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Worst American Presidents

On June 9, 2011

At 5:46 pm

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The most prominent politician posts have led to some discussions of the worst American presidents. I have Buchanan at the bottom. Scott finds Andrew Johnson even more detestable. I think that in lieu of a state list tonight, I want to produce a worst presidents list.

I also want to be clear that presidents are being judged strictly for their time in office. What they do before or after is irrelevant.

1. James Buchanan. Scott makes a powerful argument for Johnson. I’m going to stick with Buchanan though, as much for the sake of argument as anything else. When the nation is literally collapsing around you and your response is to let the next guy handle it, well, that’s pretty loathsome. Buchanan was a bad president all around, a northerner completely under the thumb of the Southern slave power (see the Lecompton Constitution for one piece of evidence). But it’s for his response to succession that he gets the title of worst president.

2. Andrew Johnson. I’ve long had Pierce here. But Scott’s convinced me at least this far. Johnson did have a wide range of actions he could have taken. He chose the worse. Without good reason, I’ve always been a little less harsh on him than Buchanan or Pierce because no one elected him president. So some of the blame falls on Lincoln and his endless obsession with luring supposed loyal white southerners back into the Union. This might have been Lincoln’s greatest weakness and one wonders how harshly he would have treated the white South after the war. But he couldn’t have done a worse job than Johnson. That would be impossible.

3. Franklin Pierce. The Kansas-Nebraska Act. Enough said. Weak and worthless.

4. Richard Nixon. People always say that Nixon signed all this good legislation, etc. And that’s true, even though he didn’t want to do any of it. But for permanently changing how Americans see the presidency and politicians in general, he deserves out loathing. Take out Vietnam and Cambodia and he still belongs here.

5. John Tyler. Tyler got some discussion in the comment threads about worst president. I put him here not because he committed treason in 1861, but because he did more than anyone in the 1840s to move this nation toward Civil War. Seeing that he had no chance of being nominated by the Democrats or the Whigs in 1844, he decided to throw his horse fully behind John C. Calhoun and southern extremism, hoping to build support that way. He named Calhoun as Secretary of State, leading to the Pakenham Letter and extreme embarrassment for non-slaveholding Americans. His aggressive moves to annex Texas furthered northern belief in a southern slaveholding conspiracy. Awful.

6. George W. Bush. It drove me nuts during the Bush Administration when people routinely called Bush the worst president ever. He is very, very bad. We can pray he’ll be the worst of the 21st century. Torture, disastrous economic policies, Iraq, etc., are all good reasons for him to be at the bottom of the list. And honestly, if the economy continues to plummet, Bush’s reputation may actually go even lower. But for all of this, he’s clearly not as bad as Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce. You could arguably put him 4th and I wouldn’t complain.

7. Warren Harding. Tolerated tremendous amounts of corruption, a total non-entity of a leader. Essentially worthless. The people who work at the Warren Harding home disputed this characterization of him when I visited there, pointing to various treaties and his collection of fraternal hats and bicycles. It was very exciting.

8. Herbert Hoover. In some ways I feel bad for Hoover. A better man than Harding or Coolidge in almost every way, at a different time he might have made a good president. But he was a disaster for the Great Depression. Unable to comprehend that the government had a role to play in fighting the Depression, he let the country reach its lowest point since the Civil War. He was also a nasty, nasty racist, but I guess that shouldn’t matter here. Also, signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

9. Calvin Coolidge–generally a bad person in almost all areas. Vetoed the Bonus Act to give World War I vets a pension (later immortalized in the Bonus Army). Supported the immigration restrictions that led to the Immigration Act of 1924. Opposed the entire Progressive Era legislative package, which he had fought as Governor of Massachusetts and which he did nothing to promote during his years in office. Vastly reduced taxes on rich people. His only redeeming quality was that he was generally less openly racist than many politicians of the time, disliking the complete exclusion of the Japanese in the Immigration Act (not that this stopped him from signing it) and promoting citizenship for Native Americans.

And a curveball for #10.

10. James Madison. The War of 1812 was so incredibly stupid that Madison deserves this spot. The war nearly cost the nation its existence. A great man. A bad president.

One could make an argument for Jefferson in this spot as well, as the Embargo was arguably the single worst foreign policy mistake in American history. And he nearly botched the Louisiana Purchase, the easiest call in American foreign policy history.

I really wanted to put Reagan on here. But I can’t help but give the bastard credit for not listening to the crazies in his administration and talking to Gorbachev. For everything else, he’s awful. For being realistic about what he could do with the Soviet Union despite his rhetoric, I suppose Grandpa Caligula deserves a touch of credit.

I also think Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore both suck. And of course Hayes, Cleveland, Harrison, and most of the other Gilded Age presidents are somewhere between bad and very bad. Arguments could be made for Cleveland and Hayes particularly.

As you can probably tell, I would argue that most of our presidents have been mediocre or worse. How the nation succeeded despite the often terrible leadership at the top is for another post.

presidents

DivGuy

Where’s Andrew Jackson? Genocide’s gotta get you into the top ten.
- Aaron
  
  Yes, what about Andrew “Fuck the Natives” Jackson?
- Erik Loomis
  
  It’s complicated.
  
  As far as Indian Removal goes–we need to make one thing clear. There was no conceivable way the Cherokees were staying in Georgia. It was either Jackson gets rid of them or the white settlers of Georgia slaughter them. There really wasn’t another realistic option.
  
  Genocide is not perpetrated by a single individual, no matter how powerful. The difference in my mind between Jackson with Indian Removal and the mid-19th century presidents with slavery and African-Americans is that there were many other paths for those guys to take.
  
  Jackson was a bastard, no question. But he also represented what was essentially a bipartisan supermajority of whites who wanted the Indians out. There were good people opposing this policy and they deserve to be commended. And Jackson deserves a ton of criticism. But within the realistic options of a president at the time, it was not unlike what I believe most presidents would have done.
  
  Of course, Jackson took more joy out of it than Van Buren, who was president when most of this actually went down.
  - DivGuy
    
    This seems like a way of reducing Jackson’s responsibility for genocide. There were other people who also bear responsibility for the genocide which Jackson, as president, ordered.
    
    But a president with merely qualified responsibility for genocide can’t be excluded from a list of worst presidents ever.
  - DrDick
    
    It really does not matter what other options he may have had, this was his preferred course as he clearly stated as early as his term as military governor of Florida. While I am not sure I am completely comfortable with calling Indian Removal genocide (definitely ethnic cleansing though), Jackson himself clearly was inclined in that direction and I am pretty sure he would have favored outright genocide to forced relocation if he thought it feasible. As someone who works with Southeastern Indians (and whose son is Cherokee), I would agree that he belongs on the list.
  - Nathanael
    
    It’s not the only evil thing Jackson did, though. His abolition of the Bank of the United States — while not replacing it with ANYTHING — though often praised in history books, resulted in more and nastier economic bubbles and busts than we would have had with a central bank (this is easy enough to check with historical economic statistics).
    
    In order to proceed with Indian Removal, Jackson defied a Supreme Court order, thus damaging the rule of law in the US permanently and irrevocably.
    
    And it gets worse! Jackson is famous for eliminating merit-based appointments, the tradition of the prior Presidents, in favor of the “spoils system” of patronage appointments of incompetent cronies — something which was never fully fixed, and only partially fixed with the establishment of the civil service after the assassination of Garfield, many many decades later! That is one of the most atrocious things he did, in my opinion, as the institutional corruption spread like a toxic fungus through the system and poisoned it for decades and decades afterwards.
  - joe from Lowell
    
    It was either Jackson gets rid of them or the white settlers of Georgia slaughter them.
    
    The government of Massachusetts shot Revolutionary War veterans in order to stop Shay’s Rebellion.
    
    Don’t tell me Old Hickory couldn’t have defended the Cherokee.
    - DrDick
      
      Not even close. When he was military governor of Florida, he wrote that he no longer saw the need to make treaties with the Indians as we now had the power to force them to do what we want. He strongly backed efforts of the states to annex Indian lands and openly advocated for it.
      - Erik Loomis
        
        This is all fine–but all I’m saying is that the most likely option other than removal was massacre. This doesn’t excuse Jackson. It only says that people tell too simplistic of narratives about one of the most horrible events in American history. Jackson was evil. So were the Georgia settlers. And most of the nation.
        
        The economic policies, well, not much excuse for those.
        
        Asteele
        
        Is anyone arguing they weren’t. 18-19th century America committed ethnic cleansing on dozens of peoples and nations.
        
        Bart
        
        And other species, e.g., the Bison.
        
        DrDick
        
        Oddly, previous presidents found other alternatives protecting the Indians in their lands and there is that whole infamous SCOTUS decision (Worchester v. Geprgia) on the subject which Jackson deliberately ignored. Pressure to annex Indian lands was not new and Georgia had aggressively been attempting to do so since the Washington administration.
        
        Erik Loomis
        
        To my knowledge, no president did anything to protect Indian lands before Jackson. It’s true that Jackson was more aggressive in his actions. More aggressive by far. And yes, he did ignore Worchester v. Georgia. But I cannot honestly think of a single incident in American history where the president and the military openly sided with Indians over white settlers and then enforced that with the barrel of a gun or the power of the law. Maybe I am missing something.
        
        DrDick
        
        Actually, most presidents from Washington to Jackson generally endorsed much more prudent policies toward the Indians. Beginning with the the Trade and Intercourse Acts, initially passed under Washington, they sought to limit conflicts with the Indians and protect them from abuse by US citizens (who required a federal permit to even pass through Indian lands). Washington looked to passively civilize and ultimately assimilate the Indians through what became known as the Civilization Policy which provided education and technological assistance to the tribes, which was also followed by his successors. This mostly reflected fears of the costs of an Indian war rather than actual beneficence, but the federal government constantly sought to curb the efforts of the states, particularly Georgia, to annex Indian lands. Jackson really was a complete shift from what had come before and reflects the emergence of an aggressive doctrine of Manifest Destiny. He also precipitated a constitutional crisis when he rejected the Supreme Court’s ruling I mentioned above (this is the decision referred to in the apocryphal story about him saying, “Mr. Justice Marshall has made his law, now let him enforce it.”).
shah8

Technically speaking, I believe GWB will be moving up the charts as the long-term aspects of his policies reveal themselves. He was pretty bad…For me, definitly number three, in the Andrew Johnson class, because he forclosed a tremendous array of better futures.
- Malaclypse
  
  I’m in this camp. In 1859, Buchanan was probably not obviously awful. I think the long-term damage of open torture will haunt this century. And just as the Gilded Age led to a whole lot of ugliness in the 1930s, I’m not certain that the worst of the Great Recession is behind us.
  - jonnybutter2
    
    I’m in this camp as well. Erik has Nixon below GWB because of the psychic damage Nixon did to the country (more or less). Think about how much of that kind of damage GWB did. He was our first post-modern president. He was also, in some ways, even more blithely cynical than Nixon, although I’m not sure ‘cynical’ is the precisely right word because cynicism is a polarized form of caring. GWB simply didn’t care. If liberal democracy is not just laws but also customs, institutions and shared culture, GWB and his Turd Blossom went out of their way to trash and shit on those extra legal components with a craftiness and zeal even Nixon didn ‘t match. George W. Bush was the personification of the seductiveness of oblivion – standing on the golden gate bridge and looking down, and being tempted to jump….
    
    If Hoover was an able man who makes the list because didn’t respond well to the big challenge he faced, what can you say about the opportunity costs of the GWB administration? Not only did Bush respond poorly (to put it mildly) to his challenges, but he made just about everything much worse – he was bad in ways you couldn’t have conceived beforehand. Of course he wasn’t an able or accomplished person and would’ve been bad whenever he served.
    
    I’d also say that comparing modern presidents to 19th century ones is almost apples-and-oranges. Bush is the worst modern president for so many reasons, but especially because there’s nothing redeeming about his administration. Even Nixon did some good things – going to China is the biggie. Many modern presidents did very bad and very good things, with LBJ being the apotheosis if this phemon.
    
    Where is Bush’s China Opening, Civil Rights Act, Egypt-Israeli pact, or anything remotely like them? What did Bush do that was good? I can think of two things, and I’m not sure how major they are: 1.) he made a decent speech after 9/11 (on the second try), and b.) he facilitated a settlement to the N/S Darfur war. Weigh those two things against all the fucking up and destruction to our institutions, and…I don’t think it’s a contest. Worse than Nixon, and worse than many of the others on the list.
    
    It’s the opportunity costs above all, as Shah8 says.
    - joe from Lowell
      
      What did Bush do that was good?
      
      He really did provide leadership to take the heat off of American Muslims after 9/11.
      - jonnybutter2
        
        That’s what I meant by ‘made a good speech’. I will give him that, but I wouldn’t compare it to the Voting Rights Act or its ilk.
        
        joe from Lowell
        
        Oh, good.
        
        Because, frankly, the speech wasn’t all that.
        
        I think the country was really eager to think they had a president who was on top of things, so they blew the speech all out of proportion.
        
        But you watch it today, and it’s a pretty pedestrian effort.
        
        jonnybutter2
        
        Yes, it was pedestrian, like the content of most speeches by most presidents. That it (Bush’s 2nd speech after 9/11) was not terrible (like his first speech after 9/11) and included what you cited is why it reassured people. I give him credit for exhorting people not to blame Arab Americans.
        
        What else?
      - Western Dave
        
        He was also tremendous on modern anti-slavery issues and deserves credit for that.
        
        jonnybutter2
        
        He was also tremendous on modern anti-slavery issues and deserves credit for that.
        
        I’m glad some human traffickers were put in jail because of that law, but the presidency is not an NGO. Like the Darfur war, this was constituent service; human trafficking was a pet issue for some evangelicals, and Bush responded. Doesn’t make those efforts bad, but I’m not crazy about the selectivity.
        
        My point is that his list of positive achievements from an office with that much power and influence – over 8 years – is tiny, while his list of enormous mistakes is so long that one’s eyes glaze over. Sorry. Not really apologizing, I’m just SORRY.
    - marc sobel
      
      How with this statement
      “Herbert Hoover. In some ways I feel bad for Hoover. A better man than Harding or Coolidge in almost every way, at a different time he might have made a good president. But he was a disaster for the Great Depression. Unable to comprehend that the government had a role to play in fighting the Depression, he let the country reach its lowest point since the Civil War.”
      
      can you make these veiled attacks on Obama, the Geithner Spokeperson
- Anonymous
  
  Technically speaking, I believe GWB will be moving up the charts as the long-term aspects of his policies reveal themselves.
  
  If, by 2100, we’re living in one of the less appealing plausible AGW futures, I could see looking back at the turn of the century as the decisive moment when we decided the screw the future. Bush, sweeping into office and unsigning Kyoto, will look very bad then. This won’t be entirely fair; given the US Congress it’s unclear any other possibility was possible. But not even trying will probably make Bush look worse than all the things we currently (and properly) loathe him for.
- Nathanael
  
  Global warming. Global warming. Global warming.
  
  We had a chance to deal with global warming and George W. Bush decided to make it worse instead.
  
  As long as there are future generations of humans, George W. Bush will go down as the worst President in human history for that, and that alone. The rest is just “evil added”.
Reality Check

A list that doesn’t include Jimmy “Malaise” Carter (inflation, Iran hostages, feckless leadership, nearly losing the Cold War, gas lines) and Woodrow Wilson (the fed, an arch racist, getting involved in WWI, and a host of other awful policies) can’t be taken seriously.
- Erik Loomis
  
  Anyone who claims that Jimmy Carter almost lost the Cold War is embarrassing themselves.
  - Malaclypse
    
    But you must admit, the gas lines of 1973 were totally his fault.
    - calling all toasters
      
      And the helicopters crashing in the desert. So much for Mr. Nukyular Engineer!
  - JoshA
    
    I think you’re forgetting when a group of Soviets parachuted into Colorado and had to be held off by plucky teenagers. Totally Carter’s fault.
    - Malaclypse
      
      Soviets
      
      Not just Soviets, but Mexican Soviets.
    - charles pierce
      
      WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!
- Taylor
  
  Carter’s approval ratings went up after the malaise speech.
  
  Then he fired his cabinet.
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    It was a kind of dead-cat bounce, however.
    
    To be honest, I have problems with both the conventional story about the malaise speech (it was a disaster that contributed to Carter’s defeat) and the revisionist view of it (it would have worked if he hadn’t proceeded with the cabinet reshuffle).
    
    By the time of the crisis of confidence speech, the Carter presidency was in deep, deep trouble. The speech certainly didn’t make things worse, but it didn’t help nearly enough.
    
    Oddly, what came closest to saving the Carter presidency were another couple events that are now usually seen as dooming it: the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. At least initially, Carter successfully got the nation to rally around its President in these crisis, beating back what looked to be a potentially successful primary challenge from Ted Kennedy (with a powerful assist from the awful opening of the Kennedy campaign in the fall of 1979).
    - RhZ
      
      Did we ever confirm that the GOP employed the dirty trick of negotiating with Iran to *not* release the hostages until after Reagan was elected in exchange for weapons? I remember the release just a couple days after Reagan took office and found it to be…suspiciously-timed.
      
      Just checking.
      - mattc
        
        It wasn’t a few days later: it was five minutes after Reagan took the oath on inauguration day.
      - Warren Terra
        
        I think it’s clear that the Iranians scheduled the release to embarrass Carter. It’s much, much less clear whether they also wanted to cozy up to Reagan by the timing of the hostages’ release, let alone whether they had discussed any of this with Reagan’s people, before the election or after.
        
        joel hanes
        
        This site alleges that
        
        Robert Parry’s book Secrecy and Privilege was published in 2004. Parry’s interview with Ari Ben-Menashe (Israeli military intelligence officer 1977-1987) for PBS Frontline and subsequently in testimony to Congress revealed that the now Secretary of Defense Gates was a key October Surprise operative. Ben-Menashe also revealed he and Gates attended a 1986 meeting with a Chilean arms manufacturer (Cardoen) who was supplying chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. Ben-Menashe’s book, Profits of War, describes the Paris Ritz Hotel meeting that followed the October 15th Carter administration leak. At that meeting Gates, McFarlane, Casey, and George H. W. Bush met with Iranian cleric Karrubi. French investigative reporter Claude Angeli confirmed the French secret service provided “cover” for this meeting between the Republicans and Iranians on the weekend of October 18-19. This meeting, by delaying the hostage release, effectively determined that Ronald Reagan would become the president of the United States
        
        Parry apparently says those responsible were the same operatives that stole Carter’s Presidential debate briefing book and provided it to the Reagan campaign.
        
        Here’s the Deseret News, certainly no liberal rag, reporting on Bani Sadr’s testimony to Congress on this issue.
        
        RhZ
        
        Thanks everyone, I have always wanted to get to the bottom of this but, well, never seem to.
        
        Thanks for all the honest comments. Helpful :-)
        
        CBrinton
        
        I’ve never found the October Surprise story very likely.
        
        I never heard a plausible account of either
        
        1) What the Iranians were expecting to get out of the deal (admittedly, this might not have been terribly much, since for Iran to hold 52 hostages another few months was no great sacrifice)
        
        or (more importantly)
        
        2) Why the Iranians haven’t burned the Reagan administration figures they dealt with, given how acrimonious US-Iranian relations have been since.
        
        If there are plausible answers to these questions I’d be interested in hearing about them.
        
        Dave W.
        
        More than these, I’ve never heard a plausible account of why even minimally-rational Iranians would prefer closing a deal with Reagan (who had no actual political power at the time, and no guarantee he would ever have any) to one with Carter (who actually did have the ability to deliver on whatever he promised). People have forgotten that the race was considered extremely close up until the final debate one week before the election on October 28th, and the effects of the resulting shift in voter sentiment weren’t known publicly until the election itself.
        
        Of course the Iranians were willing to listen politely to representatives from Reagan’s team, but I can’t see them passing up a legitimate deal with Carter (if one was actually available) to go with a guy who had only a 50/50 chance of becoming president at best. It’s only hindsight that makes the election of Reagan look inevitable without a hostage release – at the time, it would have been an extremely risky gamble.
        
        ajay
        
        “I never heard a plausible account of either
        1) What the Iranians were expecting to get out of the deal (admittedly, this might not have been terribly much, since for Iran to hold 52 hostages another few months was no great sacrifice)”
        
        – friendly or at least trusting relations with the incoming US government is the obvious one that comes to mind. And those friendly relations did in fact pay off later, when the US illegally shipped Iran several hundred advanced anti-tank missiles, confident that the Iranians could be trusted a) to keep their end of the bargain and b) to keep it secret.
        
        “or (more importantly)
        2) Why the Iranians haven’t burned the Reagan administration figures they dealt with, given how acrimonious US-Iranian relations have been since.”
        
        Well, because one of them was until very recently the US Defense Secretary, and so not a good person to annoy when the US has troops on two of your borders.
- joe from Lowell
  
  Now, by “nearly losing the Cold War,” are you referring to arming the Afghan rebels, whose victory helped bring down the Soviet Union, or beginning the expansion of military spending?
  
  And by “inflation,” are you referring to the appointment of Paul Volcker and the tight-money policy at the Fed?
  
  Sure, Reagan continued both of those policies, but let’s face it: the old dog probably wouldn’t have been any of that off on his own.
- Nathanael
  
  The list could only include the top 10, and he didn’t even manage to include Andrew “genocide, ignore the Supreme Court and the rule of law, terrible economic policy, institute the spoils system and abolish merit appointments” Jackson.
  
  Jimmy Carter has no chance of making the top ten worst; there were so many truly awful Presidents.
- efgoldman
  
  If he had done nothing else (and he did a few other things), wrestling Sadat an Begin together into the Camp David Accords gets Jimmy out of the “worst” category.
- arguingwithsignposts
  
  I would also have to second the nomination of Woodrow Wilson, who not only got us into WWI, but also made the spread of the 1918 flu pandemic much worse through his “total war” footing, and the propaganda campaign. And, he bargained for the treaty that set up Germany for WWII.
Reality Check

I’ll surprise you all though: I think George H.W. Bush belongs on the list (raised taxes which prolonged, if not caused, the early ’90s recession and didn’t finish the job in Iraq in ’91. In a lot of ways he betrayed the Reagan Revolution),
- mattc
  
  A movement conservative who hates G.H.W. Bush as a turncoat? Rarer than unicorns, they are!
- Warren Terra
  
  RC’s comments are, of course, oh-so-revealing. As if “betraying the Reagan Revolution” were a bad thing! As if “finishing the job in Iraq” were a good one! Blaming Carter for an OPEC boycott that started in 1973, an Iran debacle that started in 1953, and a loss of American stature in the Cold War that started around 1963 in Vietnam. Not to mention that RC claims Carter nearly lost the Cold War, somehow failing to credit Carter for beginning the massive military build-up that Republicans like to pretend began under his successor and for backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (an act with some rather unfortunate long-term consequences, but certainly a resounding blow against the Soviets).
  
  And was getting involved in WWI such a bad thing? WWI Germany wasn’t evil in the same way that WWII Germany was, but it was still not the preferable winner of that conflict.
  - NBarnes
    
    Pretty much this. Far and away the best Republican president this side of Eisenhower; GHW Bush is clearly a conservative apostate and has no business standing next to luminaries like his son.
  - Kal
    
    There are still WWI defenders around, really? How many millions needed to die to defend the principle that Britain and France should have African colonies rather than Germany?
    - Warren Terra
      
      I wasn’t aware that America started that conflict. Or Britain, for that matter.
      - Kal
        
        US participation was entirely voluntary. And I don’t give Britain any moral credit for being the established imperialist power, as opposed to the ambitious rising imperialist power.
        
        Malaclypse
        
        US participation was entirely voluntary.
        
        Yes, but I can’t see how this would fail to bring the US into war, no matter who the President was.
- calling all toasters
  
  Reality Check is showing us the way. GHW Bush significantly cut back the military, won his war while practically turning a profit on it, and did the necessary tax hike. He actually wasn’t that bad, if you pretend Clarence Thomas doesn’t exist.
  - joe from Lowell
    
    He has some good environmental legislation on his resume, too.
    - Bill Altreuter
      
      And the Americans with Disabilities Act. I didn’t and don’t like him, but GHWB isn’t in the conversation when it comes to Worst Presidents.
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    Though basically an accident, Souter remains the most liberal Supreme Court nominee of the last thirty years.
    
    On the other hand, Lee Atwater made American politics measurably worse and Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz both saw their careers boosted (the latter’s Defense Planning Guidance provided a neoconservative frame for post-Cold War foreign policy).
TT

Wilson deserves an honorable mention.
- astonishingly dumb hv
  
  Absolutely yes!
  
  That douche undid so much racial progress.
- Scott Lemieux
  
  Wilson was pretty atrocious — WWI, amazingly bad on civil liberties, segregated federal bureaucracy, James McReynolds.
  - Kal
    
    This.
  - arguingwithsignposts
    
    Also, the total war footing led to a greater spread of the 1918 flu pandemic, and Wilson never even addressed the damned thing.
  - wengler
    
    His administration found it to be perfectly legal to round up a bunch of leftists they didn’t like(US citizen or not it didn’t matter), put them in a boat, and have that boat set sail for revolutionary Russia. Wilson was one of our worst Presidents.
    
    He also was awesome in pulling the bait-and-switch on the war issue. Running on peace and then going to war as soon as the opportunity presented itself in the first year of his second term.
- Erik Loomis
  
  But Wilson also signed a tremendous amount of excellent and much-needed legislation. Even if Wilson sucks in other areas, Keating-Owen alone brings him out of the bottom 10.
  - JB2
    
    I’m unfamiliar with the legislation you mention, but I find it very hard not to rank Wilson as one of the worst ever – top five at least.
    
    There’s the racism, yes; and the civil liberties violations. But getting into WWI was just a terrible decision. He made the worst thing of the 20th Century way, way worse by putting our finger on the scale.
Reality Check

The high tide of international Communism was in the late 70s, and that’s an historical fact.
- Erik Loomis
  
  Um, no. By the late 70s, even Castro had pretty much pulled back from supporting worldwide revolution. China’s Cultural Revolution was over. The Vietnamese evicted the Khmer Rouge. God knows the Soviets weren’t going to do more than fund and give arms to rebels in the developing world.
  
