The Lesser 30: Analyzing Recent American Presidential Eras

The Lesser 30 presidents exemplify political polarization and cultural division in modern America.

### The Lesser 30: An Era of Political Polarization and Presidential Legacy
* 📉 The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of regimes in Russia and China, contributing to a **new era of geopolitical tensions** often referred to as the **Lesser 30**.
* 🤔 This period has been marked by **significant political polarization** in the United States, with debates around whether the fault lies more with the **presidents** or the **American people themselves**.
* 👩 ‍💼 Hillary Clinton, during her husband's presidency, represented a modern approach to the role of First Lady, aiming to be **actively involved in governance** rather than conforming to traditional expectations.
* 🗳 Bill Clinton's presidency is often viewed as the **beginning of intense political polarization**, particularly following the **impeachment proceedings initiated by Republicans in Congress in 1998**.
* 📚 David Sanger's book, "New Cold Wars," critiques the foreign policy of the Lesser 30 presidents, labeling the last 30 years as a "**fantasy era**" filled with **ignorance and naivety** regarding global affairs.
* 🌍 The Lesser 30 presidents, who prioritized domestic politics, often faced criticism for their **perceived indifference to international issues**, with Biden being the exception due to his **extensive foreign relations experience**.
* 🗣 Barack Obama's rise was characterized by a **significant cultural impact**, inspiring **hope and change**, yet he navigated a **politically divided landscape** that limited his ability to **unite the country**.
* 🧑 ‍⚖️ Donald Trump's presidency further deepened partisan divides, making him a **polarizing figure**, while Joe Biden's election reflected the ongoing political tensions as he became the **oldest president in U.S. history**.

Hello friends, my name is JJ, and a few weeks ago, I made a video about the seven presidents who ran the United States from 1961 to 1993. I believe this to be one of the most culturally significant eras in the history of America, if not the world, and I wanted to analyze the degree that the presidents of that time were major cultural figures unto themselves. These decades, which I like to call the shaah era after the Japanese name for them, can feel like a very long period of history given how much happened in them in terms of technological innovations, social reform, political change, and all the rest. But did you know that as of next year, we are concluding a historical period of equal length between John F. Kennedy's election and the departure of George H.W. Bush? 32 years elapsed, and next year, when the president is sworn in for his second term, whoever that winds up being, it will mark the close of a 32-year period as well. Now, I am just going to go out on a limb and say that I do not believe that

the 32-year period that is currently concluding was nearly as culturally significant as the 32-year period that came before. I think the decades between 1993 and 2024 have been defined primarily by the degree that they consolidated the innovations of the Shah age, as opposed to introducing any comparable social, technological, or political paradigm shifts of their own. So, with that in mind, let us ditch the esoteric term Shah and instead call this era the Great 30 and our current era the Lesser 30. Now, the five presidents of the Lesser 30 were both more unusual and more normal than the presidents of the Great 30. They are more normal in the sense that the presidents of the Lesser 30 have been a lot more politically stable. We have seen three two-term presidents, and we soon see a fourth, in contrast to the Great 30, which only saw one. The current era has also seen no assassinations, no resignations, and no vice presidents assuming office. But on the other hand, the Lesser 30

presidents also had considerably less in common with one another than the Kennedy through Bush crew. All of the great 30 presidents were members of the World War II generation and all had served in the US military during that war. They all had relatively similar political careers and generally weak ideological identities, and they all generally liked and respected each other. The biographies of the Lesser 30 presidents are more all over the place. By contrast, four of the five were part of the baby boom generation, but the details are kind of strange. Three of them were born within literal weeks of one another right at the start of the baby boom in 1946. But then Obama, the fourth Boomer president, was born way at the other end, right near the generational cut-off. And then you have Trump and Biden, who were the two oldest men ever elected president. They came to power much older than all of their recent predecessors, which is the opposite of how these things usually work. The presidents of this era had much more elite educations than the ones that

came before with four of the five attending Ivy League universities, but they vary significantly in terms of what sort of work they did before getting involved in politics and how long their pre-political careers were. And unlike the World War II generation, none of them were combat veterans of the US Armed Forces. In general, the expectation of what qualified someone to be president shifted significantly in the Lesser 30 era away from what the columnist David Brooks calls resume virtues towards eulogy virtues, which is to say voters started to place a greater emphasis on electing presidents who displayed characteristics like empathy, faith, eloquence, or bluntness, and less importance on whether they had much of a track record of accomplishing things in government. Either Clinton, Bush, or Trump served in Congress, and Obama only served 34s of a single Senate term. Trump obviously had the least political experience of all given president was the first elected office he ever held, something that had only been true for a handful of other presidents. Contrast

