The latest academic ranking of presidents is out. I discuss the bias inherent in these rankings and propose a better way to look at our presidents.
The latest academic ranking of presidents is out. I discuss the bias inherent in these rankings and propose a better way to look at our presidents.
Rank Ranking:
Something Smells Bad in the APSA President’s Survey
February 2024
“As social animals, we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.”
Robert Greene
“Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank.”
Simon Sinek
We love rankings. Harper’s Bazaar once featured the 50 hottest men of all time (shockingly, I never got a call). Forbes provides the 40 most powerful women in business. The sports media love to host debates on the most successful athletes (to all you Lebron fans, MJ is always THE number one). We even have a relatively new word, listicle, that describes this desire to rank anything and everyone. As with any list, the problem becomes readily apparent. What are the criteria? What is the balance of subjective vs objective? In that Forbes list, how can they put Mary Berra, who oversees one company (GM) of one sector, and not feature Lina Kahn, whose lawless FTC regulates everything?
The Latin phrase de gustibus per non desputande roughly translates to “do not despise another’s taste,” or in taste, there is no dispute. We could rank pizza toppings by using store sales, but just because more people have a taste for Pepperoni does not make that topping superior to sausage (though everything is superior to anchovies, and pineapple belongs in a fruit cup, NOT on a pizza).
In the awards game, the subjective almost always tops the objective. The movie Shape of Water was bland and tedious, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disagreed with that assessment. When Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize after 11 days in office, it was clearly the subjective decision of the Nobel Committee, which simply liked Obama, and did not like his predecessor, rather than any actual accomplishment.
If we wish to rank the greatest athletes there are plenty of objective numbers upon which to draw. We can say Super Bowl wins for football, elevating Tom Brady above the pack. With baseball pitchers, how about wins or overall career earned run average? Yet there is still debate. A quarterback plays roughly half of the game and needs a decent offensive line, running backs, and wide receivers. They do not throw to themselves after all. And a concept called recency bias, something we will discuss later at length, is evident in sports as well. Dan Marino, a great quarterback in any era, never won a Super Bowl but played during a time when defenses were permitted actions that would consistently garner fouls in the time of Brady. Listening to talk radio in my car, there was a debate about where to rank the now three-time Super Bowl-winning Andy Reid. It was especially infuriating that they contested whether the 1980s Bill Walsh was the greatest of all time or Bill Belichick. I can only imagine what other drivers saw when I yelled in my automobile – “It is Lombardi, you fools!” (five titles in seven years with a decent but not Bradyesque QB). But of course, none of the 40-something announcers had seen Lombardi with their own eyes. Out of sight, out of mind. And so it is often the case with presidents.
I thought of all of this when, during this past Presidents Day weekend, the American Political Science Association (APSA) came out with its latest presidential ranking. The concept of ranking presidents goes back to 1948 when progressive historian Arthur Schlessinger Sr assembled a group of historians and political scientists and asked them to rank the denizens of the White House based on a range from “great to failure.” What would constitute success or fiasco? I don’t know.
Jumping (or is it pouncing when coming from a conservative), Jonah Goldberg immediately
issued an excellent piece on these rankings. He, too, pondered what the criteria consisted.
But many subjective rankings include objective criteria. For instance, rankings of the best boxers or baseball players are fun to argue about precisely because opinions differ about how you weigh your criteria. Still, you have to have some objective criteria to be taken seriously. This is how presidential rankings have always worked. As political scientist Joe Uscinski has documented, they’ve always been riddled with bias. Some of the biases are partisan or ideological. Presidents who expanded the role of government routinely score better than presidents who don’t.
Whenever one sees rankings, the immediate question is not about the list itself but who is responsible for the compilation. In the case of APSA, the membership consists of the following:
A diverse community of scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners who bring
wide-ranging interests, methodologies, and perspectives to the analysis and
conduct of government and politics.
This brings me to the makeup of scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The current ratio of progressives to conservatives in all schools, ranging from K-12 to the formal academy, is 7:1 to 12:1, depending on location and level. Some Ivy universities do not have a single humanities professor who identifies as conservative. Regardless of how this breaks down, any objective determination means that members of APSA would strongly trend progressive and thus absent criteria, will inject their biases.
The APSA’s title is “The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey.” The survey features these ranking criteria: “We asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness, with 0=failure, 50=average, and 100=great. We then averaged the ratings for each president and ranked them from highest average to lowest.”
Yet what equates with “greatness?” APSA, like Schlessinger decades ago, is very quiet on this. Later, APSA features questions such as “Who should be the next on Mt Rushmore,” Who are “the most polarizing,” and “the most overrated.” The criteria for these questions, like the general survey, are imprecise. It is fundamentally left to the rankers to determine how they would see greatness or who is polarizing.
So even if we use the criteria of “active” presidents or those who “accomplished many things during their presidencies,” Ronald Reagan, who served two terms, enacted tax reform, rebuilt the military, began the end of the Cold War, and was succeeded by his vice president, it would be substantial. Yet, with only one term each, Joe Biden and John Adams rank above the Great Communicator. And, of course, there is the recency bias I mentioned earlier. Of the first fifteen
on the APSA list of presidents, only five served in the first 112 years of the Republic, including Washington and Lincoln, as opposed to ten from the most recent 124.
