When will we stop worrying about the superficial characteristics of our candidates for POTUS, VPOTUS, and SCOTUS?
Do you think that 44/45 presidents where white men because they happened to be the best people for the job?
Given that educational opportunities were restricted to white men for the vast majority of that period, and men are generally more ambitious and it has virtually always been the case that white people in America have been the richest group, virtually assuredly so, right?
Not sure that's true so much as it's true that women who are ambitious tend to get portrayed in a more negative light.This is the kind of thing that's 'on average' like height, where there's definitely substantial overlap in the distribution.
Also your post in general is wrong. Many of those presidents were terrible. There is not a doubt in my mind that there were random citizens, male and female, of all races who were better for the job than some of them even at the same time.
Like do you seriously think Frederick Douglass or Susan B. Anthony would not have been a better president than Andrew Johnson for example?
On the one hand, no, but on the other hand I'm not sure that great advocates and activists necessarily make for
the greatest leaders; throughout the entire period I think most of the leading enterprises were generally also run by white men. (Like, would Frederick Douglass or Susan B. Anthony have been better than Andrew Johnson? Yes. But would Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller have been better than Frederick Douglass or Susan B. Anthony?)
I think what we're discussing here kinda just comes down to 'democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others'. You really can't trust ordinary people to consistently elect good leaders, and yet every other method that has ever been used has been so many orders of magnitude worse that at this point anti-democratic perspectives can be reflexively dismissed. (In addition to being literally true, this also works as a metaphor for other things, incidentally.)
I agree that for almost any particular President who was a white man, it would be possible to find a woman or non-white man who would've done the job better; for some of them, like Andrew Johnson, it would've been facile. But I think statistically, because of educational outcomes and business records, probably the vast majority of the abstract 'best' choices would've been white men.
