Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Right-Left list convergence

Matthew Yglesias calls attention to another interesting exercise in list making today.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News enlisted the help of several dozen bloggers from both the right and left perspectives to compile separate lists of the Greatest 20 Figures of the 20th Century.

Here is the list compiled from the lefty responses:

18) Lech Walesa (3)
18) Alan Turing (3)
18) Harry Truman (3)
18) Eleanor Roosevelt (3)
18) Pablo Picasso (3)
18) Thurgood Marshall (3)
18) Lyndon Johnson (3)
18) Henry Ford (3)
18) Thomas Edison (3)
18) Marie Curie (3)
18) Jimmy Carter (3)
15) The Wright Brothers (4)
15) George Orwell (4)
15) Vaclav Havel (4)
12) Teddy Roosevelt (5)
12) Bill Clinton (5)
12) Louis Armstrong (5)
9) George C. Marshall (7)
9) John F. Kennedy (7)
9) Dwight Eisenhower (7)
8) Crick & Watson (8)
7) Mahatma Gandhi (10)
6) Jonas Salk (11)
5) Winston Churchill (13)
4) Nelson Mandela (14)
3) Albert Einstein (15)
1) Franklin Roosevelt (20)
1) Martin Luther King Jr. (20)

And here is the list from the righty responders:

20) Alan Turing (4)
20) Vaclav Havel (4)
20) Friedrich von Hayek (4)
20) Reverend Billy Graham (4)
20) The Beatles (4)
15) Admiral Chester Nimitz (5)
15) Milton Friedman (5)
15) Alexander Fleming (5)
15) Thomas Edison (5)
15) Francis Crick & James Watson (5)
14) General Douglas MacArthur (6)
13) Dwight D. Eisenhower (8)
11) Jonas Salk (9)
11) Franklin D. Roosevelt (9)
9) George Patton (10)
9) Mahatma Ghandi (10)
7) Theodore Roosevelt (11)
7) Bill Gates (11)
6) Martin Luther King (12)
5) Henry Ford (13)
3) Margaret Thatcher (16)
3) Albert Einstein (16)
2) Ronald Reagan (21)
1) Winston Churchill (26)

I find it interesting that the Right-wing list includes both Mahatma Ghandi and John Lennon (The Beatles)!
It also includes Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Roosevelt.

Meanwhile, the left-wing list includes two Republican presidents - Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower as well as a Conservative Party prime minister - Winston Churchill.

And both groups seem to agree almost equally with including Albert Einstein - who, by the way, was such a bigtime liberal that he became a target of a smear campaign by J. Edger Hoover's FBI.

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