The Right has Long Used Jimmy Carter’s Presidency to Smear Democrats as Emasculated Pushovers in a Dangerous World

We need to offer men -- including young men -- more expansive models of strength than hypermasculine MAGA posturing

By Jackson Katz

Former president Jimmy Carter led a long and meaningful life – filled with impressive accomplishments before, during, and after his time in the Oval Office. He had a large sociocultural and historical footprint for a man with humble roots in rural Georgia.

Accordingly, the occasion of his death at 100 years old on December 29 has catalyzed renewed attention to various aspects of his life and career.

For example, the consensus view among historians and the general public is that his post-presidency was the most successful ever. Numerous articles have appeared during the past few weeks that recount his consistent championing of global human rights, his amazing work to eradicate the guinea worm in Africa, and the Carter Center’s vital advocacy for election integrity. I contributed a piece in Ms. Magazine about the important role he played as one of the world’s most high-profile anti-sexist men.

But general agreement about the value of Carter’s civic and humanitarian efforts since he left Washington gives way to mixed reviews about his presidential term, which to this day remains the subject of vigorous debate.

The debate involves matters of both substance and style. I want to focus on one aspect of “style,” or what might better be called the symbolic realm. What did Carter’s presidency symbolize about what it means to project strength, especially in the area of foreign policy? And how do deeply gendered assumptions about what strength looks like factor into that assessment?

Despite major and durable achievements like the Israel-Egypt peace treaty he brokered at Camp David, the mainstream journalistic storyline about Jimmy Carter’s reputation as commander-in-chief emphasizes weakness and failure.

From the beginning of the Reagan era, relentless criticism from the chattering classes reinforced the view that the cardigan-wearing Carter, with his toothy smile and folksy Christianity, lacked the toughness required to lead in a dangerous world, with so many bad actors well-armed and ready to do us harm.

Even though he increased the military budget every year and brought back mandatory draft registration, Carter’s image as a gentle, non-macho man has long fed the false perception that his personal “softness” contributed to national decline.

To this day, the right has used the feckless image of “Jimmy Carter” as a handy way to smear Democrats as emasculated pushovers. Among its other uses, this rhetorical device has proven to be very useful in dissuading working and middle-class men from identifying with the party and its policies.

The Democrats’ inability to respond effectively to this sort of gendered attack has badly hurt them for the past forty years with male voters, up to and including the 2024 presidential election.

Reagan’s defeat of Carter in 1980 was an identity politics contest about presidential masculinity

The conventional wisdom in conservative media since the early 1980s – with echoes in the mainstream commentariat as well -- was that Carter’s “weakness” caused America to become an “impotent giant” in the face of Cold War challenges and terrorist threats, culminating in the humiliation of the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979. A course correction was needed and then delivered in the election of Ronald Reagan, who – long before Donald Trump got into politics -- promised to “Make America Great Again.”

The narrative that Carter’s “weak” leadership was a major source of the country’s problems drew from a familiar trope in Hollywood westerns, the most popular genre of 20^th century cinema. The script goes like this: The townspeople are being menaced by a group of bad guys, whom the local authorities are unable to control. Then a tough-talking new sheriff swaggers into town, someone who knows how to unleash just enough righteous violence to punish the miscreants and restore law and order.

In 1980, the American political system delivered its own version of this script in the person of Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and television host turned conservative Republican politician, who emerged from central casting and entered presidential politics, stage right.

This entire business is deeply gendered. The “Reagan Revolution” was, among other things, a restoration of (white) American masculinity after the shame of the debacle in Vietnam and a series of progressive social movements – especially feminism and what was then called the “gay rights” movement – that sought to undermine traditional patriarchal authority.

As Susan Jeffords argued in her brilliant 1994 book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, Ronald Reagan was able to portray himself in archetypal roles as both the nation’s father and its king.

“For this reason,” Jeffords wrote, “(Reagan) was able to foster what many have come to recognize as a revolution in US social organization and to implement clear cut policies -- both foreign and domestic -- that would define the nation's identity and agenda for the next eight years. It was a revolution defined by what it was not. It was not Jimmy Carter or the Carter policies, which it rewrote as weak, defeatist, inactive, and feminine. Consequently, it was a revolution whose success pivoted on the ability of Ronald Reagan and his administration to portray themselves successfully as distinctively masculine, not merely as men but as decisive, tough, aggressive, strong, and domineering men.”

Sound familiar?

MAGA as a male backlash movement

It’s impossible to understand Trumpism, like Reaganism more than a generation ago, without grasping that one of its animating energies is white male backlash. In fact, the political rise of Donald Trump, and the growth of right-wing populism over the past couple of decades, is incomprehensible without an understanding of the gender and sexual politics of the MAGA movement.

