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| Trump in 1987, in his early 40s. |
Our current administration is full of the children of inherited wealth.
Nepo babies rarely experience consequences. There is very little that wealth and connections can’t fix, erase, or NDA away. Rich kids make plenty of mistakes but very few of them show up in the news, or inconvenience them in any way. So they don’t plan for consequences. They can’t imagine how bad things can get when something goes wrong. They have never lived through being one paycheck away from catastrophe. Or one illness away from bankruptcy.
You will find a tragedy in any backstory of a rich kid who thinks of other people, of how dire life might be without the protection of inherited wealth. Some loss or lesson that brings a wider awareness. FDR’s polio and JFK’s injury in military service are experiences of those presidents who learned to see the lives of the working class. You will find rich h kids running for office in local and state elections, trying to connect with their poorer constituents.
Or you might want the person who has spent a year or more making a living in a restaurant job.
There is no environment that will have you experience the whole human condition as a server in a restaurant. Making a living on tips is its own class in the psychology of money. Any retail job that has you interact with the public will give you a similar experience, but the restaurant setting is where people are encouraged to relax. Everything comes out of that, good and bad. I imagine that service as employment has been that way all the way back to the great families visiting each others’ castles, with the servants taking the brunt. ‘The customer is always right’ goes back to medieval days. Rich kids are always the customer, and therefore always right.
So I ask, if you have never served other people - and I include the military here - how can you successfully serve the People? How can billionaires, and the children of billionaires, ever make good policy for the citizens who invisibly do all the work? The wealthy just don’t have the understanding of consequences that makes for sensible policy. Rich kids do not belong in government. Of course, because they feel entitled to government assets, but more importantly, they are remarkably stupid when it comes to planning. That’s why the incompetence. They just assume that throwing money and power around will cover up their mistakes. And medievally, it often does.
If you want stupid government, give it to a rich kid. If you want successful government, give it to someone who has worked for the public. I would love to see a requirement for elected office that they have spent at least one year waiting tables and lived on it. I think the Democratic Party would be better for it. And it would show the Republican Party up for the clueless rich kids they have always been.
