Just in time for Presidents Day, the American Political Science Association released its 2024 survey of presidential greatness, which merely confirms the ideological and political bias of political science professionals — the very same people who teach (indoctrinate?) our children at colleges and universities throughout the United States. A survey like this should make parents think twice about whether to pay the exorbitant tuition to have political science professors miseducate their children.
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Some of the rankings are by now standard — George Washington (3rd), Franklin D. Roosevelt (2nd), and Abraham Lincoln (1st) at or near the top; Harry Truman (6th) and Theodore Roosevelt (4th) in the top 10; Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon near the bottom (34th and 35th, respectively); James Buchanan (44th) at or near the bottom; and Donald Trump (45th), of course, dead last.
Some of the rankings are simply ludicrous and laughable. These political science “experts” rank Barack Obama (7th) ahead of Dwight Eisenhower (8th) and Ronald Reagan (16th); they rank Lyndon Johnson (9th), John Kennedy (10th), Bill Clinton (12th), Joe Biden (14th), and Woodrow Wilson (15th) higher than Reagan (16th) and Andrew Jackson (21st). (Jackson’s ranking continues to trend downward perhaps because he manifested a populism that reminds the professors of Trump). When asked which president should join Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore, most said FDR, followed by Obama, then Eisenhower, Madison, and Kennedy.
The participants ranked Trump the most polarizing president, followed by Andrew Jackson, Obama, Reagan, Nixon, and George W. Bush, even though we fought a polarizing civil war in which more than 700,000 soldiers lost their lives during Lincoln’s presidency. Indeed, these geniuses ranked Lincoln as the fourth least polarizing president. Here again, ideology trumps history.
The survey participants selected Jimmy Carter as the most underrated president, Kennedy (surprisingly) as the most over-rated president, followed closely by Reagan (no surprise there). Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, no doubt, is overrated because it is likely that most of these professors give the lion’s share of the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The survey, of course, fits within and confirms the media narrative that favors liberal presidents over conservative presidents, and that favors Biden over Trump as the 2024 presidential election season heats up. The Hill’s headline states, “Presidential experts rank Biden 14th among presidents in survey, Trump comes in last.” The New York Times’ headline similarly states, “Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last.” Newsweek’s headline says, “Donald Trump Places Last in New ‘Presidential Greatness’ Rankings.” The Los Angeles Times features this tease on Google: “Experts rank Biden among the best presidents. Trump? Not so much.” This is how an ideologically biased survey of so-called experts becomes a “news story” to the benefit of Biden as the 2024 election approaches.
The greater long-term harm of ideologically driven political science professors is the influence they have on the minds and worldviews of young voters. Polls in the 2020 election showed that student voters favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 70 percent to 18 percent. After the election, the Hill reported that 61 percent of students voted for Biden. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, Biden led Trump among all voters under age 30 by 53 percent to 24 percent. ABC News reported last October that voters under age 30 “are trending left of the general electorate.” This should surprise no one if what those students read and hear in their political science classes echoes the beliefs of their professors as manifested in the presidential greatness survey.
The miseducation of our students, of course, occurs not just in colleges and universities but in our elementary, middle, and high schools too. But at the university level, ideology plays a greater role. And the mainstream media simply reaffirms what the students learn from their professors: FDR great, Coolidge bad; Truman and Kennedy great, Nixon bad; Obama great, Reagan bad; Biden good, Trump bad. This miseducation, of course, extends beyond presidential greatness to subjects like Watergate, McCarthyism, communism, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Great Society, civil rights, the end of the Cold War, and other sources of liberal conventional wisdom.
As long as the Left controls the education establishment in this country, the rankings of presidents will continue to be heavily skewed in favor of liberals and Democrats, and the miseducation of our students will continue. Think about that the next time the tuition bill comes due.
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