Current Events > Conservative columnist admits that Trump is now worst president in history

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/max-boot-donald-trump-worst-president-094023032.html

Imagine still supporting Donald Trump, LMAO! You'd have to be seriously brainwashed to think he's done even an OK job of handling this crisis. And we haven't even started to see the deaths pile up yet.

I recall seeing a couple other long time conservatives denouncing Trump recently

They were attacked by cultists and accused of being deep state Democrats

Like the past 20-30 years of straight up hardcore republicanism was all a ploy to take down a guy that no one ever even expected would become president

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In modern history or all history?

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Tired-Insomniac posted...

I recall seeing a couple other long time conservatives denouncing Trump recently

They were attacked by cultists and accused of being deep state Democrats

Like the past 20-30 years of straight up hardcore republicanism was all a ploy to take down a guy that no one ever even expected would become president

I've come to find that supporting Trump is basically justified by sunk cost fallacies at this point. Trumpers believe they've put so much time and energy into supporting the idiot and don't want to be ridiculed when they admit they were wrong to do so.

Ask any Trumper why they still support Donald Trump and you'll get crap about Hillary, or other deflections.

trump is handling things abysmally

but the wilson administration still falls within the past 100 years

also, the buchanan administration was a thing

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TheMikh posted...

trump is handling things abysmally

but the wilson administration still falls within the past 100 years

also, the buchanan administration was a thing

But his opinion changed over the past month.

Boot said Trumps biggest rival for the title was Buchanan, who helped set the stage for the Civil War.

But there is good reason to think that the Civil War would have broken out no matter what, Boot wrote. By contrast, there is nothing inevitable about the scale of the disaster we now confront.

Trump was warned about the impending COVID-19 crisis, but he didnt take action early by ordering the testing equipment and much-needed emergency supplies that cities and states are now struggling to obtain. Instead, Trump held rallies and played golf.

In the days and weeks after [Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex] Azar alerted him about the virus, Trump spoke at eight rallies and golfed six times, as if he didnt have a care in the world, Boot wrote.

Nixon was worse. Nixon is an absolute demon that we somehow elected to office. We are still dealing with the venom he injected into our politics in the form of making reflexive distrust of institutions seeming smart and polarizing dogwhistle driven racial divisions.

And yeah, Buchanan almost got the United taken out of the United States.

But Trump is trying to speedrun his way to a Nixon presidency in terms of corruption, moral bankruptcy, and basic unfitness.

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Modern history (post World War 2) yeah.

He's not worse than Buchanan though. He influenced the decision of the Dred Scott case and his leadership led directly to the Civil War.
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Damn_Underscore posted...

Modern history (post World War 2) yeah.

He's not worse than Buchanan though. He influenced the decision of the Dred Scott case and his leadership led directly to the Civil War.

For now, I agree with you. He's the worst in modern history. If the death toll on this spirals out of control though, he'd be responsible for more American deaths than any other president.

legendary_zell posted...

Nixon was worse. Nixon is an absolute demon that we somehow elected to office. We are still dealing with the venom he injected into our politics in the form of making reflexive distrust of institutions seeming smart and polarizing dogwhistle driven racial divisions.

And yeah, Buchanan almost got the United taken out of the United States.

But Trump is trying to speedrun his way to a Nixon presidency in terms of corruption, moral bankruptcy, and basic unfitness.

imo trump embodies all the worst traits of nixon and is much worse. the corruption, the lack of any moral compass, the demonization of critics, ect.

i do think someone like buchanan could still be seen as worse but also think if trump was potus then he would have somehow handled it worse

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Max Boot is a neoconservative and a Leftist. His most recent book is about why he doesnt even identify as a Rightist or a conservative anymore. Aside from that, hes a warmonger who has never seen an American military intervention that he didnt like. To take his viewpoint on the Trump administration seriously is to reveal a radical ignorance about what historic conservatism even is. After all, Boot himself asserts:

I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration. I am fiscally conservative: I think we need to reduce the deficit and get entitlement spending under control. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address. I am pro-free trade: I think we should be concluding new trade treaties rather than pulling out of old ones. I am strong on defense: I think we need to beef up our military to cope with multiple enemies. And I am very much in favor of America acting as a world leader: I believe it is in our own self-interest to promote and defend freedom and free markets as we have been doing in one form or another since at least 1898."

