Things like this are tricky because “what is the context?” is so hotly debated that, even if everyone has a perfect consensus model of past presidents’ actions and the circumstances in which they took them, there’s no clean middle ground on the situation surrounding an action today. For example, Abraham Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus is generally regarded as a reasonable action taken during an existential crisis, whereas, had Bush done it as part of the War on Terror, which was unambiguously not an existential crisis, most people would say that it was uncalled for. Similarly, Eisenhower’s own mass deportation campaign was substantially more intensive than anything done by more recent presidents, but did not face massive, highly-organized <protests / riots, depending on your party affiliation> intended to impede operations, meaning that “what measures are precedented to defend immigration enforcement operations?” hasn’t yet been answered.
As awkward of a solution as it is, I would cast my ballot in favor of operating on hard metrics alone, simply because operating on ‘vibes’ opens the door to a lot of bad things that neither facilitate nor, arguably, permit rational discussion. In this world, trade flows, GDP growth (normalized for population and inflation however you see fit) and deficits/surpluses would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of international trade, for instance. Incarceration rate, crime victimization rate, or the rate at which police encounters have violent outcomes would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of criminal justice. This has the benefit of everyone agreeing on whether something happened, and what happened, if something did, thus allowing a more formal conversation on why it happened.
A less strict heuristic would be to conceptualize a world in which a legally-equivalent conflict was taking place in the opposite direction, and see if the emotional reaction it elicits is the same or different. I encourage this for political conversations elsewhere, but it’s difficult to reliably evaluate whether someone is doing so in good faith, so it’s hard to recommend it as a broader policy on a ‘hard mode’ topic.
Things like this are tricky because “what is the context?” is so hotly debated that, even if everyone has a perfect consensus model of past presidents’ actions and the circumstances in which they took them, there’s no clean middle ground on the situation surrounding an action today. For example, Abraham Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus is generally regarded as a reasonable action taken during an existential crisis, whereas, had Bush done it as part of the War on Terror, which was unambiguously not an existential crisis, most people would say that it was uncalled for. Similarly, Eisenhower’s own mass deportation campaign was substantially more intensive than anything done by more recent presidents, but did not face massive, highly-organized <protests / riots, depending on your party affiliation> intended to impede operations, meaning that “what measures are precedented to defend immigration enforcement operations?” hasn’t yet been answered.
As awkward of a solution as it is, I would cast my ballot in favor of operating on hard metrics alone, simply because operating on ‘vibes’ opens the door to a lot of bad things that neither facilitate nor, arguably, permit rational discussion. In this world, trade flows, GDP growth (normalized for population and inflation however you see fit) and deficits/surpluses would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of international trade, for instance. Incarceration rate, crime victimization rate, or the rate at which police encounters have violent outcomes would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of criminal justice. This has the benefit of everyone agreeing on whether something happened, and what happened, if something did, thus allowing a more formal conversation on why it happened.
A less strict heuristic would be to conceptualize a world in which a legally-equivalent conflict was taking place in the opposite direction, and see if the emotional reaction it elicits is the same or different. I encourage this for political conversations elsewhere, but it’s difficult to reliably evaluate whether someone is doing so in good faith, so it’s hard to recommend it as a broader policy on a ‘hard mode’ topic.