We're So Full Of It!

I love Brooks' lead line. The perfect summation of our time. All of the breastbeating over the sanctity of marriage and the divorce rate exceeds 50%. All of the breastbeating over the right to life and we execute children and idiots without a blink. All of the breastbeating about the war on terror and it's all about the next election. Now, we have the prospect of Bush v. Kerry; distant cousins—9 times removed. We're so full of it. If this is (fair & balanced) cynicism, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Clash of Titans
By DAVID BROOKS

We're so full of it. We pretend to be a middle-class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. We love our Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes, Deans and Gores. We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before the New England summer homes. How else can you explain the Bush vs. Kerry matchup that confronts us this year?

In Britain neither of these guys could lead a major party. Their upper-crust pedigrees would be disqualifying. But here in the land of Ralph Lauren wannabes, one all-scion campaign follows another. Here in the land of middle-class self-loathing, we want to make sure that the guy we elect to the White House has lived a life nothing like our own.

So you have one party, the Republican Party, the so-called party of the heartland, which won't nominate a guy unless he has a ranch the size of Oklahoma. Republicans don't think you're fit to govern unless you're on the north 40 every summer clearing brush. And then you have the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, who won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower.

This year's nominee, John Kerry, is almost a parody of the East Coast establishment. He's descended from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his mother is a member of the famously haughty Forbes clan. He spent part of his childhood at a boarding school in Switzerland before his aunt, whose estate included a bowling alley inside the barn, sent him to then-snooty St. Paul's.

In 1962, Kerry sailed with President John Kennedy while visiting the Auchincloss estate. Then it was off to Yale, Skull and Bones, and Vietnam.

When he returned, he testified before Congress, and his accent was still so plummy he sounded like an antiwar version of Thurston Howell III. He went on to marry Julia Thorne, a jet-setting heiress with a family fortune of about $300 million, whose grandfather kept the entire island of Hilton Head, S.C., as a hunting preserve.

Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is worth over $500 million. Between them they have a $4 million mansion in Georgetown, a $6 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in Boston, a $6 million summer home on Nantucket, a $3 million estate in Pittsburgh and a $5 million ski lodge in Idaho, which is a 15th-century English barn that was disassembled and imported to the U.S.

Most Democrats have trouble affording one home, so when they search for a leader who shares their values, of course they nominate a guy who is running for his sixth. Of course they nominate a guy whose 42-foot powerboat, the Scaramouche, sells for upward of $700,000. Of course they choose a guy famous for his Christophe haircuts and his Turnbull & Asser shirts. Of course they choose a couple who paid to have an unsightly fire hydrant moved from the front of their Boston house, and who sought to divert huge amounts of river water to supply their sprawling Idaho lawn.

This is the land of "Masterpiece Theatre" liberals and Town & Country conservatives. Sure, we want our toffs to flatter us, and abase themselves while campaigning at our diners and cheesesteak counters. We want our Republican candidates to embrace the cultural populism of the Bible Belt. We want our Democratic candidates to embrace the economic populism of the working class. The Democrats even have a campaign consultant, Bob Shrum, who has made a large fortune taking multizillionaires like Al Gore, John Kerry and others and making sure that they run for office as born-again proletarians.

But we don't actually want to be governed by people like ourselves. We want the bloodlines.

The anthropologist Lionel Tiger points out that in many primate communities, the offspring of high-status females are immediately accorded membership in the troop's elite.

Tiger points out that politics is a visceral business. It's a tremendous advantage to have been instilled with the habit of self-assertion since infancy. If you can project a physiological comfort with power, others around you will begin to accept your sense of self-worth.

There aren't too many normal people waking up in normal suburban split-levels assuming they should rule the world. But God bless the upper class. They've lost their legitimacy, but they haven't lost their self-confidence.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company