Are there really progressives who are reading the recent dead cat bounce in Biden's polling as a sign the party needs to move left again and do some more big progressive stuff? These people are going to be the death of American democracy.
>but public and private pollsters were hampered by the same methodological flaws. Response rates have plummeted, and it’s become objectively harder to do good surveys.
It's a tangential side topic not really worthy of a blue ribbon commission, but I'd love to see a fuller post about this problem..."Does Polling Still Work?"
I used to take some civic pride in answering polls and surveys, but at some point it just became too much effort...unless there's some kind of compensation (which drives up costs and confounds via selection effects), doing "work" outside of my actual job simply isn't appealing anymore. Now I wonder if the "median poll respondent" is a lot less representative of the median voter than in yesteryears...
Agreed that now is not the time to jump the progressive shark gun...that's just classic Mobilization Delusion, exacerbated by media bubbles. Midterms first, see how things look afterwards...gotta win the game you're currently playing before thinking about the next level up.
If the idea is to pivot to the center, excite voters while avoiding partisan polarization then I can't think of any better idea than a blue ribbon commission on college costs led by Mitch Daniels and Janet Napolitano.
Oh, just shoot me now.
Or . . . how about Biden announces his plan to build a new museum on or near the Mall to be called the "Great American Music Hall of Fame" celebrating America's unique musical history. It would be built entirely with private donations, and the funds would be raised by a dollar-a-vote Internet poll where people could vote on the first tranche of Hall of Fame personnel, with the eligible list to be generated by a "blue ribbon" commission headed by, oh, Garth Brooks, Yo Yo Ma, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Kanye, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and add your own favorites.
A "Great American Music Hall of Fame" competing with the existing Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would probably piss of Cleveland and screw up the senate race in Ohio.
Totally unrelated but I am noticing my super political friends sounding way less bubbly and opinionated lately. Is this just me or are people in the real world getting burned out on twitter political hot takes and outrage and stuff? Or is like midterm election cycle a natural time for people to get less annoying with spitting their political views in folks’ faces?
We thoroughly enjoy your columns. My background in education (Elementary, Middle School & HS Students then Consultant for publisher of books & educational computer programs) brings me to focus much more on the inadequate state of our current schools’ lack of rigor and curriculum to prepare students to either go to work or to college. I believe we need to face up to the fact that most students are not being sufficiently prepared in math, reading, writing, history and geography.
I strongly believe in Trade Schools being both a part of HS as well as an important part of higher education. Not everyone can just go out and be taken on by a firm willing to teach them skills. Just one little example of a math piece that is rarely taught: how to read the shift in division from the corner box to the more advanced over/under a line. Also for people at sea in algebra, how to make a simple equation at the side of the paper like 2x3=6 - 6 divided by 3 = 2 to get their attention back to basics. In 1959, I tutored college algebra and successfully used things like that to make equations more clear. Somehow I believe we need to return to more thoroughly teaching the Basics in all subjects.
I'm now imagining much of left Twitter as Grand Moff Tarkin: "Bipartisan commissions? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."
A good idea for a commission and Secret Congress, that probably wouldn't go anywhere because of egregious rent seeking, would be about the US goods shipping and transport industry. It would cover everything from freight rail to trucks to sea and air shipping. It could tackle issues like the contractor/employee status of truck drivers, the upcoming freight rail workers' strike, the Jones Act, and the country's incredibly inefficient and expensive seaports and shipyards. Improving these things could actually have a substantiative impact on people's daily lives.
This probably good advice for 2024, but less useful now. The GOP isn't stupid; they're keeping their eyes peeled for any movement from the Dems that would allow them to refocus a bad news cycle. They'd turn a Garden of American Heroes into bad news for Dems: accuse Biden of stealing Trump's idea, decry the wastefulness of buying the statues, etc. Any commission would only get interest from GOP pariahs like Romney or Cheney, and turn into another example of anti-Trump elites aligning themselves with godless Democrats. It wouldn't pick up much of the center and would energize Trump's base, which is presently in the doldrums (ish). I mean, if you can think of something that will get moderate/indie voters to the polls without ticking off the left, riling up Trump's base, or giving GOP leadership an easy traget, go for it, but the ideas here aren't it. The only thing I'm seeing in the comments that fits the bill is Lance Hunter's comment re: Bouie's suggestion of decriminalization of weed.
