Atlas ranks the presidents -- week 9 (WORST OF THE WORST)

[OSR stands with Israel]

Im only going to do this from an objective perspective so:

1. Washington
2 Jefferson
3. Monroe
4. Madison
5. Jackson
6. Adam
7. Quincy Adams
8. Van Buren

[OSR stands with Israel]

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. James Polk

The list gets bad from here

3. Zachary Taylor
4. Ulysses S Grant (his 2nd term literally undermined all his accomplishments of the first)
5. William Henry Harrison

The list gets record breaking bad from here

6. John Tyler
7. Millard Fillmore
8. Andrew Johnson
9. Franklin Pierce
10. James Buchanan

[OSR stands with Israel]

As a slight aside, I strongly recommend the History Channel's Ultimate Guide to the Presidents that I mentioned earlier.  All of the episodes through Woodrow Wilson are on YouTube for free, and that only requires you to purchase three more ... they were $1.99 each on Amazon, so I of course did.

I had already seen it before, but it's easily the best documentary I have seen on the Presidents.  Instead of sharing random trivia about them or giving an overly moralizing narrative that is void of historical context, it really tries to look at how each man shaped the office for better and for worse.  I came away with different perspectives on a few different Presidencies:

Better Than Before: James Madison, Andrew Johnson, John F. Kennedy
Worse Than Before: John Tyler, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover (who I actually really like, lol)

(My opinion of Buchanan also went even further down of Buchanan, but I already usually rank him last...)

P.S.  For those who have browsed the threads about "party continuity" (i.e., the subject of how the bizarre myth of the two parties "switching" is really ridiculous), the documentary actually does a great job of showing that EVEN if you maintain that the GOP during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras HAD to be a more "liberal" party than the Democrats on the basis of the slavery issue alone (I reject this, but I also digress), there really is no scholarly argument that the GOP isn't clearly the more right wing party post-1876.  Okay, I'll stop spamming now.

I agree with you post-1876 for the most part, though there’s a reason Teddy left to form the “progressive” party. In reality both parties had liberal and conservative wings for most of their history, so it’s an oversimplification to say that either one definitively was THE right or left party at almost any given time in history. And during the Civil War and for the most part Reconstruction, the GOP was the overall more left party. This isn’t really up for much debate. I mean, Marx wrote a letter to Lincoln praising them.

Anyway, if we’re talking documentary recommendations, for the modern era PBS has an extensive documentary covering the life of every US President from FDR to W. Bush, with the exception of Ford, as part of their “American Experience” series. I’ve watched them all, and all are good. The Truman documentary combined with the McCullough biography of him is one of the big reasons I became such a Truman fan. The HW doc also boosted my opinion of him.

I think they have some entries for earlier presidents too but I haven’t watched those.

I think a better way to classify the parties rather than switched left or right is to classify the Republicans as the Pro Industry party with Democrats being the party opposed to the interests of industry .


So in the 19th century that meant the Democrats were the party of Agrarian as that was the main opposition to Industrial interests

in the 20th century, it was Labor as Labor were more or less the strongest opponents of industrial interests

in the 21st century it is tech as tech as been the main opponents of industrial interests


Once you look it at this way and not the left vs right way the directions the parties have taken no longer become surprising in any way

[OSR stands with Israel]

1. Teddy Roosevelt
2. William McKinley
3. Grover Cleveland
4. James Garfield
5. Chester Arthur
6. Benjamin Harrison
7. William Howard Taft
8. Rutherford Hayes

[OSR stands with Israel]

1. FDR
2. Truman
3. Eisenhower
4. Coolidge
5. JFK
6. Wilson
7. LBJ
8. Harding
9. Hoover

[OSR stands with Israel]

I've always found Hoover really interesting because he's probably the best test case for "what if we just made a ruthless, apolitical businessman president."

Unlike Trump, who was never really a ruthless businessman so much as an aggressive con artist with a crack legal team, Hoover was undeniably extremely successful in his private sector endeavors.  He was able to figure out solutions to extremely complicated problems, manage huge bureaucracies, innovate and execute.  And based on his performance after World War I, he seemed for all the world like a guy who could use those skills for benevolent, humanitarian purposes.

But Hoover really illustrated how that kind of Tony Stark figure just doesn't work as an American president.  There is no benevolent dictator here.  There is no "one guy who makes decisions and everyone else goes along."  You have to convince people.  You have to sell your ideas.  You have to work together to find compromise.  You have to take Congress's input and ideas into account.  And Hoover was completely incapable of doing those things.  He was a grumpy asshole who was used to ruling by fiat.  I'm the genius, I come up with ideas, the rest of you fall in line and do what I say, and everything will work out great.  The history books tell us how that turned out.

Also the whole Hoover just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and there wasnt much he could do is bs. His policies literally made things much worse


1. During the banking crises of 1930 he did nothing and let the banks fail which is really made it a depression instead of just another recession

Compared to the decline of roughly one-third in the quantity of
money from late 1930 to early 1933, the decline in the quantity
of money up to October 1930 seems mild—a mere 2.6 percent

http://www.proglocode.unam.mx/sites/proglocode.unam.mx/files/docencia/Milton%20y%20Rose%20Friedman%20-%20Free%20to%20Choose.pdf

2. He appoint hard money guys to the fed particularly Eugene Meyer so the whole blame people give to the Fed for the Depression, well Hoover appointed people like Eugene Meyer who helped cause the catastrophe

3. He signed Smoot Hawley which reduced American imports and exports by 67%!


In many ways the initial crash in 2008 was worse than 1929: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-2008-crisis-great-depression-analysis-20180915-story.html

https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/27/news/economy/ben-bernanke-great-depression/index.html


Its just that the actions the US Government took during the initial phases in September 2008 is what prevented from it becoming another depression.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I am not gonna rank trump as his presidency is yet not over So I’ll do Nixon through Obama

1. Reagan
2. HW Bush
3. Clinton
4. Nixon
5. Obama
6. Ford
7. W Bush
8. Carter

[OSR stands with Israel]

I really don't understand how, after recent events, people still think W. Bush is worse than Trump

We don’t yet know what the state of the nation will be when Trump leaves office though . I don’t even think he should be ranked given we don’t even know that

[OSR stands with Israel]

Lol I don’t know how from an objective point of view Carter can be ranked in the top half , doing so is as partisan as republicans rankling Hoover , W Bush or Trump in the top half of their lists .


Same with Reagan I don’t know how objectively he can count in the bottom half lol , doing so is again as lol if Republicans did that with FDR (which I tend to criticize them for too ).


These lists should not be done on how much you agree with what they did but how effective they were as presidents and the problem with Atlas on this(for both sides) is they tend to rank on ideological agreement with a president or whether or How they liked a presidency rather than how effective they are .