  I assume then what you call “international communism” is in fact Central Americans fighting against horrendous repressive genocidal right-wing regimes supported by the United States.
  - Richard Hershberger
    
    You are missing the bigger point. If international Communism peaked in the late 1970s, then obviously it was Carter who finally managed to stop it.
    - Hogan
      
      Burn.
- wengler
  
  It is yet to come, comrade.
- Halloween Jack
  
  You’re not even really trying any more, are you?
Reality Check

I also don’t think much of Nixon. His most redeeming quality was that in spite of his moderatioon he drove liberals and “progressives” batshit insane. No one knew how to push the Left’s buttons quite like Dick Nixon.
- mattc
  
  A movement conservative whose chief motivation is irritating liberals, regardless of consequences? Do the people from Ripley’s know about you?
- Incontinentia Buttocks
  
  BREAKING: Movement Conservative Lists “Pissing Off Liberals” As Major Presidential Achievement.
  
  Film at 11.
- joe from Lowell
  
  It’s difficult to think of a greater achievement for a president than turning Americans against each other.
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    And this really is a difference–and a bizarre one at that–between left and right in America today.
    
    Most progressives see the irrational rage with which the right views Obama as a problem for the nation, not a positive feature of his Presidency.
    
    What’s bizarre is that it’s the right that tends to prattle on about the importance of national unity.
    - Malaclypse
      
      What’s bizarre is that it’s the right that tends to prattle on about the importance of national unity.
      
      That’s not at all bizarre, when you remember that “unity” = “shut up, hippie!”
      
      I remember those glorious, unified days of late September 2001, when the local Afghan restaurant covered up the word “Afghan” on their signage with great big American flags. Calling Quakers and other war opponents traitors and appeasers. Good times…
      - joe from Lowell
        
        The pizza place I order from is run by Jordanians.
        
        For some bizarre reason, their boxes are emblazoned with American flags and the slogan “Proud to be American.”
        
        I remember when pizza boxes featured a stereotyped cartoon of an Italian.
        
        Furious Jorge
        
        “Do Not Tip Delivery Boy!”
        
        Warren Terra
        
        For about a year after 9/11, the Helmand restaurant in Cambridge, MA – part of a very successful chain of restaurants owned by a couple of Hamid Karzai’s more reputable siblings – covered most of its north wall with an enormous American flag. Specifically, the part of the wall that said in huge letters “Cuisine From Afghanistan”.
        
        Bill Murray
        
        Andy Barker, PI (Andy Richter’s second show) had a major character just like that
        
        Malaclypse
        
        For about a year after 9/11, the Helmand restaurant in Cambridge, MA – part of a very successful chain of restaurants owned by a couple of Hamid Karzai’s more reputable siblings – covered most of its north wall with an enormous American flag.
        
        That is the one I was talking about. We neighbors?
        
        Warren Terra
        
        We were. I’m now in California.
        
        Bill Murray
        
        Herman Cain was big on that
    - joe from Lowell
      
      What’s bizarre is that it’s the right that tends to prattle on about the importance of national unity.
      
      Do they, though? I know what you’re referring to, and that was a central theme of rightist politics for most of recent history, but is that really the message of the contemporary American right?
      
      The demonization of their political opponents is only part of what I’m talking about. Think about the demonization of people as “unproductive” and therefore unworthy of help. Older model conservatives would have lauded the American worker and explained why their policies were better for them. Now, they’re redundant at best (sorry, the loss of industrial jobs is just how it goes) and parasites at worst.
      
      Maybe I’m just describing the replacement of the nationalist right by the capitalist right.
      - Malaclypse
        
        Maybe I’m just describing the replacement of the nationalist right by the capitalist right.
        
        I think this gets at it. The old right cared about keeping the country going as an ongoing project. The capitalist right can leave the country a smoking shell and move on to some other Galtian paradise.
mattc

If Buchanan gets the Democratic nomination in 1852 and Pierce gets the Democratic nomination in 1856, then Pierce becomes the Worst President Ever and Buchanan is a forgotten antebellum doughface. A guy can’t be worst president due to an accident of chronology.
- Incontinentia Buttocks
  
  Well it all depends on whether one is arguing about presidential aptitude or presidential performance.
  
  As Erik notes above, this is especially the case for someone like Hoover, whose aptitude was actually reasonably high, but who came into office at precisely the worst time for someone with his beliefs and temperament, leading to dreadful performance under admittedly trying circumstances.
  
  (Incidentally, the nightmare scenario in American economic and political life–which would start with the Congressional Republicans refusing to budge on the debt ceiling–might put Obama in a similar position.)
  - LosGatosCA
    
    It’s closer to exactly the same than similar position.
    
    It’s a clear personal failing that Obama has never appreciated the urgency of the economic and political environment and the requirement to accept the risk of overshooting rather than undershooting on virtually every economic response.
    
    He’s like a seat of the pants pilot who just can’t learn to fly by instruments. His instincts to go slow, be cautious, understate the risks, don’t rock the boat are I’ll suited to the time and circumstance when the data says to take an action that his feedback loop just can’t confirm.
    
    Calm and deliberate is a strength in incremental times. It comes across as weak and indecisive in disruptive times.
- Amanda in the South Bay
  
  Wasn’t the reason that Buchanan is rated so horribly is that he let is Secretary of War secretly arm the traitors?
- Scott Lemieux
  
  If Buchanan gets the Democratic nomination in 1852 and Pierce gets the Democratic nomination in 1856, then Pierce becomes the Worst President Ever and Buchanan is a forgotten antebellum doughface. A guy can’t be worst president due to an accident of chronology.
  
  Yup.
- Erik Loomis
  
  “If Buchanan gets the Democratic nomination in 1852 and Pierce gets the Democratic nomination in 1856, then Pierce becomes the Worst President Ever and Buchanan is a forgotten antebellum doughface. A guy can’t be worst president due to an accident of chronology.”
  
  Quite possibly. But that’s a counterfactual and we can’t know.
Reality Check

Right wing tyrannies are better for your country in the long term than than left wing ones. Where would YOU rather live today–Cuba, or Chile? North Korea, or South Korea?
- Warren Terra
  
  Cherry pick much?
  
  I wasn’t aware that either South Korea or Chile were still dictatorships like the “left-wing” dictatorships you mention.
  
  Me, I’m just opposed to dictatorship, and willing to seriously consider the cause of those opposing it without relying too greatly on the flavor of the dictatorship in question. Wacky, I know.
  - Nathanael
    
    Furthermore, the Soviet Union improved substantially under the “left-wing” dictatorship of Lenin, and even under Stalin, over its horrific state under the “right-wing” dictatorship of the Tsar.
    
    People are better off under left-wing dictatorships than right-wing dictatorships. It’s much better to NOT be under a dictatorship of ANY sort, however.
- Incontinentia Buttocks
  
  Personally, I’d choose Leipzig or Berlin over any of them ;-)
  
  (We’re really getting conservatism’s greatest hits here. Ladies and gentlemen, the Ghost of Jeane Kirkpatrick…though to give Jeane her due, she maintained that leftwing dictatorships couldn’t reform from within at all!)
  - Ken
    
    Ladies and gentlemen, the Ghost of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
    
    The true, um, genius of Kirkpatrick was that she did not set it up on a left-right axis. Instead she said some dictators were “authoritarian” and others were “totalitarian”. The difference was that one kind would eventually step down, and the others would not and could only be removed by force or revolution.
    
    She claimed the US only supported the good kind, although I could never quite see how that distinction was made, since you can’t really tell if a dictator is the good kind until he’s no longer in office, one way or another.
    
    Also too, I recently saw somewhere on the internet a kind of “where are they now” list of the Kirkpatrick-era dictators and what eventually happened to them. History has not been kind to the Kirkpatrick doctrine.
    - Malaclypse
      
      The true, um, genius of Kirkpatrick was that she did not set it up on a left-right axis. Instead she said some dictators were “authoritarian” and others were “totalitarian”.
      
      Coincidentally, all communist dictatorships were totalitarian, while all right-wingers were authoritarians.
    - Hogan
      
      She claimed the US only supported the good kind, although I could never quite see how that distinction was made
      
      If the US is supporting them, they’re the good kind. Duh.
- JoshA
  
  Please. The ideal conservative country is one with nearly nonexistent government, and a highly religious and well-armed populace. It exists. Its called Somalia.
Reality Check

Almost forgot: Mainland China, or Taiwan? Left wing tyrannies damage the very fabric of society in a way that dictators like Pinochet and Chiang Kai-Shek do not.
- astonishingly dumb hv
  
  (this space intentionally left blank)
Reality Check

Imperial Germany wasn’t any worse than the British Empire. Actually if Germany had won WWI Communism could have been strangled in the cradle and saved the whole world a lot of grief.
- Warren Terra
  
  Who exactly do you think delivered Lenin to Russia?
  - Malaclypse
    
    The same Germans who stabbed their troops in the back, of course.
- Taylor
  
  An imperial Germany with complete domination of Europe and her colonial possessions would have more than given the US a run for its money in economic hegemony in the 20th century.
- Scott de B.
  
