The ‘Greatness’ Gimmick

Hi,

Hopefully most of you have finished cleaning up after your Presidents’ Day festivities. I still have my lights up and I really need to hose off the sacrificial altar. But my wife isn’t home for a few days so I have time. 

A minor ritual of Presidents’ Day—not as consistently observed as the more familiar dances and feats—is the release of a ranking of presidents in terms of their “greatness.” 

I promise not to dwell too long on the actual list released this week, mostly out of respect for your hangovers. But I do want to make a broader point about scientism, pseudo-social-science, or what might be better described as “scienciness.” (This is a play on “truthiness” in case the weird appearance of “scienciness” throws you off.).

As one guy at the annual Presidents’ Day costume orgy said, “Let’s start with James K. Polk.” 

I can make a very strong case that he was one of our greatest presidents. Polk promised to run for one term and kept his promise. I could almost stop there. But as a candidate he made four big promises:

1. Restore the Independent Treasury system, which had been dismantled by the Whigs. 
2. Reduce tariffs. 
3. Acquire the Oregon territory (“54°40’ or fight!” wasn’t his slogan, but it was written on his heart).  
4. He promised to yoink—a term I long thought came from Scooby Doo, but was actually minted by The Simpsons—California and New Mexico from the Mexicans. 

He accomplished all of these things.

Now, some of these things—particularly the yoinkage of California and New Mexico—had serious downsides. The Mexican-American War, critics contend, hastened the onset of the Civil War. Other critics no doubt have problems with the settler colonialism. But give the man his due: He added more territory to the United States, through both war and diplomacy, than any president, the equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase and Seward’s “Folly” combined. He also did things that warm the cockles of a traditional conservative’s heart. He believed that internal improvements (i.e. infrastructure) was a responsibility of the states, so he vetoed the 1846 Rivers and Harbors Bill on the grounds it was unconstitutional. He was bad on slavery—after all, he was a Democrat and protégé of Andrew Jackson—though he did provide for his slaves to be freed upon his and his wife’s deaths.

Anyway, victorious in war and diplomacy, promises made, promises kept, including his own vow to honor a term limit. All in all, objectively speaking a pretty successful presidency. 

And the latest ranking of presidential “overall greatness” ranks him at 25, 11 points behind Joe Biden and 10 behind Woodrow Wilson.

Now, in truth I’m not a huge Polk fanboy. I think the critics have good points. But I think I am on fairly solid ground when I say that, as an objective matter, Polk was a better president than Biden and probably a dozen other better-ranked presidents. Obviously, because I loathe Woodrow Wilson, I’m inclined to say he was better than Wilson, too. But here’s the thing, my reasons for hating Wilson are very subjective. 

I think Wilson was a bad man. More importantly, I think he was wrong about a great many things and that he implemented that wrongness in profoundly damaging ways for America. (Folks who have been clamoring for me to respond to David Frum’s apologia for Wilson will have to wait for very good reasons I’ll explain another time.) But the same reasons I despise Wilson also point to defensible reasons to define him as a “great” president. 

Grating greatness.

Part of the problem is “great” is one of those annoying words that people think, for understandable reasons, is a compliment. Something similar has happened with the word “awesome.” It originally meant to be “filled with awe” which usually meant to be overcome with fear or dread. An “awesome Twinkie” in the 17th century would be something like the giant hypothetical psycho-kinetic energy Twinkie described in Ghostbusters. An “awesome Twinkie” today would mean an especially good Twinkie (which is kind of funny because Twinkies—much like Pringles, wheat, and plutonium—really don’t lend themselves to such superlatives. As Milton Friedman said, “Twinkies are fungible goods.”) 

It’s analogous to the perennially idiotic debates about Time’s “Person of the Year.” Pundits—including me from time to time—have excoriated the gimmick not only as a pseudo-event, but an increasingly dumb one. Back when it started as the now-impermissibly gendered Man of the Year, it used to have some objective criteria that allowed it to designate some truly terrible people as Man of the Year. It went to the person who had the most influence on events of the year, for good or ill. Hence, Hitler, Stalin (twice), Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Vladimir Putin all graced the cover.  