Do these sound like the words of a serious and principled conservative political theorist? Of course not. He admits that he is essentially a liberal in all of his foundational commitments. Anyone who takes Max Boots recent essay seriously as indicative of conservative disillusionment with Trump doesnt know anything about Boots long history of progressivism or about conservatism more generally.

While I think there are reasons to be critical of Trump from a classically conservative perspective, the fact that neoconservatives like Max Boot hate him so much isif anythinga point in Trumps favor.

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I am not sure that Trump is worse than Truman and I think if we dig through history that we will find a worse president.

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SolaFide posted...

Max Boot is a neoconservative and a Leftist.

He is not a leftist in any way. But his track record includes supporting every war possible, and the suggestion that we treat our interminable middle eastern conflicts the way we treated wars with the Native Americans.
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CobraGT posted...

I am not sure that Trump is worse than Truman

Joke poster
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GOP really giving us two of the shittiest presidents in modern history in a 20 year period, damn you hate to see it.

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Also, if you believe that Trump is the worst president in United States history, then your historical knowledge is so lacking that you dont even deserve to be engaged in a serious intellectual discussion. I wouldnt be shocked if Boot believes that American presidential history begins with Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

In truth, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all abused power in ways that make the current presidents overreaches appear insignificant. Is he throwing citizens in jail for criticizing his administration, as did Adams, Lincoln and Wilson? Is he raising an army to invade foreign territories and spread democracy, as did Polk, McKinley, Wilson, JFK, and LBJ? Is he throwing American citizens into internment camps because they have an ethnicity that he doesnt like, as FDR did? Is he using the federal military to shut down the elected legislatures in states, as Grant did? Is he taking it upon himself to manage the economy, as Hoover, FDR and LBJ did?

I dont believe that this country has had a president worth voting for since Calvin Coolidge almost a hundred years ago. In the 19th century, only Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland really stand out to me as being thoroughly devoted to the rule of law. Even relatively decent presidents like Washington, Madison, Jackson, and Van Buren were responsible for some abuses of the presidential office. But, then again, Im a grumpy Jeffersonian who believes that the whole constitutional system has been destroyed by progressive tyrants and abusers going all the way back to John Marshall. Trumps problems appear relatively unremarkable to me, given the fact that weve inherited a system that has long been unmoored from constitutional government. Ironically, the supposedly great presidentsAbraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilsonare the ones most responsible for our beleaguered and corrupt presidential system. The Left, though, laughably believes that our problems began with Trump.

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Antifar posted...

He is not a leftist in any way. But his track record includes supporting every war possible, and the suggestion that we treat our interminable middle eastern conflicts the way we treated wars with the Native Americans.

No, he is. The quote that I just posted from him explicitly admits that he believes in every significant, progressive and egalitarian policy imaginable, including marriage equality, federal intervention to stop climate change, unrestricted abortion rights, mass immigration, and free trade absolutism. None of these policies are associated with historic American conservatism, as expressed by people like Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft. Boot and other neoconservative thinkers have much more in common with FDR, LBJ and Obama than anyone in the history of American conservatism.

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SolaFide posted...

I know plenty of presidential history, Trump is still laughably bad and easily among the worst presidencies ever.


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Trump mishandled the presidency long before Covid-19 was a global crisis (definitely before this January).

The president's response being the straw that broke the camel's back in most people's minds just means that they were actively overlooking Trumps shortcomings.

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SolaFide posted...

