I believe it is no accident that the nation has turned to Robert Mueller -- an old line WASP if there ever was one -- to rescue it from its present perils and dangers.
54
I don't miss the WASP presidents/leaders. WASP is an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. They ruled the country for a long time, excluding anyone who wasn't a member of their club. That meant blacks, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, Native Americans, etc. The only time they were equal opportunity bigots was with women, for whom color nor religion nor ethnicity nor ancestry mattered.
Nor am I convinced that they believed in meritocracy. These WASPs were born to wealthy, influential families. They got into the "elite" prep schools and colleges because their fathers and grandfathers graduated from them. George W. Bush is an excellent example--in what other world but the WASP world can a C student not only get admitted to but graduate from Yale? Their social, school, and family connections mean they start out life on third base.
What I miss in a president is a decent, good man who can put the country, the people, his family, our allies, and the planet above his own greed and power grabbing. I miss a president who tries to help the less fortunate in this country, as FDR did in the 1930s. I miss having a president who wasn't surrounded by personal and political scandals, who doesn't call people names, mock them, threaten to lock them up, and who doesn't brag about how he is the best president in the history of the universe and how great everything is.
No one is perfect, but I would settle for decent.
81
The current hagiographies of George H.W. Bush are more than a little ridiculous, but it has nothing to do with nostalgia for an "elite." It's the simple fact that he at least had good manners and behaved like a responsible adult in public. People want THAT again, because we now have a tantrum-throwing toddler in the White House, someone with less decency, manners, and respectability than you average seven-year-old.
54
Ah, miss the days when those excluded from the table had no choice but to crawl away. Horrible that now they are bringing folding chairs and forcing themselves in.
50
We miss WHAT? People with such a sense of privilege and entitlement that they feel justified in violating the constitution in order to appease our enemies and arm death squads, and then avoid all culpability? The man oozed insincerity from every pore of his being. What was at his core, other than his right to perpetrate the obscene (all the while doing it politely, of course) is beyond me. Please don't include me in the "we" that misses WASP supremacy.
31
Neither the WASPY Bush boys nor the Romney boys followed that WASP tradition of service to country.
The Irish Catholic Kennedy's, on the other hand, gave three sons in service to their country.
"Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart described the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes — "
He was not deemed legitimate even by Republicans who quickly saw he was not a third Reagan term.
18
Unless we subscribe to the notion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can run a Federal department or a large corporation - or be a governor or a president - then we are committed to there being SOME value in demonstrated ability, and therefore to the ideas of merit and indeed of an "elite."
Our problem is with the fact of unearned membership in an elite, based on inherited wealth or other factors not connected to personal merit. But then wealth itself confers many opportunities to acquire personal merit through schooling, family connections, opportunities not open to all, etc.
There is no more ambiguous or over-used word than "elite," which in the mouths of politicians and others can mean anything from "highly educated and credentialed," to "wealthy," or even just "white, anglo-saxon Protestants," who may be neither educated nor wealthy. Some of the purest "WASP"s in that sense are unemployed Appalachian coal-miners.
The most highly educated elites, who are generally not wealthy, are mocked by the wealthy elite, who like Trump are neither highly educated nor intelligent (his deluded self-praise notwithstanding). The masses of non-elite have been propagandized into thinking that the educated elite are responsible for their problems, when it's actually big business that is more to blame - the tobacco, oil, chemical, drug, and other industries that poison us and the world in general, and profit from wars. It's an ingenious example of scapegoating - quite deliberate, and despicable.
25
Patricians like the late President Bush are far more noblesse than oblige. Just as the elites will discard “democratic” , sorry, meritocratic, values, they’ll eat their servants if the hunger for more strikes them (as it inevitably does). Douthat is trying to make a case for a (spiritually) enlightened elite, glossing over the fact that in practice they are neither kinder or gentler, as the records of the minions doing their dirty work show.
15
It's even worse. The real change occurred when the WASP elite lost control of the Republican Party between 1960 and '64. It went way beyond "compromises...with Sunbelt populism." Radical Republicans with Goldwater as their candidate used racism to flip the South and lay the foundations of the present Party. Trump became the face of a Party that had been recruiting America's bigots for decades. It might be healthy for a new elite to have a voice, but it can't happen until the present Republican Party is beaten into the ground.
12
While I respect while disagreeing with some of his action, I am not nostalgic for George H. W. Bush. Salute to the man, condolences to his family, and move on.
15
Why is there the need to mention the term WASP? My father was a WWII veteran and behaved the same way..... And he was not a WASP and what he was is not important. He was a man from a generation that most behaved that way....
14
This is absolutely the strangest Douthat column I've ever read. I often don't agree with what Ross says, but I usually follow the logic he uses.
Not this time.
"our current ruling class" ??
Who do he think that is? Wall Street? Silver-spoon-fed scions like Trump? Intellectual elites like all of those "influential" college professors? Paternal pedophilic priests from the establishment that he supports so much?
No, seriously, I just don't get this column.
I mean, I'm an older WASP, and I have no affiliation to my "class." GDMT, I'm an offspring of the Mayflower, and my aunts were proud members of DAR (google it). But, we never held power or tried to be superior to anyone.
I remember somewhere in my public school days being told that an enlightened despotism was the perfect ruling system. I kind of bought that idea then, but now I realize that such a thing is rare, and totally fragile, with exactly no guarantee of succession.
So, Ross, what in the world are you hoping for?
17
Interesting piece, Douhat, but you could of stripped it down to one sentence:
When the WASPs abdicated civic responsibility in favor of wealth transference to the rich, they transformed the GOP into an integrity-free party that can only sustain itself through falsehoods and racism.
Thus, Trump.
37
WASPs do several things very well: They recognize talent and ability (within their frame of reference) and put it to work in meritocratic ways for all of us. They also know how to manage continuity by playing the legacy game - like Yale-bred family dynasties propped up by privilege. They also are good at following the Ten Commandments, like loyalty to the law and other first principles, respect for parents, saying nice things about God and community, and not openly stealing, discriminating, excluding, coveting or plundering(for this they rig the system they control with special thanks to God for letting it be so). But like any other unrestrained elite, evenyually they hyper-ventilate and can't see over their own increasingly elegant and irrelevant teacup, ignorinng that other people have just as much to offer in new and challenging ways as the world goes on. Our task is to keep useful WASP stuff and build out from there without being fooled. Fools like Trump are bent on an opposite course (his MAGA means steal, lie, insult people, and break stuff). Let Bush 41's memory wake us up and remind us to take advantage of patriciaon methods to build a liveable America for all of us - and invite everyone to join the party. I think George H.W. and Bar both would be pleased.
7
This is a wonderfully thought-out piece of journalism.
Maybe 10 years ago, the NYT printed a good Sunday (I think) piece reviewing the successes and resulting decline of the WASP elite, inspired by the great figures and philosophers of the Age of the The Enlightenment, as, evidently, America's Founding Fathers were. I haven't been able to locate the piece, but it touched on many of the same ideas.
8
I knew from the moment I saw the author, title, and subtitle that I would only be able to tolerate an even more-ridiculous-than-usual column from Ross because I can anticipate reading the many pithy comments destroying what he thinks is reasonable, enlightened, etc. Diving into them now! Thanks to all the wise readers who are actually enlightened and reasonable.
23
It is disturbing to read this article, to see the author incorrectly ascribe positive behavior to one tiny segment of the world population.
It is about values, and values transcend ethnicity, or color, or religious affiliation.
The only hope is that somehow, someday there will be a pendulum swing back to the celebration and encouragement of humility, honesty, generosity (of spirit and means), and tolerance.
We must all do what we can to get the pendulum swinging back from today’s world, where too many good people are turning a blind eye to greed, superficiality, corruption, intolerance and an unhealthy worship and pursuit of celebrity.
21
I'm afraid Douthat's a bit magnanimous in his assessment of the recent past. Only the WASPs miss the WASPs. May George H.W. Bush rest in peace. He was a decent, well-meaning fellow. But, as for his presidential legacy, I'm sorry to say that mediocrity, not meritocracy, is the byword. Which, I guess, is more than can be said for his son.
10
It has been exhausting these sixty years to read or hear how those who are religious or protestant or form the northeast are more patriotic than me, the atheist. The fools with the lapel flag pins that never served the country, Captain Bone Spurs "loving" the military; Samuel Johnson's famous quote " patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" comes to mind. Mr. Douthat seems to conveniently forget all the "WASP" decisions; segregation, misogyny, Vietnam, Allende, Bush V. Gore, Citizen's United, et al that have lead us to this place.
I will not speak ill of 41 on this National Day of Mourning but Douthat has some 18th century ideas presented in this piece that I for one am happy to know are in the past. The path is forward, Mueller will show the way and Douthat should be sent packing.
13
What criterion should be used to admit people into this ruling class? The old elite the author speaks of was decided based on family pedigree and faith. If that is not to be used, nor academic scores, nor demographic diversity, then what?
It's easy to say that it would be nice to have a WASP-like class that wasn't limited to WASPs. But every possible new criterion to establish one is rejected.
Also, I found this claim absurd: "a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists." How is being an "Arabist" anything other than shallow and performative?
3
@Patriot: Declaring that you are a "nonaristocratic Wasp" is nonsensical, no se ofenda, an oxymoron, because WASPS r the aristocrats.I should know since my father,who came from Old Blighty as part of the wave of immigrants from the British Isles in the 1920's and 1930's, worked for over a half century as a butler for the Phipps,Hitchcocks, as in Tommy Hitchcock, the great polo player , Laddie Sanford,also a star on the polo field, the sort of folks who had houses, not just homes, and who, like Larry Thor whom he also worked for, could afford to travel around the world in his yacht while the average bloke stayed at home to make a living.Bushes are WASPS, but Clinton's origins, more modest, would put him in the category of a "petit blanc!"Kept a photo of my father in uniform standing, waiting to serve Laddie Sanford at dinner, and another one of him in the background of a late evening dinner at the Christian Holmes estate in Sands Point ( The Holmes family were scions of the Fleishman Yeast and Fleishman Gin fortunes.)All of the above were "old money," as opposed to the "nouveaux riches"of today!ir was a late evening dinner party in which all the guests dressed in various costumes, and 1 sees the face of Clifton Webb, late movie actor and guest, straining to be seen by the photographer!That must have been in the late 1930's or early 1940's.
Please forgive me on this day of mourning for speaking my mind. I don't miss the WASPs. Given the present state of the nation, I find it difficult to unambiguously go along with the sentimental tone of the day. Once upon a time I would have happily looked for the good in the man and his life, and confined my comments to positive statements. Now, however, we are confronted with the Trump Republicans and such spectacles as the histrionic WASP Brett Kavanaugh who, more likely than not, sexually assaulted one or probably more underage young woman. Like many members of the Bush dynasty, Kavanaugh was a Yale legacy admit. I cannot be unambiguously positive today because my thoughts of late have often turned to ethics and decency, and because I believe President George Bush's ethics and decency were conditional, predicated on whether or not they were advantageous vis-à-vis acquiring the things he surely felt he was entitled to: wealth, power, and elected office. In that light, the deplorable Willie Horton campaign ad was not the exceptional campaign event that so many claim it was. It was, on the contrary, altogether consistent with the conditional ethics and decency that are, all too often, associated with the entitlements and prerogatives claimed by the rich and powerful. The Bush family is to be commended for resisting Trump, but haven't the majority of WASPS, Kavanaugh among them, decided to throw their lot in with the president and his Trump Republicans? What does that tell us?
8
Love those hierarchies don't you, Mr. Douthat? I think Frank from NJ hit the nail on the head. This op-ed denies actual historical reality on a monumental scale. It truly is "pathetic drivel" as Frank said.
Rather than repeat all the facts that Frank listed that refute all Douthat's points, let me mention the book Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes, 2012. There the reader will find an analysis based on reality. The Bush family is a perfect example.
The old Wasp ruling class consisted of families begun by a talented ancestor, and his offspring may not inherit his abilities that started a fortune. The not talented kids are propped up by the money, power, and connections of the father, and thus begins the decline of earned merit that the Founders dreamed of. Not there haven't been exceptions.
By the time of John Quincy Adams, the educated gentleman of impeccable character was replaced by Andrew Jackson. We saw Clinton and Obama, from humble beginnings, make it through merit. The rich wasps, W and Trump, propped up by ancestors, typify what Hayes discusses.
Talent, merit, and with Obama, good character. Presidents are all imperfect.
It's the old rich wasps of yore Ross dreams of. What about the not rich wasps, Ross? Poor souls would be nothing if not led by your heroes, the Wasp ruling class? What about Lincoln?
You converted and accepted the Catholic hierarchy. Whoops, a bit flawed also I'd say.
5
By the way, WASPs are still here in the U.S., and just because someone is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, it does not necessarily mean that he or she is part of an elite ruling class.
Moreover, more than a few people find the use of the word WASP as derogatory.
Happy Holidays!
7
Well, not everybody misses those WASPS - the WASPS I miss are the people like FDR.
5
Thank God the WASP’s are not in charge! The ‘Social Register’ upper east sliders and clones elsewhere discriminated openly with deed restrictions, private clubs, and other methods designed to exclude everyone else. America’s future is much better off with diversity. I’m hoping one day we will call ourselves Americans, period!
2
Eisenhower - Kansas - military hero
Kennedy - Massachusetts - First & only thus far Roman Catholic
Nixon - Ohio, California - resigned short of impeachment
Ford - Michigan - appointed, maybe a WASP
Carter - Georgia - Navy, Peanut farmer
Reagan - Ohio, California - Movie star
What you are missing is the fact that the WW2 generation came home, educated under the GI Bill, entered the various professions, took their place among the ruling classes. Their children the Boomers you appear to have such a problem with.
Along the way, as educational opportunities began to expand, Women & people of color, & yes the children of the working class, many Roman Catholic, 2nd & 3rd generation immigrant stock began both to become educated & enter professions.
What you are seeing in the nostalgic look at H.W. is the direct contrast between his personal virtues & the current occupant in the White House. Why you are hung up with the WASP demise, something the vast majority of Americans is not obsessed with I'm not sure.
Is it because despite your Harvard education you do not feel you fit in?
Your piece comes across as racist, isolated from the life of a country that reflects contributions of Black people some of whom have been here for over 300 years. Most of whom like President Obama of mixed race parentage tracing their roots back to plantation sexual exploitation. My homeroom in the early 1950's was comprised of kids whose last names all started with Mc, about 40% were Black.
5
A sense of dignity, decorum and civility. A sense of duty and public service. Okay? That's what is missed. Not the whiteness or the Anglo Saxon Protestantness.
11
The WASP's nest is still here, very alive and well. Just hidden from sight. It's a very private club and you are not invited.
8
The term WASP is redundant in itself. There has never been such a thing as a black Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or even a black Anglo-Saxon Catholic. There are, of course, African and African-American protestants, but they are hardly Anglo-Saxon.
1
I was raised as a high-steeple WASP. There were lots of wonderful people in that ethos, for which I am forever grateful.
But the notion that they alone should rule is ridiculous and offensive, because a lot of that noblesse oblige was sealed off from all other Americans.
Ross, yours is the Calvinist view of predestination. Have you started going to a Presbyterian church?
6
You mention "Boomer" three times, once in reference to "Boomer-era emotivism" - which closely follows your snide aside re: "pantheism".
It's popular to blame baby boomers for all our ills. You do it a lot. So does David Brooks. We're the root of all evil, with our weekend buddhist retreats and yoga classes, right?
What about guys like Hugh Hefner? Ken Kesey? Timothy Leary? Abby Hoffman? Jerry Rubin? Think they had an impact on the cultural zeitgeist? Not a single one of them was a Boomer.
You can keep bringing it up, and I'll keep pointing it out.
2
What you're saying is: for all their faults, better. I say, America was never great. If the only thing left to sustain us is welcome back an ethos that allowed millions of human being to be treated worse than abused animals, I say, "Go, China!" You can gloss over anything you want. The world already looks at US with new eyes.
1
As long as my mother is still alive, and calling me weekly to dispense moral and financial advice, I am unable to miss the WASPs.
5
Ross, if I may be so bold and ask. Did you never read Dickens?
9
A good example of “adaptation rather than surrender “ was GHW Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court- it was a calculated political choice that caused harm to millions, mostly non WASPs.
4
Another screed by someone who decries identity politics, redefining the increasingly coequal identity of White Conservative Protestant Male, as not an identity but a societal virtue that has somehow been unfairly abandoned and shunned. Except in this instance he is using words that are by their very definition markers of identity and expecting us to not notice his clumsy repackaging.
4
Do we miss the WASP's perhaps is some ways we do. I miss their poise, their once upon a time well constructed manners and envy their superior educations. But they are alive and well among us just in a transformed way. They are still christian, they are still white, they still have all the money and they still have all the power and access to the best educations that money and position can buy. They still form a tight ring to protect one another.
Somewhere in the Reagan era they came out from behind their secret societies, country clubs and posh mens clubs and brazenly decided to insure their permanency at the top of the food chain. They developed their strategies with the likes of Lee Attwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. Today they are just down and dirty Republicans. Trumpinistas are the new breed of elites without the pretense or polish of their predecessors.They are aided and abetted by the old WASP guard and will eventually devour one another. Good riddance.
7
Re 'pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit" - My family was extremely poor and the only way my siblings and I could attend college was by doing well enough on GPA, SAT and personal references to obtain scholarships. The colleges we attended took 1) academic 'merit' and 2) financial need.
If this process is unfair, what would you suggest to replace it?
George W Bush is an example of a WASP who was likely accepted only due to his connections as a legacy. To me this is far more unfair than 'merit' - demonstrated academic and/or athletic skills resulting from personal effort.
5
I'm trying to figure out why we should be nostalgic for the old WASP rule. I like good manners more than most because they often mean you have an idea that someone else exists in the world besides yourself, but under the leadership of this thank-you-card-sending elite that Mr. Douthat seems to find so appealing, we invaded Cuba and the Philippines on little pretext, engineered both the Dust Bowl and the Depression, got ourselves bogged down in Korea, ruined lives in the McCarthy era and then heading headlong into Vietnam -- all the while approving of an either de facto or de jure system of apartheid (that was mainly dismantled under the leadership of a very un-WASPish Texan). I can list and dissect the many, many failures of my fellow baby boomer presidents, but while WASP rule might have a nice sepia tone appeal, it was not necessarily better.
4
Let's not forget that Bush Sr. was a war criminal in Iraq. I think that counts for more than whether his speech was polite and grammatical.
Indeed, politeness can be downright harmful in political life. It has its place, for example in complimenting one's relatives' overcooked food, where the underlying issue doesn't matter much. But in politics, the bad actions covered up by politeness really matter. I'm thinking of the famous British upper class politeness in India, for example, or the Southern US slaveholder sipping his mint julep on the verandah.
No, what's transforming our society for the worse is the dramatic growth in inequality between the polite social parasites and the workers who actually produce the riches of the rich. That makes people angry. Sadly, it's too easy for the rulers to find scapegoats -- refugees, China (the return of the Yellow Peril), Mexicans, "welfare queens," students, intellectuals, transsexuals, whoever.
The world today is a scary place, Mr. Douthat, but you're not helping.
6
Gerrymandering and the electoral college are the too things destroying this country. Majority seems to no longer count for anything, except an asterisk in the results book. Why in the world we put up with this is beyond me.
3
Just because they don't let us on the Supreme Court anymore doesn't mean we've gone away.
2
Ross, you're kidding us with that title, right? Right?
And last time I checked, Trump was White, Saxon (if not not also Anglo), and Protestant (if not a good Christian). Diminishing numbers of an already minority of Americans think he leads well.
Kindly, Ross, be more careful before speaking for "us"
2
please research the origin of the term 'meritocracy.' hint - it's british and not meant to describe an actual meritocracy, the way we understand it today.
1
Ross, you appear to be attempting to make a virtue of necessity, and it's ironic that you identify your own Catholicism early in this piece.
The decline of WASPism mirrors the decline of Catholicsm, in a much more compressed time frame, but has the same root cause. That is, increasing levels of education in the broad population.
As a side note from the safety of the far side of the world, it's fascinating to watch the determined efforts of America's uber wealthy to destroy the public education system. Appalling, but fascinating. A return to Dickensian times, anyone?
Christopher Hitchens probably provided the best response to this article, years in advance.
He observed, when speaking about the Catholic church, that it was all very well to give them credit for the progress that they'd made, the ground they'd given, but any such credit always needed to be kept in the context that those concessions were always given under extreme external pressure (nothing's changed there), and that no-one should dare to forget how they had behaved when they held the whip hand.
Years after Hitchens' death, it remains true of the Catholic church, and it's almost certainly true of WASPs.
5
Well done Mr. Douthat. In the comments it seems to me some need to read the article over for they have misunderstood its core. There is only so much space a newspaper columnist has. We might want some extreme limit of characters but there still need to be books in all our imperfections to explain things more broadly. I have written fourteen books and now have three more planned and writing for I still feel and know my understanding is still not written well enough...a learning process...so we continue to support Mr. Ross (if you will).
1
Nice try at rehabilitation, Ross.
Sorry, the nostalgia is mainly AstroTurf. Whatever sliver of authentic there might be is entirely attributable to the convenient foil offered by the abject horror of the Trump-tastrophe.
The WASPs never governed better for anyone but themselves. Obama did it far better than any of them, and under objectively vastly more challenging conditions.
Moreover, the very designation WASP utterly elides the pivotal fact of gender. WASPs are implicitly assumed to be men. Personally, I feel much more optimistic about the prospects of being governed by the "grabbed" than by the "grabbers".
Give it up. Trump is the culmination of the long line of what Reagan started.
6
At least they had manners and treated people with decency -most of the time.
2
Douthat, the Establishment WASPs may now be relegated to names on college buildings or do-good philanthropic funds, but their ways live on.
The immigrants have made good, and right here in greater New York, and in D.C. Catholics and Jews have long left the slums and ghetto behind, and their descendants populate elite private academia. In some tony schools the old rituals are hardly changed. They now have reached the previously unthinkable inner sanctum of NYC's fraternal and business club world and I'm not talking about the velvet rope after dark places. No, the places with high-backed chairs, deep carpets, oil paintings and a "Jeeves" to get you a drink.
They own the yachts, the expensive but tastefully designed houses, and the habits of world travelers, and not in tacky coach class, heaven forbid. So yes, while there has been a lot of leveling in the last 50 years, people whose ancestors once worked in sweat shops and in construction, now wear ersatz WASP clothing from designers who themselves rose from the Catholic or Jewish ethnic neighborhood.
3
Seems to me that the current GOP is the decadent dregs of the WASP hegemony for which Mr Douthat is so nostalgic: an aging white political class desperately clinging to power, by any means necessary short of an actual coup: stealing a Supreme Court position, suppressing voting rights for non-whites, gerrymandering, legislatively diminishing the powers of incoming democratically elected official who aren't in their club. Being nostalgic about the WASPs is like being nostalgic about the cigarettes you smoked, that ended up giving you cancer.
22
Yikes.I have been privately celebrating the demise of WASPs.Especially male and now Douthat says they will be missed.Not by this girl.Their day has come and is now going...their entitlement and discomfort around people they consider lesser has always irked me and those" lessers" include women, non whites,non Christians and randomly anyone they consider not their equal.Sayonara.
13
For Ross Douthat & his admirers, history has a golden glow and seems often to begin around 1945, when Eisenhower, Marshall & Bradley conquered Europe, and Macarthur conquered Asia, and WASPS gave the non-WASPS the gift of freedom.
In Douthat's rose-colored history of WASPS, there is no Trail of Tears, there is no slavery, there is no Civil War, there is no seizure of Mexico, there is no Gilded Age, there is no Treaty of Versailles, there is no Depression, there is no round-up of Japanese-Americans, there are no boats filled with Jews banned from US shores, there are no American-designed coups in South America, or Iran, or Egypt, or Greece, there is no Korea, there is no Vietnam, there is no Iraq, there is no Afghanistan, there is no Syria, there is no Yemen, there is no imperialism or colonialism.
No. There is only WASP paradise, where, like that mythical town in Minnesota, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average--and everbyody is polite, tolerant, and educated, and only looks down his nose at those who deserve it.
Like, say, the rest of us. No thanks.
19
"Comments are moderated for civility," I see. It would be nice if your op-eds were moderated for white supremacy.
The subhead literally reads, "Their more meritocratic, diverse...successors rule us neither as wisely or as well," and the "their" refers to a group whose name begins with a letter standing for white.
Civility is all well and good. But calling for civility in response to racism is rotten. Fix yourselves.
13
Mr. Douthat should try a little immersion in history. He would find that elites, old and new, are self-replicating by nature and that the arraviste only forced entry into the old elite by using a battering ram of cash.
2
"The nostalgia flowing since the passing of George H.W. Bush has many wellsprings: admiration for the World War II generation and its dying breed of warrior-politicians, the usual belated media affection for moderate Republicans, the contrast between the elder Bush’s foreign policy successes and the failures of his son, and the contrast between any honorable politician and the current occupant of the Oval Office."
Face it! That "Greatest Generation" so venerated by Tom Brokaw had a generation of grandchildren who basically - as my great aunt polly in Nebraska said: "Went completely to seed"
Yup! And these morally and ethically unconscious and devoluted old white people elected a completely greedy grifter and vulgar reality show fool as their president.
They wouldn't know a Bush from a Redwood -when it comes to history - it ended an hour ago.
They don't read -they don't analyze or self reflect (like their president) on anything but me -mine - more. (and getting stoned)
Yeah -there's some amazing future stars out there - really the best and the brightest and kindest humans ever produced BUT the 80% -the stupid awful people - ARE running the show right now -and things might just not work out this time around.
3
So a Medieval-brand Roman Catholic is liking the Elizabethan Protestant Americans of the plutocracy?
Thanks, Ross.
8
Mr. Douthat's piece misses the point by a "country mile" and diminishes his and his employer's stature in the arena of public opinion. His use of the bully pulpit to castigate "old money" New Englanders imbued with a sense of noblesse oblige is tired and worn out false indignation. He fails to admit that GHWB had the option to become a "Gatsby like" member of society or to answer his inner self's call to politics as a vehicle for pursuing the greater good. The wisdom of his choice is obvious, even to those of us outside of the east coast.
I am deeply disappointed that the Times would print this tripe on the day of the late president's state funeral. I am reminded of a quote oft used to characterize the McCarthy - Army hearing of the early 1950s by their counsel, Mr. Joseph Welch who said " Sir have you no sense of decency."
I always thought that Times opinion columnists had "Class"...no longer. The Time can and should do better!
4
His WASPiness is not what made him great. Obama has the same good manners, respect for his country, love for his family, and diehard sense of humor.
George H.W. Bush was a good person despite his social standing, not because of it. His experience in combat may have had something to do with it.
7
Just exactly for whom are we supposed to mourn? The Roosevelts were not WASPs--they were Dutch--and they were pretty much the only ones among the privileged elite who really did much for anyone other than themselves (and Teddy had some pretty bad foreign policy attitudes). Woodrow Wilson, the racist who drummed black people out of the civil service? The rest of the white male presidents of the 20thc were either not Anglo-Saxon, or not Protestant, or not from privileged upbringings. Perhaps we should celebrate that epitome of Waspishness, Alger Hiss?
5
Bless the child of the workin' man
She knows too soon who she is
And bless the hands of a workin' man
He knows his soul is his
2
Who is this "We?" I couldn't make my way through this column, because I had so many objections.
4
Can there be any doubt that this is a column that advocates for white supremacy? No matter how floridly or obliquely? It's absurd that this was allowed to run, not because the argument being made here is taboo, but because it is -- and I mean this -- one of the dumbest things anyone could think. Absolutely shameful.
10
Yuuup. We miss those Poor Privileged White Male Sexist Bigoted Protestants from decades gone by. Secure in their privilege and place in the World, they could look down from on high and pontificate with confidence. "Father knows best." Little did we know how little they did know. ( known unknowns and unknown unknowns, thank you D. Rumsfeld.) Thank goodness, their like we will never see again.
8
Do we, though?
3
The article claims that our ruling elites in the federal government are chosen based on their SAT scores. And yet, everyone who asked Obama to show his SAT and LSAT s ores was accused of being a racist....
Do I have this right - did you use "cosmopolitanism" four times in two paragraphs?
"...the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America," is just plain arrogance.
Isn't Trump a WASP? No thanks.
3
The Meritocracy is selfish and self absorbed and buys itself into heaven to assuage their guilt.
3
Maybe old money doesn't grub so pathetically for more.
1
Miss them? During WWII, a State Department they dominated kept this country from rescuing thousands, maybe millions, of Jews from the Holocaust. I don't miss them at all.
9
Mr. Douthat, you are sounding more Confucian with each piece you write. Is there something you want to tell us?
1
Hey Ross - we’ve had 45 presidents. Of those, 43 have been WASPs. a little perspective.
4
Given that "W" stands for white, isn't this article blatantly racist? And given that Obama was the most competent, successful president of the past few decades, how does this article have any merit?
Seems to just be an embarrassing example of confirmation bias.
7
Ross, before you write another column like this, you really need to get out there and talk to a person of color, a poor person, an immigrant, or an LGBT individual about their "longing for...a ruling class that was...deemed legitimate".
Seriously...
11
Trump's only utility is to be a yardstick by which we measure past, present and future leaders for folly, foolhardiness and futility.
Measured against just 2 years of Trump, mediocre Presidents like GHW Bush and Dubya "Fool me twice" look positively Mount Rushmore-an in the rear view mirror. Even the first sock-puppet president, Ronald Reagan, gets high marks for civility and demeanor even though he cut federal funding of school lunches (ketchup became a vegetable) and introduced America to the Cadillac-driving Black welfare queen.
Reagan and the Bushes set America on a direct course to Trump, chaos and calamity, careening in a demolition derby set on a highway to hell.
Horror at Trump shouldn't be mistaken as nostalgia for the numb normalcy of New England patricians off on a dude ranch fantasy fueled by Texas tea.
They set the table for Trump, leaving us with scraps and sticking us with the bill.
I get Douthat's dilemma. It's hard to feel principled when the principals of your tribe mistake price tags for values and tell Americans not to ask what their country can do for them but instead to "read my lips" and rest easy because it's "Mission Accomplished."
Only the Establishment would have us believe their fire in the belly is something other than indigestion.
11
Something about that British decency...carries through. Where does it come from? Two thousand years of high population density on an island crowded since ancient time? Maybe someone British can divulge...
1
"moderate Republicans"
Has Trump gutted the Endangered Species Act yet? If not, surely then "moderate Republicans" belong on the "endangered, extinction imminent" listing. Trump and the current crop of 'win at all costs, party before country' Republicans have so very little in common with the generation of "moderate Republicans" that *shared* power and governance, that worked to govern all the nation, for the good of as many as they could, not just their own party hard-core. "moderate Republicans" are now, sadly, one more paragon extinct than they were. We will miss them more the longer the current party grasps and clings to power, despite their continuing losses in elections. Eventually, history has shown, the people's will will triumph, whether through votes in ballot boxes, or in the streets. Pray we keep enough integrity in our elections to keep the people's trust in them, instead of the streets.
1
I read reactions to this column before I read the column itself and expected to be outraged, but there's something to be said for pointing out the lack of concern about acting on behalf of the public among too many of our public servants, especially the one in the White House. Do these (mostly) men really care about or even understand the common good when so many of them are in the pockets of millionaires and billionaires lobbying for tax cuts for the rich and offering high paying consulting jobs after retiring from so-called public service? WASPs certainly aren't the answer to America's leadership problem for all of the reasons that Douthat himself points out. My problem, as others have also stated, is that the author generally ignores the issue of socioeconomic status associated with WASPs. This term certainly doesn't include ALL white American Protestants, but it does mean men and women of a certain class and this creates a whole set of problems already associated with the Republican Party that Douthat ignores--we're already on the brink of returning to Gilded Age ideas of a "deserving poor", for example, that reflects the imposition of an upper class sensibility that no longer serves our society well at all.
1
Uh, I was mostly nodding along with you until the "more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well". Nope. Peter Beinhart's analysis is closer to my sense of the matter. Much like I felt about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, I disagreed with HW Bush on a few important issues but felt like I could live with him and certainly never questioned his legitimacy or thought that he would EVER try to undermine our institutions or launch an attack on facts and truth itself. There is currently an attack on the very foundations of our nation and democratic republic, largely due to the impact of money and messaging campaigns of interested parties on siloed media outlets, particularly on the right, I'm afraid. I remember when I first caught wind of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and right-wing media. The left wrote it off and did not respond for years, but it grew. Then Murdoch monetized that sort of messaging. Monied interests caught wind. "Talking points" became the phrase of the day with well-financed firms devoted to creating them and politician elected by that same money repeating them over and over and over. That messaging caught like wildfire in social media. Now, the words "narrative," "meme," and so many more are ubiquitous. I just don't see how that has much to do meritocracy, diversity, or secularization of America.
7
Not counting the learnings of Rome's patricians, it took WASPs hundreds of years to fine tune the necessary characteristics for their class to stay in power, a mix of self interested behaviors and, as politically needed, societal generosity. Please give the new meritocratic system time to mature and refine the criteria of merit. It may start with what is easy to measure, SAT scores etc. It will be at risk of being hijacked by the winners of the time (I recommend reading Excellent Sheep, The Miseducation of the American Elite by Yale Professor Deresiewicz). But in the end, if democracy prevails, meritocratic values will mature and evolve at a more rapid pace and with more societal benefits that a system based on one class and religion. Of course "If democracy prevails" is a big if. Rather than express nostalgia for an old fine tuned WASP machine, let us focus on how to save meritocracy from the current meritocrats. Keeping money out of politics is in my view the biggest issue to ensure a collective and continuous refinement of meritocratic criteria.
5
One get their idea of building and seizing character would be great....but GHWB's crowd had to serve their country before they could make their own $. Huge difference in the next generation or how the elite get ahead nowadays....Imagine if you forced them to to do 2-3 years in military rotations appropriate for their talents.
3
Noblesse Oblige is limping along weakly - at best. Observe the current victors of our meritocracy - our tech billionaires. They are barely a part of any sense of noblesse oblige in American society. They are doing almost nothing (relative to their net worths - on average - to help tilt the scales towards those most in need, or the earth). To quote Josh Brolin's character from 'Wall Street 2': when asked by Shia LaBeouf what his 'number' is , his answer is 'MORE.' One can never have enough money, apparently. What has happened to service, charity, and just being a good person?
9
Developing a sense of responsibility to the community and the nation in children doesn't seem to be happening in a broad way. The culture is splintered. Individualism is overrated and each child being special doesn't anymore sound like Mr. Rogers but rather teaching children they are better than other children. And then there is civics education. Here in Mexico, these things are taught and for all the problems Mexico has at the top, people still value each other.
6
Bush reminds me of Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt,
They all grew up in “character forming” families and institutions. You can call them elites, but they don’t have to be. Eisenhower did not come from a tradition of wealth but from military tradition. Roosevelt developed part of his character in realms outside family inheritance. Obama is a little outside this narrative. He too emerged honorably but From a less identifiable tradition to me. More power to him. I need to read his life. What Douthat might be getting at is that recognizable elites form austere programs of self denial and honor. They train values, behaviors into character. Meritocracy is about individual ambition, a less public and identifiable character trait. Sometimes, ambition and charisma are called for. Bill Clinton, for example. Sometimes elite grooming, George H. Bush, falls flat. Perhaps, trump with his upbringing in the tough, few holds barred of NYC real estate has also usefully stripped away some of the pieties and sentimental rituals of calcified honor.
The very old proverb applies:
Of those who have died say nothing but the good.
As someone who grew up near Boston and attended a then mostly WASP academy, I find all the theorizing about the decline of the WASP establishment to be both inaccurate and inappropriate.
Let him rest in peace.
4
Thank the WASP Uberclass also for the dysfunctional Electoral College that is flunking Democracy so badly in deeply divided America.
Had not the Landed Gentry needed to keep their hand in and foot on the neck of the rabble to correct choices that didn't conform to the power structure, we would today have a truly representative Democracy. And states like the Dakotas with a tiny fraction of the the electorate would not be swinging elections away from the majority.
13
Evolving into a "hardened" aristocracy? No, as I grow older and see the dangers of passion, motivated to preserve the value of past sunk costs, I recognize the hazards of overreach. It can blind the better nature of our angles. Discomfort with change and displacement is primal. I look back at our founding fathers, warts and all, and I am awe struck at how hard they attempted to stand close to principle, having learned first hand what a monarchy has the capacity to do. President Bush, was a good man and I teared as I observed his well earned and well loved farewell. I smiled at the though that he was our President, a past leader who's standing will rise in the eyes of the nation. I smiled upon seeing the blend, through touching observations, that he was laser focused upon the well being of the country, blending strength, vision, and discipling with a large dollop of our founding fathers wisdom, and Mr. Rogers' innate kind demeanor.
1
First step might be, as many have suggested, get rid of the word "I." Too many today focus on the I want, I need, I deserve, I don't want, etc. We need to focus more on the collective "we." This principle is expanded from the singular "I" of a person to the collective "I" of whatever group we are part of. And to the broader "we" that expands beyond that group to the broader society, country, world. Remembering particularly today George H. W. Bush as one of the last us leaders who approximated that vision of his life. Approximated as we are subject to human failures, but more important is what our ultimate driving force of our lives calls for us to do.
5
This is satire, right?
23
I don’t get this association of elite with Ivy League schools. I went to two and in both cases the vast majority of my classmates are now just normal middle to upper middle class people in jobs populated with lots of state school grads dealing with many of the same financial, career, and personal issues. In fact, earning data for colleges revealed that the average midcareer salary of a Harvard grad is around $90k, comfortable sure but in no way elite. There are only a small number who are truly in positions of power and many of them had WASPy family connections predating their university tenure (and plenty of folks like that exist at state schools too). Your average Harvard grad probably has less political influence than your average resident of Iowa or New Hampshire or North Dakota.
4
I thought and thought, but I am no WASP and am unable to be and Mr. Douthat is personally belittling, personally demeaning me, for my ethnicity, and that is racist.
Do not belittle and demean me for my ethnicity, Mr. Douthat.
14
It may be the case that there will always be an "elite" leadership class, but however it is constituted, let's hope it is far more inclusive, welcoming, democratic, and flexible than our past and present "elites", and let's do without the religious trimmings as well. The Establishment's piety is rapidly leaving the stage, here and elsewhere in the world. It's not coming back, Ross, so try to make do.
5
@gradyjerome
Jimmy Carter had what you call "religious trimmings," George H.W. Bush did not.