But because our culture has embraced the idea that all publicity is good publicity, the editors have opted to use the gimmick as a way to opine rather than describe.  In a civilizationally confident society, we wouldn’t replace “leader” for “influencer.” 

I think the transformation happened in 2001. Going by the old standard, Osama bin Laden clearly should have been Person of the Year, but they gave it to Rudy Giuliani instead. Today, it basically means whatever the editors want it to mean, and often what they want it to mean is remarkably stupid. If you were around in 2006 and were dorking around on the Internet, you were Time’s Person of the Year. 

So, if you define great as “consequential” you can make the case that Wilson was a great president, even if you think that he was consequentially crappy. For instance, these new rankings place FDR as the second greatest president. I think putting him above Washington is gross, but putting him near the top doesn’t bother me, even though much of his presidency-for-life bothers me a great deal. 

Rank rankings and real rankings.

There are two kinds of rankings. We can call them subjective and objective, but it’s important to keep in mind it’s a spectrum, not an either/or binary thing. Some rankings are purely objective. A list of the tallest mountains in the world doesn’t lend itself to too much chicanery. But even here there’s room to play games. I always chuckle when Hawaiians boast that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world. It’s true, of course—if you measure from base to peak. But a third of Mauna Kea is below the ocean’s surface. If you start on land and climb to the top, you can say you climbed the world’s tallest mountain. But, come on. It’s sort of like getting off the elevator just below the top of the Empire State building and then claiming you climbed to the top. 

But you get what I mean. Lists of tallest buildings, richest countries, fastest land animals, highest scoring athletes, etc. are basically objective, even if sometimes some asterisks might be involved. 

Subjective rankings flip the ratio around. A purely subjective ranking would be something like my list of best Women’s Prison Movies (Chained Heat 2 baby!) or Steve Hayes’ ranking of best chicken wings. 

But many subjective rankings include objective criteria. Rankings of the best boxers or baseball players, for instance, are fun to argue about precisely because opinions differ about how you weigh your criteria, but you have to have some objective criteria to be taken seriously.

This is how presidential rankings have always worked. As political scientist Joe Uscinski has documented, they’ve always been riddled with bias. Some of the biases are partisan or ideological. Presidents who expanded the role of government routinely score better than presidents who don’t. Another bias is presentism. Recent presidents do much better. It’s sort of like the “in memoriam” video near the end of the Oscars every year. The applause for actors and directors the audience knows or remembers is more intense than for people who haven’t been famous for 40 years.  

And you know what? That’s okay. I mean, it can be annoying. But it’s normal. 

What’s more problematic is the way these rankings are packaged and popularized. Which brings me to the scienciness.  

These rankings tell us almost nothing interesting about the presidents they rank, but they tell us a lot about the rankers. In other words, flip the telescope around and you can learn a lot about what the “experts” value at any given moment, but very little about the inherent value of the presidents being ranked.  

If these lists just measured consequence, it would be ludicrous to put Donald Trump dead last. Trump was a very consequential president. His Supreme Court appointments alone are a testament to that. How you—or political scientists—weigh those consequences says a lot about you, but very little about him.

And that’s why I hate the pretense of these rankings. The academics who participate— and much more so the publicists who foist this stuff on us with the help of a pliant media—want to pretend that these are using objective criteria, that there’s something borderline scientific and certainly something manifestly authoritative about the results. From the “Presidential Greatness” “white paper”: 

The results of this ranking are quite similar to the results from our previous surveys (released in 2015 and 2018): Abraham Lincoln again tops the list (95.03 average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8), and Dwight Eisenhower (73.73). The most notable changes in this ordering are Franklin Delano Roosevelt moving up to #2 from the third spot last year, and Dwight Eisenhower falling back to #8 from #6 last year. The bottom of the rankings is also relatively stable. Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and Warren Harding (27.76).

Look at all those decimal points! We all know that decimal points = science!

But this is a poll. Serious people understand that polls do not measure good and bad so much as popular and unpopular. And while in this era a lot of people think popular and good are synonyms, these people are simply wrong. In other words, these rankings are a way to avoid making an argument by hiding behind numbers and pretending that the people generating the numbers aren’t simply expressing opinions.

