I know the two words in the title of this blog are usually connected: politics and theater. It is because politics is nearly all theater and a shameful amount of theater is Democratic Party politics.
That is not what this blog is about. This blog is about pro-commerce.
The unexpected reality of commerce, which is making it increasingly impossible for the traditional hereditary elite of the world to maintain its hereditary status, is the fact that the child of a great commercial genius will probably not be a commercial genius and may not, in most cases, even be commercially competent. The business can not be successfully passed on to an heir.
This inability to pass on genetically, culturally or by education the ability to make an offspring successful in commerce means that meritocracy has a great future in a commercial world and condition of birth means little.
Whenever I say that we live in a meritocracy from which the hereditary elite was dissipated in the 1960s I get pushback. People say: 'look at the Bush family, the Gores and the Kennedy family'. We have hereditary political elites.
Sometimes people give me similar examples from the theater industry where countless children of stars became celebrities when they grew up. Judy Garland/Lisa Minnelli, Ryan O’Neal/Tatum O’Neal and Martin Sheen/Charlie Sheen/ Emilio Estevez.
What is relevant to this conversation is that indeed political and theatrical competence can be passed from parent to child. They are both tribal with many families in the tribe.
The reason is that political and theatrical competence is not very competent. It is not very complex and not hard to learn. It consists mostly of who you know and who your family’s networks are. To put it in the most crude terms: politics and theatrical life is often based on insider tribal status. Insider status rarely helps when passed on in the commercial world.
This is not to say that all politicians are at a lower level of competence than successful businesspeople nor is that true for all theater people. But it is generally a fact that a competent businessperson is significantly more competent than a similarly successful politician or theatrical person.