One was of an elite Ivy League tradition, the other not.
I would not conclude that a "religious trimmings" is necessarily a bad thing, nor that it necessarily stems from the Northeast.
Sweeping generalizations such as this column are often not very accurate.
I don't know if I have trouble with the idea of noblesse oblige per se, but with the idea it assumes that the "upper classes" somehow know what's best for the rest of us. I grew up in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, but we were just farmers in the Midwest. Nothing elite about us. I think other citizens from all walks of life have a lot to contribute to our country. I do sometimes wonder if we have a shared sense of purpose. If Douthat is trying to say that whoever our current "elites" or leaders are should have a sense of common purpose for the betterment of all of us I would agree. But I can't help thinking that he shares the belief so many have had that some us of know what is best for the rest of us.
7
@CM
Well said, thanks--
2
I'm not even sure where to begin on this one. I'm a WASP, and grew up among lots of good ones (and some bad ones), and have some good and bad things to say about the ones who ruled the world. But this essay feels so contrived and confused to me. It seems to be longing for the "good old days" in one sentiment, but with alterations that might excuse the really, really bad parts of those days. It's just... odd. And it presupposes that we should have a "ruling class," as if that didn't get us exactly to where we are today. We need leaders who are competent, fair, trustworthy, of at least average intelligence, hard working and consistent. Those are all things I think most people would also want from the management of a bank, school, mall or church.
Government isn't supposed to be a magic kingdom where "special" people do things only they (by dint of "class" or background) can do. It's not supposed to be a set of sublime skills or inbred abilities. It's a job. Sometimes a very hard job. But good people come from all kinds of "classes," and if you've never met someone in a blue-collar job or teaching high school history or running a Piggly Wiggly who could be a better president than the one we've got, you don't get out anywhere near enough.
I'm only being slightly hyperbolic. This idea that government is an "elite" profession is what hurts us. It binds our leaders to other elites in business and finance. And that's a recipe for "class" disaster.
37
Wowza. People see the term "WASP" and go off the handle. This was a good article. We will ALWAYS have an elite group of people, whether by birth or by education; it would be nice if they could embody the finer qualities of the American WASPs in the idea of service and giving back, in the idea of equality for all, and in the idea of moral leadership. Come on, they were our Pilgrims, a hard-working, upright, all-for-one group that was the only group that could have started a nation that is this prosperous, with such work ethics. We DO need some moral leadership, and their examples are nowhere near the worst that we could hold up as a great citizen and leader.
10
This column reminds me of how Woodrow Wilson (technically a WASP but not a New England one) came to Princeton, found a place that was even more of a social club than the place that Scott Fitzgerald went to, and tried to make it into some facsimile of a university. (I am impressed by the description of the preceptorial system given on their website.) If the WASPs were left to themselves and their values alone, they might not deserve to hold either Harvard or Yale. Douthat is sniffing around the idea that elite groups need to do self-examination and not say that all their values are bad and meant to perpetrate their own power, but not say that all their values are good either. It's probably better to say that elites should be loyal to institutions and try to protect them and their best purposes rather than loyal to themselves as a class.
We, and I am a Democrat, miss competence. Bush was very adept at getting consensus for the Iraq war, as opposed to his son's almost deliberate desire to "go it alone" with "you're either for us or against us" rhetoric. He had the maturity to realize that the true mandate was to get Saddam's army out of Kuwait. Now we have massive instability in the Middle East due not to GHW's acts, but due to his "macho wannabe" son.
This particular reader still has a sense of puzzlement about what Douthat thought was wrong with Obama. After all, Obama was a centrist in many ways, and certainly NOT a liberal in most areas. Was it style or substance? To still hold Obama and Trump as more-or-less equals but somehow equally flawed shows a level of bias and intellectual dishonesty that is hard to fathom.
27
The issues this piece points out with our emerging diverse elite arise because this new elite has not yet become established. Minorities and women are still in the process of seizing their place within a growing power vacuum.
It takes the charisma and energy of Barack Obama to be the first black president or kid in your family to attend college.
It takes humility and a desire to give back to be born with privilege and still wish to work hard or serve.
As successive diverse generations become more established in their power, the best leaders will begin to share more traits with the best leaders from less diverse establishments of the past.
6
The comments, which I just finished reading, are an important help to me and much appreciated. I still find the prejudiced, but knowing how the column might be read more softly helps.
4
Perhaps the point here is that our missing former President Bush actually has nothing to do with his being a WASP. Looking through the comments it seems like those that liked him liked certain aspects of his character, and those that disliked him disliked either certain, or at least strongly perceived, actions.
The 'problem' then, if we must have one, I think Ross actually pointed out, namely that, "certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite". In other words, human nature is always the problem for humans, not race, color, creed, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
As far as the former President's religious beliefs, and given how much praise for his personal conduct is seen on this board and elsewhere. We might suggest that wherever former President Bush has gone, and just as we all too will someday, he did not take anything with him he wasn't going to need. Excellent article as always Ross.
What a lot of commentators here overlook is the debt of gratitude we owe to the WASP elite that dominated politics from the 30s (FDR) right through to the beginning of the Vietnam War, by which time their influence had pretty much run its course.
The entire post-World War II international order (think NATO and the Marshall Plan) that put Western Europe back on its feet and held the Soviet Union in check came about thanks to far-sighted internationalists like Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and their like.
Products of Eastern Establishment prep schools and colleges, they took to heart the lofty ideals of service instilled in them and shunned self-aggrandizement in the interest of making America more secure and the world as a whole more prosperous and peaceful.
The ahistorical Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the framework of international cooperation they worked so hard to establish. We as a nation may never recover from that loss.
8
This reminds me of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic. Ross might have been better served titling it Why we Miss the (WHITE MALE) WASPs because this reads of such extreme racial bias I dont know if there is any point hiding what he is really trying to say.
18
Interesting that not once in this column does Douthat define the WASP acronym. Is he afraid to say it? The W is for WHITE. Is this column really that openly racist? This is baffling piece to read in the Gray Lady and I wish I had not.
23
As the offspring of Roman Catholic immigrants from a Slavic country, I can only marvel at the bigotry and stupidity on offer here. I expect that readers whose origins are, for example, in one of the African nations once so ~wisely ruled~ by WASPs simply fall over in a dead faint on seeing this kind of nonsense.
23
To expand on Tim Nelson's excellent comment below, the principled elite has become, not just out of fashion, but a target. "Principled" in this case means guided by motives beyond self, and for the benefit of the whole. "Elite" means training and preparation to put those principles into practice. Both of those qualities have been dismissed by the right and left, and an opposite set of qualities brought to the fore.
In the UK, there is a system called the civil service. That does not mean postmen, and city clerks, and accountants. It means experts with experience in policy-making, advising, and evaluation. "Career" civil service means that they transcend politics and serve every government as disinterested advisors. While that system has served the UK well, it is under attack, too. You may wish to point out all the flaws of such a system, you may think government is unimportant and is best done away with, you may think those people shouldn't be paid for by taxpayers money. But in doing so, you are responsible for a weaker, less responsive government. You are smoothing the way for political appointees way way down the organisation chart, to carry out political agendas, not professional advice. You have given access to moneyed interests from outside government, with no public scrutiny, to set policy that affects your own lives, generally not for the better.
GHWB and his ilk had higher motives.
6
Yes, there were and still are some honorable human beings who happened to be Wasps. I personally love old drawing room comedies. I have known a few to the manor born Wasps in my time and they seemed a bit cranky but more fair minded and more honorable than most people. I suppose the cranky part comes because they were economically free to say what they wanted and did. And their manners, when not being cranky were sublime. But all in all I am glad they are disappearing, A bad apple Wasp is harder to stop you know.
3
One of the mistakes that many commenters below are making is attributing noblesse oblige to the Ivy League.
Whether one likes noblesse oblige or despises it, it does not really come from the Ivy league
Some of it comes from family tradition (Roosevelts, Harrimans, etc).
But much WASP noblesse oblige comes from a few prep schools that have long cultivated the notion.
Groton and St Paul's in particular.
Mueller and John Kerry were contemporaries at St Paul's (Mueller captained the teams on which Kerry played) and their school devoted a great deal of attention to fostering "service" in the noblesse oblige style.
Going to Dartmouth, Brown or Harvard is not where the WASP elite gets exposed to this idea.
6
The takeaway from Douthat's column that most commenters seem to miss is that our democracy (any democracy) works better with a principled elite in charge. Douthat clearly is not arguing that that elite for today's America should be white, anglo-saxon or Protestant. I read him clearly arguing for inclusion and diversity; racial, geographic and otherwise. This unwavering Democrat admits that the current trend toward authoritarian, white nationalism in the western world scares the bejeezus out of me. I associate it with the power of fear and demagoguery, but also with democracy gone wild and a shattering of faith in the notion that America represents something valuable and good in this world of ours. An elite that holds fast to that faith is a necessary bulwark against the destructive forces represented by our current morally corrupt president.
275
@Tim Nelson. Couldn't say it better myself. Another thing that has changed, though, is that politics has become far less about service, and more for personal aggrandizement, or that of friends. GHWB was motivated to serve. We can debate all day whether he did that well or not, but he did it. Now, service has taken a back seat to less savory motives. The current resident in the White House is one of the worst examples, but he has a lot of company. Look at McConnell, look at Wisconsin, look at King, look at Nunes, etc.
49
@Tim Nelson
"Works better with a principled elite in charge"? Nah. Not when the opportunity deck in our country remains so innately stacked in favor of Brett Kavanaugh and his ilk. And what principles are you promoting that you propose that this elite should carry forward? From what I see, the more financial wealth (i.e. elite-ness) an individual has, the more entitled and the less principled their behavior. Example 1: Where were your "principled elite" in the debate on the recent unfunded $1.5Trillion tax giveaway to these elite, that has provided none of the falsely claimed benefits (other than a brief "sugar high" in the economy) and will be paid for by the children and grandchildren of what remains of the middle class. IMO, the term "principled elite" is an oxymoron. Example 2: Wisconsin - Republican losers' "sour grapes" power grab based on KochBros-purchased (Thx to Repub SCOTUS Citizens United decision) gerrymandered districts and zero principles.
Nah. It's time to look further afield for leaders with wisdom, insight, ethics, empathy, respect for science ("facts are friendly"), a commitment to legal and economic fairness (inclusiveness, diversity), respect for the rule of law and for the Constitution that they've sworn to uphold and defend, and with a respectable cadre of deeply experienced colleagues and advisors.
59
@Tim Nelson We've always been led by elites and even Trump's administration is overflowing with them. Elites have to bear some responsibility for an environment that's allowed demagogues to prosper. I want public servants who champion accountability and back principle with action, rather than simply rhetoric. I prefer our ruling class be defined by ethos and ability rather than social status..
16
We need to get clear about what we mean by “meritocracy”. Analytical skills, the ability to spot patterns, imagination, knowing how other people think and what motivates them, character, prudence, decisiveness, and many other facets of intellectual and emotional intelligence should be brought to bear by people who influence events.
The sorts of merit measured by intelligence tests and grades at the university are only a part of that. Performance metrics are important but can be misleading, as they were during the Vietnam War. But the way we often bandy about the term “meritocracy” makes me think we value skills and results that are relatively easy to measure, important as those skills and results may be, over other necessary skills and results. Efforts involved in securing the blessings of liberty and in the pursuit of happiness aren’t easily quantifiable.
The things I’ve read or heard about the old Waspy elite way of doing things that impress me the most are the ideas that they cultivated the long view and the broad view, often had a sense of “enoughness” when it came to their wealth, and began their Ivy League educations by learning about the death of Socrates.
5
Good lord, where do you even start with this sacharine sweet, romanticised soliloquy to America’s earliest 1% lords and ladies? We really need someone to psychoanalyse this bizarre attachment to our British aristocratic history that seems to have never quite left the quiver of peculiar American conservative fantasies. Destiny to rule and noblesse oblige? Get outta here.
This is quite the stewpot of inconsistencies, half-truths and imagination my dear Ross. “a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly”? My questions are when has it not, and since when did America agree that it was a good thing to ascend to a caste system? A few (at least one with H.W.) Bertie Wooster, hale good fellows cannot erase the extraordinarily toxic impacts of an extreme minority wielding far too much influence over the majority of hard working and long suffering common folk. This is false equivalency at its finest comparing the deluded royalty of old money power brokers with the constitutionally declared meritocracy (all men created equal?) and finding the latter wanting?
Let’s go with Foer’s insight and begin to make some fundamental repairs to the American meritocracy beginning with instilling in our children an ethos of service as a common good? How about we make this possible by really dealing with the ridiculously damaging economic inequalities that yield the Koch’s and the $200 Billion Bezo’s while our poor live under bridges and on the streets?
