There is not a ton of positive news for America or Americans, but here’s one so let’s take it: Two recent data points suggest that the dangerously high influence of “experts” on average Americans’ thinking is collapsing. It cannot come fast enough.
First point, timed right at Presidents Day this week, the Presidential Greatness Project, a survey of historians and scholars, published its latest ranking of U.S. presidents. And, as to be expected, it’s a forehead-slapper of reality disconnect.
Coming in this year at No. 14 among all-time presidents is the bumbling, muttering tool of psychopath leftists and corruptocrats everywhere, Joe Biden. This ranking hilariously puts him in the top one-third of all American presidents. The list places Donald Trump dead last, the very worst president in all of American history. Again, hilariously predictable. Of course, these are the same “experts” who in 2015 ranked Bill Clinton and Woodrow Wilson above Ronald Reagan, and put Jimmy Carter ahead of Calvin Coolidge.
Any semi-objective reading of Biden’s and Trump’s first terms by measuring how well Americans fared and how well the world fared finds Trump’s demonstrably better in almost every category, from the economy to wage growth to containment of Russia to peace in the Middle East.
But here’s the thing: Normal Americans are realizing this.
Related: The Election Will Be a Referendum on Joe Biden’s Presidency
The tell, of course, is who these “experts” are. The self-own is in their own words: “Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics…” Social science is well understood to be the most leftist of the academic categories. They are the hackiest of the leftist academia.
The authors of the survey further self-own when they write in the Los Angeles Times: “Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents.” Those “norms” are exactly what most Americans have had enough of. Yet the same bubble-dwellers saw no radical departure when Barack Obama promised and pursued the “fundamental transformation” of America. This mindset has resulted in Republicans moving further down the presidential success sweepstakes as Democrats move up.
Their lack of self-awareness in their social science academia seclusion is almost breathtaking.
The second data point, however, completely reinforces how cloistered these people are from actual Americans. It just doesn’t require a college degree to rate Biden and Trump if you literally lived through their presidencies.
Rasmussen found that Americans — those struggling through the Biden presidency in real time — say that Biden has been a dismal failure in his first term. All of the institutional “expert” help and hardened media defense perimeters in the world could not hide Biden’s growing senility and staff incompetence. Nearly 60 percent said that Biden’s presidency has been a failure, including 40 percent who called his presidency to date a “complete failure,” while another 18% called it “mostly unsuccessful.”
A paltry nine percent graded Biden “a complete success,” presumably the most diehard partisans, pretty much the same as the comical experts in the Presidential Greatness Project.
However, Rasmussen found that Americans generally approved of Trump’s first term — particularly in light of what has followed — with 56 percent labeling Trump’s first term a success, including 22 percent saying it was a “complete success.” Even some Democrats agreed, with 28 percent calling Trump’s presidency a success — including 11 percent who called it a “complete success.”
Granted, these are only two data points. But combining them suggests that Americans are turning away from the propaganda poison of the anti-American “expert” class and relying more on their own good senses. This is a good and necessary step forward.