The dynastic temptation

The following is an excerpt from a column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland:

Will you be among those queuing to see Spectre? If you are, you don’t need to explain why. It’s simple. It’s the new Bond movie and you like Bond movies.

This week Justin Trudeau, handsome enough to play James Bond, as it happens, was sworn in as the new prime minister of Canada. He succeeded where his Liberal party had failed four years earlier. Even his greatest admirers do not deny that part of his appeal resides in his last name. He is the son of the former PM Pierre Trudeau and his much younger wife, Margaret, and some of the glamour and excitement of that past era has rubbed off on him.

The birth of such a dynasty is new for Canada, but not elsewhere. For the dynasty is the franchise movie of politics: the reliable brand that brought in the crowds before and enjoys an automatic box-office advantage over all rivals. Where Bond, Superman and the Transformers are the titans of cinema, so the Clintons and Bushes, the Gandhis, Kenyattas and now Trudeaus dominate politics around the globe.

It’s one of the more unexpected features of modern democracy. Those who demanded popular self-rule centuries ago partly did so as an explicit rejection of heredity as a qualification for power. Gone would be the ruling families of the ancien regime, replaced by elected representatives of the entire people . . .

Of course, everyone should be judged on their individual merits: they should not be disqualified because of their parents. And yet the stubborn grip of dynasticism epitomizes social immobility at the highest level, a clustering of one group at the top of the ladder crowding out everyone else. Politics becomes a kind of Shakespearean clashing of clans at court.

You can’t legislate to stop this happening, but we can insist on a wider, more fluid, more genuine social mobility. Otherwise politics will become ever more like the cinema — new faces, perhaps, but telling the same old story.