When they say that Obama scored a 73.8 and Eisenhower a 73.73, it says absolutely nothing about Obama or Eisenhower. What it tells you is that a couple political scientists, perhaps with Coexist bumper stickers on their beaten-up Priuses, liked Barack Obama—for whatever reason—slightly more than Eisenhower. Just because their opinions get folded into an average doesn’t make them any more correct—or incorrect. The organizers asked 525 political scientists to participate and 154 submitted “usable responses.” So basically, if some guy named Ted or some gal named Felicia hadn’t forgotten to mail in their responses or hadn’t spilled coffee on the questionnaire, Ike might not have been edged out by Barry. The plural of opinions doesn’t fact make. 

Again, that doesn’t mean this stuff is useless. It’s just useless at forming serious opinions about presidents. It’s actually somewhat useful for forming opinions about the experts who were polled (and my opinion of these experts isn’t improved by the results). Think of it this way. A recent RMG poll found that “elites” (debatably defined) are twice as hostile to individual freedom as the average American. That’s potentially a really interesting insight into elites—and average Americans—but it says bupkis about the importance of individual freedom. 

Similarly, if at CPAC they have a poll of attendees, the results will tell us something interesting about what CPAC attendees think about Donald Trump or Ukraine or whatever. It will not impact my opinion whatsoever about Trump, Ukraine, or anything else—save my view of the people who participated. 

What bothers me about this sort of thing is the way so many news outlets report the findings but then bury the lede. Rather than report on the latest research revealing the biases of a narrow slice of academia, we’re supposed to talk about what these findings say about the presidents themselves. If they polled the same group of academics on the issue of abortion or Israel or tenure, few serious people would change their minds about abortion, Israel, or tenure. But we might change our minds about academics. 

Garbage in, garbage out.

This isn’t just a problem with presidential rankings. The loss of faith and trust in institutions is a complex phenomena with many causes. But one of them is that people increasingly recognize that “experts” use their authority to peddle personal preferences, or professional self-interest, as if they are scientific judgments. We saw this from many public health experts during COVID and the distrust they fomented borders on the criminal. Declining vaccination rates for measles and other diseases costs lives. We can debate climate change another time, but as a basic observation, the belief that climate experts have agendas beyond fighting climate change is, at minimum, a problem for climate science. 

You may recall I despise the “Doomsday Clock” for similar reasons. The Doomsday Clock has always been a PR stunt masquerading as a science-y enterprise. But at least its creators admit, when pressed, that it’s just a metaphor, knowing full well that the press will sell it as something else for them. 

In my underrated second book, I wrote a lot about the World Health Organization’s World Health Report 2000 that ranked the U.S. health care system 37th in “overall performance.” Barack Obama and friendly pundits eager to push Obamacare used the report as scientific “proof” that Republicans were idiots for insisting we had the best health care system in the world. The problem is that the report put enormous weight not on things like health outcomes, life expectancy, etc., but on things like “financial fairness.” Indeed, “financial fairness” amounted to 25 percent of a nation’s score. Other criteria were heavily weighted to questions of “distribution” of resources, with a heavy bias toward single-payer systems. Indeed, much of the study wasn’t even a “study” but a poll of “key informants”—a plurality of whom were WHO bureaucrats. It’s interesting that public health bureaucrats are biased in favor of socialized medicine. But that’s not a slam dunk argument for socialized medicine. 

In short—okay it’s too late for me to use that phrase. In conclusion, secular societies may not be governed by organized religion, but they are at least partially governed by secular priests, by people who claim authority based upon their specialized knowledge and institutional status. I want to be clear: This is unavoidable. Advanced civilizations are advanced because of the division of labor. Experts are not only inevitable; they are essential. But experts who abuse or misuse their status are a problem. It’s a form of secular priestcraft. 

In a healthy society, specialists are supposed to be a check on other specialists. Journalists are specialists. They are supposed to bring skepticism to the pronouncements of other specialists—climate scientists, political scientists, public health officials, college presidents, etc. But a lot of journalists are products of the same institutions of the experts they cover, and so long as those experts confirm what the journalists already believe, they often leave their skepticism at the door. Experts who say things the journalists don’t want to hear get grilled on their funding and biases. Such grilling is great, but not if it’s only deployed against those you disagree with.