Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.
Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”
…
“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”
The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”
That’s… Not what we call a statistically valid sample size.
Note, that is not 154 random people on the street. That is 154 US academics specializing in presidential politics, a much smaller total population.
That’s not the way that I read that. If that’s true, then the phrasing was very unclear.
I did not read this article in particular, but the actual report: http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf
Its so tiresome, because none of this shit is going to matter once the next Big Hurricane wipes a few more Gulf Coast cities off the map. The “Best/Worst” Presidents are all yet to be written, not set in stone by some dipshit Frank Luntz poll of 50-something ivy league academics.
People are going to be looking back at the Obama/Trump/Biden Era as absolutely utopian, with the way our economy is pitched. Its the Kamala Harris / Greg Abbott / Beyonce / Tucker Carlson presidencies you’re really going to have feelings about over the next thirty years.
TBH, once the really hard consequences of climate change hit–blue ocean events, mass die-offs of fish across all oceans, dust bowls in regions that are currently bread baskets, etc.–I don’t think that most people are going to be worrying about a president at all.
If humanity is lucky, we’ll all die from a previously unclassified pathogen from melting arctic ice. If humanity is unlucky, it’s going to be death from a century of famines.
We worried quite a bit about the President during the last 30s-era Dust Bowl.
Its not the end of the world. Its the end of a particular way of life. As the old world dies, the new world struggles to be born.
No, it’s not the end of the world; the planet will shrug humanity off and continue without us just fine. The world will do just fine, right up until the sun turns into a red giant and the expanding corona envelops this planet and burns it away, in a few billion years.
It will probably be the end of civilization as we understand it though.
More primitive civilizations have endured more desperate conditions.
We are not more primitive civilizations. We have culturally forgotten most of the things that are absolutely necessary for more primitive cultures to survive, and there are not nearly enough people have have any of these cultural memories to pass knowledge on at a meaningful scale. Tribes in sub-Saharan Africa might be able to survive, if climate change doesn’t wipe out their prey animals. Same with certain tribes in Brazil, assuming that temperatures don’t go past 95F for wet-bulb temperatures in the Amazon.
But we’re not them.
Developing large agriculture surpluses and potable water reserves, while expanding safe arteries of travel and maintaining peaceful coexistence with our surrounding neighbors?
Global literacy is at a historical peak. And methods of archiving/distributing information have never been more diverse or prolific.
They’ll be some of the first to go, precisely because they don’t have industrial agriculture or advanced pluming and A/C.
Advanced plumbing doesn’t help you when you no longer have ground water, and there’s no snow melt to feed your reservoirs. Agricultural surpluses dry up when the topsoil is exhausted, there’s no water for the crops, and the growing zones have shifted so that the land that used to be perfect for corn and soybeans can’t grow them at all anymore. Peaceful co-existence stops the minute famine hits. Those safe arteries for travel? That’s in large part what’s causing this. We keep pumping out carbon dioxide at ever increasing rates with out global production, and blithely assume that there will always be a new technology to prevent the whole house of cards from tumbling down.
And literacy? That’s not the same as being able to do a thing. I’m talking about skills, thing that need to be learned and practiced from a young age.