(Image via Wikimedia)
We often think of oligarchy in immediate terms—a handful of people with whom all of the power and wealth are vested. One of the less-considered impacts is that after a few years, we’re left with their kids, who are even stupider and more venal than they were.
The Republican Party, who seem somehow to have captured the working class, keep putting up one nepo baby after another. George H.W. Bush, the son of a senator/investment banker and grandson of a railroad company president. George W. Bush, further down the creek than that. Mitt Romney, son of a state governor and automaker president. DJT, the ultimate failson, riding the family fortune into the dirt over and over and somehow still convincing people to lend him credit and credence. Elon, child of a wealthy landowner and jewel dealer.
We see this elsewhere, of course. Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti. Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq. King Charles. A.G. Sulzberger, the sixth-generation publisher of the New York Times who never would have risen that far on individual merit. All of the Kardashians. And the ultimate DEI hires: Don jr., Eric and Ivanka.
When I was a postdoc at Duke, I kept hearing other postdocs talking about something their mother had done as an administrator at some college, or something their father had done as a professor of chemistry. It seemed too common to be coincidence, so I literally went door to door and asked each person what their parents had done for a living. Fourteen of the twenty-six had one or both parents in higher education.
When power can be inherited, we can’t talk with a straight face about meritocracy.
Herb Childress 