Carter was never able to understand that his personal feelings about things changed nothing. He felt that if he agonized enough over an issue it would alter reality to fit what he wanted.
This came to a head with his “malaise” speech. The malaise was within him, not in society as a whole, and his attributing his feeling to our nation was the final straw for most people, fed up with his sanctimonious, weakling, half-hearted attitude towards his job.
Actually, Carter was never able to think other than what the broad & abstract U.S. foreign policy was at the time: “Democracy”. Carter was never able to put that policy in context and think about the consequences of its application outside the U.S. - worse even, he wasn’t able to manage it when it didn’t work.