Also, if you believe that Trump is the worst president in United States history, then your historical knowledge is so lacking that you dont even deserve to be engaged in a serious intellectual discussion. I wouldnt be shocked if Boot believes that American presidential history begins with Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

In truth, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all abused power in ways that make the current presidents overreaches appear insignificant. Is he throwing citizens in jail for criticizing his administration, as did Adams, Lincoln and Wilson? Is he raising an army to invade foreign territories and spread democracy, as did Polk, McKinley, Wilson, JFK, and LBJ? Is he throwing American citizens into internment camps because they have an ethnicity that he doesnt like, as FDR did? Is he using the federal military to shut down the elected legislatures in states, as Grant did? Is he taking it upon himself to manage the economy, as Hoover, FDR and LBJ did?

I dont believe that this country has had a president worth voting for since Calvin Coolidge almost a hundred years ago. In the 19th century, only Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland really stand out to me as being thoroughly devoted to the rule of law. Even relatively decent presidents like Washington, Madison, Jackson, and Van Buren were responsible for some abuses of the presidential office. But, then again, Im a grumpy Jeffersonian who believes that the whole constitutional system has been destroyed by progressive tyrants and abusers going all the way back to John Marshall. Trumps problems appear relatively unremarkable to me, given the fact that weve inherited a system that has long been unmoored from constitutional government. Ironically, the supposedly great presidentsAbraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilsonare the ones most responsible for our beleaguered and corrupt presidential system. The Left, though, laughably believes that our problems began with Trump.

You start with "your historical knowledge is lacking if you think Trump is the worst president", but then proceed to disagree with most historians on who the "best" presidents are.

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Anyone who puts Jackson on their list of best presidents goes immediately into the "do not listen to" pile
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SolaFide posted...

Max Boot is a neoconservative

well that changes everything

SolaFide posted...

No, he is. The quote that I just posted from him explicitly admits that he believes in every significant, progressive and egalitarian policy imaginable, including marriage equality, federal intervention to stop climate change, unrestricted abortion rights, mass immigration, and free trade absolutism. None of these policies are associated with historic American conservatism, as expressed by people like Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft. Boot and other neoconservative thinkers have much more in common with FDR, LBJ and Obama than anyone in the history of American conservatism.

i may want to dispute comparing fdr and lbj to neoconservatives; different circumstances guiding their policy, particularly fdr. perhaps a case to be made with lbj, given the cold war establishment's (and the buckleyites/fusionists) shared geopolitical interests with the right-wing trotskyists that became known as neocons

obama was closest, particularly in foreign policy where he operated in lockstep with them in parts of the middle east and north africa, but on the other hand he did butt heads with netanyahu quite a bit

i do agree though that neocons are a far fry from traditional american conservatism (where the modern torchbearers would arguably be the likes of buchanan, bannon, carlson, TAC)

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I think literally every post of TCs I've seen has been about Trump.

Talk about rent free lol

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MrKapowski posted...

I think literally every post of TCs I've seen has been about Trump.

Talk about rent free lol

The guy keeping track of my posts is crying about rent free? Yeah, ok buddy

SolaFide posted...

Is he throwing citizens in jail for criticizing his administration, as did Adams, Lincoln and Wilson?

Yes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/media/journalists-arrested-trump-inauguration.html

SolaFide posted...

Is he raising an army to invade foreign territories and spread democracy, as did Polk, McKinley, Wilson, JFK, and LBJ?

Yes. This actually pretty much started after WW2 though and hasn't stopped.

SolaFide posted...

Is he throwing American citizens into internment camps because they have an ethnicity that he doesnt like, as FDR did?

Yes.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180427-htmlstory.html

SolaFide posted...

Is he using the federal military to shut down the elected legislatures in states, as Grant did?

You mean stop states from trying to secede again? No he hasn't done that I guess.

SolaFide posted...

Is he taking it upon himself to manage the economy, as Hoover, FDR and LBJ did?

Yes.
https://www.latimes.com./business/story/2020-01-16/trump-fed-nominations

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SolaFide posted...

I dont believe that this country has had a president worth voting for since Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge was garbage

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Our death rate is half the worlds death rate, and per capita we arent even close to being the number one in cases, so yes I would say hes done at least an ok job.

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Anteaterking posted...

You start with "your historical knowledge is lacking if you think Trump is the worst president", but then proceed to disagree with most historians on who the "best" presidents are.

