“At some point you have to wonder if the bloodline thins,” James Goodale, a former Times senior executive, memorably told Mnookin.

As it goes with family newspaper dynasties, so too with family political dynasties. As I researched and wrote books about American Revolution leader Samuel Adams and President John F. Kennedy, I could see how each of them was shaped for the better by being from a political family—and how each political family ultimately declined from its presidential peak.

Samuel Adams’s father was also named Samuel Adams and is known to history as Samuel the Elder or Samuel the Deacon to avoid confusion. The Samuel Adams extended family also included Samuel’s cousin John Adams (and his wife Abigail) and their son John Quincy. Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams eventually were elected president of the United States.

In addition to his role as a church deacon, Samuel the Elder served as a selectman and justice of the peace in Boston, and as an elected member of the legislature in what was then the British colony of Massachusetts. He also directed a land bank company that issued paper money for use by Massachusetts farmers.

The British Parliament outlawed the company in 1741, dealing a financial setback to the Adams family. To satisfy obligations supposedly created by the bank’s closure, the Boston sheriff attempted to seize the Adams family house, fueling the younger Samuel’s deep skepticism that decisions made in faraway London would ever adequately respect the rights of the colonists.

Nearly 200 years later, another high-striving Massachusetts political clan rose to prominence. John F. Kennedy was the grandson of John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a mayor of Boston and congressman. He was also the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, who had served as founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and as ambassador to Great Britain in the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt (who was himself a distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt). Kennedy’s brothers Robert and Edward eventually served as U.S. senators and ran for president themselves. The list of other Kennedys who have served in Congress and in state offices is extensive.

JFK’s politics, like Samuel Adams’s, were also fundamentally formed by his father’s encounter with the British government, though in a different way. In 1938, as ambassador during WWII, Joseph Kennedy took the desire for a peace all the way up to the line of appeasement, and probably somewhat across that line, when he supported the Munich pact with Hitler. At the time it was a stance he deemed necessary given Britain’s weak military position.

But John F. Kennedy later learned from his father’s error. JFK set out his own “peace through strength” approach, which translated into a military buildup during his presidency. In his Harvard senior honors thesis, which became a book titled Why England Slept, JFK wrote: “We must always keep our armaments equal to our commitments. Munich should teach us that; we must realize that any bluff will be called.”

In the cases of Samuel Adams and JFK, political family ties wound up working to America’s overall net advantage, at least initially. Without Samuel Adams’ leadership—he signed the Declaration of Independence, gave the order to start the Boston Tea Party, and gave the name to the Boston Massacre—we’d all still be subject to some hereditary monarch, or at least Americans would have been British colonists for much longer. JFK pushed back against Communist aggression, after taking a harder line than his father had initially against the Nazis.

But by the time the Adams clan got down to the John Quincy presidency, or by the time some members of the latter generations of Kennedys began their public service, the prime period had passed. Samuel Adams rose to greatness by opposing British taxes; President John Quincy Adams became infamous and unpopular by imposing the so-called Tariff of Abominations. That tax on imported goods raised prices for consumers to pay for government spending and to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition. John Quincy Adams lost his bid for re-election in 1828, when he was resoundingly defeated by Andrew Jackson, who opposed the tariff.

At least John Quincy Adams made it to the White House; that can’t be said for Sen. Edward Kennedy, for Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, or for Rep. Patrick Joseph Kennedy. Though Edward Kennedy certainly had his legislative achievements, the other Kennedys degenerated to mediocrity, or worse. Patrick Joseph Kennedy, who represented Rhode Island, is known mainly for a long and well-publicized personal struggle with alcohol and drug addiction and abuse. Joseph P. Kennedy II, who represented Massachusetts in Congress, was known mainly for a close association with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

In the same way that a television series that goes on for too many years is likely to “jump the shark,” or that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” so, too, political families tend toward decline rather than toward continuous improvement.

