It's Thursday, August 17, 2023. I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the briefing. A daily

analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. One of the reasons that the American

founders thought that George Washington just might be the perfect first chief executive

for the nation. The first president is that George Washington was not only head and shoulders

above all others in terms of leadership. The other great asset he had in the eyes of

his colleagues was he had no children and in particular he had no son, which is to say

the first president of the United States could not be the founder of a dynasty named Washington.

You have to understand that the background of this is the British aristocracy and what

they saw as the problem that came with an inherited aristocracy with too much political

cultural and economic power. Even as the American founders largely styled themselves as a new

style of aristocracy, landed gentry, having a great deal of patriotic fervor that was

diverted towards the project of this new nation, they saw the danger of dynasties and they

wanted to avoid it. Nonetheless, it's simply a matter of fact in the world of politics and

history that dynasties tend to emerge. There are all kinds of reasons for that. The two main

reasons are this. Number one, money. When you have money and you have the inheritance of

that money and you have the long term legacy of that money, you could create something of a

dynasty. As you look at just say a small town, sometimes there's one family with inherited

wealth that just stands out because that family is something of the landed gentry of that

area. But nonetheless, in politics, the other way that you create a dynasty is by having

a name that becomes so familiar that the name itself is a massive asset. Now over time, these

names tend to lose some of their value. But in the modern media age, it turns out that there

are lives and like radioactivity, there are half lives and then half lives do the value of

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