Talk Elections

Which Democratic 2-term President was the most Conservative/right-wing?

You are missing someone obvious.

Cleveland pretty easily

I mean does it even make a difference

FDR was not a two term President.

he probably just means 1+ term presidents

This is how I would rank them (from most conservative to liberal)


1. Grover Cleveland
2. Bill Clinton



3. Andrew Jackson
4. Barack Obama
5. Harry Truman
6. Woodrow Wilson
7. FDR
8. LBJ

Cleveland I suppose (but not on foreign policy).

Clinton is by far the most conservative from the last 90 years, but obviously Jackson and Cleveland are the most conservative.

Obviously Jackson or Cleveland but the party was completely different 100+ years ago. Bill Clinton would be the viet answer given he moved the party to the right.

Cleveland, though he was a reformer in terms of ethics and such. I would note that Andrew Jackson was too anti-business to be a conservative. He was more of a frontier populist.

Voted Jackson because, with all due respect to fiscal conservativism, this guy's cultural conservativism reached genocide levels.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore may have moved the party to the right on economic issues, but they also moved it to the left on social issues. In other words, they were probably ideal from a donor perspective.

Whether intentional or not, the Lewinsky scandal did have on impact on society at large. Not to mention Gore's views on the environment, etc.

Cleveland. Jackson was on the left.

Jackson was the most conservative president period.

Grover Cleveland?

Cleveland by far.


Oh, I didn't know firing staff because of terrible gossip directed towards one woman over a marriage was considered conservative.


Actually, that's pretty socially progressive compared to what most people would've done during that time period.

All in service to the common (white) man.

Andrew Jackson was a majoritarian. He felt that the majority should always get their way, even if that meant harming a minority. This contrasts with egalitarianism, which means protecting minorities from the bigotry of the majority.

I don't think that's a fair description of Jackson's majoritarianism.  Obviously if a big state like New York wanted to take away the rights of people from Tennessee, he wouldn't be down with that.  Jacksonianism as a political tradition involves a fierce commitment to individual rights and opposition to elitism. Egalitarianism means equality, and Jackson believed in equality.  The key question is who this equality extended to: Who are considered a part of the community who's rights must be respected, and who are outside of this community?  For Jackson, it was the whites.  And so protecting the interest of the smallholder white farmer meant clearing space for them to make a good living and set themselves up as free and independent people. The Whig opponents of Jackson's Indian policy had a more expensive view of whose humanity America had a moral responsibility to respect, even though they often had a more conservative understanding of equality.

LMAO. Get out of here.

This. I think people need to look at Jackson besides just focusing on the genocide.

Third parties aside, "right" and "left" are N/A to Presidential elections before 1896.

How is that wrong:



Bill Clinton Presidency not only Republican-lite, but you can argue he put Reaganism on steroids. Under his presidency, he signed NAFTA(which HW couldn't get through a dem congress), signed Welfare Reform(Which Reagan wouldn't have dreamed of getting passed) , took deregulation further than even Reagan did(with Glass Stegall and some other regulatory laws) , cut the Capital Gains Tax, cut Domestic Spending . He was also by far expanded the War on Drugs more than any other President and perused tougher on crime policies more than any other president.


Yes he may personally not be that conservative but his presidency was.




Obama is a Liberal but his presidency was not more Liberal than Wilson, FDR, LBJ(Truman is debatable) .

Andrew Jackson was not a conservative lol

Grover Cleveland, followed by Andrew Jackson.

1.) Grover Cleveland
2.) Andrew Jackson
3.) Woodrow Wilson
4.) Bill Clinton
5.) Harry S. Truman

6.) FDR, LBJ and Obama are about equal; the most liberal presidents we ever had

This, more or less.

Jackson is a complicated case.  Like Lincoln, Jackson sort of defies conventional description.

Agree on Jackson.

It's also really interesting to think about today's social issues and ask how past liberal Democratic presidents would view them. For example, would FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ approve gay marriage and campaign finance reform?

....no. Economics is directly related to slavery and the Genocide. Stop trying to make this “racist sociopathic murderers were really leftist economic populists” thing happen.

Jackson did this to please landless poor whites. The party of businessmen, commercial farmers, and bankers (ie the party of capitalism) the whigs opposed his Indian policies.

As I said, there was no "right" and "left" until 1896. Jackson was a majoritarian populist.

1)Cleveland
Huge gap
2)Clinton
moderate gap
3/4)Obama, Truman
5/6/7)Wilson, LBJ, FDR

In general, I'm against trying to impose liberal/conservative labels on pre-1896 presidents, so I'm going to exclude Jackson. However, Cleveland's handling of the Panic of 1893 was the single biggest cause of his party's move to the left in the 1896 presidential election, so I think it's reasonable to include him.

Clinton governed as a centrist. Obama and Truman were both mainstream, center-left politicians who advocated pretty liberal policies but generally faced a conservative Congress (at least in one house). Wilson, FDR, and LBJ might not have been personally more liberal than the others, but each moved the country decisively to the left.

I think honestly, Jackson was probably the most regressive and reactionary of any American President (even people like Buchanan and Pierce, who more represented stagnation than anything else). He represented the degeneration of Enlightenment-era Jeffersonian thought into thuggish demagoguery. The Democratic Party he founded - made up of the planter elite in the South, the crooked machines in the North and those state-level bankers who opposed the machinations of centralised bankers for reasons of personal profit - really started to ramp up a lot of ugly phenonomona that would take decades to be fully resolved (and some might say have never been resolved). The old idea of the Founders that slavery would wither away and die was tossed - now slavery was to be the new normal. Racism was not unknown in American politics - obviously - but not till Jackson and MVB did racist attacks on blacks become an acceptable and omnipresent part of campiagn discourse. (it's very worth noting that this era saw the first smatterings of what we would now call left-wing union sentiment. After the collapse of the old guild system that was practiced by the craftsmen and artisans of the Sons of Liberty etc, new Workingmen’s Parties sprung up in the urban cores, formations which were cooly recieved by Jacksonians and Anti-Jacksonians alike, and led to the former doubling down on aforementioned racist sentiment.)

 The old internationalist doctrines of the Founders, even the most "nationalistic" of them all, was also tossed aside for the sake of tubthumping nationalism, a motivation which led to his one decision that has any latter-day merit, threatening to kill the POS Calhoun during the nullification crisis. And of course, there was a very anti-intellectual aspect to his supposed anti-elitism which has reverberated to this day; his legacy in that respect is the gutter press and the minstrel show (a tactic which was quite karmically turned back on the Democrats with the Whig's ludicrous attacks on MVB).

Yeah, I think there is a good case to be made that Jackson was not just a madman, but the single most malignant President in American history in terms of his long-lasting effects. Everything that was good and enlightened about the Revolution found itself channelled into regressive aims: ethnic supremacy, mystical woo about manifest destiny, faux anti-elitism, deranged nationalism, strongmanism, and a fetishisation of violence and militarism. And every attempt to build a left-wing or egalitarian movement in subsequent years was weakened by the fact this charlatan had diverted populism to build his own deranged movement for the benefit of his own rich backers.

That’s an interesting take, Crabcake. What would the degeneration or “vulgarization” of a modern liberal movement look like in your mind? A successful George Wallace casting himself as Roosevelt’s successor?

I think the vulgarisation of liberal politics would see the Democratic Party fall ever closer to Indian National Congress style politicking. Basically all the worst traits of the HRC campaign ramped up.

Is the reason for making this about 2-term Democratic Presidents to keep Jimmy Carter off the list?

Because, in modern times, I think Jimmy Carter was by a fair bit the most conservative Democratic President.  LBJ comes close with the Vietnam War and Bill Clinton with the unfortunate foolish late second term embrace of financial deregulation, but Carter was consistently center to center right.

Of course, Bill Clinton also embraced the odd position of rejecting 'neo Liberal' austerity economics in the United States while forcing it onto indebted countries through the IMF around the rest of the world.