TAKE "NONGOVERNMENTAL" SERIOUSLY.

Former president Jimmy Carter departed this life at the end of last year.  Reason's Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency, while taking stock of the Carter presidency, offers a back-handed compliment.

In the coming weeks, we can expect to hear a lot of nice things about how "our best ex-president" hammered nails for Habitat for Humanity instead of racking up $200,000 speaking fees from Goldman Sachs.  But even the most effusive Democrats will likely stop short of praising Carter's performance as president, while those Republicans able to maintain a dignified silence will bide their time until it's OK to start burning him in effigy again.

Whatever ceremonial respect Jimmy Carter gets paid while he's lying in state, it's unlikely to change his historical reputation as a second-rater. The scholars who fill out the presidential rankings scorecards typically dump him in the bottom half of American chief executives, and most of the rest of America remembers him as a colossal failure.

There's something in the Carter presidency for just about everyone to deplore. If Barack Obama was "like a Rorschach test"—people saw in him what they wanted to see—then Jimmy Carter evokes images we'd rather blot out: gas lines, yellow ribbons around trees, burning helicopters in the desert, that goddamned cardigan sweater. He left office as "a potent symbol for the futility of government and naïveté of reformist zeal," historian Bruce J. Schulman writes, "as much a relic of the despised, disparaged '70s as yellow smiley faces, disco records, and leisure suits."

Count Mr Healy among the few pundits not troubled by the paucity of transformational zeal: "[T]here's a lot to be said for James Earl Carter's comparatively modest conception of the office."  It is not to that I wish to speak.  Rather, let me focus on that post-presidential hitch as volunteer carpenter for Habitat.  Let us consider, dear reader, the extent to which zoning codes and set-back regulations and all the other impedimenta of housing development make fewer building sites available for Habitat projects, push up the prices of houses, and might make a Habitat house a more elaborate project than it otherwise would be.

Take nongovernmental seriously.

Next, consider an observation by Juan Cole in Common Dreams, more commonly understood as the site where collective action is equivalent to governmental action.

After he left the White House, Jimmy Carter did a lot of traveling for his foundation. In Africa, he saw those suffering from the guinea worm, and asked what could be done about it. He was told that the flea that carries the larvae is big enough so that even just filtering water through cloth would get rid of it.

From 1986, Carter put together a coalition of the World Health Organization and health ministries in the afflicted countries (which then included Pakistan) to get the word out to people about the need for water filtration.

He even at one point in the mid-1990s helped negotiate a cease-fire between the north and the south in Sudan so that his activists could reach affected villagers and teach them how to filter the water!

I sometimes wonder about the evolution of health practices over years. Who first had the idea that fermented beverages were a good idea?  Who made the connection between drinking wine or beer and suffering less from infections than people who drank the local water?  Might the documented alcohol intolerance among the first peoples of North America be a consequence of the continental polar climate making the ponds and streams less hospitable to the likes of the guinea worm?  All of that noted, providing people with the knowledge to live less dangerously is something that doesn't have to require government action.

Take nongovernmental seriously.

That noted, George Will is suitably dyspeptic.

As ex-president, Carter’s freelance diplomacy included hijacking the Clinton administration’s policy toward North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Time magazine’s Lance Morrow described Carter as “a psalm-singing global circuit rider and moral interventionist” who behaved “as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio.”

His post-presidential involvement with Habitat for Humanity illustrated the large reverberation of a good example. Of his presidency, let us charitably say what he said of his disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission, in which eight helicopters invaded a nation larger than Alaska. It was, he said, “an incomplete success.”

Let's treat that "freelance diplomacy" as a marker of the limits to nongovernmental organizations.  Diplomacy is still the province of state actors, and international relations imply governments screwing other governments.  National Review's editors raise the same point.

Carter’s post-presidency, widely praised, was overpraised. He raised money and talent to eradicate scourges such as the Guinea worm. But he also fancied himself an emeritus freelance diplomat, meddling in Haitian and Korean affairs, and becoming, via his ongoing interest in the Middle East, an anti-Israel shill. There was something performative about his well-photographed house-building with Habitat for Humanity: Your left hand should not know what your right hand is hammering.

National Review contributor Philip Klein elaborates at length on that anti-Israel shill claim.

Take nongovernmental seriously.