Former US President Jimmy Carter died today at his home in Plains, Georgia, aged 100, making him the longest-lived president in American history. Carter served only one term, from 1977 to 1981, and left office after a crushing defeat to Ronald Reagan amid inflation, energy problems and the Iran hostage crisis. By the conventional standards through which presidents are usually ranked immediately after leaving office, his political career appeared to have ended badly. Yet Carter then spent more than four decades working on election monitoring, conflict resolution, public health, housing and human rights through the Carter Center, eventually receiving the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. His death therefore raises a question unusually relevant to politics today: should political success be measured primarily by how effectively someone acquires and retains power, or by what they do with influence once retaining power is no longer possible?
Carter’s presidency itself deserves more nuance than either the later saintly image or the older caricature of complete failure provides. He entered the White House after Watergate, presenting himself as an outsider capable of restoring integrity to government. His administration brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, which helped produce the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and fundamentally changed the Middle Eastern balance of power. His administration also elevated human rights more explicitly within American foreign policy and pursued energy conservation at a moment when American dependence on imported petroleum had become strategically dangerous. Yet the presidency was overwhelmed politically by stagflation, energy shortages and especially the Iran hostage crisis, during which 52 Americans were held for 444 days. Carter was defeated decisively by Reagan in 1980.
The interesting analytical point is that political performance and historical legacy operate on different time horizons. Voters need to evaluate governments according to conditions they experience now. Historians can evaluate decisions according to consequences visible decades later. These perspectives can produce different judgements without either being irrational. An American household facing inflation in 1980 had little reason to award Carter electoral credit because historians decades later would regard Camp David as important. Likewise, contemporary voters cannot be expected to optimise according to historical reputations that have not yet formed.
This is why retrospective voting is simultaneously necessary and imperfect. Democracy needs citizens to punish governments they believe have performed badly. Otherwise elections provide little accountability. But citizens operate with incomplete information, short time horizons and enormous difficulty distinguishing government decisions from external shocks. Presidents therefore receive blame for recessions they did not entirely cause and credit for booms they did not entirely create.
Political accountability is noisy.
The alternative, however, is worse.
A system in which leaders can insist that history will eventually vindicate them regardless of present failure gives voters no meaningful mechanism for removal.
Carter accepted that mechanism completely.
He lost.
He conceded.
He left office.
That sounds almost trivial until compared with the events following the 2020 US presidential election. Democratic alternation depends on defeated leaders accepting that political authority belongs to offices temporarily rather than individuals permanently. Carter’s behaviour after 1980 represented the ordinary constitutional norm: losing power was politically devastating but not existential.
The significance of his later career is that he demonstrated something else as well: losing formal authority does not require losing public purpose.
This distinction matters because political systems become more stable when former leaders possess meaningful lives outside power. If leaving office means irrelevance, humiliation, prosecution or exile, leaders acquire stronger incentives to remain. If former presidents can retain status, influence and productive roles, peaceful succession becomes psychologically and politically cheaper.
This is part of the authoritarian exit problem we have encountered repeatedly this year. Maduro’s allies in Venezuela fear what losing power might mean. Assad ultimately fled Syria. Hasina fled Bangladesh. Political systems become more peaceful when losing an election means becoming an opposition politician or private citizen rather than becoming a prisoner or refugee.
Carter’s post-presidency represents an unusually successful version of democratic exit.
After leaving office, he and Rosalynn Carter established the Carter Center in 1982, which became involved in conflict mediation, election observation and global health. The organisation has monitored more than a hundred elections and became particularly influential in efforts against Guinea worm disease, whose global incidence has fallen from millions of cases annually in the 1980s to only a handful in recent years. His Nobel Peace Prize recognised decades of work involving peaceful conflict resolution, democracy, human rights and development.
The Guinea worm campaign is particularly interesting because it demonstrates a kind of political achievement almost opposite to electoral politics. Elections reward visibility, communication and coalition-building. Disease eradication requires institutional persistence. Health workers need to return to villages year after year, monitor infections, provide filtration, change behaviour and maintain surveillance even when case numbers become tiny.
