I looked in vain for the positive accomplishments of Biden that kept him out of Tier 5. I think you need an addendum there.
While I don't agree with all your placements, I do appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you briefly defend them. Very good. Keep it short, hit the important points.
I tend to think that beginning in 1900 (although I'm a Teddy Roosevelt fan, and if you ever need the best Teddy impersonator to do a show, I'm a good friend of the very best one, so hit me up) many of the Presidents have at least a slight sociopathic streak. In some it's huge and deep (Wilson, LBJ, Obama, Biden). Clinton had it, but he also had a fullblown, IMHO, sociopath of a wife, which didn't help curtail his behavior.
One can draw straight lines from the other Tier 5 denizens led straight to hell--Civil War, Jim Crow, Nazism, Depression, Jihadism. Not clear at this time what the long-term results of Biden are, though I don't think that the invasions of Ukraine or southern Israel would have been tenable without the firehose of oil revenues that followed the change of administrations. As I mentioned somewhere else, Biden might better fit with WHHarrison, Taylor, and Garfield in a reconfigured "dead or disabled" category; at this point, it is unclear to what extent or whether he has actually presided.
I‘ve often said that Reagan was the greatest president of my time. So nice to see it confirmed. And Ike didn’t fare too badly, either.
The Trump aficionados, however, will have a hissy fit about you calling their hero out for his reckless behavior and accuse you of having “TDS.” What, you don’t like his stick-it-to-the-man mean tweets?
Some might. Others will shrug. One of the most dedicated Trump voters I know surprised me not long ago by saying, "Oh ... the guy is a complete asshole. I don't want to be his friend. I don't want to eat lunch with him. And I damned sure don't want my sister marrying him. But the alternative is Biden."
I didn't vote for Trump the first two times. This year I'm a "broken glass" Trump voter. I still don't like him on a personal level, but, I'm not dumb enough to ignore the alternatives."
And I'm rather constantly amazed by the apparent belief that one must "lurve" Trump if you're willing to vote for him. TDS is a very real thng.
Because you are so much smarter than Trump supporters, eh?
"Mean tweets" is just shorthand for Trump being Trump.
The bottom line is that Trump supporters acknowledge the man's flaws. It's embarrassing to watch Democrats line up and spout superlatives for the mediocrity that is Harris.
(2) You can claim here that “mean tweets” is shorthand for anything, but if it’s anything other than mean tweets, I have only your word for it. Dubious.
(3) The bottom line is that if Trump supporters do acknowledge his flaws, they’re keeping mum about it, or at best mighty elliptical.
(4) The question arising about me and a given Trump supporter is not which is smarter but which is more nearly correct about a particular political question. Being smarter doesn’t even significantly affect the odds.
(5) Is there a Trump supporter smarter than the vice-presidential candidate? And he is ambitious, energetic, persistent, and flexible far more than I, and undoubtedly exceeds me in other virtues and skills. But I think him less intelligent than myself. I don’t propose to expose personal information as proof. You needn’t believe, but this is my answer to Schreiber’s offensively personal question.
"I don’t propose to expose personal information as proof. "
After you edited out bragging about your academic achievements. I agree with the edit, it wasn't a good look.
You may have gone to Caltech, but since we're into argument from authority territory I'll point out that I'm a professional writer and in my humble opinion #5 needs some editing because the syntax is poor, the meaning isn't quite clear, and you started two sentences with conjunctions.
I'm kind of warming to Trump, even though my initial impression was contempt. The guy definitely speaks carelessly, often insultingly, pointlessly so. But...I'm kind of liking the fact that he just blurts out what's on his mind, that it's never pre-tested for political suitability, or even "should be said in polite company." It's a bit of a relief never needing to wonder whether I'm being bullshitted or gaslit, or even treated with cynical courtesy. Trump just doesn't do that, obviously to his considerable detriment, not to mention harm to his working relationships, but, in this era of the polished political candidate who might as well be created from whole cloth by an AI and special effects, there's something relaxing about Trump.
It would be different if his bull in a China shop speech habits led directly to similarly jagged action but that I'm not really seeing. He definitely speaks chaotically, but I'm not sure he acts that way. Maybe sometimes, the stuff that landed him in legal hot water comes to mind, although that may be explained by his lack of experience in politics, and how Caesar's wife is a real thing. But when I look back at his first Administration and its formal action, it mostly seems cautious and steady. Indeed, compared to the lurching about of the Biden Administration, he appears rather conservative.
I might feel differently if I listened to him more, it seems like just listening to him drives intellectuals to a frenzy. "How can anyone say something so dumb/provocative/politically incorrect?? We all *think* it, yes, but you're not supposed to say it out loud!" But I tend not to listen to politicians very much, because I assume almost all of the time they're trying to bullshit me and it's tiresome to resist. I prefer to look at the actions they take instead.
I agreed his *speech* was unthinking and unplanned, but I specifically contrasted it with the *action* I observed during his first Administration -- which did not strike me that way at all. He was certainly not a great President, certainly not the best organized, but he was also not nearly as chaotic as his speech seems to have suggested to people for whom polished speech is ne plus ultra (which does not include me). Indeed, I think the Biden Administration has demonstrated considerably more chaos and lack of purpose than the Trump Administration did[1].
I'm not sure what to make of your second comment, though. My experience is that the case for any political candidate is only in part his own nature, and the rest the nature of his opponent. We are never presented with such a smorgasbord of candidates that we have the luxury of picking out our favorite on purely positive grounds. In my entire lifetime, I've never voted for President based only on my preferred candidate's positive qualities -- it has always been a healthy mixture of his positives and his opponent's negatives, and quite frankly, I would say with me a good 75% of the time it's the opponent's negatives that dominate my decision. It's who I dislike least.
So from my point of view the point that much of the case for Trump is that he's running against Harris (or more precisely the Harris machine) is sort a sterile observation: that is always the way it is in elections where we get only a choice between 2 candidates, both of whom represent some kind of lowest common denominator among a very wide swathe of loosely allied voters. Even saying the entire case for Trump is based on Harris isn't very special -- again, large numbers of votes in every election have repoted exactly the justification for their votes, and it's not the least bit surprising, or new.
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[1] FWIW I also agree Trump is an egoistical asshole, and I would not care to work for him, "have a beer with him" as the modern metaphor goes, or be his friend; which opinion I do not base on any personal knowledge, but just that he has alienated so bitterly so many pretty competent and apparently reasonable people. But I'm not voting for National Best Friend or even National Nice Guy, but for a Commander in Chief. Being an asshole is not immediately diqualifying.
I disagree, which is nothing; but more important, I appear to have made myself insufficiently clear.
I think the only case for either candidate has to be made on entirely negative grounds, that is, of the horror of the other candidate; as there is no positive case for either. None.
That is not to say that the two negative cases are equal.
Hmm. I'm not sure I grok what you mean by "positive" and "negative" cases, to be honest. I don't really think that way. I mean, for example, suppose my only issue is not making inflation worse. There are 4 categories into which I can sort actions of each candidate: (1) actions Trump will take that will make inflation worse, (2) actions Trump will take that will not make inflation worse, (3) actions Trump will NOT take, the lack of which will make inflation worse, and finally (4) actions Trump will NOT take, the lack of which will not make inflation worse. I can make a similar list for Harris, of course.
Now, I can certainly add up all those actions (or non-actions) for each candidate, and conclude which is likely, on balance, to be better on my single issue. But what I am not understanding is how I can also sort those actions and nonactions into "positive" and "negative" cases for each candidate.
For example, would the "positive" case for Trump be only actions in (2), on the grounds that "positive" implies some deliberate action that is in the right direction (for me)? Or is the "positive" case all of (2) and (4), on the grounds that both are in the right direction, and it seems a bit odd to award more credit for action than inaction, since both may be deliberate, or even optimum (e.g. we might argue the most influential thing a President can do to reduce inflation is NOT propose new spending initiatives).
Or should I include only actions and non-actions that I am persuaded Trump chooses with some kind of deliberate thought, and leave out those that happen without conscious intention -- just because they would be out of character, say, or are foreclosed accidentally by conflict with other priorities (e.g. let's say his obsession with appointing Federal judges of the right persuasion, or just tweeting obscene cracks about Gavin Newsom, leaves him no time to dream up new spending initatives)? I could make that distinction, I suppose, but it still seems odd -- like I am grading both candidates not just on outcomes congenial to my goals, but also awarding "effort and conduct" extra-credit points for outcomes which are not just congenial to my wishes, but which are also undertaken with a spirit and energy I admire. Style points, basically.