It’s a bit like a family business, or following one’s parent into a profession. Which brings us back to the Ochs-Sulzberger family and the New York Times. One starts with an advantage of seeing up-close, at a very young age, how things are done. One gets the vicarious benefit of experience, learning from a parent’s successes and failures and capitalizing on their connections.

For every happy second-generation family businessman or third-generation doctor or lawyer, though, there’s a miserable one—a child who went to law school or medical school merely, or mostly, because dad or mom did.

In democracy as in capitalism, the real power resides, in the end, with the customers. We can choose whether to patronize a family business or to buy from an upstart instead. We can choose to vote for someone with a famous last name or to elect someone new instead. The choices of many unknown voters or customers wind up being more consequential than the choice of some famous politician’s son or spouse to run or to retire, more decisive than the choice of some heir to stay in the business or to sell.

That, after all, was one of the radical ideas that Samuel Adams and his fellow revolutionaries were fighting for—that governments derive their just powers, not from a monarch’s parentage, but, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “from the consent of the governed.”

The post From Samuel Adams to JFK, American Political Dynasties Have Floundered appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I can. Over the years, for the sake of my children’s enrichment, I have ordered gold-standard wrapping paper, reusable polyurethane bags, various types of overpriced produce, several mugs embossed with childhood art of questionable quality, and a decidedly non-miraculous miracle sponge.

Most working parents I know have a love-hate relationship with the PTA, that benevolent oligarchy in yoga pants. PTA parents are cliquish and relentless, but hard-working and sincere. And ultimately, they’re not the ones to blame for all of the needling flyers, fundraising packets, and soul-crushing suggestions that if you don’t buy gourmet grapefruit, the field trip to the petting farm won’t happen, and everyone will be sorry.

No, the real problem is a system that has yanked the parent organization from its roots: an advocacy group, founded in the 19th century by women who couldn’t vote, which has successfully pushed for kindergarten, mandatory immunizations, and child labor laws. There’s still a National PTA, based near Washington, D.C. But over the years, many school-based groups have lost faith in its agenda—or decided the dues weren’t worthwhile—and gone independent.

And without a common purpose or an overarching mission, many PTAs have evolved into school-based fundraising machines, largely divorced from the “teacher” part of the name, and generally turned inward. (By the time the country song “Harper Valley PTA” came out in 1968, its clannish reputation had been sealed.)

In the process, PTAs have replaced true community with something that’s essentially the opposite.

Alexis De Tocqueville gushed, long ago, about Americans’ peculiar version of enlightened self-interest, the way selfish motives still somehow led people to lend their time—and property—to the greater good. “The principle of self-interest rightly understood,” he wrote, “produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.”

Modern parenting culture, though, allows for no denial. For many, the birth of a child is the start of true civic engagement—a stake in the future, a reason to get involved. But that self-interest is channeled to the community that’s exclusively yours.

It starts with the way many American states fund education, with shrinking state aid bolstered by local property tax rolls, so that haves and have-nots are enshrined. Even within smaller towns, school funding is a zero-sum game: Every tax hike becomes a face-off between the needs of kids and the fixed incomes of the elderly, every school board debate a proxy for anxiety about real estate values.

On policy, we’re no better. When it comes to pitched battles over education, where you stand is often a function of what your own child needs. In Massachusetts, a recent ballot question—which would have lifted a legal cap on charter schools—pitted desperate urban parents, eager for good options, against parents who feared erosion of support for public schools. The measure lost, but in the end, nobody won.

And because we don’t fund education as we should, we’re slaves to fundraising drives, easily co-opted by corporate goals. When I was in high school, a local supermarket chain ran a contest: Win an Apple computer for your school by collecting some vast sum in grocery receipts. “Isn’t that unfair to poorer districts?” I asked. My father called me a communist.