22
I'm afraid that perhaps your intellectualizing of what it means to be a WASP has clouded your judgement, dear scholar. I get what you're trying to say but must disagree. George H.W. performed in a dignified manner but he also invaded Iraq during its invasion of Kuwait, and encouraged an eruption of Shiites in the south who were under the belief that Americans would support them. Well, we didn't and they were slaughtered by Saddam. Retreating Iraqis were then mowed down by U.S. air power in the desert. It seemed to be the start of the end for that part of the world. Sure Trump is much worse and we could expect even more mayhem but please don't turn the WASPS into heros.
10
I am a WASP--Ivy, Episcopalian, Scotch/English ancestry, then Wall Street lawyer, Peace Corps Volunteer, etc.
Living in Brazil as I do has taught me that here this heritage is irrelevant.
But.
The one thing I know for certain WASPs have done, is change the Ivy League forever.
When I enrolled in 1960, my class of 815 men had 5 blacks, two from Africa, and a Jewish quota, very few Roman Catholics. One seventh of my class went on to law school, almost as many to finance, publishing, other "suitable" professions. Many volunteered for war or peace projects.
That composition has changed completely. The diversity of the Ivy League schools is now firmly fixed into their identities, and that of their graduates. Importantly, as Ross has pointed out, it was the WASPs who forced the change upon their own universities. It was the monied WASPs who created the endowments that permit financing an Ivy education for those without sufficient funds.
So, yes, I'm not always proud of being a WASP, but I am proud of those who engineered potentially cataclysmic changes in their universities, changes which made them better places.
11
I predict Ross takes a beating for this one. That will be too bad. But, unfortunately, the notion that anyone in our society should aspire to be "better" has also take a beating. As a result, perhaps inevitably, we are now finding that few among us are better. And so we are all worse.
2
WASP-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
The Constitution makes no provision for giving power to people based on race or religion. If he WASPs were doing such a great job, things wouldn't be so bad now..
Aristocracy-a class of persons holding exceptional rank and privileges, especially the hereditary nobility.
Hereditary nobility holding exceptional rank and privilege is what the U.S. Constitution was designed to avoid. We need to stop trying to create new aristocratic families. The success off one family member does not mean that other members of the same family will do a good job. We don't need Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, or the wanna be Trumps trying to make themselves into hereditary nobility, and the celebrity obsessed Americans that fall for this nonsense need to grow up.
I'm under no illusions that the U.S. is a meritocracy. If it was,CEOs that run their companies into the ground wouldn't be making hundreds of times more than the people that actually do the work, leave with golden parachutes, or become president of the USA.
But positions should be held by the person that would do the best job, so meritocracy is a worthy goal.
The problem is that we have a bunch of wanna be WASPs trying to create aristocracy through lying and theft (in the grand tradition). Watch the Trump family snobbish float around and it is obvious that they want to be royalty.
Meritocracy is one worthy goal among many. Aristocracy is a thing to be avoided.
We need to help everyone do well.
15
American leaders are supposed to govern, not rule.
11
I am amazed at the nasty, convulsive comments that erupt with nearly every one of RD's columns, and this is certainly no exception. The reservoir of bitterness in the NY Times reader when it comes to these departures from the accepted liberal wisdom is bottomless. All the elders of my family and those of my friends served in WW2 or tried to. One fellow who initially failed the eye exam went to the trouble of stealing the chart and memorizing it. His prize? An almost daily risk of life and health in malarial Burma fighting the Japanese. 20-year-old Bush narrowly avoided capture by an enemy that practiced summary execution and cannibalism on their American prisoners. This class of sacrificial life still persists, but is held in low regard by what passes for our paladins and rulers these days. Boys -- and girls nowadays -- still enlist and confront unspeakable dangers in faraway places on behalf of the rest of us and in service to the ideals their grandfathers honored. This impulse to live up to something greater than themselves is not to be mocked in any generation. But it is especially egregious on the part of those so unmindful of the blood that pays for their contempt and derision.
5
@Michael
Nicely said, Michael.
Despite being liberals, many of the grousers here are more like Trump than Bush when it comes to service,
They are brothers in the bone spur fraternity that did not serve in any of our conflicts.
4
@Michael
Sorry, but your tendency to over-generalize everything from the NYT reader to those who may not necessarily agree with Mr. Douthat, doesn't make you opinion any more truthful or valid.
10
@Michael. A person does not have to be a 'WASP' to exhibit worthy characteristics - noble, heroic, self sacrificing, patriotic, etc.
1
The difference between the Rockefeller Republicans and the movement Republicans who superseded them is the difference between doctrine and dogma. Mr. Douthat could elaborate...
See also: Louis Auchincloss...
1
This is quite possibly the most embarrassing column I'll ever read. Since you seem to be such a connoisseur of WASP-culture, let's frame this essay for what it truly is: a Fairfield-county high school graduate complaining this his white-male entitlements are not guaranteed to him by a more diverse, less inheritable establishment. We do not need aristocracy, we need leadership. George HW Bush displayed leadership qualities we rarely see now because he and those of his generation had to learn to lead in order to win a terrible war. The last generation of establishment leaders have failed because they've never learned to lead anything of consequence - instead, they've rode a wave of unmatched economic output and political stability that was merely the natural result of America being the world's only superpower after WWII. And in 2008, when it all hits the fan - WHAM - we're lucky to be dealt Obama, but the end result of a generation lacking leadership skills is truly Trump, the ultimate non-leader. Hardship and empathy, not wealth or genetics, begets leadership. Our society is most threatened by the on-going presence of aristocracy (old and new) in our politics and culture: big money donations and billionaire status. The meritocracy may not be perfect, but only because it was corrupted by the WASP-sentiment of giving your children their future ("Princeton Review"), rather than building one yourself. Look at what the WASP establishment has given us. Disgusting.
11
Why no mention of Robert Mueller, the classiest elite currently on (or modestly off) the national stage?
7
@Carson Drew
Yes, Bob Mueller, captain of the hockey team at St Paul's, is a product of the old New England elite.
4
If you read this piece less as an infuriating excuse and yearning for WASP hegemony and more of a critique of “performative cosmopolitanism” and meritocracy, it’s much more interesting.
The click-compatible title and subheading seem built to light up the commentariat and overpower his frank acknowledgement of the faults, privilege and bigotry of the WASPs.
I enjoy the diversity of perspective Ross brings to the paper, despite our ideological differences.
4
Ugh. First, I don't know about you but I don't want to be ruled. I thought that went out with kings and queens. WASP is not synonymous with moral decency, social justice or tolerance. You can't stereotype a group of people and think that you produced a well-written article. I didn't even bother to finish it.
9
Loved him-mostly, but remember he sided with the anti Roe v. Wade Republicans and wanted to eliminate choice.
1
Sorry, but I do not miss them one bit.
5
@drdeanster
Rather a neat line in class resentment and sectarian intolerance. How about instead responding to his central suggestion, in my view, that the old elites, with all their many demerits, were still better than their replacements, who, in an intoxicating atmosphere of it's-all-up-for-grabs, opted for relentless, unchecked worship of the expansion of personality. Private desires that could fill the universe. Every investor, every grad student, every ghetto crook, every celebrity an untouchable 18th-century European aristocrat who can mess around as they like because prosperity and freedom are bulletproof and little people without much personality will clean up the messes.
(Cf. Kingsley Amis: More will mean worse.)
1
I do not miss the WASPS at all. They succeeded in ruling by expending the blood of millions of innocents as they played their ego driven war games. One Latina married to Jeb Bush does not wash away this Patrician stain despite their shameful use of her in this manner. Now we have Jenna on NBC as we had Chelsea earlier on. Nepotism, WASPS, it seems they are experiencing a painful long-standing well deserved death rattle. Even some black folks aspire to WASPISHNESS as silly as that seems. Cover of Michelle's book?
4
It isn’t the meritocratic, secular leaders that supposedly replaced WASPs that are the problem, it’s the MAGA-WASPS—the uneducated, superannuated, evangelical white horde led by their pandering politicians, that are destroying America. Their race and religion is the same as the old WASPs but clothed in more uncouth attire and poor manners. Meritocracy, diversity, and secularism have never held political sway in the US—but should.
7
@Martin Johnson. I for one became really put off by George W and especially Jeb Bush's harping on about their moral and religious stances ('culture of life', Terri Schiavo disaster and so on).
3
“As a Catholic?” Mr. Douthat, you converted to Catholicism. As someone from a traditionally Catholic family, I don’t miss WASPs in the slightest and welcome diversity in our politics.
8
I didn't know Mr. Douhat had converted to Catholicism (I think his religious status never crossed my mind).
However, while I wouldn't suggest this type of dynamic applies in Mr. Douhat's case (one would have to give Mr. Douhat the benefit of the doubt & assume his conversion came only from some form of direct, irresistable spiritual ephinany, or a sober, rigorous theological investigation leading to Catholocism as the inescapable conclusion), the conservatism-conversion-to-Catholicism combo reminds me of T.S. Eliot, or what I recall of the matter. It seems to spring from a sneering disdain for modern man's materialism & ostensible shallowness, lack of connection to the sublime & heroic. (J. Alfred Prufrock.)
In contemporary times, one could imagine such a sense of disenchantment-seekimg-re-enchantment in the following form: 11 months of the year an ordinary Protestant or Jewish guy quietly laments the ordinariness, non-fuzziness of the non-Christmas-season months, waiting until Thankgsiving kicks off the lite-FM playlist of Bing Crosby, Rudolph, Little Drummer Boy, etc etc, Tinsel, wreaths. colored lights announcing "the most wonderful time of Year." The snow, the claymation TV specials...
This guy thinks: "why can't I have this warm-fuzzy, & nostalgia & family-focused sweetness 12 months of the year: Join the Church! Get away from the jaded, materialistic, cold, humdrum bourgeois quotidianness & secularlism, have Christmas year-round.
That's "Prufrock-conserveratism."
After reading this piece, seems like Ross wants to be the campaign chairman for a the prototype "Millennial" WASP.... Beto!
2
Lest we forget, Bush did appoint Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. It was a perfect example of WASP thinking.
“Yale grad? Check
Conservative? Check
Black guy? Check
There’s a unicorn, he’s the guy.
But wait, he harassed some woman? We’ve all done that at a cocktail party after a few pops. No biggie.”
Except it went horribly wrong as Thomas has proven to be incompetent.
Bush did that, lest we forget. Enough of WASPs.
10
"We miss the WASPs"--said No Black Person Ever.
20
Religious people are mostly totalitarian. They are only for their own rights. They love to oppress and demean people who are different. Democracy be damned. They fought against it as long as they could. Sounds like the republican party today and the author of this article.
10
This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read in the New York Times. As an African American born in the 1950s I can assure this blithering idiot that I do not "miss the WASPs." I also won't miss this columnist either when the Times gets tired of this nonsense and fires him.
18
We no longer have as strong a sense of right and wrong as we used to, which loss we can ascribe to the diminishment of the influence of religion. By it’s nature, religion sells right vs. wrong, but it’s Achilles heel is that it relies on taking that idea a step further into “we’re right, your wrong.” More importantly, it asserts this certainty in areas where the rightness or wrongness can’t be proven objectively, leaving it vulnerable to the assaults of science.
Moreover, religion took for itself sole authority for defining morality, defining right and wrong in overtly canonistic terms. This is a recipe that is doomed in an increasingly rational world.
Morality ought to be redefined in terms of its usefulness in ordering society. Humans are inarguably social creatures, and morality is fundamental to the ordering of society, serving as it does as a tool for allowing people to live together successfully in groups. This trait is what allowed us to become the dominant species on earth, and it is of critical importance in our future survival. Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments after receiving them from God is a great story, which undoubtedly helped sell them as rules to live by. They are, if you take away the magical thinking, mostly rational precepts for ordering a stable society.
Relativistic philosophy served a purpose in diminishing the rule of superstition in organizing society, but it misleads us into thinks there is no right and wrong.
2
Being a WASP does not imbue a person with the common decency and respect for others that this country is longing for in it's leadership. Look around at your neighbors (and dare I hope, your friends). The country doesn't have "Bush nostalgia". We are a nature founded on the values set out in the constitution. We've struggled to overcome (still to overcome) the obvious ways in which we are not all equal. If we are nostalgic, we are so for a time when men and women in office were honorable and patriotic human beings. May H.W. rest in peace. He understood decency and created friendships and working partnerships that reflect that. It has nothing to do with being a WASP and everything to do with being a mensch.
6
Douhat is talking about Conservatism and this only works when contested by a 'Loyal Radical Opposition'. As the British Conservative writer Keith Feiling wrote in 1953:
‘More, then, consequently in all probability than others, the Conservatives should be a comprehensive cause. Even if we ignore its very wide territorial variations of type, and pass over likewise its first unorganized century of life, the elements that have gone to compose it in modern times are mixed, contrasted, even mutually hostile. ..
The problem remains to isolate the 'principles', under which Conservatives are willing to serve.
‘If the first may be thought rather a method or a temperament than a principle. It is a skepticism, amounting to disbelief in any purely intellectual process as a means to explain rights and duties or to justify political obligation. They distrust general notions such as "the community" and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny.
