Agreed. Harding was a lousy President but he is definitely the preferred choice of this group.
Yeah, he was a corrupt prettyboy and not quite politically correct by modern standards, but Harding seemed to care about black people. I went with him.
I voted for Harrison but after reading the thread and looking into things I’d switch to Harding. Hopefully this time he would have a tough honest chief of staff.
Bumped thread.
New poll of presidential historians now ranks Trump as dead last.
They also note a trend of Democrats moving up in the rankings; attribute it to a tendency to view favourably those who respected institutional values of the office. Not restricted to Republicans dropping; a couple of Dems (Jackson and Wilson) are steadily dropping, because of their treatment of marginalised people.
When you see these historical views of the Presidents, you may keep in mind that the positions of the parties have changed over the years. For example, the Republicans started off as the more liberal party, and by the mid-19th century, the Democrats were more conservative. (I don’t think today’s liberal-conservative distinction applies before about 1850 or so.) FDR and his New Deal certainly changed that, so since 1933, the Dems have been more liberal.
Wilson ran on a platform that included many of the Progressive Party desires. By any standard of the day he would have been considered a liberal. Modern historians downvote him because he was more racist even than usual for the time, but that wasn’t really thought of as a disqualification, or even conservative.
Jackson has gone through an almost complete flipflop of his place in history. “Jacksonian Democracy” brought him hagiographies that rival the founders. That more recent historians note his treatment of Indians is to be expected and would have surprised historians before WWII. Repellant as that was, it didn’t affect the country as whole. What did was his opposition to the Bank of the United States, which in 1837 precipitated the worst depression in the country’s history to that time and sunk Martin Van Buren’s presidency. It’s not often that you can ascribe the destruction of the American economy to a president but economics has advanced along with everything else.
Jackson was a populist for his time. He campaigned on the idea that he was backing the “common working man” against the wealthy elite.
The problem was that Jackson, and most people in his time, defined the common working man as a white male. The idea of defending the rights of women or non-whites wasn’t included in populism.
This is a Stop pressing the button meme situation. Absolutely without reservation any of the above.
The only one that gives a moment’s pause is Andrew Jackson as the trail of tears was actually worse than anything Trump did. But there is absolutely no doubt that is only because Trump was never given the opportunity. Trump is definitely just as much of a psychotic racist as Jackson, as well being more narcissistic to boot. In fact one of the few things that could qualify as a political belief from Trump, that is not directly related to his personal aggrandizement, is a love of Andrew Jackson (this was pilloried at the time as Trump not knowing history, which was wrong IMO. Trump did know history and he was saying things would have worked out better if Jackson, an avowed supporter of slavery and opponent of secession, had been alive long enough to barter a pro-slavery solution to keep the southern states in the union)
Andrew Jackson was not in the Poll. Andrew Jackson was actually worse than Trump in my opinion. He needs to be off the Twenty 20 years ago.
Oh yeah. Johnson not Jackson. Definitely no one on that list gives me pause, then.
I’d stand by what I said though, even if Jackson did worse things than trump, that’s only because he had opportunity to. Trump just never had chance to order tens of thousands on a death march, he absolutely would have done so however. Trump’s expressed personal admiration of Jackson is the only thing I’ve heard him say that is not a transparent attempt to appeal to the worse people for reasons of personal aggrandizement.
I’m going to need to see a lot more evidence before I believe Trump knows any history.
I feel if you questioned Trump about his admiration of Andrew Jackson you’d be more likely to find it’s based on Jackson’s face being on money. And if you pushed it a step further, Trump would name Andrew Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin as two of his other favorite Presidents.
Trump was clearly a history nerd when it came to Jackson. How else do you explain his research that showed Jackson could have negotiated an avoidance of the Civil War if he only had the chance? Literally every so-called historian missed that important fact.
I mean while as coherent as always, it is genuinely the only public statement I’ve heard by Trump that can’t be summed up by “do or say whatever will get Donald J Trump the most power, adoration and money”
Trump ruminated after lauding Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president “a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.”
He obviously idolizes Jackson, (a vehemently pro-slavery racist psycho who sent thousands to their deaths) and thinks alternate reality where he was president instead of Lincoln would be a better onw.
I don’t know US Presidents very well. But I’m going to guess that none of the others wanted to turn the US into a fascist regime.
After quickly reviewing some I went with Harding.
This is the ultimate factor. Sure, a lot of the other awful Presidents were racist, violent, stupid, corrupt, and all that. But as bad as they were, they didn’t break the system, and it was ultimately that system that allowed gradual improvements in the treatment of all those marginalized people. If Trump had had his way, all the major institutions of the US would have been changed in ways we can only guess at, that would likely have rolled back a lot of the progress the US has made in the last 150 years, and left those institutions broken, and in the hands of people who would use them only for their own gain, at the expense of all the people they hate.
This is nearly as true in this time as it was in Jackson’s.
None of the choices is even remotely as bad as DJT. None them were criminals bent on unfettered power. None of them had a cult of personality that accepted his every utterance as manna from heaven. You could reanimate Charles Manson and still have a more sterling character than DJT.
Heh, I just posted this in the ‘Schadenfreude’ thread, and then noticed this thread, so I may as well share it here too:
So, if you buy the poll rankings, any choice other than trump would be the better choice. But then, I would vote for a cup of warm spit for President over trump.
The more I’ve thought about Jackson, I think he’d be the one who we would have the worst time with. We’d have a bad time with James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Woodrow Wilson, with or without the stroke that left his wife as the de facto POTUS. But Jackson was, IMHO, a smarter and more capable version of Trump. Jackson would have both tried and succeeded on 1/6/2021. None of the others would have even tried.
But then who would be vice president?