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?
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.