Washington was an all round peice of shit. He owned most of the land in Virginia and many slaves, whose teeth he wore as dentures.
Lincoln had a more mixed legacy. On one hand, he was a racist and a colonizer, and a moderate on anti slavery. On the other, he supported the rights of labor over capital, lead the union army to victory in the civil war, and signed the emancipation proclamation. He also put radicals in charge of reconstruction.
I'd say Washington was a bad president. Lincoln was also a bad president, but the best we've ever had
All US Presidents - without exception - were pretty terrible people. That being said Lincoln and FDR are the top two presidents in US history and it is not even remotely close. (EDIT: someone here made a case for Grant that seemed pretty reasonable)
By the way, Lincoln was not an abolitionist nor did he believe in the equality of the races.
(EDIT: Washington was shit, obviously.)
What I am going to say next will sound dumb, but that's because it's american politics. The reason he lost was because he needed to get reelected. He won by acting like a chad the first time, so he couldn't be a pussy now and roll up his windows. The CIA doesn't need to worry about that, so they just waited till he was acting stronger than he was and took action.
Historians won't tell you that the CIA faced it's dick to the world, which is how they got the Chad strength to dome the beta JFK
Maybe don’t tell your spy network you’re going to purge them, Johnny boy.
Washington worship pisses me off so fucking much
shitty person morally, shitty commander, and a fucking nonentity in political legacy.
literally just a disgustingly rich failson falling upward his entire career and people act like the motherfucker was the US messiah or somethin
Conotocaurius (Town Destroyer) was a nickname given to George Washington by Iroquois peoples in 1753. The name in its original language(s) has been given variously as Conotocarius, Conotocaurious, Caunotaucarius, Conotocarious, Hanodaganears, and Hanadahguyus. It has also been translated as "Town Taker", "Burner of Towns", "Devourer of Villages", or "he destroys the town".
Welp. I know what I'm referring to the first president of the US as from here on out
Lincoln was probably the best, but not like that good. The other comments do a good job breaking that down but I want to add another criticism of Lincoln.
Picking Andrew Johnson, a democrat who shared 0 beliefs with the republican party except being pro-Union, the ultimate "work across the aisle" modern Dem move, was such a fucking disaster. Him becoming president absolutely fucked reconstruction.
I really don't think having Hamlin on the ballot would have drastically changed the election and a president Hamlin would have been far superior to what we got. Not to mention he didn't even end up carrying some of the border states (NJ and KY). But that doesn't sound familiar.
Lincoln, pioneer of fucking over party principles to gain power, ultimately losing any power in the process.
Let's remember the Marx letter to Abraham Lincoln:
spoiler
Sir:
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
Lincoln's probably the only time the country ever had someone who could even be arguably called a good president in charge, though obviously he wasn't perfect. Washington was a total dipshit
Washington was the richest man in America at the time of the revolution and all his teeth rotted out before he was like 25, so had had multiple sets of fake chompers, experimentally and custom designed using teeth and bone he had forcibly extracted from his slaves.
he's basically Jeff Bezos, but like confirmed that he is all vanity jacked now because he makes his lowest paid employees give him bone marrow injections from their infant children.
I like Lincoln. While there is valid criticism to be made. I don't think there was anyone better at the time, and I think his assassination really fucked up any chance the US had at not being as much of a racist shithole.
I feel like a lot of what he gets criticism for is just the fact that he was a politician acting within the framework of having to maintain popular support in a still very racist country. He was never going to go full John Brown as much as I wish he did. But in the end he helped abolish slavery, so I think that at least gives him the spot of least shitty president.
Fuck Washington though, he was a slaveowner.
Tell me three presidents of South Africa and then we talk about the fucking US.
Okay easy. (Probably because I'm South African lol) South Africa has elected 4 presidents since 1994, and had a total of 5 presidents since 1994. (Six if you count the person who was president for a few hours after Mbeki's resignation. I don't)
Nelson Mandela from 1994-1999, Thabo Mbeki from 1999-2008. Kgalema Motlanthe after Mbeki's resignation from 2008-2009, Jacob Zuma from 2009-2018, and Cyril Ramaphosa from 2018 till now.
Overall Mandela was easily the best, Mbeki did a ton of neoliberal austerity reforms that messed a ton of stuff up. He also didn't believe that HIV caused AIDS, which led to a ton of people dying. Zuma was very corrupt and shared similar beliefs to Mbeki on AIDS (like saying a shower could cure HIV). Luckily he put people in charge of healthcare that accepted the science around HIV, unlike Mbeki. Zuma has been sentenced to jail for 15 months for contempt of court recently. Ramaphosa was partly responsible for the massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana while he was a CEO of Lonmin mines before being president, but at least he's better than Zuma and Mbeki. So yeah mostly bad except for Mandela. Still 1000 times better than the apartheid days, that cannot be understated.
we totally overlook world history for such a US dominated conversation. I'm not even American, but have takes on all these things because you have to with America being the dominant hegemon. a utopia is a world where we can go without talking about American culture or politics for a day
Grant was way, way better than Washington in every concievable way (despite his collossal fucking up of first nations policy) and he gets a rep as a drunkard. By far 2nd best president, followed by FDR.
Hell, Jefferson, the noted child molester and slaver was better than Washington in every way.