Of course I do. Though I still enjoy reading and learning from various historians on all sides of the political spectrum, the historical academic establishment is almost monolithically progressive. The primary ideological dispute going on in historical scholarship is between New Left Marxian historians like the late Howard Zinn and more traditional New Deal progressives like H.W. Brands, Peter Onuf, and David McCullough. Historians often do a fairly good job of recounting the basic "facts" about the events that took place, but their metric for great presidential statesmanship tends to be something like: "how much did this president transform America and alter the course of the nation's life?" I reject as specious their basically liberal premise that the job of the president is to transform society, so it is no surprise that I assess someone like FDR much more negatively than the historical establishment does, even if I agree with them that he did, in fact, transform America in radical ways.

Additionally, I am a political scientist and not a historian, so it is not at all shocking that I disagree with the evaluation of the historians on American presidential history. Historians often focus so much on context and circumstances that they downplay or ignore the fundamental duties that a constitutional officeholder is meant to pursue: namely, to carry out his oath of office by defending, preserving, and protecting the American Constitution. They also tend to neglect any scrupulous examination of the political thought and principles that motivated the presidents to do what they did, preferring instead to focus on how they used their circumstances to expand executive power. The ones who did this, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, are routinely considered to be "great" presidents, even though it is quite clear that most if not all of the people who ratified the Constitution would have been quite dismayed at their administrations. While I certainly believe that we need to pay a lot of attention to context, I think we are fundamentally missing something about people like Woodrow Wilson and FDR if we don't turn our attention to the bizarre combination of Hamiltonian liberalism and Hegelian progressivism that influenced them to act in the ways they did. Historians don't seem to have any concern about this, whereas Ias a political theoristam very interested in this dimension of their leadership.

Lastly, I think we are lying to ourselves if we believe that these "presidential rankings" are actually objective gauges of a president's legacy. What metric are they using to measure a president's effectiveness? It certainly doesn't seem to be the amount of dutifulness that a president showed in carrying out his oath of office to defend and protect the United States Constitution. If it was, Grover Cleveland and John Tyler would be ranked much higher than petty tyrants like Ulysses S. Grant, FDR, and LBJ. Presidential rankings today of the sort put out by clowns like Max Boot and most of the people in this thread seem to be based upon the nebulous standard of "does the guy advance the progressive policies that I want him to" rather than anything truly objective or quantifiable.

TheMikh posted...

well that changes everything

i may want to dispute comparing fdr and lbj to neoconservatives; different circumstances guiding their policy, particularly fdr. perhaps a case to be made with lbj, given the cold war establishment's (and the buckleyites/fusionists) shared geopolitical interests with the right-wing trotskyists that became known as neocons

obama was closest, particularly in foreign policy where he operated in lockstep with them in parts of the middle east and north africa, but on the other hand he did butt heads with netanyahu quite a bit

i do agree though that neocons are a far fry from traditional american conservatism (where the modern torchbearers would arguably be the likes of buchanan, bannon, carlson, TAC)

To your initial point: it does change everything. Neoconservatism is inimical to traditional conservatism, for reasons that Boot himself admitted. He is just as interested in carrying out liberal social transformation using the federal government as any liberal is. In fact, the old, New Deal liberals like Harry Truman are much closer to the neoconservatives than they are to people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders (note how neocons often praise Truman and LBJ's foreign policies today, whereas New Left-informed people attack their legacies). The old New Deal liberals believed in an activist federal government, but they at least claimed to reject socialism and believed that America's moral values and inherited customs were essentially decent. Both Truman and FDR, for instance, had no problem with appealing to the traditional, Puritan imagery of America as a Christian nation to advance the nation's foreign policy agenda and give the country a sense of mission and purpose in the face of Nazi and Communist threats. The New Left, in contrast, believes the whole American political tradition to be basically evil, suggests that any universal claim to moral truth is nebulous, and sides with regimes that New Deal liberals and conservatives alike saw as inimical to traditional American values (first, the Soviet Union; today, third-world, Marxist regimes like Venezuela and Cuba). People like Max Boot simply believe that the old Progressive liberalism is better than New Leftism is.