that with the great 30 presidents, the majority of whom had served in Congress for a decade or more, and three had served as vice president. Did this shift in the public's opinion of what made for a good president yield positive results? Well, let's [Music] see. Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer president, but his generation's ascendancy to the White House was not greeted with the same sort of broad public delight that had welcomed John F. Kennedy when he became the first World War II generation president in 1961. And the main reason for this was just that the Baby Boomers had emerged as a much more divisive and polarizing presence in American culture than the World War II generation had ever been. This was in part due to the triumph of conservative narratives during the long era of Republican rule under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, two men who had come to power in large part as an explicit cultural rebuke to the values of the '60s and '70s. Those were the decades in

which baby boomer culture had been the most ascendant with anti-war protests and hippies and Woodstock and all of that. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary had been somewhat stereotypical rumors when they were young as a college student. He had protested the Vietnam War and smoked pot. She was a feminist who had pursued a career outside of the home. To a lot of '90s era conservatives, this was pretty offensive stuff. And the fact that Clinton, who had avoided military service during Vietnam, was running against George Bush, who was a World War II hero, just made things worse. And I just find it impossible to understand how an American can demonstrate against his own country in a foreign land, organizing demonstrations against it when young men are held prisoner in Hanoi. I was opposed to the war, but I love my country. But on the other hand, there was also a lot of middle-aged Boomers who felt very excited and vindicated at seeing one of their own finally in the Oval Office, or maybe even two of their own. Hillary Clinton would, of course, have her own long political

career unto herself, but at the time of her husband's election in 1992, her primary cultural relevance came from the fact that she was the most thoroughly modern presidential wife in American history. A woman who wanted to be involved in government and not, as she once famously said, simply sit behind and bake cookies in office. President Clinton was quite a savvy politician who embraced centrism as his guiding policy agenda, incorporating ideas from both left and right alike in a way that kept him quite popular. Conservatives continued to despise him, however, and the sheer vicious resentment between Republicans and Democrats that characterized the Clinton years is sometimes identified as the start of the intense era of political polarization that we inhabit today. In 1998, Republicans in Congress began impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton after it was revealed that he had had an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it in court during a sexual harassment lawsuit. Clinton was the first president to be forced to testify in a

lawsuit. Incidentally, the Lewinsky thing was this huge lurid scandal that really consumed the media's attention for many, many unbroken months. Did you see Monica's new hairdo, all slicked down with that hair gel? At least I think it was hair gel. I was in high school at that time, and I remember it very well. But in the end, the impeachment failed, and this provoked a fair bit of discussion about the degree that Americans had become much more blasé about things like affairs and in general. At the same time, however, Clinton's weaselly efforts to deny the reality of what he had done and then deny his denials also helped consolidate an impression that American politics was getting a lot more shameless. In any case, Clinton left office broadly well-liked, with a presidency that was considered mostly successful. Like all the presidents we're talking about today, he is very much still alive and remains a public figure, although I would say his reputation has probably slid a bit in recent years, the post-Me Too era.

Clinton's history of sexual harassment and affairs with subordinates has certainly taken on a darker tone, plus he's just sort of naturally retreated more and more into the background as his wife has become the dominant Clinton in American life. I feel like George W. Bush is the last canonically bad president in American history. For a long time, it was Richard Nixon who was considered the last unambiguously bad president, but near the end of his life, his reputation started to improve a bit, and these days, there is no shortage of people willing to come forward and say Nixon was good actually. But George W. Bush seems to have very few defenders these days, either on the left or the right. Maybe that's going to change someday, but for now, very few people are going to rush forward to correct you if you say he sucked. Dubya was, of course, the son of former President George H.W. Bush, who had been president before Clinton, giving the two Bush presidencies an interesting sort of bookend character. The younger Bush was quite different from his father in a lot

of ways. However, he was a lot more religious, being a born-again Christian whose political career in Texas was heavily tied to the rising power of the so-called religious right, who desired a more explicitly Christian American government. He was also less articulate and knew less about foreign affairs. A lot of people considered him kind of dumb; he had a reputation for being a bit of a dope who was carried through the ranks of government thanks to his father's connections and the dogged support of the Evangelical establishment. Bush came to power in extremely unusual and controversial circumstances. The 2000 election between him and Al Gore, Clinton's vice president, was the closest in American history and had to be settled by this agonizingly long-drawn-out recount in the State of Florida. It only ended when the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court ruled that it had to, conveniently at the time when George W. Bush had taken the lead. The reality is a bit more nuanced than that, but this nevertheless poisoned Bush's reputation.

