Family political dynasties just don’t exist anymore in the world’s most stable democracies.
It is in weak democracies marred by deep social injustice that family political dynasties flourish. The wealthy simply take over the direct ownership of politics.
As the wealthy exercise power through family dynasties in conjunction with massive political machines, civil institutions become increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional. Publicly-run organs fail to provide basic services, like disaster relief, medical care, or water. Elections might even be stolen. Worse still, the act itself of building a family political dynasty corrodes societies at their very core. Dynasties rely on and indeed fuel and encourage wealth disparity in order to grow, achieve a grip on power, and to tighten that grip more and more. As they rule, they always act to cement and perpetuate wealth disparity as an essential precondition to the furtherance of their power.
the mirror image of income inequality in the political sphere: political dynasties
In a strained attempt to airbrush our political culture, most home-grown studies on American family political dynasties attempt a sunny take on the subject. Lame bromides on “branding” abound, as do half-baked nostalgic appeals to Kennedys or Rockefellers. The overriding tenor is that there’s nothing to see here, and that dynasties are fun and inoffensive mainstays of how we politic.
Time to put all that pap aside.
“For those who care about such things, rising income inequality is considered an obstacle for development,” observes a despairing Prof. Ronald Mendoza in a paper published by acclaimed liberal economics journal CEPR. With dispassionate calm, Mendoza outlines the deep damage done by the scourge of income inequality in the Philippines. It turns out, shockingly, that income inequality is not a single-issue hang-up associated with a declining ethnic majority like white working-class Americans trying to re-assert their privilege.
Income inequality is instead a key social indicator across all societies. When it widens and becomes extreme, it produces economic misery. But it also produces similarly severe and catastrophic secondary consequences — the rise of political family dynasties, which present “a very sobering view of what political inequality looks like”.
As a tinier and tinier elite hoards more and more of the wealth, the same elite purchases and dominates more and more of the political scene as well. Family dynasties arise. Their emergence “signals a growing inequality in access to power and political influence. That, in turn, could also affect the persistence and prevalence of social and economic divides”. Dynasties act at every turn to exert their financial/political power to exclude those from below. Soon, the political stage comes to mirror social inequalities with cold precision. Millionaires dominate politics and become the politicians.
And of course, politicians quickly become millionaires: “80% of dynastic legislators experienced an increase in their net worth.” Politics is reduced to little more than a pay-for-play game for dynastic families to flaunt their power. They never question or challenge the forces that produce income inequality, preferring to harness those forces to fund their own obscene wealth.
Even more perversely, they rely on income inequality to produce their voting base: “Most troubling – and this is the main link to the income inequality side – political dynasties in the Philippines are located in regions with relatively higher poverty levels”.
Quite the paradox. Why would that be?
Clans tend to rule in areas that are relatively poor and suffer from greater inequality
Simple, suggests Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg View. Dynasties find fertile ground to gin up votes in impoverished areas. Then they maintain the areas in poverty to assure future votes in their favor.
Dynasties come to power by building massive political machines. As they solidify that power, dynasties find high-poverty areas an attractive target out of which to fashion their electoral fiefdoms. It appears “easier for established political machines to win in such places”, though Bershidsky seems unsure why. Shaky or nonexistent local organizations and a sense of public abandonment may combine with high crime and low education to make high-poverty areas into readily conquered strongholds of fervent dynastic support.
Sadly, dynasties do not serve these strongholds well. Forever seeking their real funding among the financial elite and forever vigilant to stamp out any local organizational competition, studies show it appears dynasties “may also contribute to slower development” in impoverished areas they control.
Dynasties not only inhibit economic development, but political engagement as well. They transmit and exercise power in top-down, autocratic manner. Rising stars succeed not due to any “higher human capital” they possess but only due to “superior contacts with party machines”. Meritocratic rise, healthy dissent and fostering real talent is disdained. Instead, dynasties privilege always and only loyalty alone.
Everywhere the dark outcome of family dynasty politics is relentless and the same. Income inequality always rises and then remains sky-high. Fewer candidates can afford to run, and the result is almost no competition for votes. The purported ideology of the dynasty weakens and frays, and becomes little more than the enactment of its pragmatic practice.
Societies stagnate, with dynasties strengthening every step of the way down.
Grim. But for all our Bushes and Clintons, is it really so bad for us?
In some ways, no, according to Bershidsky:
In the U.S., dynastic power has been on the wane for decades. While from 1789 to 1858, about 11 percent of American legislators had previous relatives in Congress, the share dropped below 7 percent after 1966, as a 2009 paper by political economist Ernesto Dal Bo shows:
But that seems like a modest decline. We are slowly moving in the right direction by eliminating family dynasties, but they linger. So too does their essential ingredient and main social consequence, sky-high income inequality. Dynasties and income inequality mutually reinforce one another in America. They feed off each other, together forever gnawing away the foundation of social betterment, until it creaks, sags, and from time to time, collapses.