This is where the women (yes, it’s still mostly women) of the PTA and independent “PTO” come in—working hard for their kids and no one else’s. It’s not a matter of greed or cold-heartedness, but of structure. In my town outside Boston, the elementary schools in the fanciest neighborhoods hold fundraising galas with silent auctions, and host smoothie bars for the teachers. The ones like mine, filled with dual-working-parent and working-class families, scrape by with bake sales and patched-together carnivals—heartfelt and sweet, but far less lucrative. There is teacher appreciation, for sure, just no smoothies to go with it.

And because so many “extras” deemed important to enrichment are left to the schools to finance, a cottage industry of fundraising schemes has cropped up, purveying products no one really needs. PTAs are deeply susceptible to these ideas.

It all amounts to taxation by guilt, essentially unfair, and inefficient to boot. Once, I spent $25 on a book of coupons to various stores I was unlikely to ever set foot in, on the promise that half of the proceeds—$12!—would go back to the school.

I’ll forever regret that I didn’t put $25 in an unmarked envelope, drop it in the school office, and run in the opposite direction. For the good of the children.

The post PTAs Are the Opposite of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet Chiaromonte’s 3,400 residents were anything but content. They were crushingly poor and simmered with resentment. Why? In great part, as the Americans learned during their stay, because they were too family-focused.

Political scientist Edward C. Banfield went to Italy in 1954 to better understand poverty. Researchers then tended to assume people were poor due to lack of education or because they were victimized by the government or capitalism. Banfield himself had been a reporter and had traveled across the United States during the Great Depression, so he knew the reality was more complex. In order to understand why people are as they are and do what they do, Banfield believed one needed to learn how they viewed the world and their place within it.

This may sound self-evident, but it cut against the academic grain of the day. The University of Chicago, where Banfield earned his doctorate and had a teaching appointment, was known for its shoe-leather sociological research. Its Prof. William Foote Whyte, for example, wrote Street Corner Society in 1943 after four years studying a slum in Boston’s North End.

In 1956, Banfield and his wife Laura (who spoke Italian) spent nine months in Chiaromonte and interviewed dozens of residents. They pored over census data and official records, enlisted some residents to keep diaries, and conducted psychological surveys on others. Two years later, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society described what they had found and concluded that Chiaromonte’s poverty and grim melancholia (la miseria) were rooted in its people’s “amoral familism.”

The adults’ core attitude was that one must “maximize the short-run advantage of the nuclear family,” and “assume that all others will do likewise.” This might not seem like a bad thing—doing good for one’s own family is universally lauded as moral behavior. But taken to an extreme, a focus on the family can be destructive. Socioeconomic progress demands that individuals cooperate with one another, and work for the common good.

There was very little of that in Chiaromonte. Banfield found no organized voluntary charities, just an order of nuns—brought in from outside the town—struggling “to maintain an orphanage for little girls in the remains of an ancient monastery.” The townsfolk, he found, “contribute nothing to the support of it, although the children come from local families. The monastery is crumbling, but none of the many half-employed stonemasons has ever given a day’s work to its repair. There is not enough food for the children, but no peasant or landed proprietor has ever given a young pig to the orphanage.”

The priests in the town’s two churches feuded, and Sunday worshippers seldom contributed to the collection plate. The town’s doctor didn’t modernize his medical equipment because he saw no personal advantage in it. Patients could take it or leave it. Italian law required all towns to provide schooling to at least age 14. Chiaromonte’s school stopped at fifth grade, and the teachers’ attendance was erratic, their attitude toward their pupils defined by indifference.

Amoral familism bedeviled local politics. Residents assumed anyone engaged in civic life was secretly out for personal gain. Few residents participated in politics or public affairs, and most dismissed government as hopelessly corrupt. When a citizen attempted to organize a political party, the townspeople balked at paying even paltry membership dues. The town’s council was riven by factions, and seldom able to work with the mayor (who was unpaid) to get anything done. Those who participated in politics frequently switched their party identification based on opportunism, not ideology. The secretary of the monarchist party became a communist, then declared himself a monarchist again. Seeing why was not difficult: voters believed politicians were cheating them and thus voted against whomever was in power.

