Here is an excellent and detailed review of my new book, Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, which is out this week, and which you can order here now.
“Rating America’s Presidents,” review by Loren Rosson, August 6, 2020:
There’s a new book coming out, and it’s quite a treat: Rating America’s Presidents. The author, Robert Spencer, wrote the magisterial History of Jihad and many other books on Islam. A ranking of the U.S. presidents is outside his usual area, but he does a very good job where most others fail. Of the countless president rankings flooding the market, there has been only one that I find useful: Recarving Rushmore by Ivan Eland. Spencer’s book is now a second helpful remedy to the established mainstream views of which presidents were good and bad and somewhere in-between.
Mainstream historians tend to favor presidents who were (a) charismatics, (b) goal-oriented “managers”, (c) foreign interventionists, (d) big-government statists, and (e) globalists. Call these biases the (a) charisma bias, the (b) effectiveness bias, and the (c-d-e) activist biases. I’ve said this many times before: Just because a leader is charismatic and can move you with speeches, doesn’t say anything about his policies and how good he was for the American people. That he accomplished his goals says nothing about how good those goals were. (James Polk and Lyndon Johnson were the two most effective presidents in history; they were also bad ones.) That he intervened militarily abroad, economically at home, and meddled in worldly affairs are just as likely bad signs as good ones, and usually more bad; it’s precisely when presidents “do too much”, instead of showing executive restraint, that America (and other nations) end up suffering for it.
Seriously: On the basis of charisma, effectiveness, and activism, some of the worst leaders in history would have to be pronounced great, not least Adolf Hitler. These are lousy criteria to judge our chief executives, and yet most everyone uses them, consciously or not. Human beings are suckers for charisma; we feel the pull of magnetically persuasive leaders like FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (charismatics are usually Democrats, for whatever reason). We also like to focus on a president’s effectiveness (in achieving his goals, no matter what those goals are), because it allows us the illusion of neutrality, and to abstain from judgment and keep our politics private; but we can’t be apolitical in evaluating politicians. We have to get our hands dirty for the exercise to mean anything. Spencer’s cards, refreshingly, are all on the table. In his introduction he writes:
New criteria are needed—or more precisely, old criteria. In fact, what is needed is the oldest criterion of all for judging the success and failure of various presidents: were they good for America and Americans, or were they not?… What makes a great president is one who preserved, protected, and defended the Constitution of the United States. Or to put it even more simply, a great president is one who put America first.
The idea that all responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens primarily, rather than those of the world at large, has been out of fashion since World War II, and in many ways since World War I. It has been mislabeled, derided, and dismissed as ‘isolationism,’ a fear or unwillingness to engage with the wider world, even as it is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent. But it does not necessarily mean that America will withdraw from the world; it only means that in dealing with the world, American presidents will be looking out primarily for the good of Americans.
The term America First has also been associated, quite unfairly, with racism and anti-Semitism. The founding principles of the republic, notably the proposition that, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, ‘all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,’ shows that putting America First has nothing to do with such petty and irrational hatreds.
That will therefore be the principal criterion of the evaluations of the presidents in this book: Did he put America first? Was he good for Americans? Or did he leave us in a worse, poorer, more precarious, or more dangerous position than we were in before he assumed office?
Indeed, an “America First” criteria would seem so obvious, and I tend to frame that issue in the way Ivan Eland does in Recarving Rushmore. Presidents should be judged by what they did for the American causes of peace (foreign policy), prosperity (domestic policy), and liberty (freedom). After all, those are what most Americans want from life: to live in peace, to prosper, and to enjoy freedom. Though Spencer doesn’t spell out his criteria this way, they emerge implicitly in his assessments…
There is a great deal more. Read the rest here.