Hillary’s “Evil, Bad Men” joke, presumably referring to her husband, Bill bothered me for several reasons. I’m not going to lie, most things that come out of Hillary Clinton’s mouth get under my skin–but this comment bothered me because of her use of the word “evil”–most of my readers know that I’m no big fan of Bill Clinton, but even I would never call him “evil”. To me, and I would hope to most people, “evil” isn’t a word to be thrown around lightly or jokingly.
I think this shows a greater problem with our language–when someone like Reagan or Bush uses the word “evil”–he is laughed at, and yet Hillary Clinton can throw the word around jokingly? In high school, I remember an English teacher telling me how curse words are losing their power as “shock” words in our language, while polite words like “thank you” are now becoming the shock words. While curse words have a place in a language, when they are over used they lose their value. I wonder if the word “evil” has similarly lost its power in our language?
Michael Barone has an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal today, entitled Battle Royal: Bush, Clinton, Bush–Clinton? It sounds like the War of the Roses. In this piece, Barone talks about the possible “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton” succession to the White House. Barone claims “we have become, I think, a nation that is less small-r republican and more royalist than it used to be.”
At first, this strikes Barone as a bad thing, but then, he says, “I’ve decided that something can be said for the increasing royalism of our politics.”
Barone makes a strong point that the US is, in fact sliding towards royalism, he used the media attack on the Bush administration, for not announcing Laura Bush’s routine skin cancer removal recently.
Barone then goes through some of the history of Royalism in the US:
There was always a risk of royalism under our Constitution, with the president both head of government and head of state. But for a long time politicians struggled against it. George Washington turned down a crown. John Adams did not make public the scintillating intellect of his wife Abigail. For half the time in the first 40 years of the 19th century there was no first lady at all: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were widowers when they took office. After the Civil War, politics revolved so much around parties rather than presidents–can you name all the presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt?–that in the 1880s the future President Woodrow Wilson wrote a book called “Congressional Government.”
The drift toward royalism is a 20th-century phenomenon. At first it was concealed. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had strong-willed, intelligent wives and broods of children who went on to impressive achievements. But they didn’t make much of this public. Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, a Southerner who died early in his presidency, reportedly pushed for racial segregation in federal building cafeterias, while his second wife effectively ran the White House while he was incapacitated by a stroke–neither something you’d want to talk about even now. Lou Henry Hoover, an engineering school classmate of her husband, directed her public energies to promoting the Girl Scouts. With Eleanor Roosevelt, we come to the first first lady with a political identity of her own. But she was just one of many courtiers in her husband’s White House, and not necessarily the most influential.
Harry Truman did not bring Bess Truman to Potsdam; she spent much of his presidency at home in Independence with her elderly mother. Mamie Eisenhower said that “Ike runs the country and I turn the pork chops.” But ever since John Kennedy made a point of bringing his French-speaking wife to Paris, where she charmed the seemingly uncharmable Charles de Gaulle, most presidents and presidential candidates have made a habit of showcasing their wives. And most of their wives have made a point of taking up some public cause or other, some of them controversial. First ladies increasingly became public figures and, given the considerable talents and charm of presidential wives since that time, political assets.
Now we have our first first lady to run for president.
Then, Barone sums up his opinion on how royalism will affect our republic.
…the royalism of republican politics is not just an American phenomenon. You see it in other very large republics. India for 37 of the 42 years after independence had members of one family as head of government–Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, grandfather and daughter, mother and son. Rajiv Gandhi’s widow is now head of the governing party. Indonesia elected as president the daughter of a former president. So did the Philippines. Maybe there is a reason for this. It’s hard in a very large democracy for voters to judge a potential leader. They can gather some information on his or her positions on issues, but they rely on an inevitably imperfect (and often biased) media. If they are strongly on the side of one party, they can vote for that party’s candidate; but in the United States at least they have some voice (at least if they live in Iowa or New Hampshire) in determining who that candidate is. They have a hard time ascertaining the ability and character of candidates. But in making judgments about those things, it helps if you know the family.
Not that anyone assumes that family members are all alike. It would not do for candidate Bush in 2000 and for candidate Clinton today to claim to be clones of his father and her husband. Rather, candidate Bush made comments about his mother’s fearsomeness, and candidate Clinton’s “let’s chat” suggests that she is more of a listener and less of a nonstop talker than her husband. So the trend to royalism may not be all bad. It does give some candidates an unfair advantage over others. But let’s face it: Only four of the 300 million living Americans has been president and probably only 10 or 12 more ever will be. We need as much knowledge of our presidential candidates as we can get and, if we get some of it by knowing their families as closely as we know the families of recent occupants of the White House, so be it. As Bagehot put it, “The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.”
In any case, it’s no sure thing that a Clinton will follow a Bush who followed a Clinton who followed a Bush. But keep the following in the back of your mind. George P. Bush will be eligible to run for president in 2012. Chelsea Clinton will be eligible to run for president in 2016. So will Jenna and Barbara Bush, who will turn 35 several days after the election. And Jeb Bush, who had a fine record in eight years as governor of Florida, will be younger in 2024 than John McCain will be in 2008 or Ronald Reagan was in 1984. Royalism may be here to stay.
I certainly can’t agree with Barone’s optimism about Royalism here. Perhaps royalism is here to stay, but I hope it isn’t…it seems to go against every democratic and limited government bone in my body. If power corrupts, as I believe it almost always does, how much worse must it be to have one family in power for an extended period of time? I think history has shown us that royalism is not a friend to libery and limited government, and I can only believe that royalism would harm our republic as well.
So what are your thoughts? Do you think royalism is seeping into our repubic? Is it here to stay? And what effect is it going to have on our system of government?