Clarion Ledger: “What else can we expect from a man who said in 2021 that he was glad he was elected president because now “I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are”?
We need to make clear how a man like this has become the American President: the aristocratic impulse has driven certain power centers to lower their standards for this high office while heightening barriers to prevent people like you and me from have an equal voice in who holds it.
Many of America’s problems today are because the logic of oligarchy facilitates ever greater corruption and buffoonery as commitment to systems of privilege becomes the decisive qualification to hold positions of influence. Tremendous evidence of unsuitability for high office will be overlooked so long as the candidate can give certainty on that issue. …
Our Founders understood this problem. In his pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine gives a psychological portrait of such rulers: “[As hereditary succession] opens a door to the foolish, the wicked, and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”
Too many Americans have forgotten these truths. The Republican Party has only nominated someone other than a millionaire heir for president once in the last 40 years.
The result? Leaders “born to reign” but disconnected from the world they govern — presidents who, to quote “The Great Gatsby,” have “smashed up things and creatures [and economies and soldiers] and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess.””