  Very much disagree. Wilhelmine was a nasty peace of work. Among other things, the British Empire didn’t start a World War, but Germany did.
  - dwreck
    
    In fact, Imperial Germany was a really nasty piece of work before the war (Hull’s Absolute Destruction) and it got much worse during the conflict, particularly on the Eastern Front (Vejas Liulivicious has a really good book on that: War Land on the Eastern Front).
  - Ian
    
    the British Empire didn’t start a World War, but Germany did.
    
    No, it was an alliance chain reaction. Austria vs. Serbia, Russia vs. Austria, Germany vs. Russia, France vs. Germany. Each vs. is a place where WWI could have been prevented. I’d put blame primarily on Austria and Russia if anyone in particular.
    
    However, I would blame Germany for their unprovoked invasion of Belgium and brutal treatment of Belgian civilians. Worse than a crime, it was a mistake — it brought Britain into the war.
    
    My best case scenario: Germany declares that they are fighting a war to protect Austria and have no beef with France. They take a defensive stance in the West and heavily reinforce the East. If Germany does not attack France or Belgium, Britain likely remains neutral. It’s hard to imagine that the French would make progress through Alsace — they didn’t historically. Russia gets pushed back hard, and a negotiated settlement is reached in 1914-1915. Lenin never goes to Russia. Germany gets stronger, but does not get to dominate all of Europe.
- Daverz
  
  It would have saved Germany the dictatorship of Rosa Luxemburg.
joe from Lowell

But for permanently changing how Americans see the presidency and politicians in general, he deserves out loathing.

That is just about the worst reason I can imagine for putting Nixon into the list.

People were way to trusting of politicians in the 50s and 60s. The decline in their standing after Nixon was perhaps his most positive legacy.
- Kal
  
  I had this same thought.
  - chris
    
    Ditto, but… how much of our present dangerous disengagement from *politics* can be laid at the door of Nixon’s devaluation of *politicians*?
    
    Acknowledging that they all have feet of clay is a positive development, but turning our backs on the whole mess because politicians are just going to screw it up (let alone pivoting to idealizing the private sector by contrast, as if it weren’t full of the same shortsighted fools and liars), not so much.
    
    I think the disenchantment legacy is sort of a mixed bag, and you might even be able to draw a line from Nixon’s besmirching of the political sphere to Reagan’s demonization of government. Blind trust of government is bad, but blind hate may be proving even worse.
- LosGatosCA
  
  Republicans are happy to this day that Nixon’s other felonies have misdirected any rightful attention that he was the worst steward of the US economy prior to George W Bush.
  
  Price controls, Arthur Burns and petrodollars. For those alone he deserves a solid bottom 5/6 rating. Andrew Jackson should be right there with him.
Reality Check

Ok, 1960s Taiwan or Red China during the “cultural refvolution”?
- Malaclypse
  
  Chile in 1974, or Sweden? Answer that, Libtards!
  - joe from Lowell
    
    viva
    don’t want no blue eyes
    la loma
    i want brown eyes
    rica
    i’m in a state
    - joe from Lowell
      
      Oh, wait, were you talking about their governments?
Reality Check

Warren– Germany of course, but had they won they would have kept the best territory of European Russia out of the hands of the Bolsheviks and probably march to Moscow and depose them. The Kaiser didn’t fuck around, and he wouldn’t have stood for a red government on the fringes of Europe exporting Communist revolution.
- Taylor
  
  Little Willie?
  
  Sorry, for a minute there I thought we were engaged in serious discussion.
  
  LOL.
  - JRoth
    
    Maybe he was thinking of the other Kaiser Wilhelm.
- Nathanael
  
  Back here in REALITY, no country in Europe had a chance in hell of conquering any sigificant amount of Russia after Russia conquered Siberia and Central Asia. Russia was just on a different scale by then; the British Empire was on the same scale, but dependent on sea power, which was useless in Siberia.
  
  Remember, the German invasions of Russia repeatedly halted as Russians pulled back past the Urals, where vast industrial cities continued to supply them with materiel. It’s just fantasy to think that anyone other than native Russians or China could have made a dent in the Russian Empire after it conquered Siberia.
  - Warren Terra
    
    Um, Russia regained control of its territory by means of a hard-fought civil war ending in what, 1923? RC is plain nuts here, in oh so many ways, but pointing out that intervention was impossible in 1924 is no way to disprove his ludicrous claims.
    
    Heck, the US, Britain, and Japan intervened against the Soviets during the civil war; they just didn’t do so very much of it. If you wanted to imagine a crushing German victory in early 1918, I suppose you could imagine that they would then go on to heavily back a resurgent White-Russian army or even to invade themselves. Doesn’t seem to me likely either to happen or to succeed, but you point about the situation more than five years later isn’t terribly relevant.
    - timb
      
      the Germany who exported Lenin to St. Petersburg in the first place?
- Kal
  
  Yeah, but they weren’t going to win, because there was a revolutionary situation in Germany from 1919 through 1923, because the workers and soldiers of Germany were entirely fed up with bloodthirsty assholes who were willing to sacrifice any number of young people to preserve the dignity of the nation and/or the rights of rich people in Russia.
joe from Lowell

I really wanted to put Reagan on here. But I can’t help but give the bastard credit for not listening to the crazies in his administration and talking to Gorbachev. For everything else, he’s awful. For being realistic about what he could do with the Soviet Union despite his rhetoric, I suppose Grandpa Caligula deserves a touch of credit.

It wasn’t just rhetoric. Reagan was a true believer in the Rollback, Not Containment policy he’d been advocating for decades when Gorbachev came into office. That he was able to 1) recognize that the Containment end game had arrived and 2) change his policies 180 degrees in order to take advantage of it, despite the heat he was taking from his supporters, is one of the most extraordinary developments in American political history. And he carried out this embrace of Containment at a time when the consensus had broken down, with the left favoring detente and the right rollback, so he was really going down a path that everyone else had been fleeing. Who would have thought that he had it in him?

I also think Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore both suck.

I think the collective Ford-gasm this country had when he died is hilarious. For some reason, Gerald Ford looked like a pretty darn good president in December 2006.

For some inexplicable reason. Whatever could it be?
- Incontinentia Buttocks
  
  I totally agree about both these things, joe.
  
  There’s not much good to be said about the Reagan presidency (and plenty of bad), but his diplomacy with Gorbachev was, as you say, extraordinary, and lifts Reagan out of the Worst President competition IMO. Richard Rhodes’s ARSENALS OF FOLLY is very good on this point.
  - pete
    
    In a festive display of comity, I’ll agree with that too.
    
    Gerald Who had, um, a wife who founded a clinic. But Reagan was an effective President who would of course have been thrown out of the present Republican party. I hated him at the time, but then I didn’t know how much worse it could get.
Reality Check

It always comes back to the hairshirt Global Warming religion/cargo cult for the left, doesn’t it?
- Nathanael
  
  It always comes back to “I believe whatever I feel like believing and to hell with reality” for the right-wingers, doesn’t it? Your chosen “name” is TOO funny for a reality-denier. I suppose you’re so insecure about your lunatic beliefs that you have to repeatedly claim to yourself that you’re a “reality check”.
  - firefall
    
    His reality check bounced :/
- joe from Lowell
  
  Um…yeah. No.
  
  That’s not what cargo cult means.
  - Malaclypse
    
    That’s not what cargo cult means.
    
    Like that is the biggest mistake he has made in this thread. I mean, yes, he is woefully ignorant of basic terms, but what is he not wrong about?
    - astonishingly dumb hv
      
      The food for trolls here is terrible, but the portions are generous.
      - John Protevi
        
        LOL.
        
        A great take on the old joke: “such bad food and such small portions!”
Reality Check

Yeah, cause North Korea and Mainland China were better places to be than South Korea or Taiwan when they were dictatorships, right? And Russia has had a much smoother transition to democracy than Brazil, too! Leftist Morons…
Reality Check

Nicholas II never carried out an intentional and genocidal famine, and his political “prisons” were summer camps compared to the GULAG. The left is STILL defending Stalin. Unbelievable.
- Malaclypse
  
  The left is STILL defending Stalin.
  
  Name five Stalin defenders. PROTIP: if they died in the 1940s, they don’t count.
- mattc
  
  A movement conservative who takes a random, anonymous blog commentor and labels them “the left?” Do they grow you people in a lab?
- Nathanael
  
  Nick II did manage to carry out an unintentional and genocidal famine, mind you. And lost a war with Japan. And if you care at all about economic development — most right-wingers seem to — just look at the grinding lives of impoverished, sanitation-deprived serfdom prior to the first Revolution. (Pity the Bolsheviks managed to knock out the fledgling democrats.) Lenin was a vast improvement over the Tsar despite that.
  
