Revolutionary nepotism

Steve Sailer

Adam Bellow, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 576 pp., $30.

Frank K. Salter (ed.), Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 288 pp., $79.95.

THE UNITED States currently confronts foreign policy challenges involving such highly disparate foes, friends and in-betweens as North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Morocco, the Congo and the Philippines. All these countries, however, possess one striking common denominator. Although dynasticism is supposed to have died and been buried by meritocracy, these countries are all led by the children of former heads of state.

The same is true of America, whose president is not just the son of a president, but also the grandson of a senator and brother of a governor. Americans tend to be willfully blind to the crucial subject of nepotism. We disapprove of it, so we feel we ought not to think about it--a dangerous illusion as we pursue a more activist foreign policy that brings us in touch with cultures that approach the topic quite differently.

The return of family rule should not surprise us. Nepotism and its more formal offspring dynasticism have provided the basic organizing principles of politics for much of human history. For example, in the early 20th century, the ruling aristocracy of Mongolia, which comprised 6 percent of the population, still consisted of the descendants in the direct male line of Genghis Khan, even though he had been dead for almost 700 years.

Indeed, Genghis Khan, who was known as The Master of Thrones and Crowns, was so successful at propagating his lineage, both by fathering countless children and granting some of his heirs enormous and enduring political privileges, that his genetic footprint on a vast swath of Asia from the Pacific to Afghanistan leaps out at population geneticists today. A 2003 study of male Y-chromosomes discovered that about 16 million living men are his direct patrilineal descendants. That's a level of dynastic success, in the Darwinian sense of the term, approaching one million times greater than that of the typical man who was alive back then.

As ferociously exemplified by The Mighty Manslayer, this urge to help copies of one's genes survive and spread is the basis of nepotism, which biologists define as altruism toward kin. It encourages human beings to help their offspring and relatives achieve power and prosperity.

The recent book In Praise of Nepotism by Adam Bellow (son of Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow) documents how the great English biologist William D. Hamilton's 1964 elucidation of the genetic reasons behind altruism toward kin formed the plinth upon which the field of sociobiology was built. Hamilton's paradigm became more widely known from Richard Dawkins' 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene. A more accurate, if still anthropomorphic name, would have been The Dynastic Gene, since genes thrive by promoting copies of themselves in others.

Of course, biology can explain only the rudiments of the manifestations of family feeling in the political world. Further, scientists have barely begun to consider the flip side of the desire to establish a dynasty--the widespread desire to he ruled by one. Evidence for the resurgent importance of dynasticism and nepotism is everywhere. In a broad swath of southern Asia, running from Pakistan, through India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia and on to the Philippines, the dynastic urge has often worked in conjunction with the democratic impulse. In each, voters have chosen widows or daughters to carry on from their late men-folk the family business of running the country.

Some of these women entered politics to avenge the killing or overthrow of their husbands or fathers. For example, Corazon Aquino was elected president of the Philippines following her husband's assassination by dictator Ferdinand Marcos' goon squad. Benazir Bhutto ruled Pakistan after the downfall of General Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq, who had overthrown and hanged her father. Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri is the daughter of the former leftist ruler Sukarno. Sheik Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh from 1996-2001, is the daughter of the founder of independent Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who died in a military coup in 1975.

In India, the Congress Party chose as their leader in the 1999 election Sonia Gandhi, widow, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter-in-law of prime ministers. She lost party control, though, after leading Congress to merely a second-place finish. Runner-up is considered a disgraceful performance for anyone bearing the magic name of "Gandhi." The high hopes invested in Sonia were testimony to the glamour of the dynasty. Without the Gandhi name, Sonia--a Roman Catholic Italian who doesn't speak a single Indian language terribly well--would have been just about the least likely person to become head of a major Indian party.

American men have not thought highly of kings since 1776 (although American women traditionally have been notoriously intent on being presented at court). We chose not to revive the monarchy in Afghanistan, even though sentiment for de facto dynasties is strong in nearby countries, and the monarchy was the only institution that had ever provided a centripetal force in that fractious land.

Dynasticism is far from confined to Asia. Here at home, powerful men's sons and, increasingly, their wives and daughters, are succeeding to political leadership with a regularity reminiscent of the feudal days of old Europe. In 2002, for instance, Senator Frank Murkowski was elected governor of Alaska and promptly named his daughter Lisa to take over his seat in the U.S. Senate, saying he wanted the person who succeeded him to share his vision and values for the future of the state, which apparently includes Alaska being a satrapy of the Murkowski clan.

