Vapid transit

Erich von Stroheim, in bushes, looking remarkably like David Brooks, and Norma Talmadge in John Emerson's The Social Secretary (1916).

Shorter David Brooks, "Mothers and Presidents", New York Times, April 8 2015:

If you're upset at the prospect of having to choose between another Bush and another Clinton in the 2016 elections, perhaps you're one of those Hobbesians who doesn't understand how life works, believing that societies are made up of individuals. Society is in fact made up of families, and the Bushes are just as it were the Bachs of politics, for whom each generation gets its 10,000 hours of practice simply by not running away from home. So it stands to reason. Also as my headline indicates I meant to say something about mothers, but I'm out of space.

I don't want to overexplain here, but no, the problem has nothing to do with Hobbesianism. The issue is whether the United States is developing a hereditary aristocracy, something to which Hobbes hardly objected (though he preferred it should not interfere with the power of the hereditary monarchy).

Brooks's question sprawls around the important question, obscuring it in the oddest way:

If you look around the globe, these pseudo-monarchical tendencies seem to be on the increase, not on the decrease. There are Aquinos in the Philippines, Nehru-Gandhis in India, even Le Pens in France. Now that women are more empowered, each dominant clan has essentially doubled the size of its talent pool, so family influence is increased.

Why do the members of dynastic families do so well? 

Not why, but why now? None of his answers have any relation to this problem, which has clearly nothing to do with the Brontes or Alf Landon or his other examples of the way "powerhouse families nurture achievement in many ways." If it did it would have happened often in many democracies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It's not "pseudo-monarchical" but aristocratic or oligarchic, including not just families but also extraordinarily wealthy individuals like Rick Scott, Bruce Rauner, and (they're not all reactionaries!) Mark Dayton, and it is about the increasing concentration of wealth. It takes an extraordinary willed blindness to not see this.

I'm sick jealous of Albert Burneko at Deadspin, who has packed a huge bio-Brooksological analysis into a single post, but you have to read it because it's that good (Burneko errs, I think, in regarding the drunk-dialing column of March 3 as addressed to the former Mrs. Brooks—surely it's now clear that the intended victim was Ms. Snyder—but other than that the piece is splendid). Beth riffs off it at LGM. Driftglass imagines casting Brooks as the Joker in the next Batman franchise, in an image you will wish you could forget. And in a post on Friday's column, Drifty generously references us alongside a couple of geniuses.