The closer eradication gets, the less politically visible the remaining work becomes.
This is the last-mile problem of public policy.
Reducing a disease from three million cases to thirty thousand can be easier than reducing thirty cases to zero because every remaining case may exist in remote or conflict-affected areas. Success therefore requires institutions willing to continue spending resources after the issue disappears from headlines.
Carter’s post-presidential work accumulated influence partly because he possessed a resource unavailable to most politicians: time without an electoral calendar.
Presidents optimise partly around four-year cycles.
Former presidents can work on problems whose returns appear decades later.
That difference between political time and social time matters enormously.
Climate change.
Public health.
Institution-building.
Education.
Infrastructure.
Many of the most important policy investments produce benefits beyond the politicians who initiate them.
Democratic systems therefore need mechanisms capable of extending political time horizons beyond elections.
Independent institutions can do this.
Civil society can do it.
Long-term legislation can do it.
Former leaders sometimes can too.
Carter’s foreign policy also deserves reassessment through this longer horizon. The Camp David Accords did not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Middle East remains deeply unstable. But removing Egypt, the largest Arab state by population and historically one of Israel’s principal military adversaries, from the cycle of Arab-Israeli interstate wars substantially changed regional security. Egypt and Israel have maintained their peace treaty through wars, uprisings, assassinations and repeated Gaza crises.
That is a remarkably durable diplomatic outcome.
It demonstrates the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation.
Diplomacy does not need to solve every dispute to change the structure of future conflict.
If two major states stop fighting one another directly, the regional system changes even while other disputes remain.
Carter’s human-rights policy presents a more complicated legacy. Elevating human rights rhetorically helped shift American foreign policy away from treating anti-communist alignment as sufficient justification for supporting authoritarian governments. Yet strategic interests continued producing inconsistencies.
This is the permanent problem with values-based foreign policy.
States possess principles and interests simultaneously.
A government can condemn authoritarianism in an adversary while cooperating with an authoritarian ally.
The existence of hypocrisy does not make the principle meaningless.
It reduces its credibility.
The strongest foreign policy therefore attempts to narrow the gap between declared universal rules and selective application.
That problem remains unresolved today.
The United States criticises Russian violations of sovereignty in Ukraine while facing accusations of inconsistent standards over Israel and Gaza.
China invokes sovereignty strongly while threatening Taiwan.
India emphasises strategic autonomy while navigating contradictory partnerships.
International politics repeatedly demonstrates that principles become most credible when they constrain the actor invoking them.
Carter’s emphasis on human rights therefore remains relevant less because he applied it perfectly than because he helped establish the expectation that American foreign policy should at least be evaluated against a standard beyond immediate strategic advantage.
His economic record is harder to rehabilitate simply through hindsight. Inflation remained severe, energy shocks damaged confidence and unemployment rose during parts of his presidency. Carter eventually appointed Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chair in 1979, and Volcker’s extremely tight monetary policy subsequently helped break entrenched inflation at the cost of severe recession in the early Reagan years.
This creates an interesting problem of intertemporal political credit.
The president appointing someone who begins a painful adjustment can lose politically before the benefits arrive.
The successor can inherit the eventual stabilisation.
Economic policy therefore does not align neatly with electoral ownership.
Governments inherit both problems and solutions already in motion.
This is another reason simplistic presidential economic comparisons are weak.
The economy during one presidency partly reflects decisions made under the previous one.
Investment takes years.
Interest-rate changes operate with lags.
Infrastructure takes longer.
Institutional reforms can take decades.
Political narratives compress all of this into “the economy under President X”.
Reality is less cooperative.
Carter’s environmental record also looks different from the perspective of 2024. He installed solar panels on the White House, promoted energy efficiency and warned Americans about dependence on fossil fuels during the energy crisis. Those policies were often mocked politically, and Reagan later removed the White House solar panels.
Today, energy security and clean technology sit at the centre of global industrial policy.
