PRESIDENTIAL RANKINGS ARE LESS USEFUL THAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL POLLS.

Academics who fancy themselves Court Intellectuals for the Administrative State have a propensity to evaluate American Presidents for their Conformity to the Academic Prejudices.  Thus we have the latest Presidential League Tables, courtesy of those Court Intellectuals.  Not that it fools Noah Rothman, or anybody else with a functioning jive detector.

If the historians who contributed their alleged expertise to compiling a list measuring “overall presidential greatness” brought any history with them into their analysis, that’s hard to discern from the product they produced. My colleagues will take the list to task for its authors’ revisionism, but it seems that the point of this exercise wasn’t an objective assessment of American presidential legacies. It was to convey to the list’s readers that Donald Trump is bad.

According to our most influential historians, Trump earned himself a spot at the very bottom of their list registering relative “greatness” in the Oval Office. Perhaps owing to a latent sense of shame among practicing academics, Joe Biden managed only to be named America’s 14th greatest president, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson. It should surprise no one that, with throat-clearing exceptions made for presidents such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the list favors progressive Democrats and progressive Republicans. The virtue of progressivism is the common thread. We can, therefore, deduce that the goal of this enterprise was to advance voguish narratives favored by progressive academicians.

The list is reminiscent of other efforts to manipulate public perception via the selective deployment of “expertise.”

Yes, and it will be treated as Received Wisdom on the Sunday shows, all the efforts of citizen pundits and social media scribes notwithstanding.  The Credentialed Experts push such things because they think their salaries depend on them doing so.

What’s remarkable about these efforts to launder opinion into the national discourse under the guise of expertise is that the architects of these experiments are possessed of such self-regard that they think they can reshape our perception of reality. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t invested in promoting an agenda agree that Barack Obama belongs somewhere on the spectrum of historical greatness between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. No one in their right mind believes America’s civic institutions and civil society are roughly comparable to Italy’s. Anyone who was persuaded to put off emigrating to the United States because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia better cares for its female population has been profoundly misled.

Why would anyone believe this nonsense? Indeed, it sometimes can seem like belief is beside the point. The objective in articulating facially nonsensical untruths such as these isn’t to convey “expertise” but zeal in service to a faddish political cause. Today, the cause is anti-Trumpism. If history gets in the way of that goal, then history has to go.

Dominic Pino, also reacting to that silly survey, gets to the point my title hints at.

[P]residents should not be ranked in the first place, and if the APSA cared about its credibility, it would stop ranking them.

This is not to say historians should not evaluate presidents. They do and they should, and some are better than others. Exactly how that evaluation is done will take into account factors such as the evaluator’s worldview, or his belief about what presidents ought to do. That will vary, and arguments will be had on whether certain presidents were good or bad, and in what ways.

In a logical world, yes. "Presidential historians," though, are a class of people who serve as Morale Conditioners for those Credentialed Elites who have done away with self-service drug stores.

[Jon Meacham is] part of a cadre of scribblers who traffic in the role of "presidential historian," which neither implies nor is implied by holding an academic post, and which includes the likes of the long-departed Theodore H. White; and the book's dedication is to Evan Thomas and Michael Beschsloss, two more of the tribe.  For the most part, the presidential historians share the world view of the Credentialed Elite who see Governance by Wise Experts as something to be desired, and Successful Presidents as holders of the office who advance that cause.  Thus, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson rate high in that cadre's estimation, while Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan ... do not.

It will be up to future genuine historians, perhaps in another three centuries, to sort those rankings more precisely.

So let it be with the latest survey. As if the people who are inclined to vote for Donald Trump in their state primary, or should he earn the Republican nomination, in the general election, are going to be dissuaded from so doing by ... university professors?

More fundamentally, though, league tables make sense for ... a football season, but, Mr Pino continues, to treat a time series of presidential records as somehow More Meaningful than a hot-stove league comparison of the Yankees of the Twenties with the Yankees of the Sixties, is, to put it bluntly, nuts.

Turning to examples of leadership from the past is part of a healthy political culture, and presidents are an obvious place to look within our system of government.

But ranking them simply makes no sense. We can comfortably say that Lincoln was a better president than Buchanan. But what does it really mean to say that, for example, Garfield was a better president than Tyler? Or Taft was a better president than Fillmore?

The inescapable conclusion of any honest survey of American presidents is that nearly all of them were mediocre. That’s why the holiday is, and ought to be, Washington’s Birthday, not Presidents’ Day. Washington deserves celebration. Lincoln, too, deserves celebration. It’s really hard to think of any other presidents who rise to their level.

Obviously, I love Reagan and celebrate his legacy, but I suspect Reagan himself would tell you he was no Washington or Lincoln. In some sense, the only honest ranking, if one could even call it that, would be a tie between Washington and Lincoln for No. 1, and then everybody else.

The exercise of actually ranking them from No. 1 to 46 raises a bunch of unanswerable questions.

The exercise, though, continues the Cult of the Presidency. (I suppose that makes sense, has there been any cult that wasn't adulation of mediocrities?)

[T]his is really the problem with ranking the presidents: It ascribes too much power and significance to them.

U.S. presidents are powerful and significant, but still, each of them is one person in a big country. It’s an even bigger world. Presidents deserve credit or blame for specific decisions they make in areas where they actually have power. But overall results in the country while they are president? To paraphrase Barack Obama: They didn’t build that.

The U.S. is a country of millions of individuals, born into families, organizing themselves into associations and corporations for various purposes, participating in a government with checks and balances and separation of powers. It could be made better, and the government has certainly expanded greatly and in ways that it shouldn’t have. But by historical standards, this is a free country with a limited government.

That means most — nearly all — of what goes on in this country is not dependent on who the president is. It is for that fact that we thank Washington, for first leading this form of government, and Lincoln, for preserving it against armed rebellion. Ordinally ranking all of them by some standard of “greatness” is a fruitless task.

Yes, and as recent developments have shown, without a Speaker of the House, no legislation gets passed. We are seeing, every day, that a senile sock puppet can serve as the fourteenth most effective president.