The positive case for Trump is his track record of actions (not words) as President . As compared to the track record of his predecessor and successor. And Kamala is not only a part of Biden’s track record, since becoming the candidate she has repeatedly said she wouldn’t have done anything differently than Biden.
Now I think of it, maybe the better way to frame my response to your second comment is this: the argument *for* Harris would also largely be based on the person and party she's running against -- indeed, her campaign leans into this argument hard, almost to the exclusion of anything more substantive. So what I'm saying is that the argument *for* Harris that derives from who Trump is has weakened for me. I don't dislike Trump as much as I used to. Does that clarify?
Yes, and interstate trucking too. Both of those moves were more due to Teddy Kennedy, who was looking for some policy moves he could claim when he took Jimmy on in 1980. Fortunately, Alfred Kahn was favorable to deregulation and helped convince Carter to sign the bills.
I started to mention airline deregulation. But then it occurred to me that that is almost the only positive anyone with any sense of economics can cite. (He appointed Volcker, but only after the business community had threatened him.) While it was a nice move, it's rather said if that's the president's greatest accomplishment. "I tanked the economy, turbocharged Jihadist terrorism, prostrated myself before every doddering Communist dictator, crapped on the Jews, and made myself a royal pain in the ass to seven of my successors ... but I deregulated the airlines."
Regarding Jimmy Carter, let's not forget that he added to our woes immeasurably by giving the education blob its own cabinet department. Also, I'd put LBJ with the very worst for a host of reasons, foremost among them the disaster of federal student aid for college. That alone is responsible for much of our current misery.
Professor, does the American Political Science Association expect anyone outside the academic playpen to take their Presidential Greatness Project seriously? If so, why?
Part of me thinks that they really are a sharp bunch that understands all this stuff, but every few years, they get together over drinks and pot, dare each other to come up with the most ludicrous results imaginable, and then ROFL after all the press outlets start reporting their gag numbers breathlessly. If that's the case, then I have the highest respect for them. ... But in all seriousness, I'm guessing the the ASPCA would produce better numbers than the APSA.
If this is fantasy baseball for poli sci professors, then it relates to political "science" (You can't argue with science!) as fantasy baseball relates to baseball.
The report is a useful tool for their friends in the press to reinforce the smugness of midwit leftists that Democratic presidents are good, GOP presidents (well, except maybe Reagan, ’cause, ya’ know, the Soviet Union’s demise) bad.
I’m good with you putting Trump in the same bucket with Clinton. To me they would both make your T3 because the policy and country positives exceed the personal negatives. In the end, for politicians, policy is what matters to me (short of outright criminality in office like Nixon’s), not personal behavior, let alone mere things they say. But reasonable people can disagree on this.
I love that you listened to your friend on LBJ.
I agree with you on FDR, especially if effectively he is at the bottom of your first tier. Though I do note with some interest that you don’t criticize him for lying to the American public about his physical health, yet you downgrade Kennedy, Clinton and Trump for to me lesser offenses..
I have the most problem with you putting Biden in the same bucket with Clinton and Trump - especially given that you (properly) basically list only negatives for him. But I guess if Biden is on the bubble of your T5 I can live with that, too.
I did consider FDR's infirmities. But that's why I said, "Here are my tiers, fueled by incomplete, stream-of-consciousness narrative" I couldn't include everything because (A) I don't have time, and (B) The piece would be too long. FDR stays in Tier 1 because without him, Western Civilization might well have ended for centuries. I'll forgive a lot of things for that. I did ponder whether Biden should be Tier 5. (In certain moments, I also wondered whether he really belongs with Harrison, Taylor, and Garfield. At this point, I have no real idea to what extent he was ever in control of the administration.)
Thx. Not at all arguing with your FDR *ranking*, only the somewhat curious omission of lying about his health, when you spent *so* much time on similar-but-imo-less-worse behaviors of Kennedy/Clinton/Trump.
The fact that he clearly was *not* in control of his administration basically ever should be the final nail in the coffin of a Biden T5 ranking though, no?
Again, I think I had FDR's infirmities in an earlier version, and I made some quick choices on which verbiage to include and which to omit. Victory over Axis is his biggest plus, and idiotic economic policy was his biggest minus--even bigger than his late-stage afflictions. I also tended to write more on those whose Tier was ambiguous. FDR was going to be in Tier 1, regardless. Hence, brevity.
I did consider putting Biden in Tier 5, but there is a difference. Pierce, Buchanan, AJohnson, Hoover, and Carter give rise to actual disasters. (Civil War, Jim Crow, Depression, malaise/recession/terrorism.) Not clear yet whether Biden has fomented disaster, or whether we'll just muddle through his term and be OK. (I can argue either way, but not with great conviction in either direction.)
*Very* fair points all. Thx for the explanation. Can’t really argue against any of them.
But the more I ponder, the more it doesn’t sit well that you end up having Clinton and Trump in the same bucket as Biden, when the results for the country are obviously SO much better for the first two than what we got with Biden. You could bucket Clinton/Trump with Obama, OR bucket Obama with Biden, and I’d be ok with either. But all in the same bucket just seems… wrong.
Guess that’s just the limits of a tier system (and as the guy who asked for it, I should be the *last* one to complain about that! 😀).
Well, I didn't slot the presidents with an eye toward how audiences would react. But after-the-fact, it occurred to me that Tier 4 had emerged as the best of all possible groupings. Had Trump been lower than Clinton, Obama, and Biden, readers on the left would have thought "OBVIOUSLY!" Had Trump been higher than any of those three, those same readers would have said, "RIDICULOUS!!!" and dismissed the whole exercise. The fact that they are equals creates a certain dramatic tension. The same would have been true (in reverse) with a subset of Trump voters.
Ok, I see your point if the goal is to minimize extremists potentially dismissing you.
That said, look at it objectively: if Trump had never been president, the idea that Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are in the same tier is almost absurd, no? [And I repeat that tiering Obama with *either* one is reasonable enough.]
In terms of people being mad, in the absence of Trump, imagine how upset they’d be that you tier W ahead of Clinton and Obama. Vis-a-vis Obama they’d be wrong, of course, but vs. Clinton?
I note that you left out any mention of the Biden family crime syndicate where many family members (including grandchildren) received money laundered through multiple shell accounts from Chinese and other foreign sources, despite obviously being unqualified save for their connection to Joe. This was documented by Congress. Even the hugely biased Politifact acknowledges this, but to them Biden is saved because no one has yet found the actual payments of “10% kicked up to the big guy” (because of course the Biden Justice Department made a point to not look). This personal finance sleaze is as dirty as Clinton’s.
But it seems that like Hur you are letting Biden off easy [in grouping him with Clinton despite no positive accomplishments] because he is “an elderly man with a poor memory”
Now that said, I’ll repeat again I totally accept your decision on the borderline to not put Biden in T5; your explanatory logic re: no outright disaster is sound.
But to me you’re basically arguing above that Trump and Clinton (who compellingly deserve to be in the same tier) get pulled down a ranking into Biden’s tier *primarily* because so many people today don’t like the words that come out of Trump’s mouth that don’t actually impact policy and are not personal sleaze while in office (remember, your rankings are supposedly independent of anything the men did before taking office).
If nothing else, surely you will acknowledge that there is a *far* wider range in your Tier 4 than there is in tiers 2, 3 and 5 [I’m not knowledgeable enough to be able to determine the range boundaries for Tier 1].
I suspect if you did this exercise in 10 years, specifically assuming we learn nothing further about any of the 3 of them, the results would be different.
Sure is a fun exercise that can generate interesting debate, though!
Lincoln may have "saved [the] Union" but at what cost, and was it really even necessary?
The scars of the Civil War reverberate to this day when it comes to the proper division of power and responsibilities of the federal government vis-a -vis the states. In some respects, he was to the South what King Charles III was to the colonies. Except his larger army managed to subdue the smaller one.
If I'm being gracious, I'd place him in the second tier, if only for being a Republican revered by the Democrats.
Lincoln is the grand champion killer of Americans. 700,000 deaths on his watch. Plus millions of crippling injuries and huge property loss. No other president comes close. For this he deserves to be moved to the bottom of the ranks.
