Maybe picking candidates by their bloodlines isn’t what’s best for the country.
Maybe picking candidates by their bloodlines isn’t what’s best for the country.
I n Wes Anderson’s masterpiece Rushmore, millionaire Herman Blume (played by Bill Murray) stands at a lectern and addresses students at an exclusive boarding school for boys.
“Take dead aim on the rich boys,” Blume counsels the pupils of modest means. “Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything, but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it.”
Blume might as well have been reading the words of America’s Founding Fathers, who sought to break the system of primogeniture that valued bloodline over competence. The American experiment was primarily a gamble that a country might be better off if it didn’t pick its leaders based on who their parents were. (Thomas Paine specifically abhorred generational birthrights, claiming that no man had a right to the “monopoly of natural inheritance” and that “a generous man would not wish it to continue, and a just man will rejoice to see it abolished.”)
The Founders couldn’t have been naïve enough to believe that power wouldn’t pool within the upper classes — in fact, many of them fought to be able to leave land and other property to their descendants, continuing the cycle of privilege.
Today, though, many of them would flinch at the sight of so many common people falling for the deranged musings of nepo babies based solely on the unearned gravitas smuggled in by their last names.
The prime example before us is Democratic crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who through the sheer echo of three syllables has a place in our public life. Kennedy has decided to run for president, and populist conservatives are slathering him in strange new respect. If enough Democrats fall for his nonsense, things might get uncomfortable for President Joe Biden in the upcoming election. But Kennedy’s unhinged public utterances read like a list cooked up by Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies.
For instance, he has maintained the falsehood that vaccines may cause autism. He said certain chemicals in America’s water supply may be contributing to “gender confusion” among children. He has said there ought to be a law under which climate-change skeptics could be punished, including with jail time. After the 9/11 attacks, he asserted that hog farmers were a greater threat to Americans than al-Qaeda. And of course, he recently suggested that Covid-19 may have been engineered — “there are papers out there” — to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. (Had he boasted, like Dr. Evil, that his father invented the question mark, it might be his most believable — and least dangerous — claim.)
Over the past few years, the American Right has seen its share of anti-vaccine cranks. But even though Kennedy is a Democrat, the weight of his last name has suddenly made him the most useful idiot in a political movement overflowing with them. If RFK Jr. were a welder with the last name “Englehorn” and spouted the things he’s fond of spouting, he might be involuntarily committed. But when one wields the flashy “Kennedy” surname, the deranged musings of the idle rich suddenly become the gospel of the gullible.
This is not how it is all supposed to work. Americans should be doubly skeptical of public figures who were born on third base. Remember that whole “all men are created equal” bit?
(Even non-Americans fall for big names — just look at how many impressionable foreign businessmen were suckered by the clumsy dealings of a sleazebag son of a former vice president.)
Instead, we tend to see last-name familiarity as a reason to suspend our disbelief and capitulate to the allure of fame. It is why blue-collar Republicans still think a man with a silver-spoon upbringing as the son of a wealthy real-estate developer, who has a bathroom lit by a crystal chandelier, represents their best interests.
But, of course, Donald Trump is just another deranged nepo baby who has gone through his entire life without anyone telling him no. Even as indictments pile up, he has no reason to believe he will ever be held to account because he pretty much never has been. His punishment from Republican voters so far is a seemingly insurmountable lead in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.
Trump isn’t alone, however. For the past 30 years, candidates with names such as “Bush” and “Clinton” have been taken more seriously largely because we trusted their famous names. A recent analysis by Business Insider showed that the percentage of U.S. senators and representatives who had parents who also served in Congress has grown dramatically in the past half century (although it is down from its high around 2010).
The shift toward “nepocracy” doesn’t stop there. Of course, parents who didn’t serve in Congress can also be influential, so Insider looked at current senators and representatives who have parents important enough to warrant their own Wikipedia page. (An imperfect metric, to be sure — New York’s “Pizza Rat” has a Wikipedia page, after all — but it also may understate the number of nepo babies. Parents can certainly be influential without warranting a Wikipedia page.)
The numbers are jarring. In 1960, only 6 percent of senators had a parent who currently warrants a Wikipedia page; now, it’s 18 percent. During the same time period, the numbers for U.S. representatives jumped from 1 percent to 7 percent. In both cases, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to elect nepo babies. (Again, the math here is rough — someone who would have warranted an internet page had the web existed in 1960 may have been forgotten by 2023, depressing the past numbers. But it still provides at least a broad picture of generational influence — the name “Al Gore” may come to mind.)
And, of course, the nepocracy is kept alive by prestigious universities that reserve slots for the children of alumni, of rich parents, or of famous parents, or any combination of the three. The recent debate over racial preferences in university admissions has also prompted a nationwide discussion of the fairness of so-called legacy admissions, which allow the nepo class to thrive.
In fact, according to one study released this week, one in six students at Ivy League universities has a parent in the top 1 percent of income earners. Children of the top 0.1 percent of earners were twice as likely to gain entry as the average applicant with the same test scores.
The affirmative-action case, of course, has not suddenly led to a spike in self-awareness among the nepo class. Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri recently mocked the idea of legacy admissions, writing that preferences “judge you on important aspects of your character, like if your character is related to other characters who also went to your university.”
Petri is the daughter of a Harvard-educated congressman who held office for 36 years. She herself attended . . . Harvard.
So you want to take down the nepo class? Send the rich kids to state schools.
None of this is to suggest, of course, that having rich or famous parents automatically makes one worthy of contempt. Children of famous people are often smart, funny, kind, and cultured. But they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt. (And many don’t ask for it.)
Further, being a nepo baby doesn’t mean one can’t be talented or succeed. Our world would be a little duller without the artistic stylings of Jennifer Aniston and Maya Hawke and Nicolas Cage and George Clooney, nepo babies all. It took a while for people to realize that one of the breakout comedy stars of the last few years, Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, was born to comedy royalty — she is the daughter of original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman.
But these actors aren’t pushing dangerous conspiracy theories on voters or endangering the nation’s security by stealing top-level classified documents. Nepotism in politics is a dangerous game: Backing a famous but unqualified kook because the kook is familiar doesn’t make you a shrewd political operator, it simply makes you complicit with kooks.
The biggest irony, of course, is that nepo babies like Trump and Kennedy are leading a populist movement and yet have never been interested in being a part of the great unwashed populace. They are people who have spent their lives using their familial connections and wealth to avoid having to deal with the problems felt by working-class people.
I keep telling my 75-year-old father that there’s still a chance for him to become famous enough for me to be a nepo baby. Then I, too, may taste of the sweet rewards that come with unearned privilege.