In Chicago, two of the biggest names--Mayor Richard M. Daley and Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.--are also among the oldest. Winners in the 2002 elections included House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, daughter of the former mayor of Baltimore; North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Senator Bob Dole; Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, son of George Romney, former governor of Michigan; and New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu, son of former Governor. John H. Sununu. Even California's new Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an immigrant bodybuilder who would seem to be at first glance the most self-made of men, is the politically wayward son-in-law of the dynasties of the Kennedys and their non-evil twins, the Shrivers. It seems that as Americans have found other, more amusing entertainments than following politics, the public appears to have become increasingly reliant upon famous brand names.

Scions are also found in appointed positions. "No sooner had Bush taken office (after an invocation by the son of Billy Graham)", Bellow writes, "than he began handing out appointments to members of other Republican families", such as FCC Chairman Michael Powell, son of the Secretary of State, and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. The children of Antonin Scalia, Dick Cheney and Strom Thurmond also benefited.

None of this has excited much disapproval among Americans. As Bellow told me recently,

   There is a deep emotional satisfaction that we
   all understand in the pride of a father whose
   child wants to emulate him. Americans value
   the reassurance and security of a certain
   amount of continuity at the top in a highly
   mobile and volatile society. People are comforted
   by a familiar name and face.

Indeed, the growing importance of women may be contributing to the return of family ties among leaders. First, many rules against nepotism in, say, academia were relaxed in the 1970s and 1980s when it was realized that much of the best female talent was married to the best male talent, and, consequently, rules intended to prevent favoritism and corruption were harming the ascent of women, or at least the ascent of talented women.

Further, as political consumers, women tend to be more interested than men in the kind of family stories that dynasties generate. You may recall the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Many commentators curiously opined then that the tidal wave of grief signified that royalty had outlived its time. In reality, dynastic life remains highly popular because it offers soap opera in the guise of affairs of state.

The women of the world did not idolize "Princess Di" for her charity work or some other such bogus rationalization. No, they loved her because Di, unlike other female celebrities such as Madonna, didn't have to claw her way to the top of the celebrity heap. She didn't do anything to get there. She was just picked out for who she was--young, beautiful and a virgin: a princess from a fairy tale.

Monarchism would not have been so popular for so long if it also did not offer to the ruled at least some practical benefits as well. Compared to transient kleptocracies, the common folk benefit from dynastic rule because the likelihood of passing royal dominions down to their offspring encourages their rulers to think about the long term. Science-fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle said, "Politicians look to the next election. Statesmen may look to the next generation; but monarchs must look to the next generation." Rather than laying waste to their realms, the dynastic system gives kings incentive to cultivate their domains well so their children can inherit a prosperous and content land.

Dynasts are particularly inclined to build impressive civic monuments. Consider Chicago, where Mayor Richard M. Daley has won five terms, just one short of his father Richard J. Daley's record. Many Chicagoans feel that when Daleys are not in power, tax dollars often disappear into well-connected pockets without leaving a trace. In contrast, the current Mayor Daley has seen to it that at least some of the public's money gets spent on a long list of beautification projects, many inspired by his visits to Paris and other regal cities. If future generations of Daleys wish to run for mayor, these elegant works will serve to remind voters of the splendor of the name "Daley."

Although some dynastic systems institutionalized competition--most notably, the Ottoman, in which scores of half-brothers would fight to the death--one of monarchism's subtler appeals was its hint of egalitarianism. Those who inherit their positions don't need to seize them through raw talent or ruthlessness. While some Americans are driven to fury by how George W. Bush seemed to amble into the Oval Office without first displaying many distinctive accomplishments or abilities, many others seem to find it appealing that their President is a regular guy. When he says he only glances at newspapers, they identify with him.

Still, in a competitive world, the main practical shortcoming of hereditary rule is regression toward the mean. Dynasties are typically founded by exceptional men, hut the genetic randomness inherent in sexual reproduction means their children are unlikely to match fully their capabilities. The children of highly intelligent couples, for instance, tend to wind up with IQs roughly halfway between the average of their parents and those of the general population. Dynasties have long revitalized their gene pools by marriages to up-and-coming commoners, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

THERE ARE, of course, more sinister aspects to the revival of nepotism. Frank K. Salter, an Australian political scientist now with the Max Planck Institute in Andechs, Germany, points out in the book he recently edited, Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity, that in failed states where the government cannot provide security and justice, the boundaries between freedom-fighters, gangsters and terrorists can become obscure and shifting. The common denominator tends to be that they organize around blood ties, because the highest level of trust is found within families.

These intense family bonds are most often found in areas where government is ineffective or illegitimate or both. These are places where you need your extended family's muscle to survive, because the police are either feckless or predators. There's a vicious circle: Strong and just governments are also hard to establish and maintain among populations whose extended family structures are conducive to mafia-like activities.