I don’t mean to derail but I can’t quite believe the NBA representative in the hero garden was to be Kobe Bryant, a rapist. One hopes that would age poorly as the halo effect from his death wore off.
That was my thought, too (and I honestly forgot that he died until I read this comment). If you want to go with an NBA player, how about Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain or Magic Johnson?
If you expand it to "Black athletes in the big four team sports," I think the obvious pick would be Jackie Robinson.
I think your recent proposal to require porn websites to actually verify that the people who use them are over 18 or get shut down could be the V-chip for our time.
If it generated a lot of pro-and con coverage in the media it would make Biden seem normal and the people who opposed him on this issue seem like freaks. Maybe it would even work!
I love Slow Boring, but I'm having trouble believing such an intelligent person could write the sentence "now derided figures like Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus." Setting aside Columbus, who wasn't an American, what does it profit us to performatively dismiss the polymath founding father because of his failings? He is still one of the most consequential Americans and his words held more dearly by the nation than any other American. A brief slip into presentism bias
I don't understand your take. Matt's noting, accurately, that Jefferson and Columbus are indeed widely "derided" in contemporary US society. They are widely derided! I don't interpret his words to be an *endorsement* of such derision.
What I have trouble believing is that Matt actually thinks a federal "Garden of American Heroes" idea is good on substance.
I assure you Thomas Jefferson is not widely derided. Believing that reveals more about someone's milieu than the standing of Thomas Jefferson. Certainly there are specific things for which he is correctly derided, but on net he is still a revered American broadly speaking.
Would you accept "fairly" widely derided? I assume you realize Jefferson not only owned slaves, but fathered six children with a young, enslaved woman he likely began having sexual relations with when she was 14-15. We'd call that rape in 2022.
Jefferson obviously remains a titanic figure in American history, and he was very clearly one of our greatest presidents (his personal comportment doesn't change that in my view). Moreover, the "derision" for Jefferson is concentrated on the Left, to be sure.
But his controversial personal details and sexual practices indeed render him "widely" derided in the sense of "disliked, perhaps even intensely so, by a lot of people." But sure, "widely" is far from "universally" (and in this case isn't even close, I reckon, to a majority). Anyway, Thomas Jefferson comes in a for a lot of biting criticism these days—just like Christopher Columbus—that's just reality.
EDIT: For the record, for several reasons I personally oppose taking Jefferson's—or Washington's or Lincoln's—name off schools. It's inane. I'm all for removing the name of Robert E. Lee, though.
If those polling numbers from 2021 are correct, that makes Thomas Jefferson substantially more popular than kittens (76% / 24%), who I don't think anyone would say are "widely derided"
Your kitten analogy is off. To say the least. People who don't want to own a cat usually don't "deride" kittens. Maybe they just prefer dogs! But the millions of Americans who don't like/admire Jefferson in many cases intensely disapprove of his participation in the enslavement economy and his rape of a child. A bit different, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what you're disagreeing with: as I acknowledged above, I neither fail to recognize Thomas Jefferson as one of our greatest presidents nor do I want to see his name or likeness removed from public record, schools, currency and so forth. (Nor do I claim, as I noted above, that the widespread derision of Jefferson is a view held by *most* Americans). It's a similar dynamic to that involving Winston Churchill: a beloved Briton, to be sure, but nonetheless widely derided by million of Britons. Both things can be true! And are true.
I agree there are millions of Americans who intensely disapprove of Jefferson owning slaves and raping a girl who was 14-15, but his approval/disapproval ratio is so high that I don't think it's at all reasonable to call him "widely derided" -- the derision is mostly contained to the liberal college educated bubble, which produces a very skewed sense of how wide the derision is.
Sorry, have you never met someone who hates cats? There are far more Americans who don't own a cat then there are Americans who disapprove of kittens, but of the Americans who disapprove of kittens many of them do "deride" them. Most of those hate them for their impact on their personal life (allergies / annoying / smell), but then there are also those who rationally deride them because modern-day cats are causing a huge amount of present harm to wildlife [killing billions of wild birds a year]
I probably can't convince you of this because you are in a Thomas-Jefferson-deriding + kitten-loving bubble, but:
The google search for i hate kittens gets 8.43 million results while the google search for i hate thomas jefferson gets 7.14 million results
Although I will note that my first link overstated support for Thomas Jefferson, so instead of "more popular than kittens" it's possible that he's "slightly less popular than kittens", see my reply to BD Anders
Basically, my argument is that if "10-15% of the population disapproves of something" means it is "widely derided" then everything is widely derided.
I don't want to be a pill, but that's a Deseret news op-ed by Scott Rasmussen. Founder of Rasmussen Reports, generally considered the least reliable major pollster. And he doesn't provide polling links.
I know for sure that Matt disapproves of woke efforts to remove Old White Guy names from schools (he agreed with a comment of mine to that effect regarding Lincoln). So my interpretation of his remarks in this post is something like "Snark mingled with disapproval for the woke-ism on this topic he deems unhelpful to liberalism."
Still, if it were an unknown thing, it wouldn't be worthy of mention. And, while I'm perfectly aware a majority of Americans (and voters) hold high opinions of America's Rushmorian historical giants, the critique of such figures is no longer some obscure, under-the-radar phenomenon that is the province of just a few CRT cranks. For better or worse (I'd say "better" for the GOP and "worse" for Democrats) these views have widely ricocheted on social media, and are likewise held by a lot of people, at least in part. I suspect I'm an example of the "in part" aspect—I, a mainstream, not-particularly woke liberal, regard Thomas Jefferson as a historical giant and one of our three or four greatest presidents. But I'm likewise aware like many men of his class he enslaved his fellow human beings and probably sexually assaulted them. I think this latter, more nuanced, more critical, less hagiographic view of Thomas Jefferson and other, similar figures was genuinely esoteric and rare among the general public—if not historians—40 or 50 years ago; but it's now pretty common even if—as I acknowledge—it's still fairly far from a majority.
Have they, though? Did people not know he owned slaves and “ had a mistress” 50 or a 100 ago, or is it merely that it seems like a bigger deal now ? E.g. that we conceive of sexual relations between master and slave (or slaver and enslaved in the new phrasing) and between adult and teen as always sexual assault ?
So, I would wager that it’s not the fact about Jefferson that change as much but our views about race and sex.
Having said all that- I wager that the intelligentsia in every generation had nuanced views. In fact my sense is that understanding of historic greatness was more widespread in the past than it is today, as historical literacy is in decline. Anyone who is well read in history knows great men seldom are good men to quote Lord Acton. Bluntly, it’s juvenile to expect otherwise, and is hardly why they should be celebrated. We celebrate them as great people not as angles.
RE: The statue idea. Biden could do a reboot of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans! The original iteration is now on the campus of Bronx Community College, and I'm sure some of the figures are problematic (I recall Louis Agassiz being in there). But a place to start! https://www.bcc.cuny.edu/about-bcc/history-architecture/hall-of-fame-for-great-americans/
Are there really progressives who are reading the recent dead cat bounce in Biden's polling as a sign the party needs to move left again and do some more big progressive stuff? These people are going to be the death of American democracy.
Appointing a commission to “study” a problem is classic kicking the can down the road.
Every major public policy issue has been studied to death and there are think tank proposals on the shelf to suit any ideology.
I’m kind of shocked a bipartisan commission on infrastructure costs isn’t in this list!
and when they propose unpopular budget cuts and tax hikes?
>but public and private pollsters were hampered by the same methodological flaws. Response rates have plummeted, and it’s become objectively harder to do good surveys.
It's a tangential side topic not really worthy of a blue ribbon commission, but I'd love to see a fuller post about this problem..."Does Polling Still Work?"
I used to take some civic pride in answering polls and surveys, but at some point it just became too much effort...unless there's some kind of compensation (which drives up costs and confounds via selection effects), doing "work" outside of my actual job simply isn't appealing anymore. Now I wonder if the "median poll respondent" is a lot less representative of the median voter than in yesteryears...
Agreed that now is not the time to jump the progressive shark gun...that's just classic Mobilization Delusion, exacerbated by media bubbles. Midterms first, see how things look afterwards...gotta win the game you're currently playing before thinking about the next level up.
If the idea is to pivot to the center, excite voters while avoiding partisan polarization then I can't think of any better idea than a blue ribbon commission on college costs led by Mitch Daniels and Janet Napolitano.
Oh, just shoot me now.
Or . . . how about Biden announces his plan to build a new museum on or near the Mall to be called the "Great American Music Hall of Fame" celebrating America's unique musical history. It would be built entirely with private donations, and the funds would be raised by a dollar-a-vote Internet poll where people could vote on the first tranche of Hall of Fame personnel, with the eligible list to be generated by a "blue ribbon" commission headed by, oh, Garth Brooks, Yo Yo Ma, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Kanye, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and add your own favorites.
A "Great American Music Hall of Fame" competing with the existing Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would probably piss of Cleveland and screw up the senate race in Ohio.
Willie Nelson is 89 and still touring. Maybe weed is the fountain of youth.
If Biden wants to project youthfulness he should dump Kamala and pick Willie as his new Veep.
Love it! Willie could do his own singing at the inauguration ceremony!
Totally unrelated but I am noticing my super political friends sounding way less bubbly and opinionated lately. Is this just me or are people in the real world getting burned out on twitter political hot takes and outrage and stuff? Or is like midterm election cycle a natural time for people to get less annoying with spitting their political views in folks’ faces?
We thoroughly enjoy your columns. My background in education (Elementary, Middle School & HS Students then Consultant for publisher of books & educational computer programs) brings me to focus much more on the inadequate state of our current schools’ lack of rigor and curriculum to prepare students to either go to work or to college. I believe we need to face up to the fact that most students are not being sufficiently prepared in math, reading, writing, history and geography.
I strongly believe in Trade Schools being both a part of HS as well as an important part of higher education. Not everyone can just go out and be taken on by a firm willing to teach them skills. Just one little example of a math piece that is rarely taught: how to read the shift in division from the corner box to the more advanced over/under a line. Also for people at sea in algebra, how to make a simple equation at the side of the paper like 2x3=6 - 6 divided by 3 = 2 to get their attention back to basics. In 1959, I tutored college algebra and successfully used things like that to make equations more clear. Somehow I believe we need to return to more thoroughly teaching the Basics in all subjects.
SallyJones
I'm now imagining much of left Twitter as Grand Moff Tarkin: "Bipartisan commissions? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."
Speaking of the Biden Administration and bipartisanship, yesterday afternoon, Joey Fingers tweeted this:
“I am determined to ban assault weapons in this country.
I did it once before, and we will do it again.”
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1564704945810673670?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
A good idea for a commission and Secret Congress, that probably wouldn't go anywhere because of egregious rent seeking, would be about the US goods shipping and transport industry. It would cover everything from freight rail to trucks to sea and air shipping. It could tackle issues like the contractor/employee status of truck drivers, the upcoming freight rail workers' strike, the Jones Act, and the country's incredibly inefficient and expensive seaports and shipyards. Improving these things could actually have a substantiative impact on people's daily lives.
Does the J6 commission count?
This probably good advice for 2024, but less useful now. The GOP isn't stupid; they're keeping their eyes peeled for any movement from the Dems that would allow them to refocus a bad news cycle. They'd turn a Garden of American Heroes into bad news for Dems: accuse Biden of stealing Trump's idea, decry the wastefulness of buying the statues, etc. Any commission would only get interest from GOP pariahs like Romney or Cheney, and turn into another example of anti-Trump elites aligning themselves with godless Democrats. It wouldn't pick up much of the center and would energize Trump's base, which is presently in the doldrums (ish). I mean, if you can think of something that will get moderate/indie voters to the polls without ticking off the left, riling up Trump's base, or giving GOP leadership an easy traget, go for it, but the ideas here aren't it. The only thing I'm seeing in the comments that fits the bill is Lance Hunter's comment re: Bouie's suggestion of decriminalization of weed.
I don’t mean to derail but I can’t quite believe the NBA representative in the hero garden was to be Kobe Bryant, a rapist. One hopes that would age poorly as the halo effect from his death wore off.
That was my thought, too (and I honestly forgot that he died until I read this comment). If you want to go with an NBA player, how about Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain or Magic Johnson?
If you expand it to "Black athletes in the big four team sports," I think the obvious pick would be Jackie Robinson.
Maybe throw Arthur Ashe into the mix.
Agreed. Hard to think of a sportsman Americans are or should be more proud of than Jackie.
Let the baller who is free from rape allegations cast the first stone.
Ok this got me Ken, good stuff
I think your recent proposal to require porn websites to actually verify that the people who use them are over 18 or get shut down could be the V-chip for our time.
If it generated a lot of pro-and con coverage in the media it would make Biden seem normal and the people who opposed him on this issue seem like freaks. Maybe it would even work!
TIL that TVs still are required to have V-chips. I wonder if anyone still uses it? Apparently even when it came out, it was barely used.
I love Slow Boring, but I'm having trouble believing such an intelligent person could write the sentence "now derided figures like Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus." Setting aside Columbus, who wasn't an American, what does it profit us to performatively dismiss the polymath founding father because of his failings? He is still one of the most consequential Americans and his words held more dearly by the nation than any other American. A brief slip into presentism bias
He sucked, though.
I don't understand your take. Matt's noting, accurately, that Jefferson and Columbus are indeed widely "derided" in contemporary US society. They are widely derided! I don't interpret his words to be an *endorsement* of such derision.
What I have trouble believing is that Matt actually thinks a federal "Garden of American Heroes" idea is good on substance.
I assure you Thomas Jefferson is not widely derided. Believing that reveals more about someone's milieu than the standing of Thomas Jefferson. Certainly there are specific things for which he is correctly derided, but on net he is still a revered American broadly speaking.
Would you accept "fairly" widely derided? I assume you realize Jefferson not only owned slaves, but fathered six children with a young, enslaved woman he likely began having sexual relations with when she was 14-15. We'd call that rape in 2022.
Jefferson obviously remains a titanic figure in American history, and he was very clearly one of our greatest presidents (his personal comportment doesn't change that in my view). Moreover, the "derision" for Jefferson is concentrated on the Left, to be sure.
But his controversial personal details and sexual practices indeed render him "widely" derided in the sense of "disliked, perhaps even intensely so, by a lot of people." But sure, "widely" is far from "universally" (and in this case isn't even close, I reckon, to a majority). Anyway, Thomas Jefferson comes in a for a lot of biting criticism these days—just like Christopher Columbus—that's just reality.
EDIT: For the record, for several reasons I personally oppose taking Jefferson's—or Washington's or Lincoln's—name off schools. It's inane. I'm all for removing the name of Robert E. Lee, though.
"Thomas Jefferson — is seen favorably by 80% and unfavorably by 9%"
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2021/2/15/22284113/presidents-day-most-americans-still-view-the-founding-fathers-favorably-washington-jefferson-lincoln
If those polling numbers from 2021 are correct, that makes Thomas Jefferson substantially more popular than kittens (76% / 24%), who I don't think anyone would say are "widely derided"
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi8zvPJwPH5AhVnFVkFHatsDEoQFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fchrismurphyct%2Fstatus%2F1359162498734321677&usg=AOvVaw2QSrXuifE1e9v2lsvvzcZF
Your kitten analogy is off. To say the least. People who don't want to own a cat usually don't "deride" kittens. Maybe they just prefer dogs! But the millions of Americans who don't like/admire Jefferson in many cases intensely disapprove of his participation in the enslavement economy and his rape of a child. A bit different, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what you're disagreeing with: as I acknowledged above, I neither fail to recognize Thomas Jefferson as one of our greatest presidents nor do I want to see his name or likeness removed from public record, schools, currency and so forth. (Nor do I claim, as I noted above, that the widespread derision of Jefferson is a view held by *most* Americans). It's a similar dynamic to that involving Winston Churchill: a beloved Briton, to be sure, but nonetheless widely derided by million of Britons. Both things can be true! And are true.
I agree there are millions of Americans who intensely disapprove of Jefferson owning slaves and raping a girl who was 14-15, but his approval/disapproval ratio is so high that I don't think it's at all reasonable to call him "widely derided" -- the derision is mostly contained to the liberal college educated bubble, which produces a very skewed sense of how wide the derision is.
