Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
Conventional wisdom, verified in conversations with your neighbors, friends and even strangers, holds that contemporary American politics is deeply polarized. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes, “Some scholars claim that Americans are so polarized they are on the brink of civil war.”
But the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and ensuing lawsuits prove that a political civil war already exists. The headline of a Bloomberg op-ed political writer Francis Wilkinson, sounds a clarion bell: “ The Only US 'Civil War’ Will Be a War on Democracy.”
These alarms are nothing new. Research by the American Political Science Association notes that divisiveness started in the Senate in the mid-1950s and in the House of Representatives 20 years later. The presumptive 2024 presidential candidates are not liked by 60 percent to 70 percent of the voters. Both reference the Nov. 5 election as a democracy-versus-dictatorship decision point.
Gallup noted in January that 43 percent of voters consider themselves independent and the Republicans and Democrats equally divide the remaining population. Odds are the GOP lemmings will vote – regardless of research and legal findings – for Donald Trump and the Democratic Party conformists will vote for Joe Biden. The independents, who do their research, will determine who will lead America for the next four years.
Odds are also great that political parties will most likely tell their card-carrying members and foes from the “other side” a combination of disinformation, misinformation and propaganda – hoodwinking in orientation – and a smattering of truth.
Much of the time during political races we’re bombarded with massive and even conflicting information. No matter how hard we try, it’s difficult – if not impossible – to decipher truth from fiction. It’s during turbulent times like these where freethinking citizens seek voting guidance and defer to experts’ opinion.
Social science experts in political science and politically oriented research scholars participated in a late-2023 study, titled “The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey,” that ranked the presidents and gave some insight into experts’ thoughts on this election.
Here are the paramount research findings from specialists who study American presidents for a living that should give voters some compelling guidance:
- Biden was ranked as America’s 14th greatest president; Donald Trump came in dead last at No. 45. (FYI: The United States has had 46 presidents with Grover Cleveland serving as the 22nd and 24th; researchers count him just once.)
- Experts in presidential politics who identified themselves as conservative-oriented and Republican ranked Biden considerably higher than Trump for presidential effectiveness.
- Trump was identified – by far – as the most polarizing president, seven spots higher than Biden.
- Biden was acknowledged as the sixth most under-rated president while Trump came in eighth on the overrated list.
Research conducted in 2022 by the Siena College Research Institute – revered for their unbiased research and valid findings – corroborates the APSA’s findings. The institute ranked Biden as the 19th best president and Trump as – again – No. 45.
As the Los Angeles Times noted, should a Biden-Trump rematch occur, voters will be in that unique position of knowing how both candidates performed while they were in office to protect and defend America.
Between now and Nov. 5, be independent – like nearly half of the voters – and do your homework. Choose the candidate who you are convinced will demonstrate accepted norms of presidential leadership, keep America as the leader of the free world, preserve our constitutional rights, promote bipartisanship, respect laws of the land and the judicial system, keep our global trade alliances, support our military, stand up against CRINK (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea), and maintain America as a democracy versus falling into dictatorial-authoritarian control.
What would you be most proud of telling your family 10, 15 or 20 years from now? That you blindly followed the order of your preferred political party in the 2024 presidential election, didn’t vote or were a freethinking voter who seriously researched the candidates and determined America’s future?
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.