Boot, like Truman and LBJ, is a Cold War liberal who believes that the federal government is the best means of promoting the spread of universal democracy. At the level of foreign policy, this means the expansion of American military power all over the world to promote "democracy." At the level of domestic policy, this means that he supports the "proper" management of the federal welfare state and administrative regulations. Boot doesn't call for the rollback of these institutions but calls instead for better management of them. Neoconservatism and Cold War Liberalism alike are, of course, completely at odds with traditionalist conservatism, which rejects the Messianic state, political universalism, and, often times, the very idea that liberal democracy is even valuable.

Did you notice the adulation that the late John McCain and George W. Bush, both of whom were premier examples of neoconservatism, rec

UnholyMudcrab posted...

Anyone who puts Jackson on their list of best presidents goes immediately into the "do not listen to" pile

If that was directed at me, then you did not read very carefully. I said he was relatively decent, not that he was one of the best presidents. And he was relatively decent. He killed the National Bank, which was bad both from a policy perspective and from a strict constructionist perspective, vetoed numerous unconstitutional federal infrastructure projects, rejected early calls for expansion in the name of Manifest Destiny, and has the honor of being the only president to completely depose the national debt. Some people would also praise his handling of the Nullification Crisis since he thwarted early efforts by South Carolina to nullify federal law and secede from the Union. Unfortunately, his positive contributions to the American political tradition are greatly marred by his support for Indian Removal. Hence why I would say he was a very mixed president.

But sure, you can continue to just dismiss these historical figures as backwards and deplorable without even trying to seriously engage with their legacy. I hope that future historians treat sanctimonious people like you the same way.

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This fucking dude has been anti-Trump since 2016 and was basically an open supporter of Hillary Clinton. "Conservative Columnist" is a deceptive way to describe him.

https://www.salon.com/2016/05/09/hard_line_right_wing_war_hawk_max_boot_applauds_hillary_clinton_in_op_ed/

(Hate to link to Salon, but here's the receipt)

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Gobstoppers12 posted...

This fucking dude has been anti-Trump since 2016

so he's been right on this issue since 2016. what's your point?

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Resaix posted...

The guy keeping track of my posts is crying about rent free? Yeah, ok buddy

Tagging you isn't exactly "keeping track" lol

Its impressive how dedicated you are to your gimmick.

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Phantom_Nook posted...

so he's been right on this issue since 2016. what's your point?

My point is that, regardless of your political leanings, it's disingenuous to label this as if he is finally "admitting" to something, as if it's begrudging or forced.

He's basically been saying this for years and is just another random face in a sea of empty noise.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

Yes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/media/journalists-arrested-trump-inauguration.html

This is completely absurd. They were arrested for participating in violent riots, not for writing a press article criticizing the president. This also took place before Trump even got into the Oval Office, so it can hardly be blamed on him. This is a far cry from John Adams throwing people in jail for publishing newspapers that criticized his handling of the French and American crisis, or Wilson throwing Marxist essayists into jail for opposing World War I.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Yes. This actually pretty much started after WW2 though and hasn't stopped.

Trump is much more of a non-interventionist than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush were. While he has still done a lot of things in foreign policy that I disagree with, it is hypocritical to attack him and give preceding presidents a pass.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Yes.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180427-htmlstory.html

I wouldn't deny that those arrests are injustices. I do find it interesting, though, that the political Left seems to be very concerned about this federal bureaucracy's proneness to inefficiency and abuse at the same time that they seek to expand virtually every other federal bureaucracy that exists today.

Tyranthraxus posted...

You mean stop states from trying to secede again? No he hasn't done that I guess.