This is how recency bias works. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s supporters accused John Adams of being a hermaphrodite, a vicious charge for the times. Adams’ partisans said that if Jefferson were elected, he would bring the French Revolution to America, including a charge of putting children on pikes. Yet when the polarization question was asked, Donald Trump was ranked first. The surprise was that Obama was ranked third, but to the APSA member, and it would be because of his color, not his arrogance, the worsening of race relations, or the straw-manning of conservatives. Five of the top six in the polarization question had served in the office in the past 60 years. No Jefferson or Adams on that list, though each had a hand in founding political parties that, by their nature, would create greater polarization.
The first of the top five presidents in the general survey is Lincoln. Okay. The second is … FDR. Wait what? With the third being Washington. I will address this inanity later, but for now, I doubt a single political scientist has not heard of the New Deal. I would even bet they could tell you something about the TVA or the Blue Eagle. But how many could talk about the Copyright Act of 1790 or the Bank Act of 1791? FDR’s policies were built on foundations laid by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and even Herbert Hoover. Washington’s enactments were the foundation for everything else to come.
Rounding out the top ten are Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S Truman, Barack Obama, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and John F Kennedy. And the progressive bias and the recency bias again bears their imprint in the head-scratching inclusion of Barack Obama. His one significant accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, has yet to make healthcare more affordable, and less than 10% of Americans use the exchanges set up by the legislation, yet here he is, sixth in APSA ranking.
If the list were overtly about “enacting progressive policies,” then this would begin to make more sense. Perhaps Jefferson and Eisenhower would need to be omitted. But greatness? John F Kennedy was president for just three years, and one of his key accomplishments, the space program, would have been enacted by any president in that era to counter what the Soviets were doing.
Who is not mentioned until number 21? Andrew Jackson reoriented the political landscape, prevented a Civil War on his watch, eliminated a central bank, paid off the national debt, created the spoils system, returned infrastructure to the states, and designated his successor. He also moved an entire nation of Native Americans to their detriment and the deaths of thousands.
If this was anything but a ranking of “I really like that guy’s policies,” then Jackson belongs in the top ten, certainly before Kennedy, Obama, or even Biden.
Goldberg even makes a good argument that James K Polk should have been ranked higher.
Victorious in war and diplomacy, promises made, promises kept, including his vow to honor a term limit. All in all, objectively speaking, it was a pretty successful presidency. And the latest ranking of presidential “overall greatness” ranks him at 25, 11 points behind Joe Biden and ten behind Woodrow Wilson.
And Wilson. We have had our fair share of racist presidents. Nixon’s anti-semitism was legendary. But this should not be a survey of thoughts but deeds. For all of his personal commentary on the Jews, Nixon was a good friend to Israel. Wilson, on the other hand, in resegregating the federal government and jailing German Americans during World War I, was the racist who acted on his beliefs. Yet he signed into law the Federal Reserve, busted trusts, and appointed Brandeis, so he gets into the top 15.
Was Wilson substantial and had a track record of significant accomplishments? No doubt, but again, that criteria thing. War presidents also tend to rank high. This brings up a point I made earlier about Kennedy. What president would not have acted the same? After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the Zimmerman telegram, and Germany’s commitment to unrestricted U Boat warfare, it is difficult to see any President not entering World War I. In Wilson’s case, he was pulled in kicking and screaming and then once in ruled as an autocrat. Thoughts of Wilson conjure the line from the wand seller of Harry Potter Fame, Mr. Olivander, who said of the arch-villain Voldemort, “After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible! Yes. But great.”
Influence vs. politics
A better criterion than “greatness” and more in line with the concept of accomplishment is influence. In the 1970s, Michael Hart wrote a fascinating book called The 100, ranking all historical figures. Hart used the criteria of which of these people affected the most lives. Not only would their actions impact humans in their lifetimes, but they would also exert influence after their deaths. Hart put Mohammad at number one, and it is hard to argue the point. Jesus
(3rd on Hart’s list) may have founded the world’s largest religion and had 600 more years of influence than Mohammad, but Paul of Tarsus did the evangelizing, and Augustine of Hippo erected much of the structure. And Jesus never wrote anything down. Mohammad did it all: founded the religion, wrote the critical source material, and created a world empire by uniting the Arab tribes, something never done before or since.
One of my favorites on this list was the 5th-century BCE Chinese inventor Cai Lun. His invention of paper in ancient times—led Hart to rank Cai Lun above numerable kings and conquerors for the simple reason that paper was the information mechanism for some 2,000 years.
Yet even here, recency bias arises. Hart ranked Lenin 81st on his list. The original compilation was in the 1970s when the Soviets appeared ascendant. No doubt Lenin would begin to drop given the collapse of the Soviet Union after “only” 80 years. However, Lenin would probably remain somewhere on the list, given his subsequent influence on Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and Xi Jinping. Hart’s criteria were not goodness but influence. Hitler made the list for the simple reason that causing the deaths directly or indirectly of 30 million people was influence albeit of the evil kind.
CH Lists
I have touched on the ridiculous ranking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt above George Washington as not only biased but short-sighted. Without Washington, it is a simple argument to say that there would not have been any subsequent presidents. And we also return to what is meant by “great.” Alexander of Macedon is described as Great, but massacring the people of Tyre or in Bactria might not mean the same “great” as ascribed to FDR. Given that Donald Trump ranks last; I assume APSA equates great with good or even positive. With that criteria, FDR is not even third. The New Deal was a failure by any objective standard, such as unemployment or GDP growth. He imprisoned 70,000 American citizens based on their race. He lied about his serious health issues in 1944. He failed to prepare his successor, Harry S Truman, for key war initiatives, including building the Atomic Bomb. Roosevelt broke the 130-year precedent of two terms by running for a third. The Constitution is indispensable to the success of our Republic; presidents, with the possible exception of Washington, are not.
Roosevelt adherents always point to two accomplishments: staving off a 1930s revolution and his leadership in World War II. Though the New Deal failed economically (many do not admit even this), it gave the Americans enough hope to reject the specter of fascism then engulfing Europe. This always seems a specious argument. Germany’s experience with democratic forms of government was 14 years old when Hitler took over. America’s was over 140 years. Those nations with a tradition of elected officials, such as Great Britain and France, did not succumb to fascist ministrations, and I do not believe the US would have either. America encountered a similar economic calamity in the 1890s and emerged from it within five years. It was FDR’s New Deal that put the “great” in the Great Depression allowing economic despair to fester.
A better argument is Roosevelt’s conduct as a war leader. Unlike Lincoln’s first three years in office, FDR was a much better judge of generalship. Elevating George Marshall to the top spot. Putting the rough and coarse Ernest King in charge of the Navy and, by extension, the Pacific theater and raising Dwight D Eisenhower from a pre-war Colonel to a four-star general in about three years was a master stroke. Yet at the inception of the war, despite Japanese saber rattling throughout the summer and fall of 1941, their invasions of Korea and China, their military needs for resources like oil and rubber, only to be found in the Dutch East Indies and their stated position of racial superiority, America was caught flat-footed at Pearl Harbor. As Commander in Chief, FDR must take some blame for this.
And because FDR would not cede power towards the war’s end, a visibly ailing Roosevelt was not ready to take on Stalin at Yalta. It is hard to imagine Stalin, seeing the obviously dying American president, did not calculate his takeover of Eastern Europe predicated on FDR’s condition.
If the criteria are doing big, substantial things, then FDR belongs in the top five. If it is greatness as positive accomplishments, the betterment of the Republic? Then FDR should drop out of the top twenty.
In my underrated book, The Conservative Historian Collected Works (available here for sale with a Kindle device), I got into the presidential ranking game with more explicit criteria. Starting with a Burke, Kirk, Sowell, and Will model of conservatism: adhering to custom and convention, limiting government, strengthening institutions, protecting life and liberty, understanding the imperfection of humanity, and exercising prudence.
One can immediately see how this list will differ significantly from APSA’s. For example, Wilson ranked 15th in the APSA survey but is ranked 43rd in mine, only above James Buchanan and, a surprise, Martin Van Buren. In the latter case, Van Buren was the first president to attempt governmental intervention in a financial calamity. The label could fit better, but Van Buren was a proto-progressive.
And not just presidents. I also ranked generals and admirals in that book (it is collected works). It is easier to decide on military success rather than presidential, and here are my criteria:
My number one general was Genghis Khan. Not only did he directly build his armies (unlike Alexander or Caesar, for example), but he conquered three different regions against different foes. For my admiral, I had to ask whether ranking Horatio Nelson number one was ethnic bias. I grew up learning about Nelson in a way I did not with my number two, the great Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin. What tipped it was the varied ways Nelson won, and whereas Yi Sun-sin won more battles, it was against the same enemy. Nelson won against the French, the Danish, and the Spanish.
And yet, even with stringent criteria and attempts to fix my biases, I often found my rankings did include some “AD-centric” thinking as well as historical. Yet, I still feel highly confident I have accomplished much more than APSA. The difference is that my goals are a criteria based fair ranking that is meant to empower, not close down, historical debate. APSA’s rank idiocy has an entirely different purpose. Recency cuts both ways and in this case, their rankings are also about an election coming in nine months as opposed to the history of the Trump administration.
Somehow, Trump, who started no wars, presided over no financial meltdowns, followed most of the progressive policies to combat COVID, including listening to Anthony Fauci and spending gobs of money, and helped control inflation and the border, ranks below Jimmy Carter, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and Martin Van Buren. The argument for his attempts to overturn the election is a good case for the lower quartile. But given the progressive positions in 2004, with John Kerry disputing the election, and Stacey Abrams never ceding the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, it is hard to say that was worse than Andrew Johnson trying to re-empower racist Southern policies in the 1860s. Yet that the ultimate goal of this survey, circa February 2024 is as Noah Rothman states, “recent Democrats good, Trump bad.” Axios’ story on the survey began with the headline “Historians Rank Trump as Worst President.” Headlines like that are what APSA’s rank stupidity is really about.