‘Burke made eloquent how he hated 'the very sound' of abstract rights, insisting that men do not act on metaphysical speculations. And even more. His teaching was that the rules of politics are but morality enlarged, and that all moral questions are mixed questions; not to be resolved by pushing some one abstract principle to its extremity which must end in force, open or concealed, but always by reference to relation and circumstance and moral effect...’
1
You write about the "competency" of the old WASP order, but their competency was only applied to what they saw as valuable. GHWB applied no competency to handling the AIDS crisis, for example.
Noblesse oblige is objectionable because of the noblesse part. We are all oblige, some more than others, to help each other.
The categories that we place ourselves and each other in shift and evolve- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant used to define a significant trifecta of allegiances and memberships, each of which still exists but each of which mean different things these days.
2
Just look at how wealth inequality (and especially executive compensation including somatic and monetary as in today's cbs related article) has changed with our supposedly pro-democratic meritocracy.
I think what many are nostalgic for is moral bearings profounder than what Ayn Rand had to offer. Of course, it's been Ayn Rand's world for a few generations already. Hopefully that will change.
3
Celebration of GWH Bush's "old" wealth WASP demeanor and military deeds, first as a young fighter pilot and later as a victorious Gulf War C-in-C, honors what has been true of the US from its beginning: its plutocracy and militarism. Trump is but the caricature of these two persistent, even defining national traits. The hope is that, like political and satiric exaggeration, he will make clear what gentility can, as in the elder Bush's case, disguise.
1
@W. Ruddick
Do you prefer the "new" wealth of the Trumps (grandad was KKK).
Or the non-militarism (via bone spurs) of DJT?
I'll take old wealth, decent upbringing, and service to country anyday over what the Trump family has on offer.
6
We need more politicians who value civility and possess a desire to place community, country and humanity above the individual/self-interested group. These traits are not the province of any creed, color, class or caste.
7
Well, if we are being so nostalgic, why don't we bring the Queen back again?
Put plainly, there were some (many) decent folks in the older generation, and the WASP ruling class, we miss the good ones when they pass, just as we would miss the good folks of any group or class or whatever. When Pope John Paul II passed away, many non-Catholics rued his passing since he had been seen as standing up for freedom. When Pope Francis passes, there will be people of various nationalities and faiths (even atheism) who would miss him. Does that mean we are all lamenting the Protestant Revolution or the freeing of Europe and Latin America from the control of the Roman Catholic Church? No. Simply put, when Pope Benedict passes do you think there will be a comparable outpouring of sorrow and wistfulness? No.
The NYTimes should consider reducing columnists to one column a month each. Quality over quantity in this firehose newsmedia culture could be a winning strategy for all.
3
I believe the news of the "WASPs" demise is just a tad premature.
First of all, Trump is a WASP, whether you want to claim him or not! All is not lost!
A little rough around the edges, perhaps, but still.
And if we're being honest here, all that "Noblesse Oblige" stuff was more for show, anyway. Throw a few crumbs to the proletariat to assuage any speck of a guilty conscience and we're all good.
I think you'll find this new "Trumpian" system to be much more efficient and I'm sure you'll grow to love it in time, Mr. Douthat.
No worries.
2
@JayK WASP isn't just an ethnicity, but a culture and way of life - one which Trump doesn't subscribe to. There's a certain vibe and acknowledgement for those who are. Or so I'm told. Also, the Trumps haven't been in the US long enough to truly qualify (I believe Donald is second generation American born).
3
@JayK: A little rough, you say? Wait for big laugh. This sounds like it could have come out of universal speakers. Oh, and “the beatings will continue until moral improves.”
@Cynthia
"@JayK WASP isn't just an ethnicity, but a culture and way of life - one which Trump doesn't subscribe to."
I know, was just kidding around a bit.
However, I still maintain that Trump's differences are more a matter of "form" than "substance".
The WASP elite built their power structure over centuries and of course along with that came the rituals and conventions of "proper" behavior that were organically developed and nurtured and have been more or less followed. Until now.
But once Trump "hacked" that code, they were only too happy to abandon those frilly, fringe "niceties" and jump onto his boorish bandwagon to protect their power.
As others have stated, if the WASPS were so awesome, why are we so messed up?
They lost faith in themselves before the rest of us lost faith in them.
2
Carlyle Group.
7
This will be shallow -forgive me, I'm in a rush- but a shout-out to two in-their-way-quite-wonderful treatments of this theme: E Digby Baltzel (no idea if spelled right), and the movie "Metropolitan," both eloquent descriptions of the waning of the genteel WASP establishment. The film, made in the Bush era, has characters entering adulthoood attending debutante balls in white tie and tails and reflecting on their own dinosaur status (20 year old dinosaurs), and what, if anything, the world is losing with their impending extinction. This was Baltzel's (I think sociologist at UPENN) theme.
BTW, David Brooks explored this many times - the aggressive, success-driven meritocrats with their polished -more often than not, expensively tutored- SATs versus the more genteel predecessor establishment, explicitly invoking Baltzel as an early, extraordinary interpreter/chronicler of the trend. Nicolas Lemann's work on the cultural history of "meritocracy" is also extraordinarily informative. But then, Hoftstadter's "Social Darwinism in American Life" creates a broader context on how this trend was set up during the *original* (ie, our antecedent) "Gilded Age."
1
C'mon, man! Truman. Eisenhower. Cinton (oops). Obama.
WASP elites? I think not.
54% of the founding fathers were Anglican, now Episcopalian. the rest were mostly Unitarian and Presbyterian.
The REAL core of their ideology was that they could foresee a secular and humanist nation, guided by their religion without being ruled by it.
White Southern Slave State Confederates have always been a cursed disease in our country. Their racist hatred, enhanced by their defeat in the Civil War, continues to this day.
What we really miss, Mr Douthat, is the leadership of sensible, Northern,
anti-slavery Yankees.
8
Well I was trained as a WASP-Catholic: Republican family, country club full fo WASPs and Catholics but no Jews (they had their own clubs). Went to a Jesuit Prep School which encouraged IVY League Colleges. I was and am a hybrid. I never liked Bush; I put him with all Republicans (except Rockefeller). I was a Rockefeller Republican until I couldn't stomach them any more, especially that faker Reagan so I became a Democrat. Also I entered academia where there were few Republicans. In some ways, after
watching the funeral I am a bit changed about Bush. He was much better than GW. As for AIDS he was not good but no Republican ever was (and still aren't). Finally is it possible for
Trump to be embarrassed as he sat there with folded arms?
He's no WASP---he's nothing.
5
I had to re-read one sentence several times . . . But the meaning remained the same. You actually insinuate that Obama is/was "feckless." That tells me everything I need to know about you that I didn't before. You can reasonably (but, more likely, given your narrow background and primitive religious perspective, unreasonably) take issue with Obama's worldview and principles of governance. But, by not distinguishing him from the rest of H.W.'s successors, you HAD to be very consciously tagging him as similarly "feckless." Doing so demonstrates that you cannot be respected as a commentator on any subject. Obama was plenty flawed -- but that particular flaw is the LAST one that could be ascribed to him . . . unless, of course, . . . you're . . .
7
How do the Kennedys fit into your flawed hypothesis?
7
This is one of the most ridiculous and tone deaf op-ed pieces I've seen published in the NYT. The last thing we need right now is more WASPy religion in our politics.
Conservatives are clearly having to do all kinds of mental calisthenics lately in an attempt to distance themselves from the current state of affairs they helped create.
Any minute now we're going to get another column from David Brooks about how we need to get back to being a "kinder, gentler" country..... wait for it....
8
Ok. so we should long for the homophobic, bigoted, exclusionary, primogeniture--based ruling class of yore? Puh--leeze!
9
While traditional WASP's still lead many major corporations, banks, not-for-profit's, and government agencies, "killer bees" have been after WASP's since the late 1940's. Most importantly, the U.S. population has more than doubled since 1950, mainly from "organic growth" and also increased immigration of Hispanic's. As such, influence of the old-time WASP's has been diluted. Secondly, more aggressive media reporting, followed by the internet, has exposed the vices of the upper classes. Hey, they're just like us! Next, the 1960's civil rights movement and its successors have diminished the good old boys networks. Finally, the feminist movement exposed the WASP's as purely a men's club.
Yes, many of us fondly remember the politeness and quiet wealth of the Rockefeller's and the old Bush's. Much like a family business, however, "good political manners" struggle to survive second generation ownership, and rarely survive the third generation.
4
It was the baby boomer generation's sheer numbers that brought real change to the United States. Add to that the extinction of European colonialism in the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century making possible the re-emergence of China and India and one gets a clearer understanding of the fall of the old ruling classes of Western civilization.
3
You are missing the forest for the trees. What we really miss are not the WASP's, but their generation, the ones that came of age in the 1900's-1950's, lived through wars, and pandemic flu, and starvation, and economic depressions, and fascism, - who learned that we all have to work together, at some level, to survive. They also learned that the wealthy and the powerful (the WASPs) could not have it all.
8
This article is so mistaken in many ways. We do not long for lost WASPS in our society. What we miss and long for is moral fiber in our leaders and in ourselves, ethics, honesty, civility, good manners, kindness, and humility. President Bushes' funeral was beautiful, gracious, and so inspiring. It has inspired me to hug my grandchildren and kiss them when they come home from school today.
6
Quiet, you! said the old elites. And slow down. We have the answers and we've had them for generations.
Quiet, you! say the new elites. And stop right there. We have the answers and we've had them since I met my friends at university.
3
I wonder how long Ross Douthat will last at the New York Times, the embodiment and voice of the tribe that has succeeded in taking over from the WASPs. The whole piece is an implicit criticism of the moral, spiritual, and financial chaos that has ensued under them.
Most interesting was his observation that elements of the WASPs both elite and middle-class, immolated themselves, and continue to do so, out of a sense of guilt. From colonization through the Revolution through the Fifties, the WASPs, both elite and commoner, had provided leadership, ethos, and the Protestant ethic to making this a great modern society.
Shaken by the disaster of the VietNam War, the WASP elite never recovered.
We remaining WASPs - and mine were here since Plymouth Rock - however can remember what was good about them and the former America, pass it on to our offspring, and use it as a bulwark, observing the decline, degeneration, and fragmentation of the successor society.
3
I think that what Ross is referring to isn't the WASP heritage, but the heritage of a ruling class born in the northeast after the Civil War. In addition to a lineage that came down from Puritan ancestors, they also had inherited wealth and privilege. People still go to places like Harvard and Yale to pick up connections to that privileged group. The Bush family certainly is part of that class.
My grandmother, who was not wealthy nor connected exhibited what I consider to be true WASPiness. She was religious with a conservative, but not particularly evangelical, theology. Conspicuous consumption was almost a sin. She also had strong ideas about decorum and little tolerance for the evils of alcohol.
I think that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants like my grandmother made some positive contributions to our society, but they also laid the foundation for many of the problems we are experiencing. From comments George H.W. Bush made, I suspect his WASP background was similarly positive and negative, but wealth and social position was even more important to making him what he became.
3
Douthat writes, "The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists."
"Non-American world?" He means non-white world. Seen from a condescending white male perch where WASP values are the default norm and understanding the perspective of other worlds requires an extraordinary level of transcendence. Yet the "shallow multiculturalists" who live their entire lives deeply immersed (or submersed) in "American" (i.e. white) values are somehow the ones who don't get it.
3
Goodness, a lot to digest in this column! Mr. Douthat paints a binary picture of American WASP history. As if each and every one of us American WASPs grew up privileged, attending prep schools, boating with the Kennedy gang and had inherent racist tendencies. Such nonsense! WASPs of all economic backgrounds forged this country without a sense of guilt or superior views. My father, a son of a Protestant minister, attended an integrated high school in the 1940s. He grew-up in a middle class neighborhood that had a rich diversity of people. In my view, the greatest contributor to WASP ruling class demise was that deciding decade, the sixties. And the irony of it is WASPs brought it upon themselves. They led the revolt against America’s ruling authority, questioning every premise of power. That’s how history goes.
7
Wrong. There is no nostalgia. Fox is broadcasting George HW's passing as a paean because he was a Republican. CNN and MSNBC are likewise hailing him because they want to contrast Bush, the "good" Republican, with Trump, the "bad" one.
All these George HW Bush "celebrations" are nonsense. Nobody cared about the guy when he was alive; and nobody will care next week, nor beyond. Sorry, but truth.
3
A slight dilution of authority isn't really a disappearance. Demographic shifts probably have more to do with the shift in political power. But, WASPS haven't lost their grip on Government as the current lawsuit involving Harvard's admission and line-up at 41's funeral make obvious.
1
The basic premise is that the "elite" will act as a cohesive group to preserve and perpetuate their existence and in so doing, serve the Country. This may well have been true for a long time, but certainly now it's more everyone for themselves and any idea of what that group identity used to mean, let alone the idea of a "shared responsibility for the greater good" have long fallen by the wayside.
George H. W. Bush served in WW-II and served in combat missions. The idea didn't even extend to his own children when George W. Bush avoided combat duty in Vietnam and remained home under the Texas Air National Guard. But at least he served at all, which is still more than can be said of his successors.