  Stalin, of course, was a reversion to Imperial form and beyond; and yet everything he did had been tried by right-wing kings in the Middle Ages, they just didn’t have the technology for it.
  - DocAmazing
    
    Ivan the Industrially Terrible.
Murc

I’m going to go to the mat here and actually defend Herbert Hoover. Does he make a list of BEST Presidents? No, of course not. Does he belong in the bottom ten? Hell, no.

Some of your assertions are flat-out wrong, Erik. Hoover DID think the government had a roll to play in ending the depression. He thought that very strongly. And he listened to the smartest economists he could find, men who were renowned for their financial wisdom and expertise in the still-young field of modern economists.

It just so happened that both Hoover’s inclinations and those of the people he was listening to were ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Like, hugely, monstrously wrong. But they were wrong in ways that weren’t obvious at the time.

We can only decry neo-Hooverism today because it was actually TRIED once and failed. John Maynard Keynes and his fellows were thought of as crazy radicals whose ideas defied all common sense, and there was precious little real-world evidence that this wasn’t so.

Hoover, unlike, say, modern Republicans, genuinely cared about ending the depression and the economic well-being of all citizens. His life before office reflects that belief. The fact that he failed to make that happen while in office, that he failed at the great challenge of his life, doesn’t make him a GOOD President, but it doesn’t make him one of the very worst either.
- Bill Murray
  
  there was precious little real-world evidence that this wasn’t so.
  
  when has evidence ever stopped the Oligopophiles in economics?
  - Murc
    
    Hoover wasn’t in favor oligopolies.
    
    Christ, the man explicitly was against Gilded Age economic policies, identified strongly with the original progressive movement, and endorsed Teddy motherfucking Roosevelt!
- Malaclypse
  
  We can only decry neo-Hooverism today because it was actually TRIED once and failed.
  
  Yes. Believing in Say’s Law in 1929 was anything but stupid. It was wrong, but not stupid.
- StevenAttewell
  
  I have to disagree here. You’re giving Hoover way too much credit.
  
  Hoover was adamantly opposed to the Federal government ending the Great Depression – he repeatedly vetoed public works bills, flat-out rejected the idea of Federal relief, and only reluctantly accepted the totally inadequate RFC.
  
  He did so against the advice of POUR and PECE, two commissions he established. Hoover’s problem was that his belief in localism, volunteerism, and associationalism was too damn strong. It’s not that he didn’t care about the poor – he just didn’t care enough to break the traditions of a lifetime.
- Walt
  
  Keynes was probably the world’s most influential economist when he came up with what we now call Keynesianism. He was an influential policy-maker during World War I, and a famous public figure for The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Throughout the 20s Keynes was responsible for the economic proposals for the Liberal party.
Murc

Oh, and RC; my answer to all your questions is ‘Neither.’
Bill Murray

Was 4 years of Buchanon really worse than 8 years of GWB?
- Incontinentia Buttocks
  
  Yes, in that the US was in dramatically worse shape in 1861 than it has been at any time during or since the Bush Presidency. Not even close.
  - Malaclypse
    
    Okay, but that is a bad comparison. It is equally true that the US was in dramatically worse shape in 1857, or 1853, than it has been at any time during or since the Bush Presidency.
- joe r
  
  This is a hard one and we are too close to Bush to decide. I would say Bush has the potential to be considered to be much worse for the simply reason the US is much more important and powerful today than it was in 1859. And if global warming turns out to be as some fear than G.W. Bush will turn out to be #1 by a mile. (And the election of 2000 the most consequential in world history.)
  - JRoth
    
    It’s not the first time I’ve thought that, but I was reminded again by something I read the other day. It’s really kind of astonishing how everything hinged on that moment. Much as the press hated Gore, and as much as Republicans were already crazy, if he wins FL comfortably (ie, if the Palm Beach ballot wasn’t misdesigned), it’s very easy to paint a picture of a much, much better off USA and world now and in the future. Even if he loses in 2004 for whatever reason, that’s 4 years farther down the correct road (wrt global warming, al Qaeda, debt, good government, etc.).
    
    Sigh.
Reality Check

Lenin was every bit the bloodthirsty maniac Stalin was, he just didn’t live long enough to realize his “potential”. If you follow a philosphy that calls morality and decency “bourgeois trash”, you’re going to be a maniacal tyrant once you are in power. Just face it, Bolshevism is poison for civilization.
- Warren Terra
  
  I’ve no great love for Lenin, but he was quite unlike Stalin. Stalin was bloodthirsty, a power-mad paranoid. Lenin, by contrast, was bloodless, striving to realize his ideological goals rather than to achieve personal power. Lenin was willing to perpetrate atrocities if he thought it was the quickest path to his goals; Stalin deliberately sought out opportunities to perpetrate atrocities.
  
  In any case, if you’d read any real history instead of trips stamped with the Regnery imprint, you might be familiar with the New Economic Policy – or, in other words, Lenin’s tolerance of free enterprise in the context of a largely socialist society. Care to guess who replaced the NEP with ruthless and bloodthirsty forced collectivization?
  - Warren Terra
    
    Er, “trips” s/b “tripe”.
- joe from Lowell
  
  Just face it, Bolshevism is poison for civilization.
  
  Wow, you sure you want to stick your neck out like that?
  
  Like Oreos at a Michael Steele debate, the furious dissents from your observation are thick in the air, like locusts.
  - Furious Jorge
    
    That is very poetic.
  - Kal
    
    Hey, I’ll throw one out there, for my tipsy amusement:
    
    http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/02/lies-they-tell-about-lenin
Reality Check

And serfdom was abolished in the 1860s, idiot. Read a fucking book.
- Warren Terra
  
  I realize it’s not exactly a book, but how about Wikipedia?
  
  In 1861 all serfs were freed in a major agrarian reform, stimulated by the fear voiced by Tsar Alexander II that “it is better to liberate the peasants from above” than to wait until they won their freedom by risings “from below.” Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its abolition was achieved on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to increase revolutionary pressures.[citation needed] Between 1864 to 1871 serfdom was abolished in Georgia. In Kalmykia serfdom was only abolished in 1892.[20]
  The serfs had to work for the landlord as usual for two years. The nobles kept nearly all the meadows and forests, had their debts paid by the state while the ex serfs paid 34% over the market price for the shrunken plots they kept. This figure was 90% in the northern regions, 20% in the black earth region but zero in the Polish provinces. In 1857, 6.79% of serfs were domestic, landless servants who stayed landless after 1861.[citation needed] Only Polish and Romanian domestic serfs got land. 90% of the serfs who got larger plots were in the 8 ex Polish provinces where the Tsar wanted to weaken the Szlachta (the rest were in the barren north and in Astrakhan. In the whole Empire, peasant land declined 4.1%, 13.3% outside the ex Polish zone and 23.3% in the 16 black earth provinces.[citation needed] These redemption payments were not abolished till January 1, 1907.
  
  So: serfdom was abolished in 1861. In some places; later in others. And the abolition was structured to impose the heaviest possible burden on the newly “emancipated” underclass, who received their nominal freedom but retained the chains of grinding poverty.
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    If only the Tsar knew! ;-)
    - Malaclypse
      
      The Cossacks work for the Tsar, comrade.
  - joe from Lowell
    
    He said a fucking book, Warren.
    
    You have weird taste in pp0rn.
    - gocart mozart
      
      I reccomend the Kama Sutra, great fucking book.
- Nathanael
  
  Formally abolished. Read a fucking book yourself.
Reality Check

So, serdom was abolished. Equating the situation of peasants in 1914 to serfs in 1861 is as dumb as saying Jim Crow and sharecropping=plantation slavery.
- mattc
  
  If by “equating,” you mean “the material conditions of the people involved in both cases were largely unchanged by the formality of emancipation,” that’s not dumb, that’s accurate.
- Warren Terra
  
  Yeah, that would be a wacky notion.
  
  Actually, the book I’d recommend isn’t the one I linked, the which I haven’t read and so can’t recommend, but rather Eric Foner’s history of Reconstruction, which recounts in soul-crushing detail the ways that Jim Crow and especially forced-labor laws amounted to a near-reimposition of slavery. But the one I linked had the right title, and good reviews.
- Malaclypse
  
  Equating the situation of peasants in 1914 to serfs in 1861 is as dumb as saying Jim Crow and sharecropping=plantation slavery.
  
  Hard to believe that Republicans don’t see black Americans voting for them in droves. A real fucking mystery, I tell you what.
- Ben
  
  Wow.
  
  I wanted to make a joke in response to your last comment, something snarky about how your position on the instantaneous freedom of the serfs is as dumb as not recognizing sharecropping and other economic injustices taken against freed American slaves after 1865.
  
  And then you reference sharecropping and the general economic practices you had to ignore to write your previous comment.
  
