Dynasties
You just knew this had to be a Daniel Larison post:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft has reminded us that we do not actually have either a functioning democratic or republican system, but instead suffer through a series of inept family-based cliques in a kakistocratic oligarchy (there are certainly no aristoi in our political class) in which connections are decisive and merit painfully irrelevant. The latest example of this is the"Kakistocratic." I've been looking for a word like that for, oh, almost eight years now....accession to the thronepresidential campaign of Clinton. In other words, things are running much as they have done for much of my lifetime (and almost certainly longer than that). The idea that Bush-Clinton fatigue will set in among voters this time derives from the average pundit’s impatience with the dreariness of dynastic cycles and the continued belief that democracy results in generally better, more dynamic and less squalid government. Our system keeps doing its best to prove that belief wrong, but it persists anyway.