Academics would have us believe that Joe Biden – who was recently deemed mentally incompetent by his own Justice Department – has made a better president than the likes of Ronald Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant, and James Monroe, not to mention Andrew freaking Jackson?
Late last year, the “2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey” was conducted among current and recent team members of the President & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the self-described “foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics,” along with “scholars who had recently published peer reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses.” The goal was to create a ranking of “presidential greatness” that included all occupants of the office from George Washington to Joe Biden. Some 525 respondents were asked to rank each president from 0 to 100, with zero representing failure, 50 average, and 100 great. 154 usable responses were received and their ratings were averaged to produce the final list of how the real card carrying experts rank American Presidents. The end result would be laughable if it didn’t say more about the intellectual bankruptcy of academics than any realistic rating of true greatness. How else can you possibly explain that a full seven out of eight Democrats who held the presidency since 1900 are in the top 15 of all presidents ever? What would the odds of that be on any truly objective poll and if that was the case wouldn’t everyone be better of just voting Democrat on chance alone? Somehow, these academics would have us believe that Joe Biden – who was recently deemed mentally incompetent by his own Justice Department – has made a better president than the likes of Ronald Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant, and James Monroe, not to mention Andrew freaking Jackson? Ironically, the only Democrat President since 1900 not in the top 15 is the one President Biden is most frequently compared with by the average American, Jimmy Carter. Carter, widely considered by the broader public as one of the worst of the 20th century, sits in the top half directly below the aforementioned Andrew freaking Jackson and above the likes of James K. Polk, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge. Otherwise, the top ten alone tells you everything you need to know: Barack Obama, whose entire presidency has largely disappeared without a trace save for the ungainly behemoth that is Obamacare and who witnessed the worst deterioration of race relations and political polarization in general, is ranked at number eight. The indispensable man, George Washington, who defined the Presidency to this day, sits behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy, who didn’t even serve a full term in office – not even three full years – is ranked number 10, right above James Madison, the Father of the Constitution.
Not surprisingly, former President Donald Trump was ranked dead last, 45 out of 45. Yes, Trump is ranked behind presidents who served barely a month (Harrison), less than year (Garfield), and resigned in disgrace (Nixon), despite having secured the first peace deals in the Middle East in a generation, defeating ISIS and starting no new wars on his watch, opening up relations with North Korea, securing the most comprehensive tax reform in a generation, the most significant reform of criminal law in a generation, remaking the federal judiciary, and spearheading the effort to deliver a vaccine faster than anyone in the history of the known universe among other achievements. These are all substantive, lasting accomplishments, many of which were considered neigh on impossible when he entered office, whether one loves the former President or hates him. The remaking of the judiciary remains controversial especially following the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, which in itself capped yet another generational battle that most conservatives had thought was lost long ago, but the other achievements have had an almost indisputably positive impact on people’s lives both in America and around the world. There are people who would be in prison now without him. There are millions with more money in their pocket because of him. There are lives that have been saved by their own standards as a result of his leadership. These real card carrying experts, however, have ranked him behind James Buchanan, an absentee President with no achievements to his name who stumbled into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson, a maligned retrograde who sought to rollback protections for ex-slaves after the Civil War. Among others, Donald Trump also ranks behind George W. Bush, who has managed to approach the top two thirds (32) even after leading America in the worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam and presiding over the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people their lives and threatening the livelihoods of young people to this day, again according to their own metrics. Carter, mentioned earlier, has managed to rise to number 22, the top half of all presidents, but he too presided over an economy so bad there was a “misery index” to measure it while completely and totally bungling the Middle East. Likewise, Carter does not have a substantial achievement to his name, a Presidency that produced nothing of value save for solar panels on the White House roof – which were promptly removed by the next President. So bad in fact was the Carter presidency, that he ushered in 12 years of Republicans, setting up two landslide victories for Ronald Reagan, and yet he is now considered above average for reasons that are completely unexplained, save there is a (D) by his name.
Perhaps the only welcome surprise on the entire list is Teddy Roosevelt slotting in at number four. Roosevelt was a figure so widely popular and respected in his day that his face graces Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, meaning he was once considered among the greatest of the great, but overtime, he has become a victim of his own success. America was both peaceful and prosperous during his (almost) two terms, which should objectively accrue to a leader’s benefit, but history tends to elevate those who managed major crises, sometimes of their own making. Roosevelt had the political and diplomatic skills, however, to prevent a crisis from occurring in the first place. He stopped a potential war with Germany when Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to exert his influence in Brazil, combining a subtle show of force with a secret diplomatic effort that allowed Germany to withdraw without losing face, a lesson President Biden would do well to learn dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was willing to put his own prestige on the line to resolve domestic and international challenges, securing peace between a recalcitrant Russia and a victorious Japan, and resolving a strike that threatened the nation’s coal supply without actually using government power, simply his own personal prestige and negotiation skills. Roosevelt was also considered a progressive in his day, ushering in much needed rights for workers, early, targeted environmental protections that were equally important, turning conservationism into a cause, and using government power to limit monopolies. The model he set has been perverted beyond recognition in our era, but the political battles he won on all these fronts set the standard to this day. At the same time, he was an ardent advocate of American exceptionalism, Western values, and military might, believing minorities and underprivileged countries would not rise to become world powers until they embraced our way of life, speaking in language that can be shocking to modern sensibilities. As such, he took unauthorized military action in Panama, essentially fomenting a coup backed by the military though we did not fire a shot, and liberated Puerto Rico fully from the Spanish.