with about half the country right out of the gate just 7 months into Bush's presidency. Islamic fundamentalists destroyed the World Trade Centers in Manhattan, killing thousands of New Yorkers. In the immediate aftermath, Bush suddenly became quite popular as Americans rallied behind the man leading the country through this very frightening time. I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. It would prove to be short-lived. Bush's presidency wound up being defined by the war on terror, which he proclaimed immediately after the September 11th attacks. It was this big open-ended war against what Bush called Islam fascist terrorists all over the world, embodied chiefly by a US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and then a follow-up invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Iraq invasion, in particular, was very controversial given that Iraq only had the vaguest of links to the September 11th attackers, and it only became more controversial as

the years went on, and the American Body Count continued to rise, along with the cost to taxpayers. Bush's cabinet was full of all of these very tough people who insisted they knew exactly what they were doing with the wars, which they said were very clearly in America's self-interest and would end in decisive victory. And when that didn't happen, these same people were increasingly viewed as incompetent narcissists, puppeteering a fundamentally clueless president and plunging America deeper and deeper into this bloody, unwinnable quagmire in the Middle East. Back home, things weren't great either. In late 2007, there was a massive global economic crash, ushering in a few painful years that would later be dubbed the Great Recession. The crisis wasn't Bush's fault, but he received poor marks for his leadership during it, and it contributed to the overall climate of pessimism and frustration that characterized the final years of his presidency. Bush's approval ratings got astonishingly low near the end, at one point even dipping into the

teens, which even now is still the most unpopular that any president has ever been. He has now been out of power for a while, and as someone who was in his 20s during the Bush years, it is often astonishing to me how much of the stuff that defined his presidency is now largely absent from American culture. The war on terror, in particular, was once defined as like this huge civilizational conflict that would define everything for the indefinite future, with radical Muslims supposedly the most pressing threat to the American way of life, and people just don't think that way anymore. Even Republicans that said Bush's decision to shift the focus of American foreign policy to the Middle East was hugely significant in the medium term, and in that sense, I would say arguably makes him the most significant of the presidents of this era, even if his legacy has been largely [Music] disavowed. Barack Obama's election in 2008 was a major cultural phenomenon in the United States, and not just because he was the first black president. His

rise to the presidency was extremely swift and was in large part a byproduct of his great charisma as a public speaker. He had become an overnight sensation after delivering a stirringly optimistic speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that we have a right just wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us. And for the next four years, Obama was in constant demand. He spoke at endless campaign rallies, he did the talk show circuit, and he released a book about his political idealism that millions of Americans pretended to have read. After 8 years of the Bush administration, a lot of people found Obama's rhetoric of hope and change incredibly inspiring, and this was

especially the case for My Generation. Once Obama announced that he was running for president, a bunch of my friends actually crossed the border to go and volunteer for him. They were so excited by the premise of someone this kind and cool becoming president of the United States. All sorts of young people made these posters and songs about him. Yes we can, yes we can. I remember reading somewhere that he was the first American politician in a very long time to be the subject of sincere rather than satirical art. The right, however, called this a creepy personality cult. Even at the peak of Obamamania, Obama never really had the same sort of cross-party support that someone like Ronald Reagan had had. This was in part because American political culture had become a lot more ideological by the time Obama came around, with voters and politicians alike more cognizant of what it meant to be on either the right or the left, and more hostile to anyone who didn't fit neatly into the camp that they identified with. Obama's political worldview had been

formed in large part in opposition to the politics of Reagan, who was the most overtly conservative president up until that point. This meant that Obama was part of a new wave of democratic politicians who were more comfortable thinking of themselves as progressives first, rather than centrists or pragmatists. This had been a big theme of Obama's successful efforts to displace Hillary Clinton as the Democrats' 2008 presidential candidate. Once elected, Obama would spend much of his presidency dodging accusations that he was a socialist or worse, but in office, he proved to be relatively moderate and cautious, while still identifiably to the left of both Bush and Clinton. The worst pains of the Great Recession had largely wrapped up by the early months of the Obama presidency, but even still, the Obama years were marked by a generally weak American economy, with some of the consistently slowest rates of economic growth in decades. I know there are a lot of Zoomers out there who are nostalgic for their Obama era childhoods, but

