Dynasties, And The Democracies That Love Them

There's a lot of discussion out there about the 2008 election and Hillary Clinton's apparent lock on the nomination. I've never been a huge Hillary fan (and a decade ago I was one of those foaming-at-the-mouth Hillary haters) but it's a measure of how disastrous Bush has been that she looks better all the time. And after a few more years of the current administration, I may count myself as one of her fans.

But I have a major misgiving about a potential Hillary presidency, and it's an issue that doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. If she is elected in 2008, that would mean that the same two families will have had a lock on the Oval Office for almost a quarter century, starting with Bush 41's victory in 1988. It would also mean that control of the presidency or vice-presidency will have passed between two families without interruption for thirty-two years since 1980---eight straight presidential terms straddling two different centuries.

Is this what we really want?

Since Reagan was first elected, our field of presidential candidates reminds me of a kaleidoscope that has a slowly, ever-narrowing lens. I think several factors are at work here. Familiarity and voter comfort are part of it. We seem to go through periods of status quo administrations, interrupted occasionally by system shocks that usher in unknown outsiders; Watergate paving the way for Carter is an example. Sometimes the public recoils from the experience of novelty and returns to the womb of safety and continuity. This was certainly the case for twelve years after Carter's single term. And continuity obviously was an important factor in the Clinton and Bush re-elections. This voter tendency is understandable but makes me uncomfortable. It's somewhat analogous to Ben Franklin's warning about surrendering liberty in the name of security and losing both. I believe that the supremacy of a professional political class embodied by a few families with which the public feels "comfortable" is inconsistent with our basic principles of liberty and ultimately erodes democracy.

There are other factors undoubtedly at work. Money (and the name recognition required to raise it) is far more important to the political process than a generation ago. And the ubiquity of the media, the evolution of the chattering punditry and the rise of a corporatized professional media class is also important. For the past quarter century, the media has reported on, gossiped, inside-dished, and chattered about the same few political families in a sort of self-reinforcing myopic feedback loop. Could there be any better illustration of this than President Bush being asked in an interview last week---apparently seriously, by a supposedly professional reporter---whether Laura Bush is interested in running for president?

If our choice of leaders merely reflects who we are, and our media provides what we want to see and hear as a society, what does that imply about our collective willingness to take risks? Risk-taking, accepting outsiders and embracing long shots are essential parts of our national identity---from crossing the Atlantic in ships, to braving the plains in wagons, to aiming for the Moon in a tiny metal capsule. Are we still capable of that? Or are we becoming the type of society that was content to stay home sipping tea and paying taxes to an incestuous, entrenched royal family in England or Spain while others set out on their own? Are we closer to the America of 200 years ago, or are we now more like an old world, resource-hungry imperialist power that invades others without provocation, ceding inventiveness and risk-taking to upstarts like China and India? It's certainly possible to argue that increasingly loud protectionist sentiment---about both trade and immigration---and our withdrawal into an ever-shrinking handful of leaders with whom we're "comfortable" are not unrelated.

The U.S. is a huge country, with an incredibly diverse population consisting of people from every other nation on the planet. Yet the best we can do for leadership is a stale, soporific boilerplate of the same few families decade after decade, punctuated occasionally by a Supreme Court decision that decides an election. How does this jibe with our global promotion of democracy, especially in the Arab world where clans also run nations for decades at a time?

Hillary will probably be a formidable candidate. She might make a good president. And this is certainly not something I thought I'd ever say, but depending on whom she runs against and what's happening in the world three years from now, I may even vote for her. But I won't do so without thinking hard about the broader implications yet another passing of the White House keys between the same two families would have for our democracy and national identity.