What I learned from doing a presidential tier list

 So, I was going to post a presidential tier list article, but it took me literally a whole day to go through everyone and rate them, and it was boring, and I don't think anyone wants to read that, so I'm just going to post the results and talk about them a bit. I more want to focus on what I learned from doing this exercise, than the actual presidents themselves.

For reference, here's the tier list.

1) Further disproving the narrative that compromise and "respecting the office" gets stuff done.

There's a lot of talk among democrats about incremental changes, and compromises, and trying to make everyone happy, and not stepping out of bounds. Bullcrap. 

The best presidents on my list are the ones who took life by the horns and actually decided to DO SOMETHING about issues. Lincoln preserved the union, Roosevelt introduced legislation, Polk expanded the US to the west coast, FDR gave us the new deal. These presidents gave little thought to whether it was the president's job to do these things, they just did it. 

For reference, my rubric for grading these presidents looked at what they did and what legacies they did. I weighed the good they did, and the bad, and I gave a rating based on the net score they got based on that. The best presidents always did tons of stuff, often fundamentally reshaping the country and leaving long lasting legacies in their wake.

Some of the compromisers and people respecting the power of the office were some of the worst presidents. Franklin Pierce, Millard Filmore, and Grover Cleveland are among these. The former two decided to compromise on slavery, which just inflamed everyone, driving us closer to the civil war. The latter decided to not act in the midst of the gilded age to improve the lives of people. These guys are the anti-Lincolns and anti-Roosevelts. Because they governed opposite of them, they ended up with bad ratings.

This is why I crap on Biden, by the way. I know I gave him a high ranking here, but that's because he has a few mildly progressive "first 100 days" ideas floating around, without the baggage a 4-8 year presidency has. His positives are still only 1/4 of what someone like FDR accomplished as well, and that's including FDR's downsides and baggage in there. He looks good here but he's likely not going to remain an A.

2) You can do lots of stuff but still be a scumbag with a bad rating

Woodrow Wilson is a good example of this. This dude carved out a legacy for himself, but his legacy is flawed. I personally blame him in par for pushing us toward WWII long term due to his aggressiveness toward the future axis powers in negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. He also was extremely repressive at home in dealing with protesters, even going so far to lock up Eugene Debs for daring protest against the draft. 

3) Democrats are often no friend of the left

Even during the new deal era, taking in the actions of these presidents as a whole, I can't say that the democrats are really the left's allies. Rather, they do what Biden is doing now, taking a few of the causes on acting on them, while stabbing them in the back elsewhere. Truman is notorious for this. He literally wanted to draft strikers in various industries who held off their labor grievances until after WWII ended into the military. And then there were the red scares and mccarthyism against socialists, essentially destroying the labor movement. More recent democrats are even less responsive, with Clinton essentially governing like a literal republican (his legacy even worse than Bush Sr's in some ways), and Obama being a moderate. To repeat point 2, you can do a lot of stuff, but if you also do a lot of bad stuff to outweigh your accomplishments, you're not going to be remembered well by me. 

Something for Biden to take into consideration with his tentative A rating. He could very quickly be knocked down to a B, C, or even a D tier president depending on what he does in the next 3.5 years. This is like grading Obama in May 2009. He likely could've gotten an A too. 

4) Some presidents are just awful

Even among the Fs I dont believe all of those guys were unilaterally bad, nor tried to be bad. I mean I could've split the F tier into 2-3 tiers in and of itself. Some were just scumbags like Wilson who had some positive legacy but I determined his good outweighed his bad. Some were republican presidents whose legacies are controversial, just disliked by me. But then you got people like Jackson who were just callous toward blacks and native Americans, while not being good at governing. And let's not even get started about Trump...

5) Trump is the worst president...by a wide margin

I knew Trump sucked, but looking at Trump now in retrospect, the amount of damage the dude has done to the office is just...insane. No president comes close. We had people like Jackson or Johnson who were divisive in the past, and people like Nixon who were corrupt, but none of them have anything on Trump. He's like this weird mixture of all of the worst presidents all at the same time. He's Jackson, Johnson, Wilson, Nixon, and Bush Jr all in one. I think the threshold was -10 scoring wise to get an F. Trump hit -43, and I started remembering more things he did after doing that rating. The next worse was Buchanan at -25, and even he arguably didn't deserve it THAT badly. I just kind of felt like if you're the dude who essentially let the civil war happen, that's kind of a big screw up. Trump never had a single screw up that was THAT bad, but he had so many screw ups along the way he ended up doing worse. Screw Trump. Just screw him.

6) Some presidents get more hate than they deserve

Sometimes crises (especially economic recessions) happen on the watch of various presidents...and they're blamed for them, even if they did nothing wrong. Pre FDR this is especially common. The president had little ability to actually respond to such crises back then, but they were attacked for not doing anything. Van Buren was blamed after Jackson's policies crashed the economy. Hoover actually did try with the great depression, he just didn't have the right solutions like FDR did. Again, sometimes it takes someone who breaks those boundaries and really says "I dont care what you say, I'm doing this" who actually gets crap done. Yes, there will always be naysayers of these greats, but sometimes if you want an omelette you need to break some eggs.

And let's not get started on Carter...

Conclusion

Doing this exercise did teach me a lot, and while I don't want to share the article I was going to write going into the details of each one as it is long and boring, it really does teach me how politics works. Looking at things in context really describes why I dislike politics as it exists. We have so many crises and no one with any ability to do anything actually wants to. We need someone who takes the reins of power, and forges a new path in the 21st century. We need a new Roosevelt. Someone like Theodore and Franklin who just come in and say, this crap needs to be done, and I'm not putting up with any crap and is able to do it.

I feel like the centrist dems are dooming their party to mediocrity. Even as good as Biden is doing on this chart, he's still not doing anywhere near enough. He might be a mildly fondly remembered president in the grand scheme of things, but he's no FDR. We need like a Bernie Sanders or a more competent version of Andrew yang.