Objectively speaking, Obama's America was a much less dynamic time to grow up in than the Reagan 80s or the Clinton 90s, and I feel like that plays a role in how people think about his presidency today. Obama is often spoken of as a president who raised expectations very high, but in practice, was just kind of broadly satisfactory. And as a leader, he was limited by the fact that, as I said, American culture was just becoming a lot more ideologically divided, and to a large chunk of the country, he was never able to function as anything more than a symbol of the Democratic left. That said, Obama does remain America's most popular living president, which to me suggests that people like him best when he can function as a sort of aloof symbol of a certain sort of moral authority rather than a day-to-day partisan politician. [Music] So Trump is a hard guy to summarize, and not just because he is the most divisive figure in modern American politics. At a higher level, it remains difficult to describe exactly why he has been as

politically successful as he has been, and people on all different sides have all sorts of different theories. In my opinion, the correct take is just that Trump is very personally popular with a lot of Americans, in kind of the same way that Obama was. The polls suggest that a lot of Trump supporters just sincerely believe that he is a very honest, principled guy who stands far above all other politicians in America today. And this level of consistent support is why he is now able to make a credible third run for the presidency just four years after losing it, something no other defeated president has had the courage to attempt, let alone pull off, in over 100 years. Trump's success in the 2016 election is often attributed to his status as a Washington outsider, which was nothing new, combined with his savvy ability to capitalize on his pre-existing fame as a reality TV star, which was something very new indeed. A flamboyant real estate developer turned tabloid darling turned television host, he was America's first true celebrity president. And a century from now, I very

much suspect that that might be the main thing he is remembered for as the ultimate non-politician. Trump has been responsible for bringing a lot of aspects of American culture that have been historically excluded from American politics into it, including conspiracy theories and a lot of blunt opinions and ideas that are common to what the Press often euphemistically refers to as low-information voters. This confident but ignorant personality, which one pundit referred to as Donnie from Queens, became all the more inescapable given that Trump was also the first president to make active use of social media and was constantly tweeting all of his passing thoughts throughout his presidency. The other dimension of his unique brand of outsiderness was his conscious decision to ally with the most extreme and even underground faction of the American right-wing. His most ardent ideological supporters were initially the sort of far-right people that a previous generation of Republican leaders had been keen to keep at arm's length. You will be very, very impressed.

hope they have now conquered much of the party under his leadership. As a result, Trump's presidency undoubtedly deepened the partisan divide in America, and I think it is difficult to speak of any of the accomplishments of his presidency independent of the fact that he was consistently disliked by more than half of the country for most of it. The Lesser 30 presidents in general were all quite unpopular, but unlike even George W. Bush, Trump never once had an approval rating over 50%. Even if you're a Trump supporter, this is something that just has to be recognized as an objective reality of his presidency. The fact that he was the first president to be subjected to two impeachment trials, for instance, can at best just be spun as evidence that his political opponents really hated him. And of course, now he's in all of this legal trouble, which at one time would have been interpreted as an unambiguously bad thing, but is now understood in wildly different ways depending on which party you [Music] support. Joe Biden unseated Trump in 2020.

making Trump the only President so far of the Lesser 30 to not win a second term. But Biden's election was narrow, and the fact that Trump might be able to narrowly get back in shows that the extreme polarization of the Trump years is also a defining characteristic of the Biden years as well. Now in his early 80s, Biden is the oldest president in American history and has had the longest political career as well. He was a high-profile senator for many decades, first elected in the Nixon Administration. This combination of age and pedigree can often make him feel like a very anachronistic sort of figure, a 20th-century politician in the 21st century. He is not very flashy or flamboyant, which voters like as an alternative to Trump, but in office, he hasn't inspired a great deal of enthusiasm, which has limited his influence as a cultural figure. His supporters call attention to some of the bipartisan legislation that he has negotiated through Congress and want him

to have a reputation as a great legislator like LBJ, but that probably misreads the degree that Americans still value traditional political skill these days. I think more than anything else, what Biden proves is that in an era of extreme political polarization, the individual personality of the president matters less than what side of the Great American culture War the president's party is considered broadly aligned with. So, to his critics, Biden is judged by his tribal association with everything else in American culture that is considered left-coded, which would include the social justice movement, Hollywood, those anti-Israel protesters on college campuses, and a whole bunch of other random things. And then, the degree that you find fault with these things, you also find fault with Biden. At least, that's one theory. Biden has been as unpopular as Trump for most of his presidency, which suggests it is equally possible they've just both been generally underwhelming presidents, which implies that, you know, maybe somewhere out there, there is a politician who is capable of uniting the country and

