracy. Deb and I had been sitting with Joshua Carter before he spoke and watched his speech from about the distance shown in this photo. A large mixed-partisan crowd rose in a standing ovation as soon as he finished. You can listen to and read his talk below. (Photo courtesy of Dayton Literary Peace Prize.)

This post offers two more entries in the Jimmy Carter chronicles.

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Joshua Carter, on what his grandfather stood for.

First, a presentation I have mentioned several times before (here and here). That was a brief 10-minute speech by one of Carter’s grandsons, Joshua Carter, just after the recent election. He delivered these remarks when accepting, on Jimmy Carter’s behalf, a lifetime-achievement honor as part of this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize (DLPP) ceremonies.

Down in the footnotes, I have a full transcript of Joshua Carter’s speech that evening¹. I hope that you’ll listen to the real thing in the brief clip below. His delivery makes the message much stronger. The audio will also give you a sense of the audience’s response. Remember that this was delivered on the first weekend after the 2024 election results had become clear. I use this clip courtesy of the DLPP.

Here is Joshua Carter:

For reference, from a photo that evening you see Joshua Carter, in the center, with this year’s other DLPP honorees. From left they are: Tania Branigan, Paul Lynch, Anne Berest, and Victor Luckerson. (Photo DLPP.)

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Ball? Vance? Brzezinski? What might have been.

Now, the other update. From James W. Carden, in The American Conservative, a new, highly critical article about Carter’s foreign policy and national-security legacy. It contains a lot of information that is new even to me, as a former member of Carter’s staff.

For instance, I had not focused on the fact that Carter seriously considered the estimable George W. Ball as his Secretary of State, before deciding on Cyrus Vance. Ball, who served under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was an early, prescient, isolated, and courageous critic of the quagmire commitment in Vietnam. As Carden points out in this piece, Ball also warned against the long-term consequences—for the US, for Israel, for the world—of what would now be called Netanyahu-ism in Israel.²

Carden’s article comes from a different overall political perspective than my own. But its details and stories are worth considering now, in assessing Carter’s record 40-plus years ago and the country’s prospects now.

New Year’s Wishes all around. (And, as a civic note, I am presenting all these Carter items outside a paywall.)

1. Joshua Carter’s speech, as transcribed by Otter.Ai with some tweaks by me:

My name is Josh Carter, and I'm Jimmy Carter's grandson. I'm honored to be here at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize to receive the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On my grandfather's behalf, it means a lot, especially now.

My grandfather spent his lifetime writing the first book that he published. It is not on your list, and you can't buy it. When he was 28 he wrote an instruction manual on how to operate a sodium-cooled nuclear submarine. Over the next 70 years, he has published more than 30 books, dozens of trip reports, hundreds of speeches and op-eds.

In every one of those publications he maintained his unchanging principles of truth, of human rights, service, democracy and peace. It's quite a legacy. Since my grandfather entered hospice care 21 months ago, I have been revisiting his books, because I knew that one day I would only be able to access my grandfather by reaching into the past,

And what a treasure he left me. What a treasure he left us.

Now, I'll admit to you that I had a different speech plan before Tuesday. After the election results came in. After I was able to get out of bed. And after I started watching HBO’s Chernobyl to cheer up. [Laughter.] It's true!

I grabbed my copy of [Jimmy Carter’s] Our Endangered Values and I read the whole book in one sitting, and then I read his Nobel Peace Prize lecture to see if it was still applicable.

I was not particularly in the mood to build bridges. However, I spent my time before the election talking to friends who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and I found that most people who supported him didn't watch his campaign. Most people tried as hard as possible to avoid looking at the presidential races.

They didn't go to his rallies. They didn't watch his speeches. In fact, I had more than one person tell me that they hated the things that he said, but the trickle of content from four years of scrolling through their articles and memes painted Harris as a polarizing, ineffective leader who blames all of her failures on identity politics. And they saw Trump as a targeted outsider that had been relentlessly attacked by the entire corrupt American system, and he was doing it all for the American people.

So after the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He simply asked, How do you spend a billion dollars and not win? And the staffer missed that one of Trump's new Cabinet members [he means Elon Musk] spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked.