More like a million out of 31M. The 700,000 doesn't count civilians, including slaves or WIA who later died. Plus he killed the Republic of the Founders by removing states as sovereign actors starting us on the long road to the mess we are in now. And he didn't free the slaves either. That happened after he was dead. If you read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation, you will find that the slaves in the areas controlled by the Union were exempted. It was basically a PR stunt to forestall British and French intervention. See his letter to Horace Greeley for his true position. Yeah he did save the Union, eventually, at gigantic cost but bungled the management of the war (with help from the Republicans in Congress) until he finally found Grant. True to his Whig background, he also instituted gigantic corporate welfare programs and an income tax.
I don’t think you have to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. It was clearly limited to areas controlled by the Confederacy. He did, indeed, bounce around among generals pre-Grant. Which is the example I think of when I realize how right FDR got his general staff from the start.
I know little about him--which says something good. I can tell you about Winfield Scott, Ambrose Burnside, Henry Halleck, George McClellan, etc.--and that ain't good.
Old Fuss ‘n’ Feathers came up with the Anaconda Plan. Respect. Old Brains never had such brains. Burnside was promoted far above his abilities—against his will, he said. But he said it after Fredericksburg and the Crater. As to McClellan, he was a fine railroad man and should have stayed one.
Historians note the 1860 pro-Union vote in many Confederate states. The ruling class that defended slavery pushed secession. But they were able to rally those opposed or indifferent for a long brutal war. Evidence from the people who actually fought indicates it was because they were invaded.
From what I’ve heard since moving to Tennessee, there were a lot of people, at least in East Tennessee, who did not want to fight in this war. Some of them
ended up fighting for the union. On the other hand, in Ohio towns along the Ohio river, where some of my ancestors lived, there were people who were sympathetic to the southern cause. I gather they were in a minority, though.
In my humble opinion, yeah, it was necessary. For me, George III's England and the colonies disagreed mostly over administrative matters--not great questions of morality. (I'm very fond of John Steele Gordon's contrarian take in "George the Great" https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-steele-gordon/george-the-great/). I am one who believes the Civil War was fought almost exclusively over slavery, with states' rights and tariffs as mere emanations of that cursed institution. I know all the arguments to the contrary, and I don't buy them.
Thought that I have pondered. Slavery could easily have lingered for one additional generation in America (as it nearly did in Brazil). Nazism or its equivalent could have arisen a generation earlier in Germany. With the confluence of these two counterfactuals, America would have had no moral advantage over the hypothetical proto-Hitler.
The Civil War makes us think that slavery was destined to disappear in the 19th century, but I don't believe that to be true. In 2024, we live in a world that, most likely, has more slaves than at any other time in history. Our Civil War and Britain's war against the institution has made it impossible for countries to brag about its continuation, but it's still out there. And with the Civil War, I suspect it could long have continued as a respectable institution--perhaps up through our own day.
I grew up in the 1950s. In a copperhead County in Illinois. Had The South succeeded inseceding, I can imagine slavery persisting there through the 1960s, easily.
And given the number of our militray coming from the South I can easily imagine the US North not being pepared to help beat the Nazis, and . . .
In a de facto sense, something awfully close to slavery DID persist into my lifetime in Southern Virginia. Throughout the 1930s, Virginia’s ruling clique had a powerful envy of Hitler and Nazism—particularly given their common enthusiasm for eugenics.
You can't have WW2 without WW1 ending the way it did. Probably wouldn't have ended that way without US intervention which wouldn't have happened or been weaker had the Confederacy persisted. Kind of difficult at any rate to imagine the Nazis allying with a country with a Jewish Founding Father (Judah Benjamin).
In teaching economics, i used to use WWI as the greatest historical example ever of the sunk cost fallacy. The countries couldn’t stop fighting, because that would render the prior deaths in vain. (FYI, I also used “that these dead shall not have died in vain” from the Gettysburg Address as an unintended enunciation of the concept. Judah Benjamin was, indeed, an odd case, but he would have been long-gone by then. He was a bizarre enough character that they might have carved out an exception for him.
Not close. The worst feature of slavery, according to slaves and ex-slaves, is that families could be separated by purchase and sale, and often were. Then there was always the lash. Jim Crow at its worst had nothing like that.
Yes Jim Crow featured terrorism and lynchings. Bad, but a lot less bad than slavery. BTW, to my astonishment, in recent years I’ve had a lot of liberal-to-lefty friends denigrate (mostly Republican) America’s suppression of Jim Crow on the grounds that there weren’t really all that many lynchings!
And a creepy tendency to praise the confederacy as allegedly exhibiting certain libertarian qualities--ignoring that it was based upon the single most un-libertarian principle of all. (For doubters, read A H Stephens's Cornerstone Speech.)
I had a teacher once who argued, perhaps puckishly, that the origins of the particular horror of American slavery lay in the lack of any common law tradition in England (or its antecedent Norse and Germanic cultures) governing the institution, such as *were* found in Islamic, Persian, and Roman tradition. Lacking any deep tradition on how to run the peculiar institution, they just crudely adapted the English tradition on chattels.
So while a Roman, Persian, or Ottoman slave would have been (very) inferior, he would also have still been seen as human, and have certain very basic rights, and his masters would have had some traditional circumcriptions on their behavior. But the rights of chattels -- of animals or farm implements -- are by nature of a wholly different class than those of humans, even inferior humans, and the circumscriptions on their owners far less, if they even exist at all.
I don't know how persuasive the argument is (or even if he meant it entirely seriously), but it's an interesting take to me, inasmuch as it's sort of a slightly meta Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the pure accident of adopting chattel law for slavery, through ignorance of any other tradition, eventually led (or contributed greatly) willy nilly to the eventual cruelty of the institution, especially including the callous disregard for family bonds you mention, and which I have also heard was considered its nastiest feature. Could we really ne moved, as a collective, to a greater cruelty *just* because the law happend to be initially framed cruelly?
Lincoln arrived in DC inclined favorably toward the idea of buying freedom for of Delaware’s slaves in exchange for a constitutional ban on future slavery. To be a test case to extend to other states. It would have provided a model that recognized that Northerners in free states were still culpable for slavery, for a variety of reasons. Ultimately adjudged to be too expensive an idea. In hindsight, of course, it would have been pennies on the dollar, compared with the war.
Congress has never been very good at balancing present expenditures against future costs and risks. But then, what legislature in the world is, or in history ever has been?
Not an undivided fan of FDR’s war leadership, of which a bit more anon. But he did one spectacular Mt. Rushmore thing.
Between September 3, 1939 and December 11, 1941, in secret, deliberate, politically highly dangerous moves in direct contravention of the Neutrality Act, he contrived to support Britain and her allies at war, and thereby saved civilization. All hail FDR, one of the greatest presidents!
Now, the conduct of the war. First, he did some big things right. (Obvious things that only a bad president would have neglected, but still.) (1) Insofar as it was his choice, unity among allies above all. (2) Destroy the most dangerous enemy first (though some Americans thought Europe was “their war” and Japan was “our war”). (3) Maintain unity and stability of command in each service. (4) Achieve full recruitment of the Congress and the people, and economic conversion for total war. (5) Appoint George Marshall as chief of staff. (6) Have Stimson and Knox as service secretaries. (Okay, not every competent Democratic president would have done that last one.)
The debit side begins with CinCUS Admiral James Richardson’s strong advice to President Roosevelt not to split the Pacific Fleet and put half in Hawaii, imitating the Russian disposition in 1905. For this the Admiral was relieved and Roosevelt went ahead, with Port-Arthur-like sequel we all know. There is a lot of blame to go around for Pearl Harbor, but a chunk belongs at the top. (Ignoring conspiracy theories that it was a deliberate sacrifice.)
(That the Philippines even more astonishingly suffered a similarly catastrophic surprise eight hours later I shall here blame only on the OTC, MacArthur, not Roosevelt.)
The historian Rear Admiral Samuel E. Morison, whom I greatly esteem, in turn greatly esteems the late Fleet Admiral King; nevertheless I think the latter was at best a grave mistake. He hated our British allies too obviously, and refused to have the Navy learn from their ASW experience, producing the “second happy time” for U-boats, yet another defeat that bears comparison with Pearl Harbor. His direct subordinates quickly learned that even excellent performance would earn the same chewing-out as poor performance, and continually burned out and were churned back to sea after 3 or 4 months; he had confused toughness on his subordinates with toughness on the enemy. (Should I mention that he regarded young officers’ wives as his harem?) There is more, but not now.
I gave FDR credit for prioritizing Germany first; but then, why was America on offense in the Pacific between Midway and VE Day? Because faced with any choice between A and B, he tended (like a Democrat) to choose both, to the detriment in execution of both. Thus the Nimitz Central Pacific Campaign and the duplicative MacArthur South-West Pacific Campaign.
