Revolutionary nepotism

The United States is almost the only state that has a genuine republican tradition that can call on the pride and loyalty of its citizens. Almost all other republics either have disputed constitutional histories (France) or a rather dry legalistic character that shrinks from requesting patriotism (Belgium or Blair's UK).

The Chinese Communist Party seems to be following in the footsteps of Mexico's amusingly named former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRO, as the Communists seeks to maintain legitimacy by constant appeals to the glories of the Revolution combined with informal term limits on its supremos.

The enormous productivity of China's coastal provinces has provided the elite with a sizable margin for error. Still, the greed of the Party's princelings engenders much resentment, perhaps more than any other aspect of the regime. To combat this, the Party occasionally executes a corrupt lower-level official to encourage the others.

Since there is little racial difference between the rulers, the entrepreneurs and the masses in China, frustration tends to be diffused toward multiple minor targets. In contrast, as detailed in Amy Chua's book World on Fire, in Southeast Asia, the corruption of the ruling families and the riches of the Overseas Chinese business elite make for a volatile combination. The children of the indigenous dictators, such as Bong-Bong Marcos in the Philippines and Tommy Suharto in Indonesia, tended to pocket huge profits by granting Chinese cronies monopolies in return for partnerships. The overthrow of the Indonesian regime in 1998 coincided with an anarchic pogrom against the Chinese minority.

In the Middle East, the fizzling of leftist secular ideologies has led to dynasticism, as it has in Syria where Ba'athism has given way to Assadism. In neighboring Iraq, however, neither of that gruesome twosome, Qusay and Uday Hussein, will be following their father into power. Farther westward, in Egypt, the noisy secularist ideology of Gamal Nasser may become literally nominal--one of the two main candidates to succeed Hosni Mubarak is his son, Nasser's namesake Gamal Mubarak.

The failure of the revolutionaries in the face of rising Islamic fundamentalism paradoxically makes dynastic succession appear to be the safest choice for those fearing an Islamist takeover. Yet, the unfairness and inefficiency of nepotism can also feed Islamic extremism, as in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, when many Afghan patriots, tired of the battling of the family-based warlords, turned to a movement of religious students in the hopes that their Quranic ideals would heal the rifts between clans. They were known as the Taliban, and everyone is aware of how that story ended.

The evolutionary anthropologist Gregory M. Cochran suggests that the future of hereditary rule is even brighter than its present. Some day, megalomaniacal strong men like Saddam Hussein will be able to avoid breeding flagrantly defective potential successors like Uday, or even normally regressive ones like Qusay, merely by cloning themselves.