Presidents Should Not Be Ranked

Noah dismantles the progressive bias of the latest ranking of presidents from the American Political Science Association. Read his post here.

On the ideological issue, I’d just add that despite all the “reckoning” about history that has happened in the past several years, Franklin Roosevelt ranks second, after Lincoln and ahead of Washington, on the list of great presidents. He still gets a free pass — even from progressive historians — for Japanese internment, leading a political coalition that included white segregationists as an integral part, and ignoring the republican convention of only seeking two terms. (Not to mention worsening the Great Depression with the New Deal, trying to destroy the independent judiciary by packing the Supreme Court, seizing privately owned gold by executive order, and other issues that conservatives are disproportionately — but nonetheless correctly — upset by.)

The bigger point, though, is that presidents should not be ranked in the first place, and if the APSA cared about its credibility, it would stop ranking them.

This is not to say historians should not evaluate presidents. They do and they should, and some are better than others. Exactly how that evaluation is done will take into account factors such as the evaluator’s worldview, or his belief about what presidents ought to do. That will vary, and arguments will be had on whether certain presidents were good or bad, and in what ways.

Efforts by others at National Review to rehabilitate the reputations of Grant and Harding, to give two examples, are beneficial exercises in historical education, and they carry with them messages about what the authors believe good presidents ought to do. Turning to examples of leadership from the past is part of a healthy political culture, and presidents are an obvious place to look within our system of government.

But ranking them simply makes no sense. We can comfortably say that Lincoln was a better president than Buchanan. But what does it really mean to say that, for example, Garfield was a better president than Tyler? Or Taft was a better president than Fillmore?

The inescapable conclusion of any honest survey of American presidents is that nearly all of them were mediocre. That’s why the holiday is, and ought to be, Washington’s Birthday, not Presidents’ Day. Washington deserves celebration. Lincoln, too, deserves celebration. It’s really hard to think of any other presidents who rise to their level.

Obviously, I love Reagan and celebrate his legacy, but I suspect Reagan himself would tell you he was no Washington or Lincoln. In some sense, the only honest ranking, if one could even call it that, would be a tie between Washington and Lincoln for No. 1, and then everybody else.

The exercise of actually ranking them from No. 1 to 46 raises a bunch of unanswerable questions. To avoid any ideological bias, I won’t use names to illustrate what I mean. Was President A a bad president, or did he just happen to be elected at a really bad time? Was President B a good president, or did he just happen to be elected at a really good time? Would President C, generally viewed as bad, have been a good president if he served in the 1840s instead of when he actually served? Would President D, generally viewed as good, have been a bad president if he had served during World War I? Did President E manage to succeed only because he had a cooperative Congress? Was President F a failure because Congress was against him? Would President G have been any good if Scientist X and Businessman Y had not invented and successfully marketed Technology Z that improved everyone’s standard of living during his term?

All of these questions take into account factors outside the presidency. And this is really the problem with ranking the presidents: It ascribes too much power and significance to them.

U.S. presidents are powerful and significant, but still, each of them is one person in a big country. It’s an even bigger world. Presidents deserve credit or blame for specific decisions they make in areas where they actually have power. But overall results in the country while they are president? To paraphrase Barack Obama: They didn’t build that.

The U.S. is a country of millions of individuals, born into families, organizing themselves into associations and corporations for various purposes, participating in a government with checks and balances and separation of powers. It could be made better, and the government has certainly expanded greatly and in ways that it shouldn’t have. But by historical standards, this is a free country with a limited government.

That means most — nearly all — of what goes on in this country is not dependent on who the president is. It is for that fact that we thank Washington, for first leading this form of government, and Lincoln, for preserving it against armed rebellion. Ordinally ranking all of them by some standard of “greatness” is a fruitless task that, by virtue of being impossible, will inevitably reduce itself to the silly ideological exercise that Noah has aptly described.