Finally, the whole strategic bombing campaign in Europe was colossally expensive in comparison to the (substantial but not colossal) damage it caused to the Axis war effort—not even counting the collateral damage. The men were fantastically brave and skilled but the technology wasn’t mature. Far better had those men and resources been invested in tactical air, or other technologies and tactics with, for given Allied blood and treasure, more destruction of the Axis war effort.
All interesting. Here's the single most succinct explanation of America's entry into the war (the our war/their war bit) that I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHhPNzQXHI.
Lincoln, one of the least polarizing???? It's not like he prompted any states to secede from the Union or anything ... "Saving the Union" takes some parsing. Yes, he set events in motion that forced the seceding states back into the Union, after they were dissolved into military districts, but this "Union" was not the same voluntary association of states it had been before. We now had a national government instead of a federal government. At the re-raising of the Stars and Stripes over Fort Sumter in 1865, Henry Ward Beecher celebrated not abolition of slavery but a victory over states' rights. "This is the flag of sovereignty," he declared. "The nation, not the States, is sovereign." People stopped saying "the United States are" and began saying "the United States is."
But was Lincoln's Union ever really in danger? The seceding states were happy to just go away and leave it on its own. The only danger it was in was economical: with lower tariffs, as Northern newspapers pointed out, the Southern states would draw shipping away from Northern ports. Disaster was predicted. The proposed original 13th Amendment, the Corwin Amendment, would have let states keep slavery legal forever so long as they stayed in the Union. The deliberate destruction of Southern infrastructure, not to mention the death of 1/4 of the Black population due to the War and Reconstruction, hardly reflects well upon him.
Slavery may have been abolished de facto, but it was not abolished de jure until after his death, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Despite the cult created around him (commencing immediately after his assassination), he continues to be an extremely polarizing figure.
Yeah, 33 of the survey respondents thought Lincoln was among the most polarizing, but 60 thought he was among the least polarizing. I'm guessing the question isn't clear--that some thought it referred to "in Lincoln's time" and others thought it referred to "in our time."
FDR gets far too much credit for the war in Europe. It is far too easy to forget that the German army was defeated decisively at Kursk & Stalingrad by the red army. Myopic historians overlook that 80 percent of casualties in the European war were on the Eastern front. Perhaps Stalin should be slipped into tier one along with FDR.
Methinks the Molotov-Ribbentrop throws a wee monkey wrench into your suggestion. WWII began as a secret alliance of Hitler and Stalin. That protocol gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland. Thank God that Hitler was stupid enough to think he could invade Russia and do better than Napoleon had done a century earlier. But Stalin’s switch to the Allies was tactical, and he deserves no credit for anything positive. I don’t think historians are particularly myopic on this particular point.
I write about automotive history and have seen it mentioned in sources on the Arsenal of Democracy. Could be an urban legend, I'll ask my Russian friends. Here are the statistics:
"The United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks...
Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.
Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.
The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.
In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease...
The Lend-Lease program also sent tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including more than 38,000 lathes and other metal-working tools. Such machines were of higher quality than analogues produced in the Soviet Union, which made a significant contribution to boosting Soviet industrial production.
American aid also provided 4.5 million tons of food, 1.5 million blankets, and 15 million pairs of boots."
It should be redundant in me to point out that the threshold problem with classifying Stalin as a Tier One President of the United States is … (everybody together) … Stalin was not President of the United States.
Only then do we come to the facts that Stalin was a Hitler ally, a genocide in his own right, a totalitarian, a conqueror, an incompetent (except for political infighting) in war and peace, and so on and on.
What a great summary! It doesn't matter that I disagree with you on many of the rankings (Harding and Coolidge, which I've windbagged about earlier. Also think if Taft is going to be praised as a most distinguished ex-Prez he should be compared to J.Q. Adams, who I think matches Taft's ex-Presidency for his anti-slavery fight in the House) I especially like the capsule summaries given to each Prez. Much more thought provoking thatn the "I don't like him or his politics" gouging that the poli sci profs used to put Big Don down.
No argument. He did go back and forth a few times as I finalized the list. And especially for that reason. Ultimately, I gave him credit for making a colossal effort to thread the needle in an impossible situation, in sharp contrast to his two immediate successors, who alternated between dawdling and throwing bones to the slaveholders.
While Wilson deserves his place at the bottom, Biden is right there with him. You forgot weaponization of federal agencies against his political opponents and an ambitious censorship apparatus to silence Americans. Biden is a truly bad president. Way worse than Carter, for instance, or Hoover.
3 comments, Bob, for your consideration. 1-I went to medical school in the mid-80’s and had to borrow money at 16% interest, which took me around 15 years to pay back, so Reaganomics didn’t work for me. 2-I believe the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid has been one of the greatest humanitarian accomplishments of our lives, we ought to be smart enough to agree on how to pay for it. 3-there seems to be little recognition (not just in this column but in the media over the last few years) of possibly the worst of Trump’s behavior-the methodical, intentional destruction of as many government agencies as he could by placing clowns in charge and making a farce of their essential functions, apparently literally putting the prepared notebooks for each department in the trash. It’s hard for me to swallow seeing Clinton, Obama and Trump in the same grouping.
It’s not hard to create large humanitarian accomplishments if you don’t include how to pay for them.
Right now we’re doing it by borrowing. That makes it worse than temporary: not only does it have to stop, but the money has to be paid back, with interest.
I’m not saying there’s no other way to pay for them. I’m just saying hold your applause until we have one in place.
--My friend, who suggested LBJ for Tier 5 because (in part) of Medicare and Medicaid wrote to me before you posted this comment. He's a world-class authority on Medicare, and told me, "If anyone objects, perhaps note that I did not mean to take a subjective side in the question of whether Medicare or Medicaid should have been enacted. But rather, both were enacted in forms that were financially unsustainable, and we haven’t fixed that yet. If Medicare and Medicaid costs were calibrated to grow at sustainable rates, I would not have included them in the core of my critique of LBJ."
LBJ told his own chief advisor on the subject that Medicare would be a fiscal train wreck (that was LBJ's own metaphor), and he told him, "pass it anyway."
Reaganomics didn't fix the Nixon/Ford/Carter economic mess overnight, so you happened to study medicine just a bit too early.
As I explained to someone else, Clinton, Obama, and Trump were all damaging, and hence not up to Tier 3. But at the same time, none of the three took actions that led to disasters on the order of Civil War, Jim Crow, Nazism, Great Depression, or Jihadism, so I didn't think any of the three belonged in Tier 5. They were all somewhat damaging, but not horribly so.
I looked in vain for the positive accomplishments of Biden that kept him out of Tier 5. I think you need an addendum there.
While I don't agree with all your placements, I do appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you briefly defend them. Very good. Keep it short, hit the important points.
I tend to think that beginning in 1900 (although I'm a Teddy Roosevelt fan, and if you ever need the best Teddy impersonator to do a show, I'm a good friend of the very best one, so hit me up) many of the Presidents have at least a slight sociopathic streak. In some it's huge and deep (Wilson, LBJ, Obama, Biden). Clinton had it, but he also had a fullblown, IMHO, sociopath of a wife, which didn't help curtail his behavior.
One can draw straight lines from the other Tier 5 denizens led straight to hell--Civil War, Jim Crow, Nazism, Depression, Jihadism. Not clear at this time what the long-term results of Biden are, though I don't think that the invasions of Ukraine or southern Israel would have been tenable without the firehose of oil revenues that followed the change of administrations. As I mentioned somewhere else, Biden might better fit with WHHarrison, Taylor, and Garfield in a reconfigured "dead or disabled" category; at this point, it is unclear to what extent or whether he has actually presided.
I‘ve often said that Reagan was the greatest president of my time. So nice to see it confirmed. And Ike didn’t fare too badly, either.
The Trump aficionados, however, will have a hissy fit about you calling their hero out for his reckless behavior and accuse you of having “TDS.” What, you don’t like his stick-it-to-the-man mean tweets?
Some might. Others will shrug. One of the most dedicated Trump voters I know surprised me not long ago by saying, "Oh ... the guy is a complete asshole. I don't want to be his friend. I don't want to eat lunch with him. And I damned sure don't want my sister marrying him. But the alternative is Biden."
That sums up my feelings almost perfectly.
I didn't vote for Trump the first two times. This year I'm a "broken glass" Trump voter. I still don't like him on a personal level, but, I'm not dumb enough to ignore the alternatives."