Amoral familism also impoverished families. By tradition, a son was entitled to inherit a portion of land from his father upon marriage. The obvious result was smaller and smaller parcels of land, which were increasingly impossible to farm for profit. The son of an artisan was expected to be an artisan—never mind whether the town economy demanded a cobbler or blacksmith. From the cradle, the family socialized children—not infrequently through beatings—to follow the old ways, stay close to home, and distrust others.

Chiaromonte in 1954-1955.

Collectively, Chiaromonte’s residents all wanted more money, and each was jealous of any other who had more lire or nicer stuff. But they rarely sought to earn more by producing more or better. Banfield’s research revealed astonishingly low levels of individual agency. Unlike the family-focused southern Italian mafia (Ndrangheta), Chiaromontians were too cynical to form criminal enterprises. Crime was rare and usually petty in the town. Material success was attributed to personal corruption or luck, which might be reversed by bad luck. With everyone out for his own and on the take, the system by definition was rigged. Why try?

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society was a watershed in poverty studies, one still read in college classes today. It showed the importance of culture to socioeconomic flourishing. “People live and think in very different ways,” Banfield wrote, “And some of these ways are radically inconsistent with the requirements of formal organization.”

This was not “blaming the victim.” In the case of Chiaromonte, Banfield hypothesized amoral familism was exacerbated by factors outside the average citizen’s control. The town’s physical isolation, to cite just one factor, meant that citizens could little imagine their living other than as they did.

Some scholars criticized Banfield for overstating the power of values on behavior. They pointed to root causes. Material scarcity tends make individuals more anxious and distrustful of others’ intentions. And the larger provincial government had significant authority over Chiaromonte’s affairs, which exacerbated the political haplessness.

Banfield died in 1999, but the book continues to attract readers because its portrait of poverty is heart-aching and—to this day—recognizable. Like J.D. Vance’s recent bestselling memoir of Appalachian life, Hillbilly Elegy, Banfield’s Moral Basis shows that families can be a wellspring for poverty and misery, and that the root causes are a complicated blend that can be difficult to overcome.

The post How an Idyllic Italian Village Was Crippled by Family-Centrism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the inverse can also be true. When members of insular nuclear families lose understanding and empathy for those unlike them, the family can threaten liberal democracy itself.

This threat intensifies when citizens feel left behind, economically or otherwise. When a family’s own economic survival appears to hang in the balance, voters can ignore the interests or rights of groups of others —for example Muslims or undocumented immigrants. Such a response undermines democracy, since democratic decision-making functions best when we can take the larger view of what is good for all citizens—including those unlike us.

Democracy requires a meeting place where people can share ideas, interact with those different from them, and—at least—not demonize them. This serves a few purposes. The better we understand the concerns and anxieties of those unlike us, the more we can empathize, and be persuaded to compromise or consider their good. This directly contributes to stability, since we are more likely to maintain our commitment to democratic institutions, and to uphold the rights of all, if we have some trust and empathy for our fellow citizens, especially those we aren’t related to, or don’t know personally.

Marxist theory co-founder Friedrich Engels saw the private family as foundational to capitalism, making possible the intergenerational transfer of wealth from biological father to son. The nuclear family also enables caring about one’s own to the exclusion of others, because focusing on the success of “one’s own” conceptually depends on marking off “one’s own” from others.

The nuclear family configuration idealized in America today, which draws sharp dividing lines between people, is historically atypical. Throughout human history, we lived in extended kin groups, working together in larger family configurations. Today as we enter our “single-family” homes through our garages without meeting our neighbors, it’s no wonder we’re grappling with an epidemic of loneliness. Working families are struggling to provide childcare, to pay bills, and to have time with each other. The greater distances workers must travel each day for gainful employment further isolates families.

In a society where people face so many pressures and have long experienced stagnant incomes, it’s only human to turn the focus inward. Anxiety about providing for our own family naturally overshadows concern about others when success seems to be a zero-sum game.

To surmount isolation, democratic theorists have stressed the importance of public schools, in which children from diverse backgrounds mingle, laying a foundation for respect and tolerance for fellow citizens. Public universities too can serve this process, when students learn from peers with different experiences.

But we have no infrastructure for a vibrant civil society in which adults interact with peers from different backgrounds—different religions, races and ethnicities, social and economic classes, and educational backgrounds—to discuss issues of political importance. And that is distressing, when finding a way to bring disparate groups together seems especially urgent with regard to both racial tolerance and economic inequality.

Notions of family, are, of course, deeply intertwined with race—whatever race is. Tellingly, Derek Black—who defected from Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, founded by his father—wrote in the New York Times that he’d viewed white nationalism as defending the interests of his “white friends and family.” Of course, some families cross-racial boundaries; but when families are racially homogenous, their separation allows members to be ignorant of challenges faced by others.

The nuclear family contributes to economic inequality in two ways. First, by the so-called “marriage gap ” between lower-income people, who are less likely to marry, and higher earners in the U.S., who are more likely to marry each other, further consolidating wealth. Secondly, a family’s ability to provide a strong start for its children is directly tied to economic advantage. If, as studies suggest, an activity as simple as parents reading to their children can increase their life chances, consider the long-term effects of parents’ ability to provide a stable home, decent food, and quality healthcare.

Political philosophers have long recognized that the nuclear family is in tension with the ideal of equal opportunity, precisely because different families will give children different head starts in life. To be clear, I’m not proposing the abolition of the nuclear family, as political philosopher John Rawls once suggested in a throwaway comment. While Rawls recognized that the nuclear family detracted from equal opportunity, he also saw that the moral development which occurs within families was crucial for citizens to develop a sense of justice which would keep liberal democracy stable.

In the family, we learn to move beyond self-interest to care about the good of others. The problem is that families may isolate us from those unlike us—religiously, racially, socioeconomically— and make it harder to care for their good because we do not understand their challenges.

How to fix this? We should start by broadening the definition of family. Why not create a new-old model that builds on the age-old notion of extended family?

Legal theorists have recently been discussing “in-between” legal family statuses. Currently, one is either a parent or a legal stranger to a child; either a legal spouse, or not. So why not create a path to recognizing the variety of relationships which reach beyond the nuclear family? For instance, “in-between” legal status for grandparents or friends of parents who help care for a child, or kinship status that allows legally recognized relationships within friend groups.

In this way, the law could encourage bonds beyond the nuclear family, and thus ease some of the burdens of isolated nuclear families. This first step could put us on the path to widening circles of trust and care, and to encouraging greater interaction within a vibrant, diverse civil society.

The post To Make Families Good for Democracy, Broaden the Notion of Family Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What crime had the boy committed? None at all! So why did this happen to him?

The child had to suffer these cruelties in order to become a full Spartan citizen with the right to vote for the Spartan king. This boy shared his fate with all other Spartan boys. Their brutal upbringing was meant to ensure they would eventually be capable of assuming responsibility for the joint affairs of Spartan society—serving not the self-interest of their family and clan, but the interests of the state.

With the radical decision to pursue equality of hardship, the suppression of private riches and the drastic cutting back of the familiar in favor of public life, Sparta managed to maintain itself for an amazingly long time, for more than 500 years, immunizing itself against decline.

In any system, whether it’s totalitarian-led or democratic, the private—the social warmth of one’s own family, with its striving for happiness and the success of its members—is in some degree in conflict with the state. Lycurgus—the legendary lawgiver of the Spartan “Democracy” or “Egalité”—saw this conflict, and the surmounting of it, as necessary. “That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick,” he said, his words immortalized in many parliaments, including in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sparta is just one example of the eternal conflict between family well-being, private associations, and the common weal. The central questions are: How do societies endure this conflict and what solutions do they use to shape it? Are those solutions totalitarian, authoritarian, and elitist or anti-elitist, liberal, and democratic?

