Spencer does a “Hayward”

Although I have become more sceptical of the attitudes and motives of the Politically Incorrect Guides in recent years – seeing that they are at large a mouthpiece for the super-rich as the radical Trotskyist Left were saying before the first PIG was printed in 2004 – I still occasionally think about them and their perspective as a counterweight to the other side of politics.

Robert Spencer is an author I have had some respect for because of his revelations about the violent doctrines and history of Islam – something which I knew of from the Koran as a child but which was obscured until I read Spencer by books I read as a young adult in the late 1990s on the Satanic Verses affair. Spencer shows that Islam teaches extremes of violence and intolerance towards non-Muslims, which can be seen in the Sa^cudi monarchy whose fanatical Islam made them the best possible allies for the super-rich against revolution and even any non-elite political power.

Given Spencer’s focus on Islam, I was slightly surprised to discover that last year he had written a book on a topic the PIGs and their allies had previously addressed: ranking American presidents. Titled Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Spencer rates in one book all the presidents from Washington to Trump. When I looked at the book on Google Books, I was not able to get all the ratings, but I did get them online from Loren Rosson – to whom I give many thanks – at The Busybody.

Unlike Hayward, Spencer goes all the way back to the first presidents, but in the interests of making a one-to-one comparison of writers I will only compare with Stephen Hayward’s original The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. Rosson himself gave his own assessment, which as he says is with some conspicuous exceptions similar to those of Spencer.

President	Hayward rating	Spencer rating	Rosson rating
Thomas Woodrow Wilson	F	0	0
Warren Gamaliel Harding	B+	9	9
Calvin Coolidge	A+	10	8
Herbert Hoover	C-	0	5
Frenklin Delano Roosevelt	F	1	3
Harry S. Truman	C+	6	8
Dwight David Eisenhower	C+	6	8
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	C-	5	6
Lyndon Baines Johnson	F	1	3
Richard Milhous Nixon	C+	2	4
Gerald Rudolph Ford	C+	5	6
James Earl Carter	F	0	7
Ronald Wilson Reagan	A-	9	6
George Herbert Walker Bush	B	2	5
William Jefferson Clinton	F	0	7
George Walker Bush	B+	1	1
Barack Hussein Obama	F	0	3
Donald John Trump		10	2

Those presidents coloured in light purple – Richard Nixon and the two Bushes – are the biggest differences between Hayward and Spencer. I am well aware that conservatives like Spencer and Thomas Woods (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) view Nixon as neither a strong president nor sufficiently right-wing.

Initially my Google search was not able to see how Spencer actually views Nixon and why in Spencer’s opinion Nixon was “very damaging for America”. However, a second look showed that Nixon is disliked by Spencer because he opened negotiations with Máo Zédōng. Máo Zédōng is viewed by many on the American right as the worst mass murderer in history – Paul Kengor says Máo murdered seven times more people than Hitler. Stephen Hayward said very little about Nixon’s opening to Máo’s China, merely noting

“Nixon’s opening to Communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliché of counterintuitive politics: “Only Nixon could go to China.””

whilst saying that Brezhnev’s Russia was engaging in a “massive arms build-up throughout the 1970s”, a time when Stalinist Russia’s crisis was clearly evident to those who looked. The Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe would quite likely have collapsed regardless of who was in power in the White House and Capitol, unless they consistently purged would-be reformers over many decades like Kim Il Sung or embraced major economic reforms as China and Vietnam did. Neither policy was feasible in a continent with a long history of working class struggle even during the repressive Stalinist years – a history which the Stalinist nations who did survive lacked.

I am also aware that the Bushes have been heavily criticised by conservatives like Brion McClanahan (9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America) for circumscribing personal liberty, for instance via the Patriot Act. It is difficult to argue about the Bushes, who had little concern for personal freedom, nor for merely protecting Americans against terrorism. If Bush junior had been so concerned, his first step would have been abolishing diplomatic relations with Sa^cudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and banning entry by their citizens or people with Sa^cudi, Qatari or UAE passport stamps, not by invading states opposed to al-Qa^cida like Iraq. However, powerful ties with the authoritarian monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council are in the vested interest of the super-rich – the only group whom the major US parties represent – since their theological opposition to socialism means they are the most reliable ally for fighting a war against the interests of the majority. That the Gulf monarchies are the major supporters of global terrorism is immaterial. Any assessment of Bush junior’s real relationship to freedom should take this into account.

With Bush senior, had he left Hussein alone, Iraq would almost certainly have fought a war with Sa^cudi Arabia that would have weakened both regimes and dramatically weakened the threat of global terrorism. (Pat Buchanan in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War argued in a perfectly analogous manner that the best way to fight both Nazism and Stalinism was to let them fight each other). Again, the PIGs I have read never say this about Iraq, and these omissions need to be considered when studying such books.