08-30-2019, 07:35 PM
(08-30-2019, 10:13 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: FDR was a scumbag, and also a candidate of the times. Winning a crisis war washes away all sins.
I saw a rating of the Presidents, and FDR was high on most measures, but only 15th in personal morality. Of course almost all Presidents except Harding and Trump are above the national personal average i moral values. Even Nixon simply handled power badly, and it is hard looking at him and seeing that most people would not have made much the same mistakes if they had a little Dark Side in their character. (Nixon did not get corrupt fain from his activities at any time in his life and did not accumulate grifters around him.
FDR gets knocked down largely for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and for not facilitating the escape of Jews from Hitler's clutches. But he is not the first President to support a great constriction of immigration.
This said, I see Trump as the worst President that we have ever had for winning a Crisis War. He is in no way a moral leader. He has a stormy relationship with the intelligence services and with the Armed Services. His foreign policy is battier than Dracula's laid. He cannot appeal to traditions that could be relevant to a Crisis War. He puts his self-esteem above the public welfare.
One need not be a chest-pounding nationalist to be a good top leader. Seeking peace but getting war anyway does not mean that one has lost the war. Lincoln and FDR did not want war and got it anyway. Blunders happen, and both great Presidents demonstrated that war against the United States was a catastrophic error.
For a precedent of the leader of a Great Power bungling a war badly, think of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940. Stalin had purged the Red Army of competent senior officers, and what was left bungled the war against a country under the leadership of a nearly-ideal Crisis Leader: Karl Mannerheim, a principled, visionary, astute leader capable of uniting a country once severely divided in its politics. Stalin expected a quick campaign that would result in establishing a "Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic" as a constituent republic of the USSR. The Finns were able to exploit a topography that shows that anyone can draw arrows on a map showing a projected advance of one's troops, but that pinch points can make such arrows sheer fantasy.
Then there is Vietnam for the USA -- and Afghanistan as a tomb of imperial designs of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Figure that President Trump is the sort who puts personal loyalty and ideological agreement over competence and how that limits the quality of senior leadership in a major war. American failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan have plenty of blame to pass around, but with Trump as President during some war for his glory and the profit of war contractors, I can see a similar disaster to the first Soviet-Finnish War looming.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.