The moment the Republicans have been waiting for has finally arrived: today, House Oversight Committee hearings will start their investigation into the shady business dealings of Hunter Biden. Though Republican leaders insist that their efforts will ultimately be focused on uncovering a connection to Joe Biden, claiming that the President is “chairman of the board” of an illicit Biden family enterprise, in practice, the hearings are meant to expose and publicise the sins of the son as a means of damaging the father, and hurting his re-election chances in 2024.
As former Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon said, “I don’t care about Hunter’s feelings. This is war.” Hunter is treating it as such and has been preparing a legal counteroffensive in the form of his own threats of prosecution and defamation lawsuits against prominent conservatives. With these opening moves, the battle lines of the 118th Congress have been set, and Americans can expect to hear more and more about Hunter and his laptop (and all its tawdry contents) in the months ahead. Whatever else Joe Biden hopes to accomplish in the second half of his term, his administration will now be weighed down by the need to fight a daily rearguard battle against a Republican House determined to illustrate just how far his second son has fallen from grace.
Occasions like this may help to remind Americans of how their forebears came to found a government rooted, at least in theory, in a rejection of monarchical and aristocratic principles. Members of the founding generation apparently even rejoiced that the father of the nation, George Washington, could not father any children of his own. Many, including Washington himself, saw his infertility as a providential blessing on America’s republican experiment, lest the general’s heirs form the basis of a new kingly dynasty or, more likely, trade in the prestige of the Washington name for personal profit. Which is precisely the charge that today’s Republicans have levelled against the Bidens and the Clintons, and what Democrats have, in turn, accused the Trump children and in-laws of doing.
What Tolstoy wrote about unhappy families rings truer still for political families. Though patricians and political dynasties are — despite its professed ideals — as old as America itself, no one among them has yet written a manual for how to manage the merciless pressures of public life, which inevitably strain the bonds that are supposed to hold families together as well as keep them grounded. Furthermore, the often grossly uneven distribution of talent within such dynasties (which may produce an abundance of leadership traits in one child and a total absence of them in another) leads to expectations that are impossible to fulfil and throws the inadequacies of the “failson” into even starker relief. Indeed, the term “failson” may be a recent coinage, but the archetype it describes — “an incompetent, unsuccessful middle-class or upper-class man who is protected from… duress by his family’s wealth or influence” — is an all too familiar sight in the annals of American politics. Hunter Biden may be its ultimate Platonic form but presidential history furnishes plenty of examples of this dynamic.
Theodore Roosevelt had to deal with the alcoholic excesses of brother Elliott (father of Eleanor), whom he called “a maniac, morally [and] mentally” before his untimely death; the Kennedys had one fabled generation with Jack, Bobby, and Ted, only for Camelot to be inherited by a largely mediocre and often no less controversy-prone successor generation. Among George H.W. Bush’s sons, it was widely assumed that Jeb would take the mantle of leadership while eldest George W. was “the family clown” who threatened to disgrace the Bush name with beer-fuelled antics (to his credit, George W. overcame his alcoholism, became the 43rd president, and managed to disgrace the Bush name while sober). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and the Rodham brothers, all with their own questionable business ventures, can similarly stake a claim to being their family’s designated failsons.
But perhaps the most poignant historical parallel to the current president’s dilemma vis-à-vis his deeply troubled son can be found in Joe Biden’s predecessor as both vice president and president, John Adams. Like Biden, Adams had one son who excelled in all the virtues of statesmanship, John Quincy, and another who utterly failed in the race of life, Charles. While the former went on to succeed his father as president and became a political titan in his own right, the latter, a rakish drunkard and philanderer, was disowned by President Adams (a dramatic rendition was performed to heartbreaking effect by Paul Giamatti in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams). Charles Adams died a broken man not long after.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe