Neoliberalism is an elusive, chimeric concept. Is it a kind of ‘movement that dare not speak its name’, a polemic popularized in the 1990s against the ‘Washington Consensus’, a vaguer blending together of ‘libertarianism’, ‘neoconservatism’, and free market orthodoxies? I think a useful understanding of neoliberalism treats it not just as the prominence of neoclassical economics (even as Paul Volcker’s economic thought is crucial to understanding Carter’s policies) or a market fundamentalism, but as a substantive political and economic set of ideas.

Different historians focus on different aspects of neoliberalism to answer different question. I’ll draw on Rachel Turner and Susan and work with a broader understanding of neoliberalism as the (re)production of free market mechanisms, competition and individualisation within hitherto ‘unmarketlike’ social spheres and institutions. Crucially, William Davies notes that neoliberalism is “dominated by an idea of competitive activity, that is, the production of inequality”, and since its earliest inceptions has been fiercely anti-collectivist. Hence, what separates neoliberalism from mere laissez-faire economics, as thinkers from Hayek to Rustow stressed, was that states had to actively intervene and (re)produce institutions and conduct of the market: an umpire having “to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate and enforce the rules of the game”, per Friedman.

With that in mind, we have some room to think about Carter’s regulatory policies. As you point out, the trend towards deregulation does seem locatable in Carter’s presidency, even if Reagan, and perhaps Clinton, serve in popular memory as icons of a neoliberal American regime. Carter assumes the presidency after the country’s worst recession since the 1930s, and as David Harvey (a geographer who closely considers neoliberalism) points out, his predecessor Gerald Ford’s refusal of a federal bailout to New York City in 1975 forced the city to accept the demands of banks and markets serves as an early prologue to later neoliberal ‘structural adjustments’. (Stedman Jones suggests that away from Harvey’s Marxist perspective, public appetite for redistributive tax rates and financial regulation were already decayed by pro-market rhetoric). At the same time, Carter assumes office in the context of a fracturing economic consensus surrounding the economic approach to adopt towards crisis and inflation: amidst the perceived inability of Keynesian macroeconomic, fiscally-directed approach, Friedman’s monetarist approach is gaining traction. It’s hence relevant that two Nobel Prize-winning economists provide Carter with quite opposite advice in 1977. It’s against this context that Carter’s economic policy is carried out – most (in?)famously the deregulation of airlines, fiscal balancing after some initial steps towards expansionary policy, and the appointment of Paul Volcker – against the advice of many other Democrats.

Deregulation for the airline industry (in October 1978), and in 1980, rail and trucking, along with the passing of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (providing saving and loans associations and mutual savings banks more control over lending, and abolishing interest rate ceilings) certainly are significant acts. It’s quite telling that George Shultz, prominent in both Nixon and Reagan’s cabinets, asserts (in a 2008 interview with Daniel Stedman Jones) that Carter introduced an agenda of “economic deregulation”, pointing to the influence of the neoliberal Chicago School economist George Stigler. (We should still exercise some caution in taking Shultz’s argument wholesale – he shares many of the economic persuasions of Stigler, with a common education background). To Stigler we can add the influence of other academics in the ‘public choice’ literature, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. You’ve also asked about the influence of other Democrats: Ted Kennedy was key in raising and pushing the deregulation bills through Congress, organizing hearings in 1974 and 1975 intended to expose the ills of the federal administrative agency responsible for oversight, the Civil Aeronautics Board. Although the public narrative of the CAB’s gross failure stemmed in part from a media eager to report on the testimony of consumer groups (at the expense of other more technical, efficiency-based arguments at these hearings), it’s clear from Kennedy’s actions that Carter was not solely responsible for these policies.

The question you have about whether neoliberal policies stem from wider Democrat sentiments leads me to think about whether their impetus can be located in a different kind of distinctly non-Republican, non-conservative group: the ‘new Left’ of the 60s and 70s. A recent (2019) article by Reuel Schiller also moves the discussion away from individuals, pointing out that deregulation was the outcome not just of elite Democrats’ beliefs, but antibureaucratic, antiregulatory sentiments linked to the ‘new Left’ and counterculture. Opposition to bureaucracies, both private and public, lay not just in grassroots conservative movements. It was locatable in student groups like Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law. It was locatable even in bestselling books like The Greening of America (pub. 1970), which embodied a ‘deeply libertarian, antibureaucratic zeitgeist’. In this book that sold two million copies, it was not an orthodox conservative or neoliberal that argued markets enterprise, and the entrepreneurial spirit been hollowed out and replaced by the “American Corporate State” whose government regulations had “rationalize[d]” and “stabilize[d]” economic transactions solely for corporations’ benefits.

Even in postmodernist writers like Thomas Pychon, contemporary to Carter and Fords’s presidencies (and the links between postmodernism and neoliberalism are in themselves interesting, as David Harvey, Lyotard, Frederic Jameson etc. point out), the currents of anti-regulatory sentiment are evident. These ideas did affect public policy, and are extensively referenced by economists and lawyers pushing for deregulation, including Kennedy himself. Of course, this sentiment does not just push for deregulation – in these we also find the Freedom of Information Act, provisions that allow public challenges to agency processes, and yes, the elimination of administrative agencies.