Bret Devereaux

Quick, off the top of your head, name a single widely known period or presidency in American history about which popular historical memory is currently even *somewhat* unified as to the basic question "good or bad"https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1263138966334775297 …

I absolutely understand why people find this comforting and I'd love to invest in this fantasy myself, but it's a fantasy. There will never be a Cold War Liberal Consensus that Trump was bad. Consensus of that kind was always illusory and should by this point be very obviously so

At the same time, there are some presidents who have, in subsequent memory, maintained a fairly consistent reputation for badness: Harding, Andrew Johnson (esp. post 1960 or so), Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan.

I don't think we'll live to see it though, because the development of that consensus requires that the people who lived in the political universe that created those figures no longer be present.

Right - and, potentially (though not automatically) pushing the timeline even further out, it requires that this part of our historical memory not be a culture war battleground. Which, when it comes to Trump and Trumpism, good luck with that, at least for a while!

Yes, though very path/event dependent. Some figures and ideologies get trash-canned quite quickly, others less so. Herbert Hoover got dumpstered almost instantly, for instance. That isn't 'you are wrong' but rather 'we know even less than what we think we know.'