One wonders if there is truly anything to mourn, other than the passing of the myths we may have created for a time that perhaps never really was, we just like to think it did, for nostalgia's sake.
2
I think this is best column Ross Douthat ever wrote for the NYT.
As long as we are going to have an elite, we might as well have one with as few faults as possible.
For all their shortcomings, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and George H.W.Bush left the country in better shape when they left the Oval Office than when they entered the place.
1
If our two main parties were Democrats and RINOs, we would be doing much better. Our current problems are the result of a movement that wants to roll back the New Deal but cannot openly run on that platform. The inevitable result is a politics of deception and propaganda, of the ends justifying the means, of saying one thing and doing the opposite until words lose all meaning and deliberation becomes impossible because the necessary tools have been destroyed. The best example of this is Republican behavior on deficits and debts, condemning them while running them up every time they gain power. Pappy called this voodoo economics.
F.D.R. was a WASP who was a traitor to his class and could not carry the waspiest states in the country. Truman, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, LBJ, and Clinton were WASPS but not members of the WASP aristocracy. JFK was not ASP but was a member of the (by then permeable) aristocracy. Both Bushes were true members of the WASP aristocracy.
What we miss is the sense that our leaders know what they are doing. St. Ronnie projected this sense to part of the country, but the reality was voodoo economics, ignoring AIDS, and portraying as a great threat a country that was falling apart. Newt established the strategy of projecting incompetence and malevolence on any Democrat so that we could have that sense only with Republicans.
What we miss is a country where views like those of the John Birch Society are held by a fringe rather than a major party.
2
@sdavidc9 Ronald Reagan's father was an Irish Catholic. I don't think people would have considered him WASP back in the day.
Douthat lumps Obama in with the "feckless" Clinton, Bush, and Trump. By what definition could Obama be classed as feckless. Obama, a learned, thoughtful, man embodied WASP values of grace under pressure, civility, loyalty to family, and love of country. If his Presidency was not successful, which still is to be determined, it is because every path towards conciliation was blocked by uncompromising anti-democratic, hyper-capitalist, bigoted, hateful, fake Christians in Congress and state houses.
12
I think this is a good start. But it should define civic mindedness in our leadership as a requirement to rule. And to define it, I can start it, but won't finish:
The intention to improve society and the living standards of all citizens affected by the scope of one's government office.
Without such intent, our leadership will always leave us behind.
it's too easy to conflate the WASPy aristocracy of New England and the Middle Atlantic with the overall top class of early America, including slave-owning Southerners (some of whom were of the lower orders such as Frenchmen and - gasp! - Baptists).
now that most of the Thanksgiving leftovers are eaten, we can recall the Pilgrims as the Englishmen they were, who wanted to live in a new world that was basically England, only without the King and the Anglican Church telling them what to do. or costing them any money.
it's probably time to reread E. Digbee Baltzell on the WASP establishment. but miss them?
with their restricted clubs and white shoe businesses and professions, the admissions restrictions, their supercilious superiority, their secret handshakes and open sneers?
like a toothache.
3
@[email protected] Yeah, but many of those restricted clubs are either no longer restricted or have since closed. However, I've noticed that today's members are generally more integrated into the WASP culture, more so than REAL Anglo-Protestants who are a bit...tacky.
@[email protected] : But when others did not think or wish to worship as the Puritans did, those same Puritans who left England in order to make money, worship as they chose without a king telling them what to do and how to pray did precisely the same thing to the newcomers. They banned Quakers, threw Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams out of the colony when they refused to comply with the ruling class. Apparently religious freedom was only for people who prayed they same way they did. They didn't treat the Indians too well either...there are some books about King Phillip's War and the decimation of the native tribes.
If America were the meritocracy Douthat denigrates, he wouldn’t have a NYT column. This column pontificates about a world Douthat, perhaps even his parents, did not inhabit. In fact no one inhabited it, except for a very few meritorious old money WASPs who did the right thing because they respected themselves and others, and who were—and are—not blinded by a tradition of competitiveness that would allow them to win by dint of a Willie Horton ad.
4
It’s not about WASP’s, I think we’re missing any President with a brain and an ounce of decency.
7
How do we categorize Trump? A WASP? Or is he a fake Protestant which would make him a WASFP? Or since he is of German ancestry, does that make him a fake Anglo Saxon too?
Do these questions dwell on trivial points? Well, so does Douthat's essay.
1
Absolutely what we need is More wealty "aristocratic white men in charge. It's worked so well in the past.
5
Ultimately, perhaps what we miss about WASPs is expressed by Halifax about Churchill in Darkest Hour, "He just mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle" - everything that becomes that ability, in any situation, is what we miss. Grasping the situation, clarifying the issues, and expressing the vision in inspiring language - require more than just a village.
1
@KEF And I should not overlook - the total dedication to see it through.
1
Would like to read an actual assessment of soft pantheism, pro and con. And hard panentheism too.
" The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty, and as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry)."
Did this sentence not jump out at many other readers? Typical Douthatism. It's not just that he's religious, prefers Christianity, and despises the trend towards evermore secularism. It's that you all better get onboard with the Catholic theology. How peculiar seeing as he's from a NE WASP family (great-grandfather George Wilbert Snow was governor of Connecticut) and converted twice in his youth- first to Pentecostalism and then to Catholicism. How self-assured and sanctimonious.
And using the term noblesse oblige three times? Obviously that word holds a special place in his Catholic heart, bless him. Maybe he should have the words carved in stone and sitting on the mantel above the living room fireplace.
How this guy continues to be employed by the NYT baffles me, and judging by the comments accompanying every one of his Opinion pieces, the overwhelming majority of the NYT's readership. It's not just that one rarely learns anything new from reading his columns, but that they're painful to read. He should be selling snake oil.
Oh but he's a "conservative" pundit beholden to the Republican party and misses that old time Christian revival era when everyone was in church on Sunday? So he's selling snake oil after all, and the NYT's readers aren't buying any.
2
Mr. Douthat has shown his true colors many times over the years. Simply, Mr. Douthat's racism has no place in the NYTimes (or it should have no place in the NYTimes). I'm sure he can find sufficient employment at the Daily Caller.
5
Yeah. Let them eat cake.
6
Let's look at facts, not opinions.
Barely a week goes by without Ross Douthat gratuitously expressing his contempt for Jimmy Carter, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Now he tells us that "we" are nostalgic for WASPs.
Clearly HE isn't, so where does he get his error that WE are?
3
I am a product of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal which provided me with what I believe is a first class education. I am not a a WASP. Jonathan Swift was a WASP and defined early 18th century WASP culture with his biting satire I think the debate on which end of the egg to crack open was his bulls eye.
The Irish starvation allowed The Economist to enlist God as its defense against feeding those starving in a land of food abundance.
Like everything there is a lot to be said for and against the upper middle class WASP ethos. I respected both the son of Admiral McCain and the son of Senator Bush they were men of honour but when it came to judgement I would much prefer sound judgement to the highest ideals.
1
This may be the worst opinion piece Ross Douthat has ever written. Is he writing in an alternative universe?
Since Bush 41, we have ad four Presidents.
42: Bill Clinton. A white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
43. George W. Bush A white, Ango-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
44. Barack H. Obama. By the definition in which a person who is less than 90%+ white, a Black man, but one whose mother was a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
45. Donald J. Trump. He is by most measures (his mother was Anglo-Saxon, his father German) A White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
So this column is just Douthat still being upset about Obama.
He fails to mention John Kerry, who was a White (Irish) Catholic.
And Mormons consider themselves Protestants, although, clearly, Douthat disagrees. (I admit, I, too, consider them a different type of Christian.)
The idea that we no longer elect WASPs is without basis.
The idea that we used to elect ONLY members of the old Anglo-Saxon New England Upper Class... it was never true.
Starting with FDR... a New Yorker. He did attend Groton and Harvard. Dutch.
Truman. Public High School only.
Eisenhower. German background. Attended West Point.
JFK. Catholic. Attended Harvard.
LBJ. Southern WASP. Public education.
Nixon. WASP. Wittier College after public high school.
.... likewise Ford, Carter, Ronald Reagan were all WASPs, and only Ford attended an Ivy League school.
This entire piece is based on alternative facts.
9
WASP Virtues are Easy To See,
WASP Vices are Blurred or Buried.
21st century nostalgia for the virtues of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment is enabled by white washing their vices. The US public knows the virtues. The vices are blurred or buried or never reported.
Here are two examples from Bush family history.
One, when Bush #41 received his wings in WW2, his father Prescott Bush was to have been indicted for "trading with the enemy".
At Brown Brothers Harriman, partner Prescott Bush was the trustee for Krupp and the Nazi Party in the USA. He continued to act as trustee after the US entered the war. He did not obey the federal law to immediately deliver enemy assets to the federal government; he took his time. That did not make the news; George Bush winning his wings made the news.
Two, Bush #41 improperly traded Zapata stock and bonds in the 1960's and Bush #45 did the same with Harken Energy stock in the 1980's. Bechtel information services, which maintains the SEC archives, has misplaced nearly all the microfiche of documents directly signed by GHWB and GWB. (I've asked repeatedly since 1990.) That may be a coincidence. Maybe Boyden Gray, long time Bush family lawyer, has been successful scrubbing out Bush family dirt from history.
5
@BigGuy. This should be a Times pick !!
1
I have welcomed Mr. Douthat's efforts in recent months to renew the country's commitment to a sense of fundamental values such as hard work, honesty, modesty, respect for others, etc. But as others have noted, by ascribing these values to an acronym that stands for a particular racial, ethnic and religious identity, he risks furthering the argument that the presence of these values in our lives arises exclusively out of our WASP heritage. I doubt Mr. Douthat consciously believes this. Certainly this argument is refuted by countless examples such as the moving stories Michelle Obama relates in her recent book of her father's epic struggles to show up for work every day as multiple sclerosis ravaged his body and her mother's steadfast character in the face of Jim Crow and other efforts to keep African-Americans out of the mainstream. Yes a sense of noblesse oblige can inspire individuals to make a real contribution: but only when it arises out of humble gratitude for one's good fortune and not out of a belief that one has rightfully been born into a privileged caste.
6
Just when you think Ross can't get any funnier or more irrelevant, he proves you wrong. Please, Ross, you are a case study in wannabee patricianism, and your "Brideshead" Catholicism proves it.
3
I can't add to Mr. Douthat's treatise on WSAPs. I think he said it all, even if there is much to disagree with. His words did cause me to remember my late father-in-law. He was a card-carrying WASP. He went to Andover and graduated from Yale. He voted Republican for most of his life. I say 'most,' because in the years before his death, he became a Democrat. He was the first person I heard utter the words: "I didn't leave the Republican party. It left me."
Like President George H.W. Bush, he was a decent, honest man who decided he could no longer support a party that put its own interests ahead of the interests of the country. He didn't live to see Donald Trump occupy the White House, although it probably wouldn't have surprised him. He saw the path his old party was taking and he knew it was the road to hell.
2
Pfffff!
The old WASPs are now mixed race people whose DNA shows Afro, American Indian, and Asian ancestry.
We've gotten over it. Just like the royal family.
It confess tho, I understand why some white nationalists have gone into delusion in order to protect their 3d grade notions about whiteness and its alleged meaning.
You're confusing WASP with intelligent.
1
What a vapid and racist piece. Hard to believe that it is not satire but an actual defense of WASP culture and entitlement. Ross Douthat seems to lack even a most basic understanding of history -- and the blood-stained legacy of his WASP ruling class. The NYT really should install some measure of quality control before publishing such uninformed polemics.
5
@Axel Fair-Schulz
I don't think he meant to lionize whites, Anglo-Saxons, nor Protestants or advocate for their entitlement. You're pretty hasty in supposing him such a great fool. (N.B. I'm not here to lionize or even defend him either. Just his idea on this single occasion.)
If I'm not mistaken he would see all their faults as clearly as you do. But although the putative elite WASP merits were always embodied in just a minority of them, at least that was something. At least the meritorious among them could hold the reins some of the time. And at least they could inspire a sizeable minority of the rest of us schmoes and so spread healthful values. Only snobs and airheads were unaware that it was three-quarters mythology, but it had value in sustaining useful ideals that could help keep human dignity, eternally imperilled, realistically aloft.
Now those merits, once rare, seem gone. Now esteem for those merits, once common, seems rare.
Case in point: Your reflex to pressure his bosses to shut him up. What would you think of me if I suggested comments like yours should be denied publication as "some measure of quality control"? Fairness to all was always in short supply and a truly hazy ideal anyway. But now open opposition to it in favour of 'fairness to those who I say deserve it' is widely considered preferable. Young tyrants of the future salivate at the change in tone.
Not only did the WASPs have more than their chance, they screwed it up. Not for themselves, of course. They have enough in the bank to inherit for generations without having to work. No, they screwed it up for everyone who isn't one of them.
The most unethical bunch of 'decent people' in the history of the world.