Again, this does not mean every Carter energy policy was correct.
It demonstrates that political timing matters.
A policy can identify a genuine long-term problem before voters perceive the solution as economically or culturally acceptable.
Leadership therefore involves a difficult optimisation between following public preferences and attempting to change them.
Move too far ahead and lose the authority required to implement anything.
Move too little and government merely responds to problems after they become crises.
Carter often struggled with that political translation.
He could diagnose structural problems more effectively than he could build durable political coalitions around his solutions.
That may be the central distinction between governing competence and political competence.
A leader can understand policy without understanding how to make voters accept it.
Another can master political communication while governing poorly.
Democracy requires some combination because technically sophisticated policy that cannot survive elections is not durable, while politically successful policy that does not solve problems eventually loses performance legitimacy.
Ronald Reagan understood the communication side far better than Carter.
Carter’s later reputation benefited partly because post-presidential work removed the need to solve that electoral optimisation problem.
He could pursue causes according to his own priorities without winning another election.
This is why his life also complicates how we rank presidents.
Presidential rankings concentrate on four or eight years because the office is what historians are supposedly measuring.
But political influence does not stop at the White House gate.
Carter spent 43 years as a former president, far longer than his four years as president.
His post-presidential life therefore became quantitatively and qualitatively larger than the presidency itself.
That is unusual.
It also provides a useful argument against treating political office as the highest possible form of public service.
Formal power allows decisions affecting millions.
Civil society can sometimes pursue narrower objectives more persistently.
Neither substitutes for the other.
Carter demonstrated both.
His death also arrives at an interesting moment in American politics. Donald Trump is preparing to return to the presidency after campaigning around a model of leadership almost stylistically opposite to Carter’s. Carter cultivated modesty, religious service and personal restraint. Trump emphasises dominance, confrontation and personal political strength.
It would be too easy to turn this into a moral comparison in which one personality represents virtue and the other decline.
The more useful question is why different political environments reward different leadership styles.
Carter emerged after Watergate, when Americans wanted honesty after presidential scandal.
Trump emerged from declining trust in institutions, when many voters wanted someone willing to attack those institutions.
Political leaders do not simply shape political culture.
They are also selected by it.
This creates a feedback loop between institutions and leadership.
Low trust produces demand for disruptive leaders.
Disruptive leaders can weaken trust further.
Alternatively, successful disruption can reform institutions and rebuild legitimacy.
Which occurs depends on performance.
Carter’s post-presidential legacy offers another model of political influence: credibility accumulated through behaviour rather than dominance.
Credibility is slow capital.
It cannot be generated through one speech.
It grows when actions remain consistent across decades.
This is why Carter’s reputation improved after leaving office even though the electoral verdict on his presidency was devastating.
Citizens updated with new information.
Historical judgement is allowed to do that.
We should therefore resist the opposite temptation of rewriting the 1980 election as though voters were simply wrong.
They evaluated the government they experienced.
Later generations evaluate a much longer life.
Different datasets produce different conclusions.
That is reasonable.
The broader lesson is that political defeat does not settle historical value, and historical rehabilitation does not invalidate democratic defeat.
Both can coexist.
Jimmy Carter lost an election overwhelmingly.
He left peacefully.
He spent the next four decades building institutions rather than trying to recover the office.
He ultimately became more admired after losing power than he had been while possessing it.
There is something institutionally important in that trajectory.
Modern politics encourages leaders to treat relevance as inseparable from office.
Carter demonstrated that authority, influence and service can continue after formal power disappears.
Democracies need more of that norm because peaceful political succession becomes easier when politicians understand that losing power does not mean losing a public life.
A presidency lasts at most a few years.
A political legacy is constructed over much longer periods.
Carter’s life may therefore be remembered less as evidence that a supposedly failed president was secretly successful than as something more interesting:
political success itself has more than one time horizon.
Voters were entitled to remove him in 1980.
History was entitled to keep evaluating him afterwards.
And Carter was free to spend the forty-four years between those judgements changing the evidence.