And I'm rather constantly amazed by the apparent belief that one must "lurve" Trump if you're willing to vote for him. TDS is a very real thng.
I haven't met a single Trump supporter who is unaware of the man's flaws.
I don’t know. The online ones characterize them as “mean tweets.” Not much insight there.
Because you are so much smarter than Trump supporters, eh?
"Mean tweets" is just shorthand for Trump being Trump.
The bottom line is that Trump supporters acknowledge the man's flaws. It's embarrassing to watch Democrats line up and spout superlatives for the mediocrity that is Harris.
(1) You’re right about the Democrats and Harris.
(2) You can claim here that “mean tweets” is shorthand for anything, but if it’s anything other than mean tweets, I have only your word for it. Dubious.
(3) The bottom line is that if Trump supporters do acknowledge his flaws, they’re keeping mum about it, or at best mighty elliptical.
(4) The question arising about me and a given Trump supporter is not which is smarter but which is more nearly correct about a particular political question. Being smarter doesn’t even significantly affect the odds.
(5) Is there a Trump supporter smarter than the vice-presidential candidate? And he is ambitious, energetic, persistent, and flexible far more than I, and undoubtedly exceeds me in other virtues and skills. But I think him less intelligent than myself. I don’t propose to expose personal information as proof. You needn’t believe, but this is my answer to Schreiber’s offensively personal question.
"I don’t propose to expose personal information as proof. "
After you edited out bragging about your academic achievements. I agree with the edit, it wasn't a good look.
You may have gone to Caltech, but since we're into argument from authority territory I'll point out that I'm a professional writer and in my humble opinion #5 needs some editing because the syntax is poor, the meaning isn't quite clear, and you started two sentences with conjunctions.
I'm kind of warming to Trump, even though my initial impression was contempt. The guy definitely speaks carelessly, often insultingly, pointlessly so. But...I'm kind of liking the fact that he just blurts out what's on his mind, that it's never pre-tested for political suitability, or even "should be said in polite company." It's a bit of a relief never needing to wonder whether I'm being bullshitted or gaslit, or even treated with cynical courtesy. Trump just doesn't do that, obviously to his considerable detriment, not to mention harm to his working relationships, but, in this era of the polished political candidate who might as well be created from whole cloth by an AI and special effects, there's something relaxing about Trump.
It would be different if his bull in a China shop speech habits led directly to similarly jagged action but that I'm not really seeing. He definitely speaks chaotically, but I'm not sure he acts that way. Maybe sometimes, the stuff that landed him in legal hot water comes to mind, although that may be explained by his lack of experience in politics, and how Caesar's wife is a real thing. But when I look back at his first Administration and its formal action, it mostly seems cautious and steady. Indeed, compared to the lurching about of the Biden Administration, he appears rather conservative.
I might feel differently if I listened to him more, it seems like just listening to him drives intellectuals to a frenzy. "How can anyone say something so dumb/provocative/politically incorrect?? We all *think* it, yes, but you're not supposed to say it out loud!" But I tend not to listen to politicians very much, because I assume almost all of the time they're trying to bullshit me and it's tiresome to resist. I prefer to look at the actions they take instead.
Is “unthinking, unplanned” really what you want in a president?
No, I think the only case for Trump is the person and party he’s running against.
I agreed his *speech* was unthinking and unplanned, but I specifically contrasted it with the *action* I observed during his first Administration -- which did not strike me that way at all. He was certainly not a great President, certainly not the best organized, but he was also not nearly as chaotic as his speech seems to have suggested to people for whom polished speech is ne plus ultra (which does not include me). Indeed, I think the Biden Administration has demonstrated considerably more chaos and lack of purpose than the Trump Administration did[1].
I'm not sure what to make of your second comment, though. My experience is that the case for any political candidate is only in part his own nature, and the rest the nature of his opponent. We are never presented with such a smorgasbord of candidates that we have the luxury of picking out our favorite on purely positive grounds. In my entire lifetime, I've never voted for President based only on my preferred candidate's positive qualities -- it has always been a healthy mixture of his positives and his opponent's negatives, and quite frankly, I would say with me a good 75% of the time it's the opponent's negatives that dominate my decision. It's who I dislike least.
So from my point of view the point that much of the case for Trump is that he's running against Harris (or more precisely the Harris machine) is sort a sterile observation: that is always the way it is in elections where we get only a choice between 2 candidates, both of whom represent some kind of lowest common denominator among a very wide swathe of loosely allied voters. Even saying the entire case for Trump is based on Harris isn't very special -- again, large numbers of votes in every election have repoted exactly the justification for their votes, and it's not the least bit surprising, or new.
--------------------------------
[1] FWIW I also agree Trump is an egoistical asshole, and I would not care to work for him, "have a beer with him" as the modern metaphor goes, or be his friend; which opinion I do not base on any personal knowledge, but just that he has alienated so bitterly so many pretty competent and apparently reasonable people. But I'm not voting for National Best Friend or even National Nice Guy, but for a Commander in Chief. Being an asshole is not immediately diqualifying.
I disagree, which is nothing; but more important, I appear to have made myself insufficiently clear.
I think the only case for either candidate has to be made on entirely negative grounds, that is, of the horror of the other candidate; as there is no positive case for either. None.
That is not to say that the two negative cases are equal.
Hmm. I'm not sure I grok what you mean by "positive" and "negative" cases, to be honest. I don't really think that way. I mean, for example, suppose my only issue is not making inflation worse. There are 4 categories into which I can sort actions of each candidate: (1) actions Trump will take that will make inflation worse, (2) actions Trump will take that will not make inflation worse, (3) actions Trump will NOT take, the lack of which will make inflation worse, and finally (4) actions Trump will NOT take, the lack of which will not make inflation worse. I can make a similar list for Harris, of course.
Now, I can certainly add up all those actions (or non-actions) for each candidate, and conclude which is likely, on balance, to be better on my single issue. But what I am not understanding is how I can also sort those actions and nonactions into "positive" and "negative" cases for each candidate.
For example, would the "positive" case for Trump be only actions in (2), on the grounds that "positive" implies some deliberate action that is in the right direction (for me)? Or is the "positive" case all of (2) and (4), on the grounds that both are in the right direction, and it seems a bit odd to award more credit for action than inaction, since both may be deliberate, or even optimum (e.g. we might argue the most influential thing a President can do to reduce inflation is NOT propose new spending initiatives).
Or should I include only actions and non-actions that I am persuaded Trump chooses with some kind of deliberate thought, and leave out those that happen without conscious intention -- just because they would be out of character, say, or are foreclosed accidentally by conflict with other priorities (e.g. let's say his obsession with appointing Federal judges of the right persuasion, or just tweeting obscene cracks about Gavin Newsom, leaves him no time to dream up new spending initatives)? I could make that distinction, I suppose, but it still seems odd -- like I am grading both candidates not just on outcomes congenial to my goals, but also awarding "effort and conduct" extra-credit points for outcomes which are not just congenial to my wishes, but which are also undertaken with a spirit and energy I admire. Style points, basically.
The positive case for Trump is his track record of actions (not words) as President . As compared to the track record of his predecessor and successor. And Kamala is not only a part of Biden’s track record, since becoming the candidate she has repeatedly said she wouldn’t have done anything differently than Biden.
Now I think of it, maybe the better way to frame my response to your second comment is this: the argument *for* Harris would also largely be based on the person and party she's running against -- indeed, her campaign leans into this argument hard, almost to the exclusion of anything more substantive. So what I'm saying is that the argument *for* Harris that derives from who Trump is has weakened for me. I don't dislike Trump as much as I used to. Does that clarify?
It clarifies.
Hey, Carter deregulated the airlines.
Yes, and interstate trucking too. Both of those moves were more due to Teddy Kennedy, who was looking for some policy moves he could claim when he took Jimmy on in 1980. Fortunately, Alfred Kahn was favorable to deregulation and helped convince Carter to sign the bills.
I started to mention airline deregulation. But then it occurred to me that that is almost the only positive anyone with any sense of economics can cite. (He appointed Volcker, but only after the business community had threatened him.) While it was a nice move, it's rather said if that's the president's greatest accomplishment. "I tanked the economy, turbocharged Jihadist terrorism, prostrated myself before every doddering Communist dictator, crapped on the Jews, and made myself a royal pain in the ass to seven of my successors ... but I deregulated the airlines."
And home brewing.