  You reference the very thing you overlook in the previous comment
  
  That’s beyond trolling. It’s more like living your deception, like something out of The Prestige. Bravo l’artiste.
Reality Check

And many emancipated peasants (or at least their children) became prosperous–they were called “kulaks”, you might have h eard of them. If you were in the USSR, you might be railing against them as “the top 2 percent”.
- Nathanael
  
  They weren’t the top 2%, the noble elite were. *eyeroll*.
Reality Check

Big landowners were “liquidated” by Lenin. The kulaks were the most prosperous remaining group.
Reality Check

Yup, Hoover was a “progressive” just like FDR (and Wilson) and they both made it worse. “Progressivism” is to Bolshevism what powder cocaine is to crack cocaine.
- TT
  
  So, cutting unemployment in half, ending bank runs, cleaning up and stabilizing Wall Street, and going off the gold standard in order to spark a surge in exports “made it worse”?
  
  Is it legal to be this dumb?
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    Legal? Last I checked it qualified you for a position as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations!
    - gocart mozart
      
      Its a requirement to get the Republic nomination. Is RC Santorum?
      - Malaclypse
        
        Is RC Santorum?
        
        Let’s just say that he has more than a little Santorum in him.
        
        Joey Maloney
        
        No more calls, please. We have a Weiner.
- StevenAttewell
  
  Hoover was significantly to the right of Wilson, who was himself the most conservative progressive who ran in 1912.
- wengler
  
  Are you secretly trying to say you’re on crack?
efgoldman

I also think Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore both suck.

I got nothing to say about Fillmore one way or the other, except he had the funniest name of any president.
I think Ford takes a bad rap, however, not because of anything he did or didn’t do, but because of how he came to the office. Remember, he was never elected to anything except congressman from Michigan. He was appointed VP when Agnew the scumbag resigned after it was shown he took bribes, and then Ford ascended to the presidency when Nixon-who-was-not-a-crook resigned just before he would have been impeached.
I’d give Gerry an incomplete, at worst.
- Murc
  
  I dispute, sir!
  
  Funniest Presidential Name is INDISPUTABLY President Jimmy Goose.
  - efgoldman
    
    Funniest Presidential Name is INDISPUTABLY President Jimmy Goose.
    
    But Millard Fillmore was really preznit.
  - Brett Dunbar
    
    Goodluck Jonathan (Nigeria 2007-)
    
    Canaan Banana (Zimbabwe 1980-87
- astonishingly dumb hv
  
  I find these names funny:
  
  Rutherford
  Grover
  Harding
  Barack
  Milhouse
  Teddy
  Johnson
  Millard
  Polk
  - joe from Lowell
    
    Woodrow.
    
    Heh. Heh heh.
    
    “Woodrow.”
  - Furious Jorge
    
    I once owned a dog named Rutherford B. Hayes.
    
    It just seemed like a good dog name to me.
    - Ann Isotrophic
      
      In James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times a relative (uncle? grandfather) named a dog ‘Rover Cleveland’ as a stab..
- Erik Loomis
  
  OK, though I’m essentially getting taken on for making the same argument about Andrew Johnson.
  
  Also, Ford was really bad when you get into the massive number of vetoes he made. All those somewhat liberal bills Nixon signed, Ford vetoed.
  - Incontinentia Buttocks
    
    Hehe…he said “Johnson”!
Antonio Conselheiro

Hello. I am a troll and I would like to buy control of the LGM comment threads from Reality Check. Do I give the money to RC himself, or do I just outbid him at LGM?
- Uncle Kvetch
  
  Your comment is both (1) relevant and (2) comprehensible. You’ll never compete with RC. Just give it up.
- Halloween Jack
  
  You have to work on getting that ball nice and slow and directly over the plate.
joe r

I must say I liked the post but I thought the last comment was snide and wrong. First of all our system was predicated on not needing great leadership and I would add that democracy — rule of the people– must assume that great leadership is unnecessary. I find it reassuring that we don’t need too many Lincolns. Second, I disagree I think on the whole we have fairly good leadership — and some duds. For instance, I revere FDR – but I have respect for Hoover’s attempt to deal with the Great Depression. He was just in the thrall of outdated economic theories — and even then he pushed the envelop as far as could. Yes, he was a failure — but he was an honorable failure.
- StevenAttewell
  
  Hoover did not push the envelope as far as he could – he made things actively worse: he tried to balance the budget, he vetoed public works projects, etc.
UberMitch

I also think Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore both suck

Wait, are you talking about that comic strip with the duck? Yes, that shit does certainly suck.
- Erik Loomis
  
  It’s true, I hate Gerald Goose.
Greg

I rate Bush worse than Buchanan simply because Buchanan had a crisis thrust upon him and handled it poorly, whereas most of Bush’s damage was in areas where he initiated horrible policies he didn’t have to (tax cuts and the Iraq War to name the big ones). On top of the failed policies he initiated, there are his failed responses to the challenges thrust upon him (the threat of terrorism, Katrina, immigration, the financial collapse and Great Recession, climate change).
RhZ

Erik, I am really glad you are here.

RC would seemingly agree; maybe others, too.
Anonymous

“Worst American Presidents”
Opinons are like assholes; Everybody’s got one.

Few would agree with your assertions other than the sycophants on this board.
- Warren Terra
  
  Cogently argued, Anonymous. May I call you Anonymous?
- joe from Lowell
  
  Every (non RC) top line comment on thread, except mine re: Reagan and RhZ’s, takes exception to something Loomis wrote.
  
  I think you’re just pissy because you still think it would be fun to have a beer with George Dubya.
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David M. Nieporent

1. James Buchanan.
2. Woodrow Wilson – A racist who got the U.S. into an unnecessary war, botched the aftermath, and locked up dissenters. Kind of like how GWB is perceived, only he really did it.
3. FDR – the New Deal. ‘Nuff said. Plus, Japanese internment.
4. GWB – Massively boosted spending while pretending to cut it, thereby giving us the worst of all worlds — big government and its attendant failures wearing the mask of small government. And Iraq.
5. Pierce.

Really, the only good president was William Henry Harrison.
- Warren Terra
  
  It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to hold forth and remove all doubt.
- Furious Jorge
  
  Yeah, what the fuck was FDR thinking by putting people back to work and averting a Communist revolution? Clearly, he is the suckiest suck who ever sucked.
  
  Er, I mean, third-suckiest.
  - Warren Terra
    
    It’s a shame he couldn’t resolve the issue of his merit by leading a world-wide armed struggle against a credible attempt at global domination by the most cartoonishly evil leader any significant country has ever produced. Or at least if anything of the sort occurred, it has escaped Nieporent’s notice.
    - Red Jenny
      
      Oh come on, anyone can lead a struggle against people as eminently hate-and-fearable as the Nazis. It takes real leadership to get people riled up enough to invade Iraq or Grenada.
      
      (Which is my way of saying that if this blog had likes I would invent fake accounts to like your comment multiple times.)
    - David M. Nieporent
      
      “Leading” is sort of an odd way to describe FDR’s role; while the cartoonishly evil leader ran rampant over Europe and our allies, the U.S. stayed out of the war — you might have noticed — until being attacked. But, you say, the public was isolationist; it wouldn’t have let FDR go further before Pearl Harbor. Fair enough. So what was FDR’s great contribution? After Pearl Harbor, it’s pretty unimaginable to think that any president wouldn’t have gone to war. (On the other hand, it’s possible that another president wouldn’t have interned the Japanese based on lies. Or might have placed a higher priority on protecting the victims of the Holocaust.)
      
      Still, I did give FDR some credit; you’ll notice that I only placed him third.
      - astonishingly dumb hv
        
        My junior high school lesson on WWII had a matching section that I just couldn’t get any answers right on, maybe you could help me out?
        
        What should I put for “lend/lease act”?
        
        Also, “unrestricted submarine warfare”?
  - David M. Nieporent
    
    Yeah, what the fuck was FDR thinking by putting people back to work and averting a Communist revolution?
    
    That’s one way to describe what he did. Not an accurate way, but one way.
    
    But even if one considers the make work jobs created by FDR as important and successful, the jobs programs comprised only a small part of the New Deal.
- Bill Murray
  
  I’m rather surprised our David didn’t mention Lincoln — attacking the freedom fighters in the South, saying labor was superior to capital, ignoring the rights of property and the fifth amendment with the emancipation proclamation
  - David M. Nieporent
    
    I’m rather surprised you like Lincoln, given that he supported freedom over slavery, unlike FDR.
- Murc
  
  *slow clap*
  
  I think David has, in one post, managed to put all of this blogs regular trolls to shame.
  