These politics – along with white racial grievance and resentment – are the driving force behind MAGA, and the hold that Trump and his movement seem to have on the psyches and political choices of millions of men, including an alarming number of young men, and a growing number of men of color.

Unfortunately, the gendered subtext in presidential politics is still not very well understood in key corridors of elite analysis and opinion-making. There is general acknowledgment that Carter’s main political shortcoming was the widespread perception that he was a weak commander-in-chief.

But very little analysis in mainstream or even progressive media delves into the ways in which the right has weaponized perceptions of liberal “weakness” as a way to make explicit masculinity appeals to male voters – a strategy that has allowed them to attract overwhelming majorities of those voters over the past few decades.

A case in point is a January 9 story on page one of The New York Times, a “think” piece by longtime Times reporter Adam Nagourney, entitled “Party Haunted by Caricature of Carter Era.”

The piece discusses the ways in which negative perceptions about Carter’s mixed record on foreign policy have created a burdensome legacy for the Democratic Party, which constantly has to fight to prove that its leaders and nominees for president are “tough” enough to do the job.

As Nagourney wrote, “Mr. Carter’s political legacy produced what many analysts argue was a kind of conditioned response: an overreaction among Democrats anxious to avoid comparisons to him on foreign policy issues.”

But not once in the article was the gendered nature of this perception even named, much less examined in depth. The words “masculinity” or “gender” never appeared. Instead, there were multiple references to Democrats over the past forty years trying to appear “tough” while distancing themselves from Carter’s “ineffectiveness” and “weakness.”

Why does this omission matter?

Donald Trump won re-election to the presidency in 2024 by running a campaign that targeted men – especially but not exclusively blue-collar men -- by appealing directly to their identity as men and insisting that our culture desperately needs a reassertion of male energy and agency in the face of degenerate and corrupt leadership by a feminized elite.

One unavoidable message embedded in that critique is that women are incapable of serving as president, and can only ascend to that lofty perch of power and prestige if given special and “unfair” consideration, i.e., the way in which Kamala Harris was repeatedly derided in right-wing media as a “DEI hire.”

But it’s not just women whom the MAGAverse considers unfit to be president of the United States. Men who are not MAGA Republicans are routinely derided in conservative media as soft and weak, and therefore incapable of defending the country against threats both foreign and domestic.

Whether or not the assumptions outlined above are absurd – and I believe they are – they nonetheless have currency in contemporary American political discourse. In 2024 Trump ran a cartoonishly hypermasculine campaign – recall the wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the Republican National Convention in July – and was rewarded for it not with mockery and disdain, but with a win in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

According to NBC News exit polls, Trump beat Harris by 55-43% among men, and 60-38% among white men. He won among high-school educated white men by 69% to 29%!

There is abundant evidence in both exit poll and focus group data that this vote was driven less by issues than by a sense that the Republican Party is the men’s party, and Trump the men’s candidate.

Pundits describe this in shorthand by labeling it the “brocast” election, in which Trump went on The Joe Rogan Experience and other male-themed podcasts, in order to solidify his personal connection with male voters, especially young male voters.

The Democrats don’t need to mimic hypermasculine MAGA posturing to win back male voters

The Democrats continue to be perplexed about how to respond to all of this. Presumably, part of their reticence derives from their irrevocable commitment to gender and sexual equity and justice. They don’t want to risk alienating the party’s strong base of women, including Black women and other women of color. And they haven’t yet found a way to stay committed to those women and reach men at the same time.

But they don’t have to choose between the two. There are ways to speak to men – including young men – that don’t require compromising their feminist bona fides. In fact, one of the most promising findings of polling data over the past few years is that young men continue to support basic tenets of gender equality, like abortion rights, even as they’ve moved to the right in terms of their presidential vote.

At the risk of oversimplification, this suggests that the Democrats need to find a way to speak to young men, “meet them where they are,” and show them that their policies actually benefit them more than the plutocratic policies of the GOP. The organization I co-founded a year ago, the Young Men’s Research Project, is compiling a growing body of resources that provides insights about how to do this.

The Democrats also need to develop candidate profiles and messaging that speak to men’s gendered identities in a way that counters the cartoonish and reductive right-wing narrative about “manliness” and fitness for leadership. A key way to do that is to embrace – unapologetically -- a more inclusive and comprehensive definition of strength.

One place to start with that redefinition might be an honest assessment of Jimmy Carter’s many strengths as an authentically committed leader with the courage of his convictions – whether or not one agrees with every statement he made, or position he took.

After their devastating defeat in this past election, it should be clear to Democrats – along with anyone that recognizes the threat that right-wing populism poses to democracy -- that changing the subject, or using gender-neutral language to avoid talking about the vexing topic of men and masculinities, is self-defeating and a ticket to recurring electoral losses.

It’s also a prescription for continued backsliding in the long struggle for gender equality and justice, and other basic components of a healthy and just society.