Would that he had stayed home making beer. :)
His brother Billy would have consumed too much of the production…
So much good debate material here!
Regarding Jimmy Carter, let's not forget that he added to our woes immeasurably by giving the education blob its own cabinet department. Also, I'd put LBJ with the very worst for a host of reasons, foremost among them the disaster of federal student aid for college. That alone is responsible for much of our current misery.
Yes. The Development office for the Gramscian Long March.
Professor, does the American Political Science Association expect anyone outside the academic playpen to take their Presidential Greatness Project seriously? If so, why?
Part of me thinks that they really are a sharp bunch that understands all this stuff, but every few years, they get together over drinks and pot, dare each other to come up with the most ludicrous results imaginable, and then ROFL after all the press outlets start reporting their gag numbers breathlessly. If that's the case, then I have the highest respect for them. ... But in all seriousness, I'm guessing the the ASPCA would produce better numbers than the APSA.
If this is fantasy baseball for poli sci professors, then it relates to political "science" (You can't argue with science!) as fantasy baseball relates to baseball.
Indeed.
The report is a useful tool for their friends in the press to reinforce the smugness of midwit leftists that Democratic presidents are good, GOP presidents (well, except maybe Reagan, ’cause, ya’ know, the Soviet Union’s demise) bad.
Yup.
Well, you certainly will raise a great many eyebrows with Tier 4: Obama, Trump, Clinton, Biden!
Ya think? :)
Yeah, but after my first knee-jerk reaction, all but the Biden ranking are pretty defensible…
Thanks much for this. Very helpful.
I’m good with you putting Trump in the same bucket with Clinton. To me they would both make your T3 because the policy and country positives exceed the personal negatives. In the end, for politicians, policy is what matters to me (short of outright criminality in office like Nixon’s), not personal behavior, let alone mere things they say. But reasonable people can disagree on this.
I love that you listened to your friend on LBJ.
I agree with you on FDR, especially if effectively he is at the bottom of your first tier. Though I do note with some interest that you don’t criticize him for lying to the American public about his physical health, yet you downgrade Kennedy, Clinton and Trump for to me lesser offenses..
I have the most problem with you putting Biden in the same bucket with Clinton and Trump - especially given that you (properly) basically list only negatives for him. But I guess if Biden is on the bubble of your T5 I can live with that, too.
I did consider FDR's infirmities. But that's why I said, "Here are my tiers, fueled by incomplete, stream-of-consciousness narrative" I couldn't include everything because (A) I don't have time, and (B) The piece would be too long. FDR stays in Tier 1 because without him, Western Civilization might well have ended for centuries. I'll forgive a lot of things for that. I did ponder whether Biden should be Tier 5. (In certain moments, I also wondered whether he really belongs with Harrison, Taylor, and Garfield. At this point, I have no real idea to what extent he was ever in control of the administration.)
Thx. Not at all arguing with your FDR *ranking*, only the somewhat curious omission of lying about his health, when you spent *so* much time on similar-but-imo-less-worse behaviors of Kennedy/Clinton/Trump.
The fact that he clearly was *not* in control of his administration basically ever should be the final nail in the coffin of a Biden T5 ranking though, no?
Again, I think I had FDR's infirmities in an earlier version, and I made some quick choices on which verbiage to include and which to omit. Victory over Axis is his biggest plus, and idiotic economic policy was his biggest minus--even bigger than his late-stage afflictions. I also tended to write more on those whose Tier was ambiguous. FDR was going to be in Tier 1, regardless. Hence, brevity.
I did consider putting Biden in Tier 5, but there is a difference. Pierce, Buchanan, AJohnson, Hoover, and Carter give rise to actual disasters. (Civil War, Jim Crow, Depression, malaise/recession/terrorism.) Not clear yet whether Biden has fomented disaster, or whether we'll just muddle through his term and be OK. (I can argue either way, but not with great conviction in either direction.)
*Very* fair points all. Thx for the explanation. Can’t really argue against any of them.
But the more I ponder, the more it doesn’t sit well that you end up having Clinton and Trump in the same bucket as Biden, when the results for the country are obviously SO much better for the first two than what we got with Biden. You could bucket Clinton/Trump with Obama, OR bucket Obama with Biden, and I’d be ok with either. But all in the same bucket just seems… wrong.
Guess that’s just the limits of a tier system (and as the guy who asked for it, I should be the *last* one to complain about that! 😀).
Once again, well done and thanks.
Well, I didn't slot the presidents with an eye toward how audiences would react. But after-the-fact, it occurred to me that Tier 4 had emerged as the best of all possible groupings. Had Trump been lower than Clinton, Obama, and Biden, readers on the left would have thought "OBVIOUSLY!" Had Trump been higher than any of those three, those same readers would have said, "RIDICULOUS!!!" and dismissed the whole exercise. The fact that they are equals creates a certain dramatic tension. The same would have been true (in reverse) with a subset of Trump voters.
Ok, I see your point if the goal is to minimize extremists potentially dismissing you.
That said, look at it objectively: if Trump had never been president, the idea that Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are in the same tier is almost absurd, no? [And I repeat that tiering Obama with *either* one is reasonable enough.]
In terms of people being mad, in the absence of Trump, imagine how upset they’d be that you tier W ahead of Clinton and Obama. Vis-a-vis Obama they’d be wrong, of course, but vs. Clinton?
I note that you left out any mention of the Biden family crime syndicate where many family members (including grandchildren) received money laundered through multiple shell accounts from Chinese and other foreign sources, despite obviously being unqualified save for their connection to Joe. This was documented by Congress. Even the hugely biased Politifact acknowledges this, but to them Biden is saved because no one has yet found the actual payments of “10% kicked up to the big guy” (because of course the Biden Justice Department made a point to not look). This personal finance sleaze is as dirty as Clinton’s.
But it seems that like Hur you are letting Biden off easy [in grouping him with Clinton despite no positive accomplishments] because he is “an elderly man with a poor memory”
Now that said, I’ll repeat again I totally accept your decision on the borderline to not put Biden in T5; your explanatory logic re: no outright disaster is sound.
But to me you’re basically arguing above that Trump and Clinton (who compellingly deserve to be in the same tier) get pulled down a ranking into Biden’s tier *primarily* because so many people today don’t like the words that come out of Trump’s mouth that don’t actually impact policy and are not personal sleaze while in office (remember, your rankings are supposedly independent of anything the men did before taking office).
If nothing else, surely you will acknowledge that there is a *far* wider range in your Tier 4 than there is in tiers 2, 3 and 5 [I’m not knowledgeable enough to be able to determine the range boundaries for Tier 1].
I suspect if you did this exercise in 10 years, specifically assuming we learn nothing further about any of the 3 of them, the results would be different.
Sure is a fun exercise that can generate interesting debate, though!
Your mention of "two recent BW posts" at first made me think you had started a "Bizarro World" series. Then I remembered where I was...
:)
Lincoln may have "saved [the] Union" but at what cost, and was it really even necessary?
The scars of the Civil War reverberate to this day when it comes to the proper division of power and responsibilities of the federal government vis-a -vis the states. In some respects, he was to the South what King Charles III was to the colonies. Except his larger army managed to subdue the smaller one.
If I'm being gracious, I'd place him in the second tier, if only for being a Republican revered by the Democrats.
Lincoln is the grand champion killer of Americans. 700,000 deaths on his watch. Plus millions of crippling injuries and huge property loss. No other president comes close. For this he deserves to be moved to the bottom of the ranks.
I'll dissent from that view, but thanks.
More like a million out of 31M. The 700,000 doesn't count civilians, including slaves or WIA who later died. Plus he killed the Republic of the Founders by removing states as sovereign actors starting us on the long road to the mess we are in now. And he didn't free the slaves either. That happened after he was dead. If you read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation, you will find that the slaves in the areas controlled by the Union were exempted. It was basically a PR stunt to forestall British and French intervention. See his letter to Horace Greeley for his true position. Yeah he did save the Union, eventually, at gigantic cost but bungled the management of the war (with help from the Republicans in Congress) until he finally found Grant. True to his Whig background, he also instituted gigantic corporate welfare programs and an income tax.
Nobody said we weren’t going to get our hair mussed.
Actually, both sides severely underestimated the other. The tell on the Union side was that Lincoln called for 90 day volunteers.
I don’t think you have to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. It was clearly limited to areas controlled by the Confederacy. He did, indeed, bounce around among generals pre-Grant. Which is the example I think of when I realize how right FDR got his general staff from the start.