  Bravo, sir. BraVO.
Red Jenny

If anyone has their doubts about the awfulness of Hoover and Coolidge they should read Rising Tide by John Berry.
Walt

This thread is like a master class in trolling. God liberals like to argue. We’re argue about anything, no matter how stupid. I saw that that the thread was 160 comments, and I thought “Awesome! A knock-down drag-out fight over the worst President!” But nope. One dumb comment from Reality Check, followed by ten comments explaining why he’s wrong, then another dumb comment, followed by ten more corrections. Do you think he’s listening to you? Do you think he cares?
- Kal
  
  It’s fun, as long as it doesn’t happen for every thread. And because RC hasn’t figured out how to use the reply function, you don’t actually get stuck in a discussion of anything in particular. He just keeps throwing up targets and you keep shooting them down, like skeet.
  - Walt
    
    But it does happen for every thread. The last two weeks have been unusually troll-free, but before that, every thread was All Dumb Troll All The Time.
    - RhZ
      
      Well many are feeding them by replying. Just sayin’.
- Erik Loomis
  
  Yeah, it is unfortunate. Fucking trolls.
  - astonishingly dumb hv
    
    For the record, a) who first fed the trolls and b) was that person a member of the masthead who should know better?
    
    Your right to complain “Fucking trolls” is suspended for 10 threads or 1 week, whichever is greater.
gocart mozart

1. James Buchanan. [Sure, fine.]

2. Woodrow Wilson – A racist who got the U.S. into an unnecessary war, botched the aftermath, and locked up dissenters. [I agree, but you left out war against Haiti]

3. FDR – the New Deal. ‘Nuff said. [What the fuckity fuck! Also, I notice you think Social Security and jobs programs are worse than Japanese internment! Also you left out the whole fighting the Nazis thing]

4. GWB – Massively boosted spending while pretending to cut it, thereby giving us the worst of all worlds — big government and its attendant failures wearing the mask of small government. And Iraq. [So did Reagan. I assume you are refering to Medicare part D and not massive military spending. Also you left Abu Graib (sic) torture, lying the nation into war, and destroying the economy. I know, now he is a RINO lol]

5. Pierce. [Sure fine whatever]

Really, the only good president was William Henry Harrison. [Har! Har! Because he spent his first three months sick in bed and then died]
- astonishingly dumb hv
  
  Har! Har! Because he spent his first three months sick in bed and then died
  
  Too soon?
  - Malaclypse
    
    No, it was a “good” joke, if by “good” you mean “illustrates the kneeejerk unthinking aspects of libertarianism, while at the same time giving an example of the general callousness of the so-called philosophy.”
HairyApe

Sorry to hijack the thread from RCs discussion of whether Stalin or Lenin was a worse President, I do love Glenn Beck bumper stickers.

I want to give half a cheer for Warren Harding. He pardoned EV Debs.The election results of ’24 and ’28 indicated the country was in no mood to move away from Normalcy. Hoover was temperamentally unsuited for politics, as Nixon was, and the political, economic culture constrained the tools he had available. The Roosevelt recession was caused by FDR’s discomfort with the desperate measures the crisis of ’33 demanded. He reached political maturity as a Progressive/New Freedom Democrat. BO is a child of Reaganism limiting his imagination.

I can’t help noticing the clustering of bad Presidents. The critique is as much based on the tenor of the times as an evaluation of individuals, baring unique villains such as Nixon. Vann Woodward pointed out the impossibility of confiscation of , as neo-Bloody Shirt wavers would have it, traitors’ estates. Whatever the justice of massive land redistribution, such a move would have been completely outside the American political tradition. The tragedy of Reconstruction and subsequent imposition of Jim Crow is that white Southerners used whatever means necessary to impose draconian White Supremacy and the North wasn’t prepared to take measures to insure African-American civil and political rights. As an aside I would place Grover Cleveland on a ten worst list. He violently suppressed the Pullman Strike and his gold buggery led to the worst economic collapse other than the Great Depression.
- gocart mozart
  
  Sorry to hijack the thread from RCs discussion of whether Stalin or Lenin was a worse President, I do love Glenn Beck bumper stickers.
  
  Does this make Obama the ‘worstest presnit evah’ because he is both Hitler and Stalin not to mention a Chicago street thug as well as an effete Harvard girly man. I won’t get into the icky lawyer/professor bits.
  - gocart mozart
    
    I won’t get into the icky lawyer/professor bits.
    
    Big ol’ hanging curveball for ya’ll.
  - Anonymous
    
    You forgot anticolonial Kenyan Liberation-Theology-influenced Mau Mau and Weatherman cat’s paw!
    - Incontinentia Buttocks
      
      That last Anonymous was me.
    - gocart mozart
      
      My mistake. I also forgot “communist who does the bidding of Wall Street and large banks.” The last one is true though.
      - joe from Lowell
        
        A secret Muslim whose beliefs were deeply influenced by Reverend Wright.
- StevenAttewell
  
  Harding pardoned Debs but he also sent in the U.S army against the UMWA.
  - HairyApe
    
    The miners at Blair Mountain originally welcomed Federal intervention. They didn’t know Billy Mitchell wanted to bomb them. Any alternative to WV or local authority was an improvement. The Feds didn’t intervene in Bloody Williamson. That was a state investigation. I was half joking with my Debs reference. As much disparagement of Wilson as anything else.
John

I would argue that most of our presidents have been mediocre or worse.

Would you say that at least 50% of them have been worse than average?
- gocart mozart
  
  I woud argue that way more than 50% have been worse than average.
  - Vance Maverick
    
    Yup, 50% below the median, but 80-90% below the mean.
Ann Isotrophic

Y’all have missed a truly horrible American President (though not US president), Jefferson Finis Davis….
- Murc
  
  It’s typically implied on lists like that we mean ‘U.S.’ Among worst AMERICAN Presidents, it would of course go without saying that Jeff Davis wins.
  - Kal
    
    Yeah. You don’t want to start having to consider L Paul Bremer, etc.
Brett Turner

I don’t think James Madison at #10 is a curveball. In fact I would put him higher on the list.

We came close to losing the War of 1812, mostly because of Madison’s lousy timing. If we were going to declare war against Britain, the time to do it was while Napoleon was still strong, say 1807ish. Madison waited until Napoleon was attacking Russia and about to get his clock cleaned.

And our war strategy was terrible, fighting pointless drawn battles on the Great Lakes instead of throwing the largest army possible at Montreal.

If Madison has a saving grace, it’s that some of the blame has to go to Jefferson, whose neglect of the navy also caused problems in that war.

Almost all of my worst presidents list is 1860s and before, simply because the nation was much less established then, and there was much more damage that a bad president could do.
- Mark Field
  
  1807? That might have been a good time to declare war on Britain (with the Leopard incident as casus belli), but it would have been hard for Madison to do, what with him not being President then and all.
  - JRoth
    
    Stop making excuses, Mark! Or, should I say, Dolly?
- ajay
  
  To give him credit, he did at least decide to give up on the war after
  a) the liberated Canadians inexplicably refused to welcome the US Army with flowers and candy and
  b) it became obvious that the British had the finest navy in the world which which to transport the finest army in the world commanded by the finest general in the world, and they didn’t have anything else to do to pass the time now that they had finished defeating pretty much everyone else in Europe. Not a good time to be a country with a frigate navy and a fifteen-hundred-mile sea coast.
charles pierce

Let me take a moment to defend Jemmy Madison. Yes, the War of 1812 was not a very good idea. It is never a very good idea to have a war in which your capital city gets burned. However, I give Madison great credit in conducting that war by strict adherence to the war powers as set out in the Constitution he’d done so much to create. The Congress voted for a Declaration Of War. That is the Congress’s constitutional function.So Madison declared war. (During that war, he became the only sitting president ever to command troops in the field, and acquitted himself decently.) When the New England secessionists met in Hartford, he didn’t round them up and clap them in irons. While his greatest accomplishments were indeed the things he did before he was elected, this country, in recent decades, could have done with more presidents who had Madison’s attitude towards the constitutional war powers of the office.
Just sayin.
Scruffy Scirocco

What??? Carter didn’t even make the list but G.W. Bush did? Hokeeeey. . .I guess that shows where you’re coming from. I’d really like the 5 minutes of my life that I wasted reading this back.
- timb
  
  Carter was as big a failure as Bush? you slay me.
  
  Also, it took you 5 minutes to read a 5000 word essay? Maybe that’s why you don’t understand?
  - Malaclypse
    
    Plus, Carter was discussed numerous times in the 233 comments that he did not read or understand.
    - timb
      
      If it took him 5 minutes to read 5000 words, he could still be reading the comments by next Thursday! I hope he remembers to eat and drink. It would sad to lose a conservative in the desert of their own mind…
greg

These are all FORMER Worst AMERICAN Presidents.
The worst American President is the idiot that is
destroying the country now.
- timb
  
  I know my uninsured clients are pissed that they are getting health insurance
Ken

If you follow a philosphy that calls morality and decency “bourgeois trash”, you’re going to be a maniacal tyrant once you are in power.

This bodes ill for the Ron Paul presidency. For that matter, it means you should never vote for a follower of Ayn Rand.
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BH

Harrison as a runner-up? Any president who served only 32 days has to be on the Best Of list.
- Erik Loomis
  
  Benjamin Harrison.
Hamilton

Wow. I agree with maybe two people on this list. Did this author just put every president who didn’t solve the slavery crisis here? Way too easy.

And I’m almost confident there’s no debate that Andrew jackson is number one.