Survey of 154 scholars places 45th president behind even ‘historically calamitous chief executives’ linked to civil war
Donald Trump finished 45th and rock bottom of a list ranking US presidents by greatness, trailing even “historically calamitous chief executives” who failed to stop the civil war or botched its aftermath.
Worse for the likely Republican nominee this year, his probable opponent, Joe Biden, debuted at No 14.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the political scientists behind the survey, wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Uh… nobody’s perfect, I guess was the prevailing thought? Fwiw, they did address that topic:
(emphasis added)
So he did drop from 10 to 15 for this reason, but I guess winning WWI still kept him high.
Winning a war that got thousands of Americans killed that we didn’t need to enter is not a good thing in my book. The League of Nations, while admirable, was a failure. Neither of these things out-way the absolute bullshit the man did to civil liberties (imprisoning people for handing out flyers) and segregation. He set the US back decades.
And I haven’t even mentioned his incredible fuck ups with the flu which he was advised against doing. He ignored his medical advisors so that he could wage his bullshit war. This killed many thousands by spreading the worst flu the world has ever seen.
I don’t agree that America should not have entered WW1, winning the war decisively with the entry of a new major power not only saved lives in end, it definitely dissolved three absolute monarchies who were steadfastly opposed to democratic reform. Two of them might have collapsed regardless, but that’s not a certainty.
It absolutely prevented the most devastating outcome at the least: a victory for Germany. A stalemate was possible, even likely without American entry, and that’s something you need a whole book to explore the consequences of, but a victory would have killed European democracy for certain.
It turns out that when you look deeper into Wilhelm’s plans, goals, and beliefs that, shockingly enough, the Second Reich wasn’t all that much different from the Third.
How could it be, only twenty years later?
But, who knows? Maybe without Wilson we don’t get the Great Depression either, but in the end America was still a democracy. Wilson wasn’t why the average American was a revolting racist with delusional economic beliefs in a self regulating market, he was a symptom of it.
I thought about adding more context to my reply - like yeah, to the slave OWNERS it’s not so bad, while to the SLAVES it’s not so great… (even though they were given sammiches sometimes, I presume you know the history of that little gem of a comment:-)
I was not privy to their deliberations but I could guess that they (1) might take into account what was known at the time, and (2) even for something as bad as slavery, if they helped prop up a democracy that would one day lead to their freedom, it still isn’t nothing in that regard, even if it is insufficient on its own?
Similarly, the League of Nations did not work out directly, but even serving as a model of failure, did set the stage for the United Nations?
Hrm, maybe they assigned things to separate categories, so that like once someone already earned the absolute minimum score on something like on a scale of 1-5, he gets a score of 0 on civil liberties, but then other categories are still allowed to raise it up.
And I dunno about not entering the war. People could debate how and why, but “appeasement never works”, and watching as all our allies became conquered nations and knowing that they’d later come back as enemies… even if only decades later, I am not so sure that the question as to whether or not to go to war is as simple as “war = bad, always”. While it is true that there is no “winning” a war, only differing degrees of losing, the worst-case scenario of losing all your allies and then eventually yourself is fairly bad.
I never stated that all war is bad. In contemporary times I’m extremely pro arming Ukraine, Armenia, Rojava, etc. I wouldn’t be against using US arms to stop the current genocide of Palestinians.
Destroying the Nazis was the best thing the US has ever done. And destroying the institution of chattel slavery was the next best thing. Wars can be good.
WWI was a bad, immoral war. Germany was going to lose the war regardless of what the US did. And neither the allies or Germany had any moral standing in that war. It was just a pissing match between shitty colonial fucks that got millions killed for no fucking reason.
And in the end, no one won that war because those shitty colonial fucks ignored Wilson and imposed crippling penalties on German. So even US involvement didn’t give Wilson any leverage over those assholes and just gave them a better negotiating position against the Germans. That is not a good outcome.
Yeah I don’t know that much about WWI, I just recall getting very depressed when I first started learning about the reasons why we were there in college. Basically to make rich people richer, as always:-(.
At which point it has become the height of irony that the USA now is considering joining the neo-Nazis, in the next Presidential election:-(.
Okay so you got me curious so I took a look at the actual survey results, linked to from the article, and two things are somewhat noticable about Wilson to me.
One is that he is, as expected, on the list of the most Over-Rated Presidents. Kennedy, Reagan, Jackson, then Wilson, followed by Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, etc. So they do seem aware of these concerns, though ofc this doesn’t explain why the ranking is so high, even though consistently falling over time.
The second is what is NOT as directly noticable: he is very much kinda average, neither thought of all that highly across the different categories (Republican rankings are originally separated from Democrat ones before everything gets combined) nor all that lowly either. I wonder if he is kinda just at an inflection point, where there are truly shitty ones and truly good ones (in the eyes of their detractors and proponents respectively ofc), but nobody seemed to have quite as strong opinions about him in particular (unlike e.g. Reagan or Kennedy), so he just kinda floats around in-between the others?
Even in terms of the Over-Rated listing (Table 7), the difference between Reagan (83) vs. Jefferson (40) is that twice as many respondents considered the former to be overrated compared to half that number saying so for the latter. While Wilson (60) was directly in between, average to the core just like in every other category he appears in.
Unsurprisingly, Wilson also made the list of the Most Polarizing Presidents (Table 4), but true to form, was at the very bottom of that list, and yet with a higher polarizing score than Clinton who was identified by a higher number of people as being polarizing, but apparently lesser in magnitude than Wilson. i.e. fewer people know as much about the bad things he did, but those who know are more highly motivated to think ill of him as a result.:-)
So like, to Republicans, they considered Wilson (13) to be just below Jackson (12) and above Kennedy (14, but he’s of the opposite party affiliation!), while to Democrats Wilson (16) was just below Adams (15) yet above Monroe (17). So anyway, maybe Wilson is number 15 on the final list not bc he earned that place by being good, so much as being less offensive (somehow?) to all parties concerned than others who were considered much worse? i.e. he didn’t “earn” that spot so much as he needed to go somewhere within the listing, and that ended up being it?
It’s a possibility at any rate.