Agree about FDR. He should really be considered two Presidents in very different tiers
Truly
Except King.
I know little about him--which says something good. I can tell you about Winfield Scott, Ambrose Burnside, Henry Halleck, George McClellan, etc.--and that ain't good.
Old Fuss ‘n’ Feathers came up with the Anaconda Plan. Respect. Old Brains never had such brains. Burnside was promoted far above his abilities—against his will, he said. But he said it after Fredericksburg and the Crater. As to McClellan, he was a fine railroad man and should have stayed one.
It was the seceding states which attacked the Union, not the reverse. Aren’t you going to “credit” Jefferson Davis with at least half those deaths?
Nope. Lincoln was attempting to reinforce Ft. Sumter. The site was given by the state to the Feds to defend Charleston harbor not blockade it.
I’d say it was an ambiguous situation, and the Confederates gambled and lost.
There are records about my assertions.
Historians note the 1860 pro-Union vote in many Confederate states. The ruling class that defended slavery pushed secession. But they were able to rally those opposed or indifferent for a long brutal war. Evidence from the people who actually fought indicates it was because they were invaded.
From what I’ve heard since moving to Tennessee, there were a lot of people, at least in East Tennessee, who did not want to fight in this war. Some of them
ended up fighting for the union. On the other hand, in Ohio towns along the Ohio river, where some of my ancestors lived, there were people who were sympathetic to the southern cause. I gather they were in a minority, though.
I don’t think it was ambiguous. But I admire your generosity in argument.
Not enough to imitate it. But I do admire it.
Provoke me no provokes. That reinforcement (itself a response to a real threat) wasn’t an attack; the attack on Ft. Sumter was an attack.
(Look, fellah, it’s right there in the name!)
George III not Charles III
Yes. American revolutionaries pushing back against Charles III’s urban planning preferences and enthusiasm for organic farming.
Give him time.
:)
In my humble opinion, yeah, it was necessary. For me, George III's England and the colonies disagreed mostly over administrative matters--not great questions of morality. (I'm very fond of John Steele Gordon's contrarian take in "George the Great" https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-steele-gordon/george-the-great/). I am one who believes the Civil War was fought almost exclusively over slavery, with states' rights and tariffs as mere emanations of that cursed institution. I know all the arguments to the contrary, and I don't buy them.
Thought that I have pondered. Slavery could easily have lingered for one additional generation in America (as it nearly did in Brazil). Nazism or its equivalent could have arisen a generation earlier in Germany. With the confluence of these two counterfactuals, America would have had no moral advantage over the hypothetical proto-Hitler.
The Civil War makes us think that slavery was destined to disappear in the 19th century, but I don't believe that to be true. In 2024, we live in a world that, most likely, has more slaves than at any other time in history. Our Civil War and Britain's war against the institution has made it impossible for countries to brag about its continuation, but it's still out there. And with the Civil War, I suspect it could long have continued as a respectable institution--perhaps up through our own day.
I grew up in the 1950s. In a copperhead County in Illinois. Had The South succeeded inseceding, I can imagine slavery persisting there through the 1960s, easily.
And given the number of our militray coming from the South I can easily imagine the US North not being pepared to help beat the Nazis, and . . .
In a de facto sense, something awfully close to slavery DID persist into my lifetime in Southern Virginia. Throughout the 1930s, Virginia’s ruling clique had a powerful envy of Hitler and Nazism—particularly given their common enthusiasm for eugenics.
I have no trouble imagining a 20th century Confederate regime allying with Germany in WWII.
You can't have WW2 without WW1 ending the way it did. Probably wouldn't have ended that way without US intervention which wouldn't have happened or been weaker had the Confederacy persisted. Kind of difficult at any rate to imagine the Nazis allying with a country with a Jewish Founding Father (Judah Benjamin).
In teaching economics, i used to use WWI as the greatest historical example ever of the sunk cost fallacy. The countries couldn’t stop fighting, because that would render the prior deaths in vain. (FYI, I also used “that these dead shall not have died in vain” from the Gettysburg Address as an unintended enunciation of the concept. Judah Benjamin was, indeed, an odd case, but he would have been long-gone by then. He was a bizarre enough character that they might have carved out an exception for him.
Thus refuting the notion that CW1 ended slavery. Jim Crow was more like serfdom but that is a distinction without a difference.
Could have ended it. Would likely have done so, but for John Wilkes Booth and, later, Charles Guiteau.
Not close. The worst feature of slavery, according to slaves and ex-slaves, is that families could be separated by purchase and sale, and often were. Then there was always the lash. Jim Crow at its worst had nothing like that.
Yes Jim Crow featured terrorism and lynchings. Bad, but a lot less bad than slavery. BTW, to my astonishment, in recent years I’ve had a lot of liberal-to-lefty friends denigrate (mostly Republican) America’s suppression of Jim Crow on the grounds that there weren’t really all that many lynchings!
And a creepy tendency to praise the confederacy as allegedly exhibiting certain libertarian qualities--ignoring that it was based upon the single most un-libertarian principle of all. (For doubters, read A H Stephens's Cornerstone Speech.)
I had a teacher once who argued, perhaps puckishly, that the origins of the particular horror of American slavery lay in the lack of any common law tradition in England (or its antecedent Norse and Germanic cultures) governing the institution, such as *were* found in Islamic, Persian, and Roman tradition. Lacking any deep tradition on how to run the peculiar institution, they just crudely adapted the English tradition on chattels.
So while a Roman, Persian, or Ottoman slave would have been (very) inferior, he would also have still been seen as human, and have certain very basic rights, and his masters would have had some traditional circumcriptions on their behavior. But the rights of chattels -- of animals or farm implements -- are by nature of a wholly different class than those of humans, even inferior humans, and the circumscriptions on their owners far less, if they even exist at all.
I don't know how persuasive the argument is (or even if he meant it entirely seriously), but it's an interesting take to me, inasmuch as it's sort of a slightly meta Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the pure accident of adopting chattel law for slavery, through ignorance of any other tradition, eventually led (or contributed greatly) willy nilly to the eventual cruelty of the institution, especially including the callous disregard for family bonds you mention, and which I have also heard was considered its nastiest feature. Could we really ne moved, as a collective, to a greater cruelty *just* because the law happend to be initially framed cruelly?
Wow. Never heard that speculation before, but it does make logical sense. Doesn't mean it's true, but it's certainly a valid hypothesis.
I think the revolution more necessary than that. But for once I’m going to avoid taking us down a rabbit hole.
As to whether it was necessary, I think the reasons Lincoln gave are unanswerable (and, even if not, they are after 160+ years unanswered).
The cost could have been much lower had the traitors not fought so persistently.
Lincoln arrived in DC inclined favorably toward the idea of buying freedom for of Delaware’s slaves in exchange for a constitutional ban on future slavery. To be a test case to extend to other states. It would have provided a model that recognized that Northerners in free states were still culpable for slavery, for a variety of reasons. Ultimately adjudged to be too expensive an idea. In hindsight, of course, it would have been pennies on the dollar, compared with the war.
Congress has never been very good at balancing present expenditures against future costs and risks. But then, what legislature in the world is, or in history ever has been?
Not an undivided fan of FDR’s war leadership, of which a bit more anon. But he did one spectacular Mt. Rushmore thing.
Between September 3, 1939 and December 11, 1941, in secret, deliberate, politically highly dangerous moves in direct contravention of the Neutrality Act, he contrived to support Britain and her allies at war, and thereby saved civilization. All hail FDR, one of the greatest presidents!
Now, the conduct of the war. First, he did some big things right. (Obvious things that only a bad president would have neglected, but still.) (1) Insofar as it was his choice, unity among allies above all. (2) Destroy the most dangerous enemy first (though some Americans thought Europe was “their war” and Japan was “our war”). (3) Maintain unity and stability of command in each service. (4) Achieve full recruitment of the Congress and the people, and economic conversion for total war. (5) Appoint George Marshall as chief of staff. (6) Have Stimson and Knox as service secretaries. (Okay, not every competent Democratic president would have done that last one.)
The debit side begins with CinCUS Admiral James Richardson’s strong advice to President Roosevelt not to split the Pacific Fleet and put half in Hawaii, imitating the Russian disposition in 1905. For this the Admiral was relieved and Roosevelt went ahead, with Port-Arthur-like sequel we all know. There is a lot of blame to go around for Pearl Harbor, but a chunk belongs at the top. (Ignoring conspiracy theories that it was a deliberate sacrifice.)
