Family Privilege: It's There, But Which Party Honors It Most?
Family privilege undeniably matters for Americans. Those of us fortunate enough to be raised by parents who have sustained lasting, functional marriages, and in the process have accumulated meaningful financial resources, will often enjoy advantages that can last a lifetime.
But the contrast and conflict between the two presidential candidates this year demonstrate the way the two political parties value those advantages in very different ways. A quick look at the last four decades of federal elections and the ten nominees of each party in that timespan indicates that Republicans are vastly more likely to choose the products of prosperous and prominent homes as their candidates for national leadership.
Among the last ten Republican nominees for the White House since 1988, nine out of those ten have been the children of successful, powerful and wealthy families and only one—Bob Dole in 1996—grew up in a more ordinary and challenging environment.
The Democrats, on the other hand, lined up their anointed contenders with a preference for more modest backgrounds, with only one of ten—Al Gore in 2000—representing a famous and fortunate family as the son of a celebrated Senator from Tennessee. Kamala Harris, whose immigrant parents separated before she was seven and pursued divergent careers as academics, is far more typical of the history of Democratic contenders for the world’s most powerful position. In fact, in half of the last ten elections, the Democrats chose standard bearers who emerged from homes with conspicuously complicated marital histories.
Bill Clinton’s birth father, the traveling salesman William Jefferson Blythe, drowned in a drainage ditch after a traffic accident. He left behind four previous wives who didn’t know about one another’s existence, and his fifth partner, pregnant with the unborn future president. Clinton’s mother Virginia went on to three more marriages of her own but lived to see her son in the White House.
Barack Obama also grew up without any substantial relationship with his alcoholic father, who left one wife behind in Kenya when he came to Hawaii to study at the university and met and married the mother of the future president. A few months later, after returning to his native country, he acquired two more wives and a drinking habit that led to a series of devastating auto accidents. He spent time with his son only during a trip to Hawaii a decade after the boy’s birth. As President Obama recalled in his moving memoir, Dreams of My Father: “I only remember my father for one month my whole life, when I was 10.”
In a haunting pattern, Vice President Kamala Harris also sustains only a tenuous and distant relationship with her father, a Jamaican immigrant and PhD who became the first Black professor in the Stanford University economics department to win tenure.
These stories, inspiring in the ability of future candidates to overcome modest or even dysfunctional backgrounds, contrast with the family privilege that has characterized nearly all Republicans who win their party’s nomination. The first President Bush—who defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the child of Greek immigrants—was the son of Prescott Bush, a two-term US Senator from Connecticut and one of the founders of the powerful Wall Street firm, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. The second President Bush, George W., was of course both the son of a President and the grandson of that distinguished and wealthy US Senator.
John McCain, the Vietnam War hero and Senator from Arizona who ran against Obama to succeed George W. Bush, also felt pride about his family’s long history of service, particularly in the Navy. Both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals who played significant roles in developing the sea power of the United States. Mitt Romney, who challenged Obama when the incumbent ran for re-election in 2012, was the son of a Governor of Michigan and president of American Motors Corporation who once nursed presidential ambitions of his own before he took a post in Nixon’s cabinet in 1969.
How did it happen that the recent crop of Republican nominees differed so dramatically from their Democratic counterparts?
No one could suggest that this contrast reflects the conscious choices of a few party bosses who gather regularly in their smoke-filled rooms and deliberately anoint only the scions of the most privileged families. But the pattern may reflect the Democratic Party’s long-standing sense of itself as “The Party of the Little Guy.”
Since the formative era of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, our seventh president and the popular war hero who loudly championed the cause of the “common Man”, the Donkeys in the political menagerie have always fancied themselves as the challengers to the moneyed establishment, no matter how privileged their own Ivy-educated leaders (think FDR and JFK) might be. In that context, the sad and struggling aspects of the Kamala Harris childhood narrative might help to provide an authenticity that can overshadow her recent history as a leader of California’s progressive elite.
Trump, of course, personifies some aspects of the Republican side of the ledger—an unembarrassed plutocrat, and the son of a millionaire real estate magnate whose biography purportedly provides evidence of competitive business genius that fits well with the recent history of a historically business-friendly party. Yes, we remember Lincoln, the first Republican President, as a brawny, self-educated rail-splitter on the frontier, but we should also recall—and respect—that by the time of his rise to the White House, he had secured a comfortable, upper-middle-class life as a notably well-paid attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad.
These warring tendencies—to honor those who overcome deep disadvantages to attain prosperity and prominence, or to confer special admiration on individuals who carry on conspicuous family traditions of wealth, service and achievement—still compete for the hearts of Americans. It’s one of those deep and meaningful splits that helps to explain the closely matched sentiments that make most of our recent electoral battles so closely divided.