Ulysses S. Grant instituted martial law in South Carolina because he didn't like the fact that the voters were not likely to vote for the Republican candidates that he liked. This is, of course, after the Fourteenth Amendment had barred former Confederates from voting, so it is spurious to suggest that, if he hadn't have done this, the South would have immediately tried to secede from the Union again. It is unsurprising that you would defend this, though, given that the political Left always seems perfectly happy with martial law and abuse of presidential power on principle so long as these deviancies empower the ideologues that they like and strip supposedly deplorable conservatives of their political voice.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Yes.
https://www.latimes.com./business/story/2020-01-16/trump-fed-nominations

I don't see how the President of the United State is supposed to just leave the Federal Reserve Board vacant. As much as I deplore that institution's existence, it is here and probably here to stay.

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MrKapowski posted...

Tagging you isn't exactly "keeping track" lol

Its impressive how dedicated you are to your gimmick.

I'm sorry that it triggers you so much to see your shit cult leader get criticized for his idiocy

the trump defenders are starting to pull out the stops as you can see itt

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Took them long enough lol

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Resaix posted...

I'm sorry that it triggers you so much to see your shit cult leader get criticized for his idiocy

You're projecting lol

PS I didn't vote for Trump

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MrKapowski posted...

You're projecting lol

PS I didn't vote for Trump

anyone who calls him out for all his shitposts being about Trump is instantly labeled a trump supporter in his eyes, its hilarious

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SolaFide posted...

This is completely absurd. They were arrested for participating in violent riots, not for writing a press article criticizing the president. This also took place before Trump even got into the Oval Office, so it can hardly be blamed on him. This is a far cry from John Adams throwing people in jail for publishing newspapers that criticized his handling of the French and American crisis, or Wilson throwing Marxist essayists into jail for opposing World War I.

Yeah. Riots. That's what the Federalists were saying too shortly before they never won an election again and the party went extinct.

SolaFide posted...

Trump is much more of a non-interventionist than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush were. While he has still done a lot of things in foreign policy that I disagree with, it is hypocritical to attack him and give preceding presidents a pass.

You're talking about the guy who assassinated an Iranian general on a peace mission to Iraq in a strike that was called both pre-emptive and retaliatory, and comparing him to the guy who killed Osama bin Laden.

SolaFide posted...

I wouldn't deny that those arrests are injustices. I do find it interesting, though, that the political Left seems to be very concerned about this federal bureaucracy's proneness to inefficiency and abuse at the same time that they seek to expand virtually every other federal bureaucracy that exists today.

And I'm concerned that you're not actually concerned and/or lack the ability to distinguish between expanded social entitlements versus expanded incarceration authority.

SolaFide posted...

Ulysses S. Grant instituted martial law in South Carolina because he didn't like the fact that the voters were not likely to vote for the Republican candidates that he liked.

I'm just going to stop you right here and say he instituted martial law in 9 counties, not the whole state, and it was to squash KKK led organized violence, not elections. He did take a separate measure to stop Georgia from seceding again which is what I thought you were talking about. You are essentially just wrong in both scenarios regarding Grant's alleged abuse of powers.

SolaFide posted...

I don't see how the President of the United State is supposed to just leave the Federal Reserve Board vacant. As much as I deplore that institution's existence, it is here and probably here to stay.

There's a difference between appointing bipartisan qualified professionals and your personal yes men.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

I'm just going to stop you right here and say he instituted martial law in 9 counties, not the whole state, and it was to squash KKK led organized violence, not elections. He did take a separate measure to stop Georgia from seceding again which is what I thought you were talking about. You are essentially just wrong in both scenarios regarding Grant's alleged abuse of powers.

I didn't say it was the whole state of South Carolina, I said that he instituted martial law 'in' South Carolina. I can understand why you misunderstood, though, given the unintentionally ambiguous language. And no, you are incorrect. Philip Leigh's Ulysses S. Grant's Failed Presidency shows beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that all of Grant's supposedly philanthropic interventions in the South were about advancing the Republican Party's electoral prospects, not about justice for the freedmen. This is the only way to explain how this supposedly enlightened, progressive president who was oh-so-concerned about the rights of black Americans committed heinous injustices against the Native Americans using military force that make Andrew Jackson open-minded and also singled out the Chinese for discrimination with the Page Act of 1975. He was not at all racially enlightened, as much as his apologists try to prop him. It makes sense why modern day Leftists like him, though, since he is a kindred spirit with the modern Left in his support for oligarchy, corruption, and activist government. The heinous blend of corporatism and big government that we wrongfully call "capitalism" today began, for all intents and purposes, with the Grant administration. If Trump has indulged this system in important ways, it is at the very least not of a system of his own creation, so it is ridiculous to pretend that he can be called the "worst president ever."