A comparison with Woodrow Wilson, who is ranked 15, below Teddy Roosevelt yet above Andrew freaking Jackson, is instructive, however. Europe plunged into the most destructive war in history on his watch, while Wilson dithered and Roosevelt personally harangued him to project the strength required to bring the recalcitrant parties together to negotiate peace. Roosevelt rightly recognized that Europe was fighting a war that none of the major players wanted, one that had begun over a territorial dispute between Austria and Serbia, but quickly pulled in Russia, Germany, England, France, and others. He agreed with Wilson that the war was a European problem in principle, but had a radically different approach in practice, so different he accused Wilson and his Secretary of State of living in a fantasy world, writing “a world of two dimensions, and not in the actual workaday world, which has three dimensions.” He advocated that the United States immediately begin preparing for the worst possible eventuality, an attack on a major American city, and to engage with the European powers, particularly over Belgium, which had remained neutral in the conflict, but was overrun by Germany regardless. In his view, the mere specter of American might massing across the sea would push the belligerents in Europe to consider other options than all out war, especially as he remained cagey on who he considered the aggressor in the conflict, variously accused of siding with both the English and the Germans based on his ancestry. The uncertainty of which side we might back would cause all sides to be more cautious. He also felt that we could begin to insert ourselves diplomatically by asserting the rights of Belgium to remain out of the conflict. Wilson, however, seemed to believe a huge army could simply be conjured out of thin air, writing “The President knows that if this country needed a million men, and needed them in a day, the call would go out at sunrise and the sun would go down on a million men in arms.” An ally in the Senate claimed there would be ten million. Roosevelt replied, accurately it would prove when Wilson finally realized we needed to engage, “If the senator’s ten million men sprang to arms at this moment, they would have at the outside some four hundred thousand modern rifles at which to spring. Perhaps six hundred thousand more could spring to squirrel pieces and fairly good shotguns. The remaining nine million men would have to spring to axes, scythes, hand-saws, gimlets, and similar arms.” When Wilson rejected his more forceful approach on Belgium, Roosevelt declared “President Wilson has been much applauded by all the professional pacifists because he has announced that our desire for peace must make us secure it for ourselves by a neutrality so strict as to forbid our even whispering a protest against wrong-doing, less such whispers might cause disturbance to our ease and well-being. We pay the penalty of this action – or rather, supine inaction – by forfeiting the right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present.” One cannot prove a negative, of course, but it certainly seems reasonable to me that if Roosevelt had won his third party bid in 1912 over Wilson, World War I would not have unfolded the same way.
Similarly, the supposed historians behind this survey have given President Biden a completely free pass for the three wars that have begun on his watch, first our rout in Afghanistan, then the war in Ukraine, and now the war in Gaza. In their view, the current President is an innocent bystander in these crises, powerless to alter the course of events, little different than me and you, but that is necessarily a low bar for greatness. Greatness changes the political kaleidoscope as Roosevelt used to call it and therefore changes what is possible. During his battle with Wilson over how to respond to World War I, Roosevelt described his own record of peace through strength this way, “I ask those individuals who think of me as a firebrand to remember that during the seven and half years I was President not a shot was fired at any soldier of any hostile nation, and there was not much of a threat of war.” Any fair analysis of Biden’s greatness, or more accurately the complete lack of it, would lead one to include that he is capable of neither exerting his influence or changing any dynamic, either as a leader or a politician in general. Once again, whether you love Trump or hate him, he is the leader of the most widespread, powerful, and important political movement in decades, responsible for upending conventional party politics in ways that were unthinkable less than a decade ago. Historically speaking, he is the only man never to serve in the government or the military to ascend to the presidency, and despite all of the forces arrayed against him, continues to be the most beloved Republican by conservatives in the country and might well be on the cusp of the most triumphant comeback in American politics.
Biden, meanwhile, is completely adrift, not shaping politics in his image, but being shaped by it, pulled around by forces he cannot possibly control. The only chance he has at greatness as things look right now is as a great failure, but of course it is an election year and something must be done to burnish his image. “Presidents Day occurs at a crucial moment this year, with the presidency on the cusp of crisis as we inexorably shuffle toward a rematch between the incumbent and his predecessor,” Professors Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin H. Vaughn, the creators of the survey, wrote in The Los Angeles Times. “It’s the sort of contest we haven’t seen since the 19th century and judging by public opinion of President Biden and former President Trump, most Americans would have preferred to keep it that way.” Sure enough, the media piled on “Historians Rank Trump as Worst President,” insisted Axios. “Trump Ranked History’s Worst U.S. President, Biden Finishes 14” declared The New York Daily News, and The New York Times, “Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last, to cite headlines from Real Clear Politics’ Carl M. Canon. He ran the figures on how biased the survey has to be to reach these conclusions, “The tipoff was that Republicans rank Reagan the fifth-greatest president, but the Gipper only came up 16th in the survey. It was a math question one didn’t need a Ph.D. to solve — a 9th grader could do it: The survey had 154 respondents — so what percentage had to be Democrats or independents to bring a guy from fifth place to 16th? Off the top of my head, I guessed 90%. It was close. Justin Vaughn gave me the numbers: Of the 154, there were only 15 Republicans.” I would add that those 15 Republicans are probably never Trumpers, but what’s the point? It’s no secret that academia is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Still, it would be nice if they didn’t do their best to prove it on a regular basis.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 