If the historians who contributed their alleged expertise to compiling a list measuring “overall presidential greatness” brought any history with them into their analysis, that’s hard to discern from the product they produced. My colleagues will take the list to task for its authors’ revisionism, but it seems that the point of this exercise wasn’t an objective assessment of American presidential legacies. It was to convey to the list’s readers that Donald Trump is bad.
According to our most influential historians, Trump earned himself a spot at the very bottom of their list registering relative “greatness” in the Oval Office. Perhaps owing to a latent sense of shame among practicing academics, Joe Biden managed only to be named America’s 14th greatest president, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson. It should surprise no one that, with throat-clearing exceptions made for presidents such as Geroge Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the list favors progressive Democrats and progressive Republicans. The virtue of progressivism is the common thread. We can, therefore, deduce that the goal of this enterprise was to advance voguish narratives favored by progressive academicians.
The list is reminiscent of other efforts to manipulate public perception via the selective deployment of “expertise.” In 2018 at the height of the MeToo moment in America, the Thomson Reuters Foundation surveyed 550 specialists in the field of women’s issues with the aim of assessing the best and worst places on earth for women. Much to its shame, the Foundation found that the U.S. was one of the most nightmarish places in the planet to be born with two X chromosomes. When it comes to sexual assault and coercion, rape as a “weapon of war,” human trafficking, and general harassment, the “experts” listed America alongside such global pariahs as Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Similarly, the Economist’s so-called “Intelligence Unit,” which annually ranks global democracies based on a subjective set of criteria, downgraded America’s standing in 2017. Now, we all know what happened in 2016 that ensured the United States was in bad odor among international opinion makers, but there had to be some more objective rationale to its assessment. So, the Economist settled on compulsory voting as one of the key metrics by which “full democracies” can be judged. That’s how the institution determined that places like Uruguay — a young republic that only emerged from military dictatorship in 1985 whose archives remain largely sealed following a court-ordered amnesty for members of the military — maintains a richer democracy than the deteriorating one under which Americans languish.
What’s remarkable about these efforts to launder opinion into the national discourse under the guise of expertise is that the architects of these experiments are possessed of such self-regard that they think they can reshape our perception of reality. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t invested in promoting an agenda agree that Barack Obama belongs somewhere on the spectrum of historical greatness between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. No one in their right mind believes America’s civic institutions and civil society are roughly comparable to Italy’s. Anyone who was persuaded to put off emigrating to the United States because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia better cares for its female population has been profoundly misled.
Why would anyone believe this nonsense? Indeed, it sometimes can seem like belief is beside the point. The objective in articulating facially nonsensical untruths such as these isn’t to convey “expertise” but zeal in service to a faddish political cause. Today, the cause is anti-Trumpism. If history gets in the way of that goal, then history has to go.