You could look at any country in the world and find leaders that were just as bad and even worse throughout history. I think the takeaway should be that shitty people exist. Some of it is a product of the times, some of it just being awful people. Shitty people have and always will exist.

Edit: With these downvotes it almost seems like y'all thought I was defending them. I absolutely was not defending them. :)

There's almost no national leader that is going to be a “good person”.

I hate the "it was a different time" excuse for these awful human beings. It falls apart if you do any reading from the time. Plenty of people wrote about how shit these people were AT THE TIME. Our morals haven't expanded somehow. Our systems of control have changed to be more sustainable. The ruling class learned that slavery was not sustainable. That's it.

Also, this doesn't give an excuse for the leaders of today. The slave owners of the past are not "less caring" than the current ruling class is. The current ruling class has just better distanced themselves from direct acts of violence while expanding their ability to perform mass violence. Slavery has evolved into mass incarceration for example. We've just normalized our violence into different systems and outsourced a lot of it to the global south.

If you're a Billionaire today you are the equivalent of a slave owner of the past with significantly more violence and control than a slave owner could ever dream of.

Okay, fella - take a few breaths and relax. People are products of their times. The better ones fight for virtues and values they see as better at the time. They see an opportunity others do not and rally people around those.

Others they don't see and continue wi5h those norms, or they see the wrongs but don't believe they can rally people around fixing them.

Do not demonize people in the past who do not meet current norms. There will never be anybody who will meet those standards.

Judge them against the standards of their peers.

What if MLK did not support feminists? Would he now be considered scum, thus negating everything good he ever did?

Heck, i don't know if he had a stance on women's rights explicitly. Maybe he didn't. Is he evil if he didn't?

Carter was a pretty good person, at least post-Presidency, can't really speak on how he was in the White House though.

Reagan, otoh, was irredeemable all the way through, given while he was in the White House, that guy effectively destroyed the middle class, created the current disaster that is unaffordable post-secondary education, and created the current credit score system among other atrocities, not to mention that whole Contra business.

Yes, really, if it weren't for Reagan, there wouldn't be a massive and progressively-widening gap between the bottom and top of society, it would still be possible to get affordably educated, and people wouldn't be getting completely screwed by bad credit.

For a perfect foil of everything the US has stood for for at least the last four decades, look at most of the EU having universal healthcare, having an actually regulated education sector where for-profit grift schools like University of Phoenix or even the late ITT Tech or EDMC and its subsidiaries, wouldn't have ever been allowed to take root to begin with.

@Confidant6198 That's why I like to call them the Genocidal Regimes of America.

You want to find me a head of state that wasn't or isn't?