Iron law of oligarchy

>It's quite common for children to follow in their parents footsteps.

Sure, but there are arguably 300 million people in America who "would like to be president" I imagine. It's every child's dream, isn't it? To grow up to be president one day?

There are millions of people who want to play professional basketball, too. And many more "professional basketball player" positions available as there are POTUS. But even still, after the ~3,000 professional basketball players that the NBA has seen pass through it's doors, only 78 of them have become "second generation" professional basketball players. [0]

The odds of both sons of a former POTUS becoming (or even having a strong chance of becoming, in Jeb's case) president are just out of this world when compared to other disciplines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_second-generation_Nati...

edit: I changed 10,000 pro basketball players to ~3,000 as per forrestthewoods's info below.

Did you read the part in the wiki article about student unions?

>>Every year between one quarter and one half of the membership turns over, and Gregory argues this creates a situation where elected student leaders become dependent on student union staff for institutional memory and guidance.

Although Obama was president, Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, who is very close to him personally was Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA while Bill Clinton's wife was Secretary of State. All top positions in the Department of Defense, CIA, and Department of State are connected to this very small group. It's amazing that Obama is president and Bill Clinton's closest allies are in top positions. Long after the Clintons are gone their influence will remain in the 'institutional memory'.

What about Eisenhower?

Secretary of State isn't one of the top three offices in the Federal Government.

Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate are both higher, and plainly more important.

It can also easily be argued that the Chief Justice and Fed Chair (granted the Fed occupies an unusual quasi-government role, it's fully within the control of the US Government) positions are far more important, influential, and powerful as far as the Federal Government is concerned, compared to the Secretary of State.

While your point is entirely valid, it's worth remembering that while the various Bushes are related genetically, Hillary Rodham is related to Bill Clinton only by marriage, therefore it's not a hereditary link.

This is nothing new. John Adams was the 2nd President and his son was the 6th President. William Harrison was the 9th president and his grandson Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were distance cousins. Just reading that Franklin's wife was closer in relation to Theodore than Franklin. Include John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Surely there would have been a greater dynasty if John wasn't assassinated.

There was an Adams or a Jefferson serving as either President or Vice President of the country, as well, for the first twenty years of our nationhood. And then after an eight year break, the son of the first President Adams became Secretary of State. And then President himself. An Adams or Jefferson was President, VP, or Secretary of State for the first 36 out of 44 years the US existed!

I'm not sure what the above proves. Neither then nor now is what's going on anything like a hereditary monarchy. For one thing, Hillary Clinton is not the heir of Bill Clinton. And in both cases other people have been in the mix holding power. Washington during Adam's Vice Presidency. Obama during Hillary Clinton's Secretaryship of State. Which kind of kills the "mono" part of a "monarchy" -- if there are a bunch of different people from a bunch of different families running around with power. (Is "polyarchy" a word?)

So don't get too freaked.

(Also, plenty of first world democracies have hereditary monarchs. The United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Canada, Japan, etc. The existence of a hereditary monarchy isn't necessarily anti-democratic.)

Kings often have shortish reigns, but you're comparing the performance of multiple families to the reign of an individual king. 50 years is nothing compared to the time a set of multiple royal families can hold a throne.

> one of the three executive offices

There are not "three" executive offices of the US and the secretary of state certainly isn't one of the three. It's the highest rank cabinet position, but definitely not in the same category as president/vice president.

Well in business, you can give your kid the company, and if any employees protest you just tell them "this is not a democracy" so that's not the best comparison.

The point of this "iron rule" is that those dynasties are not surprising at all. What makes a system less bad than others is damage mitigation. The power of Bush or a Clinton isn't quite the same as that of a Bourbon or a Romanov and, even more important, the modern day versions collapse in refreshingly unspectacular ways if they do.

Does this happen much in sport? I see it a lot in music, acting and business, because nepotism is so easily perpetrated there, just as in politics. Sports I can't think of any familial dynasties. Might just be because I don't really like sports but when have there been 2 players who were the pinnacle of their sport? In fact, even in music we see manufactured dynasties but rarely organic dynasties (eg. Julian Lennon was nowhere near as popular as John Lennon but he nonetheless got a hit record). It all just suggests that these are orchestrated, oligarchical results, rather than the result of healthy democracy.

Just to make things clear, this Gandhi family is not related at all to Mahatma Gandhi.

At India's Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister. His daughter, Indira, married Ferozeshah Ghandy [1], who was born into a Parsi family.

Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv Gandhi married an Italian woman, who is now known as Sonia Gandhi [2]

Sonia Gandhi's son Rahul Gandhi is now a Member of Parliament.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feroze_Gandhi [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Gandhi

> In U.S. politics the most important persons are always figure heads. Their prominence hides democratic and not so democratic mechanisms behind decision making or electing these figure heads.

Interesting, watching US politics from the outside it seems like Obama (OK, the executive branch) has a hell of a lot of power. Personally I agree with a lot of his recent "legacy forging" executive orders, but they sure don't feel very democratic.

If Jeb Bush became president, I would expect a very Bush-like reign. War with Iran, for example.

Tyrants are servants of the people, and enemies of the oligarchs.

That's why republican democrats hate them so intensely, and have been murdering tyrants by sword and word for so many centuries.

> Is this similar to instant runoff voting?

No it involves building a graph of voter preferences to find the central nodes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting

Well, California has medical marijuana, so I guess the proposition system works sometimes. But I do think the proposition system is corrupted by the need to raise large amounts of money to advertise.

I'm not sure why you believe this, what specific measures are you talking about?

Isn't California the most economically successful state in the US? Also the most progressive. However terrible the idea is, it isn't doing much harm to California compared to other states. You might not agree with the results of some individual propositions, but maybe overall it has a positive effect?

Could you give more context & background please?

I think part of the key is to have the direct democracy be digital/online. With needing to motivate people to go to the polls (like in California) advertising and money seems to play a large role.

I think a direct democracy will still need a president and congress to handle many aspects of governance, like military action, state secrets, etc. My hope would be though that a direct digital democracy would take some of the decisions away from congress and put those decisions in the hands of the people. But certain aspects of government, particularly the military and judicial system will always have to be centralized.

> And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?

All of those seem tied to the Executive branch, whereas direct democracy would replace the Legislative (Congress in the US, Parliament in other countries). The current Executive follows the laws that Congress passes, direct democracy wouldn't change that.

In the current representative system of democracy in the US, the plutocrats benefit by having an uninformed population and a democratic process that can be influenced by money (advertising). Your fears, in my opinion, actually stem from our current representative system.

I do agree that the US should break away from the two party system, as either choice seems to yield only bad or worse results for the citizens.

Would you say an average person who works an average job has a reasonable shot at getting into elected office in the United States Congress? If no, then that by definition is a form of oligarchy.

Though random samples and a large enough sample size, you can ensure that at least those in elected (sortitioned?) positions are not members of the oligarchy. Additionally, since sortition is much more efficient in selecting candidates, it's possible to replace some formerly unelected bureaucrats with sortitioned ones. Even if it's not perfect, it's still an improvement.

If you assume the oligarchy is some fraction f of the population, and you select n representatives, then you expect only nf instead of n representatives of the oligarchy. And since f << 1, the oligarchy can not gain control of the legislative body.

As for dysfunctional, depends what kind of people you want in the legislation. If you believe that the kind of people who want to gain power should not be in office, then running for office is a contra indicator for should be in office and you have to use random selection.

Also, the sortitioned would be even more suspect than elected persons to being bought or to otherwise grabbing whatever post-term benefit they can get. Without any perspective for personal reelection, reelection of their dear party or election of designated-successor aides, they would not have anything to loose by obvious bad behavior. Pure sortition could therefore easily create a lottery ticket mentality, where a grab-what-you-can mindset would be expected and the idea of a bad person in office would shift to an egoist who does not share the benefits by securing lucrative posts for all their extended family.

But smaller sortition "modules" could still be put in place to augment or protect other mechanisms of democracy. A jury to add that witchhunt-spirit to the supreme court might not be the wisest idea, but something like randomized eligibility for the passive vote, maybe only in one of multiple houses, could probably help weaken oligarchic grip without severe disadvantage in other aspects.

This is already the base with the lobbying industry, but yes, agreed.