This video is half right, the median American voter is a treat seeking monster who’d vote to eradicate small nations in order to get a discount on burger (to be fair, they have a boss who’d enslave that median American voter if they could get away with it).
However, Carter embraced neoliberalism and his speech about living with less coincided with his own anti unionism, austerity, deregulation, and financialization so telling the American people to learn to live with less, caused Carter’s messaging to be warped.
It was interpreted by a lot of blue collar workers as the guy, responsible for their declining economic power, telling to just forget about having a dental plan and to just shut up and go to mass more often. It was taken as a slap in the face.
Carter actually meant that already materially comfortable Americans should, at the margin, focus on things like their community and their overall well being, and that doing so would make you happier than expending all efforts to get that fourth home or that tenth car.
He wasn’t wrong. After a certain point, money has diminishing marginal value (and at the very extreme high end, money can have negative utility because it isolates the owner of that fortune and can cause them to lose a lot of good will and social clout, see the Elon Musk 2013 versus now 2024).
but the irony is that he played a role in shaping the material conditions where the CEO who dared to be kind to workers and their surrounding community and to sacrifice some profits (while still making plenty of money for themselves and shareholders) gets thrown out in favor of CEO who will put profits 100% over people.
Repeat that process over and over for decades and you get, well you get what we have now.
And what makes it so bitterly ironic, is that it was the Atari Democrats, sone of Carter’s strongest soldiers, that laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley’s stratospheric levels of accumulation at levels that could make Reagan loving Wall street Barons and Oil Tycoons blush.
Basically, the younger people whom the Carter speech were intended for, highly educated and upwardly mobile young boomers, not only ignored it but outdid everyone else on Earth in terms of gaining the whole world but at the price of their souls.
Hey, tech bros, I get that being normal and putting on a beer soaked softball game with the boys would be literally impossible. So start small, how about go from net worth 400 billion down to 100 billion and you focus on not destroying the biosphere.
Baby steps back to being human.