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Why are y'all arguing with someone who doesn't know what a leftist even is lol

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Blue_Dream87 posted...

Why are y'all arguing with someone who doesn't know what a leftist even is lol

Or whose username is about being forgiven for misdeeds by God and not by being a good person

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SolaFide posted...

Of course I do. Though I still enjoy reading and learning from various historians on all sides of the political spectrum, the historical academic establishment is almost monolithically progressive. The primary ideological dispute going on in historical scholarship is between New Left Marxian historians like the late Howard Zinn and more traditional New Deal progressives like H.W. Brands, Peter Onuf, and David McCullough. Historians often do a fairly good job of recounting the basic "facts" about the events that took place, but their metric for great presidential statesmanship tends to be something like: "how much did this president transform America and alter the course of the nation's life?" I reject as specious their basically liberal premise that the job of the president is to transform society, so it is no surprise that I assess someone like FDR much more negatively than the historical establishment does, even if I agree with them that he did, in fact, transform America in radical ways.

Additionally, I am a political scientist and not a historian, so it is not at all shocking that I disagree with the evaluation of the historians on American presidential history. Historians often focus so much on context and circumstances that they downplay or ignore the fundamental duties that a constitutional officeholder is meant to pursue: namely, to carry out his oath of office by defending, preserving, and protecting the American Constitution. They also tend to neglect any scrupulous examination of the political thought and principles that motivated the presidents to do what they did, preferring instead to focus on how they used their circumstances to expand executive power. The ones who did this, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, are routinely considered to be "great" presidents, even though it is quite clear that most if not all of the people who ratified the Constitution would have been quite dismayed at their administrations. While I certainly believe that we need to pay a lot of attention to context, I think we are fundamentally missing something about people like Woodrow Wilson and FDR if we don't turn our attention to the bizarre combination of Hamiltonian liberalism and Hegelian progressivism that influenced them to act in the ways they did. Historians don't seem to have any concern about this, whereas Ias a political theoristam very interested in this dimension of their leadership.

Lastly, I think we are lying to ourselves if we believe that these "presidential rankings" are actually objective gauges of a president's legacy. What metric are they using to measure a president's effectiveness? It certainly doesn't seem to be the amount of dutifulness that a president showed in carrying out his oath of office to defend and protect the United States Constitution. If it was, Grover Cleveland and John Tyler would be ranked much higher than petty tyrants like Ulysses S. Grant, FDR, and LBJ. Presidential rankings today of the sort put out by clowns like Max Boot and most of the people in this thread seem to be based upon the nebulous standard of "does the guy advance the progressive policies that I want him to" rather than anything truly objective or quantifiable.

What I'm saying is that if a majority of people in the field disagree with you, it might have more to do with the subjective choice of metrics that either side is choosing rather than an improper objective analysis once those metrics are chosen.


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https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1247291955123335169


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SolaFide posted...

To your initial point: it does change everything. Neoconservatism is inimical to traditional conservatism, for reasons that Boot himself admitted. He is just as interested in carrying out liberal social transformation using the federal government as any liberal is. In fact, the old, New Deal liberals like Harry Truman are much closer to the neoconservatives than they are to people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders (note how neocons often praise Truman and LBJ's foreign policies today, whereas New Left-informed people attack their legacies). The old New Deal liberals believed in an activist federal government, but they at least claimed to reject socialism and believed that America's moral values and inherited customs were essentially decent. Both Truman and FDR, for instance, had no problem with appealing to the traditional, Puritan imagery of America as a Christian nation to advance the nation's foreign policy agenda and give the country a sense of mission and purpose in the face of Nazi and Communist threats. The New Left, in contrast, believes the whole American political tradition to be basically evil, suggests that any universal claim to moral truth is nebulous, and sides with regimes that New Deal liberals and conservatives alike saw as inimical to traditional American values (first, the Soviet Union; today, third-world, Marxist regimes like Venezuela and Cuba). People like Max Boot simply believe that the old Progressive liberalism is better than New Leftism is.

