Trust the experts: Nero was one of Rome’s greatest emperors

A surprising new survey conducted by a panel of experts specializing in the Roman Empire ranks Nero among Rome’s top 10 emperors.

The Roman Imperial Greatness Project expert survey polled current and recent members of the Roman Emperors and Imperial Politics Section of the Roman History Association, the foremost organization of social scientists studying Roman imperial politics.

Values evolve. Judgments change. Sic transit gloria, as the Romans liked to remind their emperors from time to time. Glory fades.

Marcus Aurelius landed in a middling position, ahead of some emperors such as Caligula and Tiberius but below Nero. Hadrian claimed the No. 7 spot, climbing eight spots higher than in the previous year’s survey.

Nero secured the 10th position, while other emperors like Commodus, Domitian, Caracalla, and Elagabalus fell below him.

The survey also delved into the partisan and ideological differences among respondents. The surveyors asserted that these differences did not significantly impact the overall rankings of the emperors.

“If you set aside the Great Fire, the appalling persecution of Christians, and the occasional murder of his rivals,” one Roman historian said, “Nero was actually quite progressive for his time. Just look at his record on infrastructure. He was very big on public works.”

For real, though …

None of the above is true. Well, except for the progressive reassessment of Nero. It turns out that’s only a slight exaggeration. Otherwise, the Roman Imperial Greatness Project does not exist. And of the many scholarly associations devoted to the study of ancient Rome, the Roman History Association is not one of them. That, too, is fictional.

In reality, something called the Presidential Greatness Project just released the results of its third annual expert survey in time for Presidents’ Day. It was bound to make headlines, like this one from the New York Times on Monday: “Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last.” And this one from Axios: “Historians rank Trump as worst president.” And this one, from The Hill, whose story I parodied at the outset: “Presidential experts rank Biden 14th among presidents in survey, Trump comes in last.”

You get the drift. The experts — the people who know — want you to know that Joe Biden is a greater president than Ulysses S. Grant, James Monroe, and Ronald Reagan, though he’s not quite in the same league as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George Washington.

And what has been Biden’s signal accomplishment, by these experts’ lights? Could it be his brilliant diplomacy in the Middle East? His unquestionable competence in withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan? His deft touch with the common folk, perhaps?

No, no, none of that. Experts say Biden “rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership, and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.”

In other words, Biden vanquished the Bad Orange Man, restored our precious democratic norms, and now intends to keep restoring them with the gusto of an elderly man with a poor memory. How great is that?

Donald Trump ranks last among 45 presidents because of course he does. So many indictments. So many mania-inducing tweets. So many unsettled and broken norms.

Experts say Trump is worse than James Buchanan, whose indolence and indecisiveness spurred the secession crisis of 1860 that led to the Civil War and more than 620,000 American dead. He’s worse than Andrew Johnson, an inept chief executive who was only impeached once. And he’s worse than William Henry Harrison, presumably because, unlike poor Harrison, Trump lacked the common decency to die within his first month in office.

Values evolve one way only

The project’s authors, political scientists Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, explained what their new survey means on Sunday in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

“Great presidents have traditionally been viewed as those who presided over moments of national transformation, led the country through major crises and expanded the institution of the presidency,” they write. “Our latest rankings also show that the experts’ assessments are driven not only by traditional notions of greatness but also by the evolving values of our time.”

Ah, yes. Values evolve. Judgments change. Sic transit gloria, as the Romans liked to remind their emperors from time to time. Glory fades.

And so, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson have fallen in experts’ esteem, Vaughn and Rottinghaus reveal, “as modern politics lead scholars to assess their early 19th and 20th century presidencies ever more harshly, especially their unacceptable treatment of marginalized people.”

Of course! Andrew Jackson treated Indians brutally and held slaves, which is far worse than his expansion of presidential power and his fiscal policies that led to the Panic of 1837. And everyone knows Woodrow Wilson’s greatest failing was his incorrigible racism — which was very bad, of course — and not dragging the United States into World War I, torching the First Amendment with the Sedition and Espionage Acts, and laying the foundations for the administrative state. Trust the experts!

The great lament of “modern politics” — always changing, and always canting leftward — is how divided Americans have become. With experts so thoroughly marinated in modern left-liberal Democratic Party dogma, reconciliation is a pipe dream.

“Academics do lean left,” Vaughn and Rottinghaus concede, “but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys.” What’s different, they contend, “is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation” but also “the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president ‘great’ to the scholars who study them.”

Nowadays, it’s fair to say, norms are what Democrats preserve and Republicans overturn. Self-government endangers Our Democracy™, which demands fealty to whatever policies progressives happen to prefer this week. Remember: Values evolve.

We need experts, Lord knows — experts we can trust. We need pilots who can fly jetliners safely and cardiologists who can perform triple bypass surgeries without killing their patients. We need plumbers and electricians and computer programmers who can figure out what our car’s check engine light means.

Do we really need “experts” in politics, though?

Those experts are untrustworthy in every way but one: We may trust they are completely sincere about their own high self-regard. Though often wrong, they are never in doubt. They really believe their own bull-oney — just as if you polled Roman historians and they ranked the tyrant Nero among the greats, in accord with “the evolving values of our time.”