George Santos & Lester Chang: Flimflammers Are Why Nepo Babies Thrive

I really need to start an "ahead of his time" label for this blog because, once again, Mr NYC is ahead of his time -- specifically, this time, about nine months. In March, 2022 I wrote a blog post about Mayor Eric Adams and how his nascent mayoralty seemed to be all about flash over substance, about how he had no clear vision or policies for the city, about his associations with questionable characters, and, most of all, just about what a weirdo he is. 

Well, now, Vanity Fair has written an article about his first year in office and concludes much of the same thing as I did. Read it, then read my blog post from nine months earlier, and see if I wasn't ahead of the curve in this assessment of Mayor Adams.

That said, I will give him this -- Mayor Eric Adams is who he says he is, and his resume prior to being mayor was impressive -- more than two decades in the NYPD followed by service as a State Senator and a Brooklyn Borough President. He is, at least in NYC political terms, the real deal, l'article genuine -- even if we don't know where he really lives. To sum up Adams, he's a political heavyweight and a policy lightweight.

Even though there's a stench of dishonesty and sleaze around Eric Adams, he is who he says he is and worked really hard to get where he is -- literally over decades. 

Which, of course, brings us to George Santos, the new Congressman-elect from Northeast Queens (and Nassau County but who cares about that?) who's entire life -- his education, his resume, his finances, his religion, maybe even his sexual orientation, is completely bogus. How a complete charlatan like this could get elected in the New York area is well, if not completely, described by Steve Isreal who used to represent this district in Congress several years ago. His conclusion is that Santos got through due to complete and utter apathy by the NY political class, the media, and voters. This is obvious, not only in the case of Santos, but in the case of a recently elected Brooklyn assemblyman named Lester Chang who, it turns out, doesn't really live in the district. If his opponents and the media had done their homework before the election, they would have exposed all this and the voters would have known that frauds were running to represent them. But they didn't know, and now New York has these twin political messes to deal with. 

And it got me thinking. 

Recently New York magazine published a bunch of articles about "nepo babies" or people who have succeeded, in this case, in showbusiness largely because they have parents who were already in the business -- and had all of the connections and power needed to launch their kids' careers. Nepotism is as old as human history, of course, parents have always wanted to give their kids and family members every advantage to succeed -- power begets power, wealth begets wealth, opportunity begets opportunity. There's a reason why so much of human history has had hereditary monarchies and titles, why the legal concepts of inheritance and primogeniture exist, and so forth -- families want to keep their wealth and power intact for generations to come; they want, in a word, legacy. 

For example, the great director John Huston has been dead for over 35 years but his son, daughter and grandson all have big acting careers. The Huston name is still important in Hollywood today, even decades after the big man's death (and John Huston's father was an actor as well so there you go). 

The triumph of nepotism in America, of course, makes a mockery of the concept of "meritocracy", a cherished American notion that everyone who achieves success did so only through their hard work, and that nothing else matters. This is and always has been BS, of course -- hard work without connections is meaningless. Family support can be vital. But nepotism is powerful not only because powerful, wealthy, and highly-connected people can create great opportunities for their kids. It's also because people who come from such families have what you might call instant credibility, you can do an instant background check on them, you know who they are because you know who their parents and families are. You know the ecosystem, the environment they came out. Nepo babies are a brand, of sorts, a known quantity, and there's an almost instant comfort level with them because you know "their people."

That's why, decade after decade, people named Kennedy and Bush kept getting elected to political office. We know them, even if we don't really like them. 

And that is the huge barrier that people without such connections, without such family power, who are starting out in their careers, face. They're outsiders, unknown, almost bewildering creatures. Such career strivers, such outsiders trying to get inside, are often derisively called "climbers" or "gatecrashers" or "wannabes." They are held suspect until they prove themselves worthy. They have to prove themselves a lot, they have to be the best of the best of the best, they have to smart and crafty as hell, they have to be able to find and exploit every opportunity, they have to work really hard and have a lot of extra special luck to "make it" -- and, as soon as they do, such "self-made" people become "nepo parents" all their own.

George Santos and Lester Chang felt that they needed to lie and cheat in order to thrive. They are blatant climbers but they obviously didn't posses the superior skills, hard work, or clear opportunities to succeed honestly, to succeed on their own -- so they lied and cheated. They're flimflam men, and they are the kinds of people that scare what you might call the Establishment, the gatekeepers, the powers-that-be. The Establishment doesn't want criminals or liars or people they deem unworthy in their midst. So this is why nepotism  and "nepo babies" thrive -- better to go with who you know, better to stay in your comfort zone, better to give opportunities to the people are already "pre-approved." The Establishment doesn't want to let in someone who hasn't, in their view, demonstrated the superior abilities to earn membership in it -- but coming from the right family means you're there already. 

The Establishment doesn't lift the gate to just anyone who doesn't already have family on the other side of it. 

In many ways, I feel sorry for Santos and Chang -- they see what others have, namely money and power, and these guys want it to -- but they have neither the connections nor the skills nor the opportunities to get it on their own, they are unable to do the very hard work to get it, to prove that they're better than the nepo babies around them -- so they lie.

And compared to these guys and any other possible "flimflammers" in our midst, going with a nepo baby is a safe choice.