Modern history demonstrates various responses to the questions, many quite dangerous. For example, the fascism of the past century emulated the regimen of the Spartans but gave the purpose a dark new interpretation: underlings in uniform were to be trained not in the path to becoming voting citizens, but in unquestioning compliance.

Early communist movements also worked on these problems. Armed with the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, communists aimed to conquer the nuclear family, claimed that monogamous relationships between man and wife were outmoded, and strived for the raising of children in large collective groups. Alternate approaches to this struggle between the societal-state collective and the private sphere are apparent in the military training at America’s West Point, the armed voting citizens of Switzerland, the cloisters of the Middle Ages and the state-run, all-day schools in today’s France.

Worth particular mention here, also, is the—fruitless—attempt on the part of the Prussian authoritarian state (between 1701 and 1918) to declare the family as the “germinating cell” of the state. In this germinating cell, the father is the absolute ruler, the mother the highest secretary, and the children the loyal subjects. The German philosopher Hegel warned in this regard that the softening of children that was happening everywhere needed to be met with strict teaching by parents—so that the children would be happy to grow out of childhood and embrace the Prussian “rational state.”

Such stories are, of course, about subjects bigger than family and democracy—they are about early man’s attempts to civilize himself. And that observation from the past begs bigger questions about the future. Is the time of social-utopian large-scale experiments and extensive population discipline projects really over, and unlikely to return? Have we—the supposedly enlightened, and educated with historical teachings—finally understood how to overcome the conflict in the goals between the natural family, personal freedom and the democratic state?

There are many answers to that question, including that we are still struggling with it. My own life (as a member of a large German family) and work (as a campaigner for democracy in my country and around the world) suggest to me that there is a solution that reconciles the desire for democratic organization with the personal striving for happiness. That answer: the development of a well-thought-out path to direct and deliberate democracy that supplements and modernizes our representative democratic approach.

More precisely, we have to develop our democracy further into a self-learning democracy. This is a democracy that does not take place just during elections, but becomes parts of our daily lives and our communities. In this way each individual citizen is empowered.

The aim here is to create a societal field that equally integrates young and old, poor and rich, uneducated and educated. What this means is that at the same time that a person is wrestling for good individual solutions for social care, for the right amount of state investment and private economic involvement, he or she is also setting personal limits and developing civic maturity. The formula proposed here is simply called “learning by doing.” The school of life then also becomes a political school of life.

Is mine a naive faith in the democratic process? Are we just delaying the reckoning with the enormous problems of our democratic model? In Germany we are trying to expand the opportunities for democratic involvement to include more deliberation and more direct democracy. This approach requires an openness to engaging with proponents of the new populist right about better democratic processes, rather than rejecting them out of hand. (I see an opportunity to work with the new German right-wing populist party to achieve its stated goal of a Swiss-style democratic system for Germany).

In periods of conflict, society needs to create deliberative spaces to discuss the rules of the democratic game. In this moment, such space would allow us to hear the voices of everyone, and give us a chance to slow down the drastic political fights over economic globalization, immigration, and whether “corrupt” elites” or “decent” common people are a greater threat. (A well-designed deliberative process can resolve thorny conflicts, as we saw recently during a dispute over a huge train project in Stuttgart.) Our political discourse must be balanced, like a fulcrum, if we are to re-establish stability and security.

Let’s think back to our little Spartan boy. He most certainly did not want to leave his mother, his family. He was just one victim-solider among millions, who, in the name of a great social experiment, was made to sacrifice his own comfort and well being for a larger ideal. Even ex post we are not able to make it sound better.

It’s more intelligent and more humane—and also urgently necessary —that we drill our democracy and send it to boot camp, rather than our children.

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