A Response to Mike Johnson
I read Mike Johnson’s article “Choosing Our Opponent: Why I will work to elect Joe Biden” in the Stansbury Forum with a mix of curiosity and concern. It’s not surprising that he intends to campaign for Biden’s reelection, but his reference to the Carter presidency to highlight what he sees as the U.S. Left’s failure in 1980, and what needs to be done now, is intriguing. Johnson wrote:
“For me, it helps to go back to 1980, when much of the Left argued against supporting Jimmy Carter’s re-election race against Ronald Reagan, a position which I believe in retrospect was wrong.”
As someone who grew up in post-Vietnam America, the Carter years were significant in my political life. I was sixteen when Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. Coming from a blue-collar, working-class family in Massachusetts, our hearts were with the Kennedys despite Chappaquiddick. Nonetheless, both my parents voted for Carter. My mother, however, distrusted Southern Democrats (Carter was from Georgia), and my father once joked, “Don’t trust anybody that smiles that much,” referring to Carter’s signature smile.
By the time I started college in the fall of 1978, Carter’s presidency had veered sharply to the right. Things worsened, especially after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, when Carter reinstated the draft (military conscription). I was part of the first generation of young men required to register since the end of the Vietnam War. My first national demonstration was against the draft in Washington, D.C., on a cold, windy day in March 1980 while he was still president.
I mention this because I remember the Carter years vividly, and I’m puzzled by why Johnson feels the need to publicly recant his group’s position from four decades ago. While he acknowledges Carter’s failures, including a lengthy list but surprisingly omitting the Iranian hostage crisis, he seems to miss the broader context: the Carter presidency was a transitional regime from the Democratic Party’s dominance since the New Deal to the Republican era starting in 1980.
All key issues of the Reagan era, particularly the deregulation of major industries like trucking, finance, and airlines, along with attacks on the labor movement, had devastating effects on unionized workers. In my book “The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS,” I was shocked to find Carter’s inflation “Czar” Alfred Kahn, a self-described “good liberal Democrat” and former chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell University, boasting about worsening the lives of unionized workers. He wrote:
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average.”
Johnson acknowledges that leading labor figures hated Carter, including Machinist President William Winpisinger and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, yet Kirkland endorsed and campaigned for Carter. In one of my favorite interviews with Winpisinger, Village Voice journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway asked:
“Is there any way the President [Jimmy Carter] can redeem himself in your eyes?”
“Yes, there’s one way he can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Die.”
“So, he’s totally unacceptable as President?”
“I have said so countless times. I don’t intend to relent. He’s unfit to run this goddamn country. He was elected on the crest of the wave of Truth Sayers, and that son of a bitch had lied through his teeth every day he’s been there. It’s quite clear he marches to the drumbeat of the corporate state.”
Winpisinger took a different path than Kirkland and most U.S. union leaders in 1980. He led a walkout of 300 delegates at the 1980 Democratic Convention to protest Carter’s nomination, later endorsing radical environmentalist Barry Commoner for President. This was gutsy for a union president heavily involved in the U.S. War Machine. Yet, Winpisinger failed monumentally when he refused to instruct his members to honor the picket lines of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, leading to devastating consequences.
Looking back at my old Carter files, I noted that much of what I kept from those years came from the lefty Village Voice, secondarily the New York Times, and a sprinkling of articles from the Old Left newspaper, the Guardian, reflecting the widespread hatred of Carter. I joined the International Socialist Organization (ISO) shortly after starting at UMass-Boston and remained a member until 2018. Our newspaper, Socialist Worker, took the right stance then — “No Choice in the 1980 Elections” — and I still defend that position now.