getting an approval rating that is at least as good as midterm Obama. But I guess we won't know until 2028 when the era of the Lesser 30 ends and a new era of presidents begins. So let me just end with one other observation about the Lesser 30 era. A common criticism of the great 30 presidents is that they cared too much about foreign policy. As veterans of the worst war in human history, they were all quite obsessed with this idea that they were going to be the guys to usher in a new era of global peace through a skilled exercise of American power. And with the exception of Lyndon Johnson, they all had a tendency to talk about American domestic politics as something that was either a distraction or even something that could actively undermine their foreign policy objectives. And while the great 30 obviously made their share of foreign policy mistakes, as a collective, they were also quite successful in achieving their goals. They weakened the Soviet Union while also improving relations with it and thereby

neutralized what they believed to be the biggest risk factor for another world war. The Lesser 30 Presidents, by contrast, were all much more interested in domestic politics and had even flirted with various forms of soft isolationism during their political careers. During their rise to the presidency, they were all subject to criticism for being indifferent or ignorant to boot the world. Biden is the exception because he served for several years as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This is a great new book called New Cold Wars by David Sanger. It is written by a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times and is all about the foreign policy legacy of the Lesser 30 presidents, and his conclusion is that they were all basically failures. He calls the last 30 years of US foreign policy the fantasy era because it was animated by so much ignorance and naivety. Along with the war on terror of the Bush and Obama years, Sanger spends a lot of time documenting how the presidents of this era fundamentally misunderstood and mismanaged relations with the new

regimes in Russia and China that had emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War and thus enabled the dangerous era of the new cold Wars that defines our world today. So I don't know political polarization at home, increasing foreign Strife abroad. You can maybe see why I'm calling it the Lesser 30, but who deserves more fault for that, the presidents or the American people themselves. Let me know in the comments, and I will see you next [Music] week. Hello friends.

The last 5 presidents explained in 27 minutes

J.J. McCullough

Clinton's history of sexual harassment and affairs has led to his retreat from the spotlight as his wife's prominence grew.

Bush is currently seen as the last unambiguously bad president, with few defenders.

The era of the Lesser 30 presidents is coming to a close, coinciding with the upcoming inauguration of a new president, marking a significant historical transition.

Bush, a born-again Christian, rose to power through his father's connections and the support of the Evangelical establishment, facing a controversial election in 2000.

Biden's presidency has been marked by extreme political polarization, with his unpopularity mirroring that of Trump.

Obama's presidency represented a shift towards progressive Democratic politicians, but he faced criticism for being too moderate while navigating a weak American economy.

The Impact of Bush and the Transition to Obama

Bush's presidency was marked by a rising American body count and a costly war in the Middle East, leading to low approval ratings and a climate of frustration.

The Great Recession during his final years further contributed to his poor leadership perception.

The transition to Obama's presidency saw a more elite-educated leadership, with Obama raising expectations but struggling to unify a divided country, ultimately becoming America's most popular living president.

The Impact of Bush and Obama on American Politics

Bush's presidency, marked by the war on terror, is now seen as having a significant but disavowed legacy.

Barack Obama's election in 2008 was a major cultural phenomenon, inspiring young people and generating sincere art, but he struggled to gain cross-party support.

The ideological divide in American political culture had intensified by Obama's time, making it harder for him to unite the country.

The Impact of Trump and Biden on American Politics

Trump's presidency is marked by his outsider status, blunt opinions, and active use of social media, bringing excluded aspects of American culture into politics.

His alliance with the far-right and extreme factions of the Republican Party was a defining characteristic of his tenure.

In contrast, Biden's long political career and anachronistic presence offer a different approach, but his lack of flair and limited enthusiasm have restrained his cultural influence.

The Impact of Trump's Presidency and Clinton's Legacy

Trump's presidency deepened the partisan divide in America, with consistently low approval ratings and two impeachment trials.

His legal troubles and the differing interpretations of his actions reflect the polarized political landscape.

In contrast, Bill Clinton's presidency, marked by a major scandal and impeachment, ended with him being well-liked, but his reputation has since slid in the post-Me Too era.

The Impact of the Lesser 30 Presidents on US Foreign Policy

The Lesser 30 Presidents were more focused on domestic politics and soft isolationism, leading to criticism for their indifference to global issues.

David Sanger's book, "New Cold Wars," argues that their foreign policy was a failure, marked by ignorance and naivety.

Trump's unique popularity and outsider status have allowed him to make a credible third run for the presidency, while the Lesser 30 era has been characterized by political stability and a lack of major transitions.

The Lesser 30 Era and Its Impact on American Politics

The post-Cold War regimes in Russia and China have contributed to political polarization in the U.

Bill Clinton's presidency marked the beginning of intense political polarization, with his impeachment proceedings highlighting the deepening divide.

The shift in presidential qualifications during the Lesser 30 era emphasized empathy and charisma over political experience, with Obama’s rise to fame driven by his inspiring rhetoric and public speaking.