This Is Not The Greatest Post In The World (This Is Just A Tribute)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has reminded us that we do not actually have either a functioning democratic or republican system, but instead suffer through a series of inept family-based cliques in a kakistocratic oligarchy (there are certainly no aristoi in our political class) in which connections are decisive and merit painfully irrelevant.  The latest example of this is the accession to the throne presidential campaign of Clinton.  In other words, things are running much as they have done for much of my lifetime (and almost certainly longer than that).  The idea that Bush-Clinton fatigue will set in among voters this time derives from the average pundit’s impatience with the dreariness of dynastic cycles and the continued belief that democracy results in generally better, more dynamic and less squalid government.  Our system keeps doing its best to prove that belief wrong, but it persists anyway. 

There will be no fatigue.  This dynastic cycle is, unless I am very much mistaken, what most Americans want, or at least it is what they will accept if it is offered to them.  Like Clinton, Bush the Younger was not called forth by an enthusiastic public, but was dropped on the country by his establishment chums and his family, and people accepted it out of sheer loathing of the other family and its allies.  

Americans’ affection for the Royal Family (or our pop culture’s fascination with the mafia, on the other end of the family spectrum) has always hinted at a sneaking admiration for hereditary and family power, and perhaps our national obsession with genealogy was also bound to catch up with us sooner or later.  It was only a matter of time before some sizeable number of us would embrace (or rather re-embrace, since this sort of thing has been happening for quite a while, as the Roosevelts and Tafts could testify) a politics defined by lineages.  There is every chance that the dynastic cycle could continue beyond 2016, and it would eventually have to be crowned by a joining of the two houses, like the joining of York and Lancaster or Komnenos and Doukas.  People have joked about this possibility in the past, but it’s not so far-fetched.  As a wise man once said of another proposed alliance of major political clans, “Then you can challenge the Klingons for interstellar domination.”  And what red-blooded American will want to turn away from that destiny?   

The only thing that is curious about Wheatcroft’s op-ed is that he expresses a degree of shock that this has happened.  Is it any wonder that a dysfunctional managed democracy has started to fall into the same sets of hands in election after election, distinguished only by the larger factions (i.e., political party and other interests) on whose behalf those hands rob empower the people?  Is it strange that a government that has what many people routinely call an “imperial presidency” should also have hangers-on and entire networks of family loyalists and retainers cultivated over decades of patronage?  The concentrated power there is, the more incentive there is to build up a huge network of allies to acquire and retain control over that concentrated power–and the more incentive there is for people to abase themselves in service to a dynasty.  The worse educated and worse informed the public is, the easier it will be to push candidates based on name and family association.   

One sympathises with the despair of Choniates as he surveyed the late twelfth century of Byzantium with its squabbling Angeloi and lesser Komnenoi, though right about now we could do worse–and probably will do worse–than a John the Fat.  We may hope that the outcome for us will be less traumatic, but if so it won’t be on account of wise and prudent government.