Boot, like Truman and LBJ, is a Cold War liberal who believes that the federal government is the best means of promoting the spread of universal democracy. At the level of foreign policy, this means the expansion of American military power all over the world to promote "democracy." At the level of domestic policy, this means that he supports the "proper" management of the federal welfare state and administrative regulations. Boot doesn't call for the rollback of these institutions but calls instead for better management of them. Neoconservatism and Cold War Liberalism alike are, of course, completely at odds with traditionalist conservatism, which rejects the Messianic state, political universalism, and, often times, the very idea that liberal democracy is even valuable.

Did you notice the adulation that the late John McCain and George W. Bush, both of whom were premier examples of neoconservatism, received from the progressives in the Media ever since Donald Trump took office? Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have looked back on Bush and McCain with misguided nostalgia for the good old days of a more "reasonable" form of conservatism (i.e., diet-liberalism) than that which Trump and his acolytes support. This is because there is at least a degree of intellectual kinship between neoconservatism and progressivism, whereas both are opposed to the populist conservatism of Trump's movement.

I've always made a bit of a distinction between the Fusionists, Chicago Schoolers, and Neocons for the longest time despite their strong similarities due in part to critiques by the former two, who perceived Neocons as being far more gung-ho and idealistic with respect to interventionism abroad towards the ends of "promoting democracy."

It seems the Fusionists and Chicago Schoolers advocated for it just to the extent of preventing the spread of Communism and Socialism (particularly during the Cold War), but I suppose you're right as they'll generally go along with and even defend Neoconservative foreign policy once things are actually in motion.

I've also historically made a distinction between Third Way Democrats and Neoconservatives (the former traditionally posing as less interventionist, Clinton aside), generally attributing their recent friendliness to their mutual hatred of their respective parties' dissident wings due to the threat posed to their power and that of their cronies, but it's not implausible that past disagreements have just been manifestations of divide and conquer politics by the same power complex, for lack of better words. The similarities are certainly overwhelming.

Tracing Neoconsevatism back to the dawn of the cold war (rather than disillusioned Trotsky supporters in the 1960s as I usually have) provides for an interesting premise I've occasionally stumbled across: that Neoconservatives, Fusionists, Chicago Schoolers, the Cold War Establishment, Third Way Democrats are all intrinsically modern manifestations of what some refer to as revolutionary liberalism - the belief that democracy should be spread around the world, whether by force or more clandestine means.

All are certainly at odds with the tenets of (anti New Deal) American Conservatism before the strains of the 1960s supplanted it, and a far cry from the conservatisms which predated it, particularly Jeffersonianism.

I'm tempted to muse about Trump having an influence on the direction/evolution of Paleoconservatism within the context of modern American politics, but he seems torn between that, populist tendencies, Neoconservative political interests, and corporate economic interests. Too many variables, too sleepy to comment on.

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Turbam posted...

In modern history or all history?

Jefferson > *

Worse than Nixon is a hell of a stretch, though.

SolaFide posted...

No, he is. The quote that I just posted from him explicitly admits that he believes in every significant, progressive and egalitarian policy imaginable, including marriage equality, federal intervention to stop climate change, unrestricted abortion rights, mass immigration, and free trade absolutism. None of these policies are associated with historic American conservatism, as expressed by people like Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft. Boot and other neoconservative thinkers have much more in common with FDR, LBJ and Obama than anyone in the history of American conservatism.

Why the scare quotes?
If you think someone can't uphold conservative values without believing in marriage equality or climate change in 2020, that's more telling of your own beliefs.

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Andrew Jackson is still the fucking worst.

I want to remind you guys that this fellow said Calvin Coolidge was worth voting for

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