Sorry, have you never met someone who hates cats? There are far more Americans who don't own a cat then there are Americans who disapprove of kittens, but of the Americans who disapprove of kittens many of them do "deride" them. Most of those hate them for their impact on their personal life (allergies / annoying / smell), but then there are also those who rationally deride them because modern-day cats are causing a huge amount of present harm to wildlife [killing billions of wild birds a year]
I probably can't convince you of this because you are in a Thomas-Jefferson-deriding + kitten-loving bubble, but:
The google search for i hate kittens gets 8.43 million results while the google search for i hate thomas jefferson gets 7.14 million results
Examples of people "deriding" kittens or cats:
https://www.mic.com/articles/87001/if-you-hate-cats-you-re-not-alone-and-there-s-a-real-explanation-as-to-why
https://www.thesprucepets.com/reasons-people-dont-like-cats-555642
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifuckinghatecats/
Although I will note that my first link overstated support for Thomas Jefferson, so instead of "more popular than kittens" it's possible that he's "slightly less popular than kittens", see my reply to BD Anders
Basically, my argument is that if "10-15% of the population disapproves of something" means it is "widely derided" then everything is widely derided.
I don't want to be a pill, but that's a Deseret news op-ed by Scott Rasmussen. Founder of Rasmussen Reports, generally considered the least reliable major pollster. And he doesn't provide polling links.
Ramussen from another survey, real numbers:
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/favorables/presidential_favorables
YouGov (higher net favourability rating than kittens, lower total favourability than kittens since more undecided):
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/historical_figure/Thomas_Jefferson?content=all
Public Policy Polling from back in 2012, could easily have changed since:
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/02/poll-george-washington-still-tops-073032
2021 C-Span Historian Survey, not the same thing as approval rating:
https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall
I’d much rather have Jefferson in my home, just to keep from having a litter box. Sure he’d eat a lot more, but I assume he’d be willing to get a job.
Those goddam kitten have had their way for too long
I was pretty sure that part was tongue in cheek? Surely ?
I know for sure that Matt disapproves of woke efforts to remove Old White Guy names from schools (he agreed with a comment of mine to that effect regarding Lincoln). So my interpretation of his remarks in this post is something like "Snark mingled with disapproval for the woke-ism on this topic he deems unhelpful to liberalism."
Still, if it were an unknown thing, it wouldn't be worthy of mention. And, while I'm perfectly aware a majority of Americans (and voters) hold high opinions of America's Rushmorian historical giants, the critique of such figures is no longer some obscure, under-the-radar phenomenon that is the province of just a few CRT cranks. For better or worse (I'd say "better" for the GOP and "worse" for Democrats) these views have widely ricocheted on social media, and are likewise held by a lot of people, at least in part. I suspect I'm an example of the "in part" aspect—I, a mainstream, not-particularly woke liberal, regard Thomas Jefferson as a historical giant and one of our three or four greatest presidents. But I'm likewise aware like many men of his class he enslaved his fellow human beings and probably sexually assaulted them. I think this latter, more nuanced, more critical, less hagiographic view of Thomas Jefferson and other, similar figures was genuinely esoteric and rare among the general public—if not historians—40 or 50 years ago; but it's now pretty common even if—as I acknowledge—it's still fairly far from a majority.
So, things have changed.
Have they, though? Did people not know he owned slaves and “ had a mistress” 50 or a 100 ago, or is it merely that it seems like a bigger deal now ? E.g. that we conceive of sexual relations between master and slave (or slaver and enslaved in the new phrasing) and between adult and teen as always sexual assault ?
So, I would wager that it’s not the fact about Jefferson that change as much but our views about race and sex.
Having said all that- I wager that the intelligentsia in every generation had nuanced views. In fact my sense is that understanding of historic greatness was more widespread in the past than it is today, as historical literacy is in decline. Anyone who is well read in history knows great men seldom are good men to quote Lord Acton. Bluntly, it’s juvenile to expect otherwise, and is hardly why they should be celebrated. We celebrate them as great people not as angles.
RE: The statue idea. Biden could do a reboot of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans! The original iteration is now on the campus of Bronx Community College, and I'm sure some of the figures are problematic (I recall Louis Agassiz being in there). But a place to start! https://www.bcc.cuny.edu/about-bcc/history-architecture/hall-of-fame-for-great-americans/
I've been to that place, it's great!