Many of you have asked if my grandfather knows the results of 2024 election. I don't know for sure. But I do know Jimmy Carter, so I must tell you that answer is Yes.

My guess would be that he has the now familiar response of being shocked and saddened, but not surprised.

He has written about improving our democracy since he left the White House, because our democracy has many flaws.

Our ballots don't look the same. We don't vote at the same time. There is no start day for our campaigns. We have no requirement for equal time for our candidates. The same states always start first, and most other states are ignored. We are the only democracy in the world that does not have a central authority to declare the winner of our election. Tuesday's verdict did not come from an American official. It came from the news.

But still, my grandfather has warned us that problems run deeper than the machinery of our ballots on election day.

Jimmy Carter has consistently reminded us that the presidency of the United States is the only elected office in the world where the person with the most votes is not guaranteed to win. The flaw of our electoral college, which was as unwise as the compromise of counting only three fifths of a Black person, guarantees that the votes in most of American states will never have an effect on the presidential outcome.

Jimmy Carter has also pointed out that gerrymandering breeds extremism and it destroys civil discourse by design. In a country where politicians choose their voters, gerrymandering awards the office to whoever wins a partisan primary with no pressure for a politician to move to the center to attract opposing votes.

In this system, civil discourse is seen as an unwanted threat to party loyalty and is actively rejected. It is true that the biggest jobs—US senator, governor, president—are not subject to the constraints of gerrymandering. But the overwhelming majority of our elected positions are and that poisons the well. So if my grandfather was standing here today, I guarantee he would state that the most damaging Supreme Court decision in modern history was Citizens United, which removes all meaningful limitations of money in our politics.

He would say it's now our system. Politicians are bought, but not as a bug, as a feature.

But his most damning indictment of American politics today might come from his Nobel Peace Prize lecture.

Toward the end of his speech, he says “At the beginning of the new millennium I was asked to discuss here in Oslo, the greatest challenge that the world faces, and among all possible choices, I decided that the most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth.” That was 22 years ago, and the problem has only grown by an order of magnitude since.

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So where does this leave us? What are my grandfather’s lessons?

What do we do when we feel and see that everything we care about is under attack, and not just immigration policy and terrorists? I mean the very idea of human rights and democracy and truth.

The answer is that we hold on to our unchanging principles of truth, human rights, service, democracy and peace, and we tell our story.

Jimmy Carter's superpower was his ability to connect with anybody and tell the truth. He could talk to kings and popes just as easily as he could talk to farmers in a poverty stricken village in Africa. He worked with billionaires and he worked with people who lived on less than $1 a day, and the way he found his audience was by listening to their concerns with compassion and then working to improve their lives.

We must recognize bad actors and lost causes, but we also must recognize that legitimately bad actors are few.

In fact, we could probably stand here and name them, but despite on how they voted, most Americans still want the same thing.

We want peace. We want stability. We want opportunity. We must also recognize that screaming, or distilling a friend or family member’s worth into the person that they voted for, has not produced the desired results.

There will be hardship coming from our government over the next four years, the incoming President campaigned on it, and the people who will be in his government have reaffirmed it. These hardships will impact red voters, blue voters and non voters alike.

So now more than ever, our most powerful weapons are our stories.

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My story includes a simple truth. My son is sick. He has a rare disease. His treatment is unaffordable.

And if the next administration follows through on their campaign promise to get rid of the one law that's keeping him alive, I’ll have to leave the United States.

This story has done what billion dollars couldn't do within my friends changed votes. Our stories matter, so let us remember that our problems did not begin with any one election. Peace is slow and peace is hard, and the problems we face are structural and generational.

But I have decided that my grandfather's Nobel Peace Prize lecture still applies, and his closing remarks are true today.

He said this:

“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and our prejudices. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes, And we must.”

2. The article says:

In a conversation with the historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002, Carter recalled his concerns over whether Ball could win Senate confirmation; after all, “he had the courage to question aspects of America’s attachment to Israel.” And Ball’s “outspokenness on the Middle East would have made it difficult for him to pass confirmation hearings. So I chose Cyrus Vance.”