Even President Trump’s fans ought to be appalled that Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, predicted with relish that the Trump family “will be a dynasty that will last for decades.”
Trump said he came to Washington to drain the swamp, to dislodge the entrenched powers. Neither he nor the nation should consider replacing one set of calcifying power-elites with another self-important set of privileged rulers.
Sure, it would be foolish to automatically dismiss a talented would-be statesman just because his family already enjoys great authority. But no one is entitled to office by virtue of a powerful daddy — all candidates must face the voters on the strength of their own real accomplishments.
John Adams’ family notwithstanding, Americans once had an appropriate aversion to dynastic politics. Alas, that aversion faded away long ago, so that the 20th and early 21st centuries were full of Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, Gores, Romneys, and others wielding multi-generational power.
About five years ago, though, I noticed an interesting shift. Suddenly, the scions of Democratic dynasties were losing luster, and losing political races, too. Nearly a decade earlier, conservative essayist Angelo Codevilla had sold huge numbers of his tract against “The Ruling Class,” with the enthusiastic reaction to it hinting at the coming backlash against dynastic rule.
And for good reason: There’s something deeply unsettling, in a nation founded with a hearty disdain for hereditary emoluments, about a national political class that features the same prominent names generation after generation.
The predicted backlash reached its zenith with the movement to elect Trump in 2016. Many of us who thought Trump was and is exactly the wrong vessel for the movement would have been thrilled to see the movement’s success, were it only Trump-less.
It should have been obvious, but apparently it wasn’t, that Trump’s bid for office was all about himself, not about the American public. If, as is quite likely, Parscale was floating a trial balloon for the bombastic billionaire, it is only further proof of that assessment.
Luckily, even one of Trump’s most vociferous media fans, Fox’s Lou Dobbs, moved quickly to pop the balloon.
“This may be one of the dumbest things a campaign manager for a populist candidate ever said: Trump family building ‘dynasty’ for decades to come,” Dobbs tweeted.
Dobbs is right. A Great Disrupter’s job is to disrupt and, after setting things right, to go back from whence he came.
