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Notes -
Adding to this with one of my favorite subjects (early US Presidents), the record was no better in the 18th and 19th centuries. Washington was a good president given that he was setting all precedents. John Adams was a very good man but probably pretty mid as a president. Jefferson was not a very good man but a good president if you ignore that he basically ignored the Constitution and was a two-faced hypocrite. Madison, pretty good (except he got us into the War of 1812, not 100% his fault). Monroe, good, not great. John Quincy Adams, very mediocre as president. And so on all the way through the 19th century - for every lion like Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln, or effective bureaucrat like Polk, you had an apparatchnik like Van Buren or Fillmore or a failure with feet of clay like Tyler or Buchanan or Johnson, or just midwits whose greatest virtue was that they didn't do too much damage, like Pierce or Harrison.
History repeats itself and echoes frequently. People would be less stuck in presentism and "This is the greatest crisis in history!" if they read more history.
How can I nerd snipe you into sharing favorite anecdotes, intriguing obscure bits etc.?
I share the sentiment. I would especially like to hear about why Andrew Jackson was a “lion” of a president, somewhere in a neighborhood of Lincoln, which I interpret from the context to mean “highly impactful and in a net positive way.”
I don’t necessarily disagree — I don’t know much about the early American presidents — but this strikes me as a possibly heterodox assertion and the explanation might be juicy.
Andrew Jackson was a very strong president, who ignored the Supreme Court, muscled states around, and strong armed the federal government into paying off its debt for, quite literally, the only time in US history. You might not think he was a good president, but he was clearly lionlike in his forcefulness and strength.
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Yes! I want to scream literally every single time I see someone say “this is the most divided we have ever been” without a qualifier, as if the entire fucking civil war didn’t happen…
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