(That the Philippines even more astonishingly suffered a similarly catastrophic surprise eight hours later I shall here blame only on the OTC, MacArthur, not Roosevelt.)
The historian Rear Admiral Samuel E. Morison, whom I greatly esteem, in turn greatly esteems the late Fleet Admiral King; nevertheless I think the latter was at best a grave mistake. He hated our British allies too obviously, and refused to have the Navy learn from their ASW experience, producing the “second happy time” for U-boats, yet another defeat that bears comparison with Pearl Harbor. His direct subordinates quickly learned that even excellent performance would earn the same chewing-out as poor performance, and continually burned out and were churned back to sea after 3 or 4 months; he had confused toughness on his subordinates with toughness on the enemy. (Should I mention that he regarded young officers’ wives as his harem?) There is more, but not now.
I gave FDR credit for prioritizing Germany first; but then, why was America on offense in the Pacific between Midway and VE Day? Because faced with any choice between A and B, he tended (like a Democrat) to choose both, to the detriment in execution of both. Thus the Nimitz Central Pacific Campaign and the duplicative MacArthur South-West Pacific Campaign.
Finally, the whole strategic bombing campaign in Europe was colossally expensive in comparison to the (substantial but not colossal) damage it caused to the Axis war effort—not even counting the collateral damage. The men were fantastically brave and skilled but the technology wasn’t mature. Far better had those men and resources been invested in tactical air, or other technologies and tactics with, for given Allied blood and treasure, more destruction of the Axis war effort.
All interesting. Here's the single most succinct explanation of America's entry into the war (the our war/their war bit) that I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHhPNzQXHI.
No question: very agreeably succinct, except for the repetition of the logo.
Lincoln, one of the least polarizing???? It's not like he prompted any states to secede from the Union or anything ... "Saving the Union" takes some parsing. Yes, he set events in motion that forced the seceding states back into the Union, after they were dissolved into military districts, but this "Union" was not the same voluntary association of states it had been before. We now had a national government instead of a federal government. At the re-raising of the Stars and Stripes over Fort Sumter in 1865, Henry Ward Beecher celebrated not abolition of slavery but a victory over states' rights. "This is the flag of sovereignty," he declared. "The nation, not the States, is sovereign." People stopped saying "the United States are" and began saying "the United States is."
But was Lincoln's Union ever really in danger? The seceding states were happy to just go away and leave it on its own. The only danger it was in was economical: with lower tariffs, as Northern newspapers pointed out, the Southern states would draw shipping away from Northern ports. Disaster was predicted. The proposed original 13th Amendment, the Corwin Amendment, would have let states keep slavery legal forever so long as they stayed in the Union. The deliberate destruction of Southern infrastructure, not to mention the death of 1/4 of the Black population due to the War and Reconstruction, hardly reflects well upon him.
Slavery may have been abolished de facto, but it was not abolished de jure until after his death, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Despite the cult created around him (commencing immediately after his assassination), he continues to be an extremely polarizing figure.
Lincoln didn’t “prompt” any states to secede except in the sense that Bank of America “prompted” the 1998 World Trade Center Bank of America robbery.
Yeah, 33 of the survey respondents thought Lincoln was among the most polarizing, but 60 thought he was among the least polarizing. I'm guessing the question isn't clear--that some thought it referred to "in Lincoln's time" and others thought it referred to "in our time."
FDR gets far too much credit for the war in Europe. It is far too easy to forget that the German army was defeated decisively at Kursk & Stalingrad by the red army. Myopic historians overlook that 80 percent of casualties in the European war were on the Eastern front. Perhaps Stalin should be slipped into tier one along with FDR.
". Myopic historians overlook that 80 percent of casualties in the European war were on the Eastern front. "
And under the Gary Anderson theory, more of those deaths should have been American and fewer Russian.
Methinks the Molotov-Ribbentrop throws a wee monkey wrench into your suggestion. WWII began as a secret alliance of Hitler and Stalin. That protocol gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland. Thank God that Hitler was stupid enough to think he could invade Russia and do better than Napoleon had done a century earlier. But Stalin’s switch to the Allies was tactical, and he deserves no credit for anything positive. I don’t think historians are particularly myopic on this particular point.
And never forget how much war material was shipped from the US to the USSR.
A couple of generations of Russians referred to medium duty trucks as "Studebakers".
Really?
I write about automotive history and have seen it mentioned in sources on the Arsenal of Democracy. Could be an urban legend, I'll ask my Russian friends. Here are the statistics:
"The United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks...
Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.
Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.
The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.
In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease...
The Lend-Lease program also sent tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including more than 38,000 lathes and other metal-working tools. Such machines were of higher quality than analogues produced in the Soviet Union, which made a significant contribution to boosting Soviet industrial production.
American aid also provided 4.5 million tons of food, 1.5 million blankets, and 15 million pairs of boots."
It should be redundant in me to point out that the threshold problem with classifying Stalin as a Tier One President of the United States is … (everybody together) … Stalin was not President of the United States.
Only then do we come to the facts that Stalin was a Hitler ally, a genocide in his own right, a totalitarian, a conqueror, an incompetent (except for political infighting) in war and peace, and so on and on.
What a great summary! It doesn't matter that I disagree with you on many of the rankings (Harding and Coolidge, which I've windbagged about earlier. Also think if Taft is going to be praised as a most distinguished ex-Prez he should be compared to J.Q. Adams, who I think matches Taft's ex-Presidency for his anti-slavery fight in the House) I especially like the capsule summaries given to each Prez. Much more thought provoking thatn the "I don't like him or his politics" gouging that the poli sci profs used to put Big Don down.
Go on, grat man!
Thanks! I did have more on Quincy Adams but edited it out for verbiage. I would have liked including something about the Amistad affair.
I would have moved Fillmore to T4 for signing the Fugitive Slave Act into law, but that's a judgment call, I suppose.
No argument. He did go back and forth a few times as I finalized the list. And especially for that reason. Ultimately, I gave him credit for making a colossal effort to thread the needle in an impossible situation, in sharp contrast to his two immediate successors, who alternated between dawdling and throwing bones to the slaveholders.
While Wilson deserves his place at the bottom, Biden is right there with him. You forgot weaponization of federal agencies against his political opponents and an ambitious censorship apparatus to silence Americans. Biden is a truly bad president. Way worse than Carter, for instance, or Hoover.
Worthy arguments.
I'll likely revise the chart a tad.
3 comments, Bob, for your consideration. 1-I went to medical school in the mid-80’s and had to borrow money at 16% interest, which took me around 15 years to pay back, so Reaganomics didn’t work for me. 2-I believe the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid has been one of the greatest humanitarian accomplishments of our lives, we ought to be smart enough to agree on how to pay for it. 3-there seems to be little recognition (not just in this column but in the media over the last few years) of possibly the worst of Trump’s behavior-the methodical, intentional destruction of as many government agencies as he could by placing clowns in charge and making a farce of their essential functions, apparently literally putting the prepared notebooks for each department in the trash. It’s hard for me to swallow seeing Clinton, Obama and Trump in the same grouping.
It’s not hard to create large humanitarian accomplishments if you don’t include how to pay for them.
Right now we’re doing it by borrowing. That makes it worse than temporary: not only does it have to stop, but the money has to be paid back, with interest.
I’m not saying there’s no other way to pay for them. I’m just saying hold your applause until we have one in place.
See my comments to Joe.
--My friend, who suggested LBJ for Tier 5 because (in part) of Medicare and Medicaid wrote to me before you posted this comment. He's a world-class authority on Medicare, and told me, "If anyone objects, perhaps note that I did not mean to take a subjective side in the question of whether Medicare or Medicaid should have been enacted. But rather, both were enacted in forms that were financially unsustainable, and we haven’t fixed that yet. If Medicare and Medicaid costs were calibrated to grow at sustainable rates, I would not have included them in the core of my critique of LBJ."
LBJ told his own chief advisor on the subject that Medicare would be a fiscal train wreck (that was LBJ's own metaphor), and he told him, "pass it anyway."
Reaganomics didn't fix the Nixon/Ford/Carter economic mess overnight, so you happened to study medicine just a bit too early.
As I explained to someone else, Clinton, Obama, and Trump were all damaging, and hence not up to Tier 3. But at the same time, none of the three took actions that led to disasters on the order of Civil War, Jim Crow, Nazism, Great Depression, or Jihadism, so I didn't think any of the three belonged in Tier 5. They were all somewhat damaging, but not horribly so.