Equality of opportunity is diminishing, while unequal distribution of wealth only increases
Extending the stranglehold income inequality and political dynasties have on America into eternity would be a nightmare. The painful downside of the double whammy has started to trouble even those journalists prone to describing dynasties as harmless brands in a political supermarket:
Now that running for office in America is so ridiculously expensive, only those with brand recognition are likely to appeal to, and have access to, wealthy fundraisers and lobbyists. Who has more wealthy Democrats on speed dial than the Clintons?
Touché. And who has more wealthy Republicans on speed dial than Jeb Bush? Before you giggle, consider who dispatched the pre-ordained GOP dynasty. Trump may be a newcomer to politics, but in practice, he emulates the dynasties he mocks in every important respect: obscene personal wealth, top-down machine, appeal to low-income voters while pushing policies designed to protect the rich.
What has made the American terrain so fertile for dynastic politicians and their clownish imitators?
The utter destruction of our “hoariest cliché...the ‘American Dream’”.
Reagan’s Revolution turned out to be the sham all those wild-eyed leftists warned us about way back when. Nothing trickled down. Instead, wealth gushed up to the super-rich, and gushed out to offshore tax havens while jobs flooded to whatever country was willing to pay its workers the least.
The impact on America, writes Rupert Cornwell in The Independent, has been an abysmal “stasis that grips American society”:
- “social mobility in America is less than in Britain and Canada – and even Europe”
- -“middle-class incomes, in real terms, have barely budged in three decades. Meanwhile if you’re born rich, you tend to stay that way, and likewise if you’re poor.”
-
In a supposedly classless society, equality of opportunity is diminishing, while the unequal distribution of wealth only increases.
This stagnation and inequality, Cornwell warns, has led directly to the rise of political family dynasties. Deposing dynasties and reversing income inequality are thus one and the same struggle.
To beat back the inequality/dynastic duo, we must also understand how dynasties convince voters to support them, often even against those voters’ interests.
Ability of a dynasty to skew the playing field influential in shaping voter preferences
The techniques are simple and brutal. To consolidate and assert their power, dynasties strangle democratic processes. They promote voter ignorance by restricting information about themselves, stonewalling reporters, disseminating false information, developing sophisticated propaganda apparatuses, capturing national corporate media chains and using their immense wealth to barrage voters with ads touting their alleged virtues around the clock.
They raise influence peddling to an art form. Inside and outside government, every form of access to the dynasty comes with a hefty price tag attached (ahem, Lincoln bedroom). If need be, the dynasties create vanity institutions in their own name to charity-wash the purchasing of access to the family — the latter purchases being the only meaningful transactions taking place.
Some of this might sound negative. But to a political dynasty, wrote Northwestern scholar Yoes C. Kenawas in 2015, that works too. Any assertion of power only further delegitimizes potential challengers as weak outsiders. The more power and the more money, the fewer challengers will arise at all. Positive or negative, a dynasty’s ability to destroy the possibility of opposition impresses voters “regardless of the reputation of a political dynasty” itself.
Rather than serving as a “quality assurance”, the family brand name is cynically manipulated and deployed by the family merely to accrue more power themselves and little more. The “opportunity to piggyback on the ‘symbolic identity’ associated with the family name” enables the dynastic politician to strive for power while avoiding the advocacy of any policy to address social inequality.
Such campaigns are effective because voters almost never have “perfect information about politicians’ behavior” which would refute the dynasty’s glossy PR self-presentations.
Additionally, in countries like Indonesia, defeating dynasties can only occur if “the rule of law works effectively to punish any misconduct by politicians.” Of course, should the laws in another country be rewritten to allow extensive legal corruption of politicians to occur, it becomes all but impossible to rein in the excesses that family political dynasties will perform there, openly, in full public view.
The success of the political dynasty resides on the strength of the family name to continue to absorb and radiate power, money, and status. The family must never stop seeking greater and greater wealth and influence. To win, it must defeat other dynasties, pseudo-dynastic millionaires, and the few straggling cranks its all-consuming reach could not preemptively sweep off the electoral stage. It must maintain its public in as much income inequality as possible to perpetuate its hold over candidates, parties and political discourse. It must never abandon its core values of untrammeled greed and infinite consumption, on pain of appearing to be losing power or diminishing:
The determinants of success in building a political dynasty are the strength of the informal family network and the size of accumulated material wealth, which help dynastic politicians to tilt the playing field that can be created by using status of one of the family members as an incumbent.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please bow down before the Peron Marcos Suharto Clinton Family.