This might be especially true in countries where inbreeding is common: cousin marriage is remarkably common from Morocco to parts of India. For example, two studies in the later 1980s found that half the married people in Iraq are wed to either a first or second cousin (versus under 1 percent in the United States). These "consanguineous" marriages strengthen family loyalty. If you arrange for your daughter to marry your brother's son, your grandson and heir will also be your brother's grandson and heir, so there is no need to fight over who inherits the family land or herd.

On the other hand, cousin marriage undermines loyalty to the state and society, which is one reason why Middle Eastern countries teeter between anarchy and tyranny. Shortly before the recent war, commentator Randall Parker wrote on his website, parapundit.com:

   Consanguinity is the biggest underappreciated
   factor in Western analyses of Middle
   Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists
   seem blind to the importance of preideological
   kinship-based political bonds in
   large part because those bonds are not
   derived from abstract Western ideological
   models of how societies and political systems
   should be organized. Extended families that
   are incredibly tightly bound are really the
   enemy of civil society because the alliances
   of family override any consideration of fairness
   to people in the larger society. Yet, this
   obvious fact is missing from 99 percent of
   the discussions about what is wrong with the
   Middle East. How can we transform Iraq
   into a modern liberal democracy if every
   government worker sees a government job
   as a route to helping out his clan at the
   expense of other clans?

Salter also points out that family-based mafias especially flourish when totalitarian regimes collapse, as in the Soviet Union, the Balkans and now Iraq. The ideological dictatorships destroyed most of the non-family associations of civil society (such as corporations, labor unions and political parties). Along with the secret policeman's alumni club, one of the few forms of organization that always survives totalitarianism is the basic biological one of kinship.

Not surprisingly, failed and ex-totalitarian states torn apart by battling clans generate large numbers of refugees and emigres. They tend to gravitate toward more ethnically homogenous, less nepotistic northern regions like Scandinavia, where the Rousseauvean citizenries offer lavish welfare because they are not yet familiar with their new arrivals' more Hobbesian worldviews.

The organized crime business is particularly attractive to immigrants with strong family loyalties because their ability to ostracize family members who betray their trust can give them a competitive advantage in illegal enterprises where participants can not demand that the courts enforce their business agreements. If a relative cheats, they do not have to shoot him. Instead, they can just make sure nobody will marry his children.

A chapter in Risky Transactions penned by University of Amsterdam anthropologist Anton Blok quotes Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta's book The Sicilian Mafia on the value of family ties between the Italian and American crime families:

   These ties allowed greater flexibility and
   safety. In the relationships between [Sicilian]
   Mafioso organizers and the Italo-American
   gangs receiving the merchandise [heroin],
   where there is mutual trust over time, it is
   possible for one courier to arrive from
   America with the money while the merchandise
   itself is entrusted to another courier.
   Since no such privileged bonds existed
   between Sicilians and Middle Eastern suppliers,
   importing was a more cumbersome
   operation.

After several generations of assimilation and increased returns to southern Italians from honest work, the Italian mafia has faded in importance on the world stage, only to be replaced by new immigrant mafias. For example, Canada's National Post reported on April 13, 2000 that

   "Kosovo Albanians make the perfect mafia--even
   better than the Sicilians", said Marko
   Nicovic, vice-president of the New York-based
   International Narcotics Enforcement
   Agency. "They are a small ethnic group made
   up of clans or families that have very close to
   family relations. The brotherhood, or Fic, is
   impenetrable by outsiders. It is difficult to
   find translators to work with police and
   impossible to get an informer or agent inside
   the organizations."

Finally, radical regimes that have lost their faith tend to gravitate toward nepotism and dynasticism, as ideology fades and biology reasserts itself. Having been founded on a revolutionary rejection of legitimacy, they wind up with crypto-hereditary systems with few of the legitimizing trappings and functions of the monarchies that many of them originally overthrew.

THERE ARE sources of legitimacy and mechanisms for transferring power in democracies and monarchies that revolutionary powers do not possess. In Europe, the certainty of accession provided the assurance of stability. And, the rigorous military training traditional for European royalty had character-building benefits (seen as recently as 1981, when Spain's King Juan Carlos coolly faced down a coup).

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.

America's lack of intellectual discourse on nepotism and dynasticism provides a near perfect example of what Harvard's human nature scholar Steven Pinker calls (with a nod to David Hume's "naturalistic fallacy") the "moralistic fallacy." We think these phenomena ought not to exist and therefore we speak and write as if they do not exist. This is a luxury we simply can no longer afford.

Steve Sailer is the National Correspondent for UPI, a columnist for www.VDARE.com and the film critic for the American Conservative.

COPYRIGHT 2003 The National Interest, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning