In another thread, it was claimed that Joe Biden is the left most president of all time. I was curious if anybody had done an analysis and I found a YouTube channel that had in fact done one. And sure enough their analysis has Joe Biden as one of the leftmost presidents in US history. Interesting.
So here is a link to their video. It is only 12 minutes long, but if you want to skip all of that I’ve also attached an image of their final analysis.
Of course, this is relative to the US political compass, as we know the American center is further right than the global center. So accepting that, any thoughts? Does this seem pretty accurate to you? Anything with which you disagree? I don’t have any strong thoughts on it since I’m not very familiar with American presidential history. I will say Joe Biden is further left than I thought and more authoritarian than I would have expected. Do you agree? Is Joe Biden a lot more authoritarian than Obama?
Trump’s authoritarianism is low but I think only relative to where he’s going not where he was. Obama seems about right to me. As do Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan. There has been a shift in America toward authoritarianism on the right. I don’t know much about pre-Reagan presidents as I was a kid when he was president except for my favorite Teddy Roosevelt, who seems pretty accurately placed. Which again, I don’t see Biden in the same vein was Roosevelt so I’m surprise they’re pretty closely placed.
The video and chart distorts the political compass it is based on, which may be seen here politicalcompass.org
This is a sophisticated site that has been operating for nearly a quarter century, and it has a very different rating for Trump, Biden, and other presidential candidates since 2004. Short answer, politicalcompass.org puts Trump and Biden in the same quadrant, in the Right/Authoritarian quadrant.
This fellow has put “neo-liberalism” in the left/libertarian quadrant,
and put FDR in roughly the same place as Stalin. This is reason enough to ask if he has a clue. His work on the earlier presidents is impossible to transcribe onto the original politicalcompass.org For example, it asks responders their position on non-representational art, and I don’t think Washington had much to say about Jackson Pollock. So I think there is not much to be taken from the video and the chart based on it.
What’s the methodology? I’ve seen measurements that define “leftness” as how often the President agrees with the positions of the more left of the two current major parties, and defines the positions of the two major parties as the positions which their current presidential candidate supports, and by that measure, it’s always true that the current Democratic presidential candidate is the “leftest candidate ever”.
Of course, an even more common methodology is “Eh, I think this guy is about a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, and this other guy is about an 8, I guess, so the second one is more liberal”. I hope I don’t have to explain what’s wrong with that methodology.
He takes a historic view of each president and tries to put their views within the context of their political times. It is 12 minute video for a topic that would take hours and hours to do it true justice, so it isn’t that deep. As I mentioned, I’m certainly not an expert on American presidential history, so I cannot speak to the accuracy. To me, the analysis seemed reasonable.
Because politicalcompass.org is using a political science perspective. As mentioned in the OP, these ratings are based on the US political compass. The US center is further right than the global (or theoretical) center.
I’m going to reject that characterization, simply because the U.S. is on the same globe as every other country.
To clarify: the center is THE CENTER. The U.S. doesn’t get to have its own center. I’ll concede that most everybody with any power here is way too far to the right. But that just means that we badly need a correction to the center.
I’d say it’s completely impossible to assign “left” and “right” to 250 years of president as the political spectrum has changed complete several times over in that time. Not just someone who appears very radical for the time being incredibly reactionary even regressive in another time. But the actual issues and policies that are how people are put on the spectrum have completely changed, it’s a meaningless exercise to try and map the early 21st century political spectrum to the earth 20th century one let alone the 18th century one.
This is hardly an unusual analysis. Every country has their own center, and from time to time it is useful to examine things from the perspective of the theoretical center, and other times it is more useful to examine things from the regional perspective.
If the creator had made it from a more theoretical perspective, then everything would be push up into the top right and there would be a lot of empty space, which isn’t very useful if you’re look at where US presidents compare to each other because you’re just going to zoom into that part of the space anyway and make comparisons within that localized space. So why not just show that localized space? To put it in a more absurd way, if I have results that range from 10 to 100, I don’t plot them on axes to 1,000,000 just because numbers go that high.
It would be very useful if the goal were to see where US presidents show up compared to the entire spectrum of political thought but again, not the author’s goal.
If you want to spread the message that we need a Trump as a counter balance (remember, remaining in the center of all things is the of utmost importance) then it’s crucial to paint Biden as an extreme leftist.
You’ve put it better than I did with my facetious reference to Washington and
Pollock: the politicalcompass.org folks note that authoritarians tend not to consider non-representational art as art, which I presume was not an issue for George.
I’d say those would be absolutely more meaningful axes than “left” and “right”, though you’d have to weight the corruption axis by standards of the time it would make sense
And Trump would be firmly at the bottom of both axes.
