Jeb and dynasties

With all that said, there are a couple of reasons why the prospect of a Bush versus Clinton presidential campaign should be troubling based on the candidates’ last names and family trees alone. (And setting aside the worldviews and habits of mind they represent; again, more on that to come.) For one thing, there really would be something historically unusual about having the same two families alternate in the American presidency for, potentially, twenty-eight out of thirty-six years. The closest analogue would be the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, who served for about twenty out of the 20th century’s first forty-five years, and they were related in a much looser way, rather than being part of the same marriage or nuclear family. In the main, the American presidency has resisted dynastic control, and the dynasts have tended to be among the less-enduring of chief executives: The Adamses were both one-termers, likewise the Harrisons (a one-monther, in William Henry’s case!), and for all their fame the Kennedys only occupied the Oval Office for the three short years of J.F.K.’s not-entirely-brilliant presidency. And they have also tended to be well-spaced: Twenty-five years from Adams to Adams, more than fifty years between the Harrisons, twenty-four between T.R. and F.D.R.

So it’s hard not to look at Bush-Clinton dominance, however shaped by randomness, as distinctive to our era, and therefore probably somehow connected to stratification and elite consolidation and other non-ideal patterns in American life generally. At the very least, it’s striking how many non-pedigreed men — Truman, Ike, Nixon, Carter, Reagan — won the White House during the golden years of the American middle class, compared to the mix of family ties and Ivy League resumes (dynasty woven into meritocracy, as it inevitably is) that has defined the office’s leading aspirants in recent decades.

And then the office itself, of course, is very different today from the presidency that John Quincy Adams or Teddy Roosevelt or even J.F.K. occupied. The American executive has always had a monarchical element relative to parliamentary systems — which is, again, a good reason to be wary of dynastic capture in our system — but today its effective powers are in many ways more sweeping and expansive than in previous epochs, to the point where even politicians who run against the imperial presidency end up succumbing to its lure. With those kind of stakes involved in who actually holds the office, it is not exactly ideal to have prominent families and their retainers seem like executive branches in waiting (as the Clinton Foundation has appeared to its donors for the last decade), or to have even a sense among the Oval Office’s occupants that the presidency and its powers might be handed on to one’s spouse or child, or to otherwise court the various corruptions to which kin-based governments are heir. The examples, worldwide, of countries where spouses regularly succeed their husbands and sons their parents does not offer a lot of shining examples of republican self-government, and one need not see the Bushes or the Clintons as in any way comparable to the Perons to think that the more extraordinary the powers of an office, the more you’d like to see its occupants share as few ties, especially blood-and-marriage ties, with their recent successors as possible.