Exactly 38 years ago this week, Jimmy Carter was having a crisis of confidence and Pierre Trudeau was not.

In the middle of July 1979, Carter, then the U.S. president, delivered a signature speech on Americans’ dwindling faith in government and democracy. Trudeau, meanwhile, just a couple of months after his crushing 1979 election defeat, was boasting at a press conference that same week that he was “the best” and vowing he would not step down as Liberal leader.

As coincidence would have it, Carter was talking to Trudeau’s son this week after a crisis of another kind. The 92-year-old former president was in Winnipeg, volunteering with a Habitat for Humanity project, when dehydration put him into the hospital, thankfully, temporarily.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who counts Carter as an old family friend — Carter was an honorary pallbearer at Pierre Trudeau’s funeral — wanted to make sure he was OK.

Carter was fine. He’s on a bit of a comeback roll these days, seeming to bounce back from brain cancer, and returning to the Habitat for Humanity job site in Winnipeg shortly after being released from hospital.

And that 38-year-old speech by Carter, now known as the “crisis of confidence” speech, is also enjoying a bit of a renaissance, thanks to the film 20th Century Women, released late last year and available since spring on Netflix.

In the film, a bunch of people are gathered around a TV, listening to Carter talk about Americans’ “growing disrespect for government, for schools, the news media and other institutions.”

“Wow,” one of the crowd pronounces at the end of the speech. “He is so screwed.” (Though Annette Bening, the star of the film, pronounces the words “beautiful.”)

But yes, Carter was screwed. He lost the presidency at the end of 1980 to Ronald Reagan. (Pierre Trudeau was already back in power by the time Regan was sworn in as president in 1981).

The speech, though, lives on, and is actually looking a lot better with time — not to mention with that Donald Trump fellow in the White House. As the New Yorker said in a review of 20th Century Women, the Carter clip in the movie captures “a piece of remarkably discerning political rhetoric that proved both sharply accurate for the moment and prophetic even to the present day.”

I was in university in 1979, studying political science, but if we talked about this famous Carter speech in our classes, I don’t recall. So I went and dug up a transcript to see how prophetic it was. Judge for yourself:

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

“For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote.”

“Our people have turned to the federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide.”

“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.”

There is a lot more in the speech — I highly recommend it, if nothing else, to demonstrate how long the conditions have been ripening for a Trump presidency.

It may also make you wonder how history might have been different if more Americans had taken Carter’s warnings to heart and elected him, not Reagan, as president.

Reagan, a far more genial Republican than the current occupant of the White House, redefined U.S. politics in ways that still reverberate through the political culture — not just in the United States, but here too.

Reagan (as well as Margaret Thatcher in Britain) blazed a trail in political marketing, helping seal the idea in many voters’ minds that government is a business and citizens are consumers. Those marketing ideas made their way to Canada under Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, to this day.

So, yes, that consumer culture that Carter warned about in 1979 is now a fact of life and Americans are governed in 2017 by a salesman, rather than a statesman.

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Memories of Carter’s crisis of confidence faded with the end of the 20th century. But the warnings, like the man himself and his friendship with the Trudeaus, are proving to be enduring.

Correction – July 21, 2017: This column was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Jimmy Carter lost the U.S. presidency at the end of 1979 to Ronald Reagan

sdelacourt@bell.net

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