Political Scholars Lose Their Last Shred of Credibility by Releasing Utterly Nonsensical Presidential Rankings
Just when it appears that academic liberals can sink no lower, the establishment’s lettered minions find new ways to beclown themselves.
According to the results of the recent 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, 154 of the nation’s leading so-called “scholars” and “social science experts in presidential politics” hold such comically grotesque views of the modern presidency that one wonders if the those “experts” occupy the same universe as everyone else.
For instance, the regime’s credentialed scribes rated President Joe Biden 14th on their list of “Overall Presidential Greatness.”
But the unintentional comedy only began there. The survey’s respondents ranked Biden two spots above Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, they rated Barack Obama 7th, three spots ahead of John F. Kennedy and four ahead of Founding Father James Madison.
To crown the absurdity, Donald Trump ranked 45th and last by a wide margin.
The top of the rankings, at least, revealed no major surprises. Respondents named their top five greatest presidents in the following order: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson.
The online survey took place between Nov. 15 and Dec. 31, 2023. Respondents included “current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association,” as well as others who have conducted “recently published peer-reviewed academic research.” The APSA is the leading professional association for political scientists.
In other words, the people who gave those delusional responses either have taught or currently teach at college and universities.
The responses, of course, have no merit. They come not from actual experts but from imperial mandarins who exist to defend the regime’s structure of authority.
That might sound like hyperbole, but how else could one explain something as absurd as Biden ranking ahead of Reagan? How does one even address such a thing on the merits?
Did it matter, for instance, how or if the president faithfully executed the duties of the office? Or if Americans’ lives improved? If they enjoyed relative peace and prosperity?
Or — and here the mandarin haughtiness revealed itself most fully — did it matter that contemporary voters either resoundingly endorsed or rebuked a president?
To America’s leading credentialed “experts” in political science, a president’s actual performance in office — at least among modern presidents — did not seem to make any difference.
Reagan, for instance, won the 1984 presidential election in a historic 525-13 landslide. Meanwhile, Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted to unprecedented depths.
Furthermore, with no objective measure for greatness, the survey basically revealed presidents the respondents happened to like.
After all, did Americans’ lives improve under Obama? How did he demonstrate a greatness exceeding that of all but six other presidents? The answers, of course, are that they did not, and he did not.
But many members of the credentialed class occupy a different reality. In fact, if they do not quite belong to the elite one percent, they certainly share a worldview with that self-styled ruling class. And at the center of that worldview lay intense hostility to ordinary Americans.
Indeed, the respondents’ ludicrous elitism appeared most obvious in their relegation of Trump to last place in the rankings.
For those who do not live in the credentialed respondents’ insulated world, that ranking almost defies belief.
To put the respondents’ anti-Trump hatred in context, consider the names they listed above his.
James Buchanan, the northern Democrat who allied with pro-slavery radicals and presided over the dissolution of the Union in 1860-61, ranked one spot ahead of Trump.
Then came Andrew Johnson, whose catastrophic Reconstruction policies left freed slaves to the mercy of their former masters until Republicans in Congress intervened to check the president.
One spot above Johnson, the respondents named Buchanan’s predecessor and fellow northern Democrat Franklin Pierce, who helped open the West to slavery by signing the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.
These are the presidents whom respondents ranked as greater than Trump.
Fortunately, those academic liberals have made their derangement so obvious that they practically deserve pity. If anyone still took them seriously, this survey should change that for good.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