What we need to do is claw back most of the money they stole from the nation, and put it towards public education (which of course they have starved during their years in power since they all send their kids to private schools with a gentleman's B and inflated recommendations and the 'Z list' for big donors).
Ross, as a devout Catholic, are you using this provocative title to draw attention away form the horrid new Catholic ruling class, from Scalia to Kavanaugh? They are perhaps more crass, their drinking and sexual harassment and racism more out in the open. But still more interested in themselves than in those they control.
It is time for progress, and by that I mean women, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and African-Americans (and especially Jewish, Asian, Hispanic, and African-American women).
5
So...one white, religious dude missing an era when white religious dude's ruled.
Yeah...no.
It might have been hunky dory for you Ross in you fevered imagination, but for those poc and "others" it sucked. Just as it sucks still. But it is getting better. Two steps forward, one step back. The struggle is real and continues.
You failed to lift all boats Ross. Thus the hoi polloi are climbing into yours.
2
Ross thinks the solution to our country's current ills is more piety and aristocracy? Really? Piety has been the cause of countless wars throughout human history, and remains the fuel that burns the Middle East. And Ross makes quite clear that while he will fudge the Protestant part, he is referring to Christian piety -- so his aristocracy must automatically exclude those of different faith traditions or no faith tradition. It is simply impossible to both diversify the elite and keep piety as a requirement. As for aristocracy, it leads to autocracy very easily. I do not like relying on a rich elite's sense of noblesse oblige to secure the necessities of life -- because the nobility can choose to stop obliging at any time.
What values should the new elite espouse? Let's start with pragmatism. I miss that one. I want to see people in office who see reality clearly, through the lens of science rather than ideology, and choose to do what is most likely to work to solve problems rather than what will feed their followers' ego needs. Humility is a good one too. Recognizing that one's own group is not inherently better than others is a necessary prerequisite for dialogue and compromise. Compassion is essential, and secular humanists are just as capable of it as religious people, whether Ross believes that or not. Piety and aristocracy? No thanks. Give me pragmatism, humility, and compassion.
2
After calming myself over the disdain I have for this column, I realize that beyond the intense prejudice shown the writer of the column is expressly devaluing "me." This writer is prejudiced against me; this writer wants to hurt me.
No, I am not a WASP so I must be devalued, demeaned.
5
Yes. We're coming to the melancholy end of the Anglo-Saxon centuries, as the historian Renee Sedillot once put it.
England, on its own and through its colonies, has been politically, technically, and culturally one of the greatest civilizing forces since the Roman empire. Like the Romans, the English had a gift for organization and government.
It's very hard to imagine a similarly-beneficial force arising out of the chaos, malfunction, murderous fanaticism, cultural backwardness and ignorance rampant in most of the non-Western world.
3
Recreating the sense of unity the country had when it was ruled by a WASP elite while still welcoming modern diversity will be the great challenge of our day. Sadly, diversity without unity is a recipe for war (not only political war, but violent war). Mankind's tribal, violent nature is not something that can be cured by educational or economic prosperity. For a country to function, people need to feel some sense of connection with each other.
Creating a new, diverse country that maintains a sense of unity will not be easy. Creating a racially diverse country that stays unified may not even be possible. But we must realize that our current methods are not working. For a long time progress was being made, but now things are not getting better, they are getting worse.
4
One hardly knows where to begin. As a WASP who graduated Harvard in 1962, I don't recognize the place Douthat fantasizes nor the one he seems to think exists today.He is talking about P values, because the WAS doesn't explain the alliance between the Ivy League and the civil rights movement, which was real. Nor do all WASPs have old money.
Moreover, by the time Harvard reformed its cooptive system of ultimate governance, which had served it well for a very long time, that group included a southern girl from Memphis -- admittedly Protestant.
I think what Douthat is actually mourning with George H.W. Bush is not WASPs -- don't Bill and Hillary qualify? -- but the presence of a certain moral compass in American political leadership. Problem is, I'm not sure that it was reliably there. I will agree with Dr. King that the arc of history has trended that way -- at least from Brown v. Board of Education to 2016 -- but the needle rarely held steady on the true north. Nor were all the good helmsmen WASPs. Some of those leaders Douthat classes as WASPs were bounders, or worse. Some of the good guys would never have made it into Hasty Pudding, or Skull and Bones.
On balance I think Douthat misses what used to be called civic virtue -- which WASPs sometimes displayed, but had no monopoly on. Given the current President and his band of thieves, one can understand Douthat's nostalgia.
5
@Howard Eddy Please read the earlier comment regarding George H W Bush's father (Prescott) and the 'trading with the enemy' (Nazi party). He does not appear to have been overly concerned with civic virtue and patriotism.
So how exactly, did the old Establishment of the last century, get established? It arose from the ashes (actually, the heirs) of the Robber Barons. Many of the elite institutions arose in the early 1900s, and were promoted / financed by the nouveau riche, albeit they were seeking the status of the previous generation of Aristocrats, who were overtaken by the copious amounts of cash flaunted by the nouveau riche.
This was the First Fall of the really old Establishment. Then came the Great War and, may I say it, Great Disillusionment, followed by the Great Hedonism, also known as the Roaring 20s, the First Fall of the new old Establishment.
Then, the Great Depression, and World War II. During this time a Revolution took place in our thinking that ultimately led to the Revolutionary 1960s, and Civil Rights. But this idealism did not last, and gave way to the Me generation which eventually morphed into our current Meritocracy.
(notice the Me in Meritocracy). Round and round the Establishment goes, and where it stops? Nobody knows!
2
Well done! But today's leftist anti-establishment types also rebel against the core values and history of society--as the stuff of "dead white males." Meanwhile, GOP is trying to remake itself and society on the flawed assumption that mass participation in free markets can hold everything together. Both Brooks and Douthat are raising the core issues of today: how do we hold society together? (It is more than just markets and rage against a fading white male establishment.)
Holding society together requires that diversity be accepted and included, unless one wishes to bar some types from "proper society", as in days of yore. Leftists, as you call them, are not opposed to core values like kindness, welcome, honesty, and justice. We just want those things extended to all members of society.
6
From our classics lessons, the most appropriate metaphor is Plato’s cave. Plato envisioned political leaders (philosopher-kings) being cloistered and trained to serve the nation, not themselves.
There is nothing particularly White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) about Plato’s philosophy, many peoples have this model including China and India. In fact Plato and his teacher were deeply influenced by currents from the East.
Our nation is in trouble because somehow we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that CEOs have the temperament to govern. We are lost in the cave without a shining light to show us the way out.
3
I'd rather be stuck at the bottom of Plato's cave, seeing reality as merely shadows on the wall... than caught in Trump's Tower, where there is no reflected reality, merely the projection of synthetic lies.
1
Except they had slaves in the time of Sophocles. That’s what the conservative philosopher kings of today would move us back to.
As an immigrant, I must say that it was the WASP culture, along with the Constitutional values, that made us love America as we worked hard to get here.
I have been mourning the extinction of the WASP for years.
They might have been an exclusionary elite, but their unfailing graciousness to “outsiders” was a lovely balm when interacting with them.
It is sad to see a ruling elite voluntarily give up power without a fight.
They were too good to survive. God help us now.
6
I grew up in Montreal and learned WASP history at the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. I learned the culture and the mores of a culture very different from my own. I remember how much I enjoyed Monty Python and the men who brought the playing fields of Eton to life and the great line delivered by Denis Moore the Highway Man, "This redistribution of wealth is not as simple as it seemed."
We buried John McCain and we are burying George HW Bush but I will not miss the culture or its victims. England will not miss Boris Johnson as much as it doesn't miss Malcolm Muggeridge.
All the education and reverence for philosophy, history and ancient culture hasn't stopped as Swift so well put it stopped the debate on which side of the egg to crack open.
I read the Economist written at the time of the Irish starvation and why we should let them die and blame the gods for our natural order.
I am with the Ontario Teachers Federation which advocated renaming all the monuments celebrating our first Prime Minister "Sir" John A Macdonald. Trump is right the US has evolved as much in his short two years than in the previous hundred. I may not like where he is taking you but the values of the WASP upper middle class were destroying your future. Dictatorship of the unreasoned is frightening.
I respected Bush and McCain but their judgement doesn't suit our times. Here in Quebec it is the middle-class and mostly the women who are leading us in to the future. It is working well.
4
The more Trumpism dominates the right wing and the levers of power, the more Ross has to blame liberals. This is precisely why the right can never self-correct.
8
why should they need to correct when they believe they are already in the right?
I think this misses the point. WASPs were fairly representative of the population they ruled and so the system was fine. Other cultural currents wanted representation but were too small to demand it. They aren't anymore, but they also aren't large enough to fully kill off the old order. Therefore we are stuck in limbo until the transition is complete and a new aristocracy that actually represents a supermajority of the new demographic make up of the country. I don't believe that it was the WASPs giving up their power. If anything the smart people that go to our elite institutions that weren't full of implicit biases against minorities realized the need for change and embraced it to retain power in the new order.
1
Ross, things are relative. People are coming together to mourn GHWB because the last two GOP presidents have redefined terrible successively, one of whom was genetically quite similar to the deceased.
6
Speak for yourself. I, representing a member of the “we” of the USA, do not miss the WASPs one bit (and I am one myself). I far prefer the growing diversity.
6
We do not have a meritocracy or a WASP elite. We have an overclass defined by great wealth. The greatest predictors of success in America are the income level of your parents and the Zip Code you grew up in.
For all the blathering about "white privilege", we never hear serious discussion about class privilege. Wonder why.
3
Just reading the title and the catch line set me off. Does Douthat not understand how offensive this is? One can admire George Bush's fine qualities, but he was not perfect. This is just not the appropriate time to list the actions and decisions that did not exemplify the integrity and decency that are being honoured today. All individuals and therefore all groups are capable of fine characters and also of ill will. It has nothing to do with being WASP or not. As a member of a minority group that is not visible, I heard stories about the polite and not so polite anti-Semitism of such people from my parents and have experienced it myself. Remember that there was a time albeit long ago when there were signs that read "No Irish (Catholics), Jews or dogs" as if they were all equivalent, not bothering to mention visible minorities who were expected to know their place at the back of the bus. The current president is as I understand it a WASP and the embodiment of the antithesis to all of those attributes talked about here.
WASPs have no monopoly on decency. The Establishment of bygone years closed the doors of progress and power to all who were not like them and maintained the Old Boys' Network for many years beyond the Civil Rights Act and progress of women, minorities, the LGBT community and others.
So, Ross, think again.
7
@Judy Trump isn't a WASP, he's a German!
1
. Mr. Douthat’s enthusiasm for hierarchy, caste, social elites, and WASP innate meritocracy is betrayed by his curious use of “ruling class” and “caste” to identify the WASP hegemony of American popular culture, politics, and the arts. He mourns the loss of WASP dominance catalyzed by a century of multi-ethnic immigration that changed everything about America’s ideas of merit.
He trips on the fallacy of supposing WASP virtues and talent are the natural consequence of being WASP. By analogy, any fool can see that there were almost no 19th century female physicians because only men have talent for medicine.
Natural talent exist in all individuals. It is innate and is not a consequence of race or some Puritan fantasy of being among the Chosen through God’s grace.
Talent and virtuous character can bloom in all “Mr. Douthat’s “castes” when it is “nurtured” by society. For two centuries , WASP “rulers” reserved to themselves the social resources for nurturing individual talent. They then concluded they were the “Chosen”.
When Mr. Douthat substitutes “ruling class” for “governing class” and “caste” for “economic class”, he illuminates his own parvenu status by aping Henry James’ view of the New England WASP as the last and only reservoir of virtue and excellence in America. He celebrates caste and perpetuated privilige rather than social mobility through merit.
4
George HW Bush is looked upon with nostalgia so the columnist goes to his favorite subject...tribes...and decides that Bush's tribe is the reason Bush is a nostalgic figure.
2
As with all nostalgic nonsense, this article harks back to a time and place that never existed except in the mind of the writer. The current crop of "elites" are no better or worse than those who came before.
3
Really? I think the WASPs miss the WASP rule. There has been a big change in the gender and color and, yes, faiths of those in the ruling chambers and it is a good change! But like all change, it takes a while for evaluation and recognition of what will work best in the new environment. I hope we will get to the point where these changes are no longer remarked upon as unusual, but simply are a matter of life as it is. When I think about George H.W. Bush and the change from his time, I think it is mainly about service to country that is NOT based upon personal enrichment of wealth and power. I sincerely believe that Geo HW Bush served his country out of love for his country, not thirst for power, wealth, or revenge. I am not sure the same could be said for his son. But no one is so nakedly opportunistic for oneself than the man currently living in The White House. It is extremely demoralizing.
1
No, we don’t.
Our current dreadful President is a WASP. Our current dreadful Senate Majority Leader is a WASP. Our superb President from 2009 to 2016 wasn’t a WASP.
We miss decency, compassion, belief in science and respect for the rule of law, not whiteness, Anglo-Saxon DNA or Protestantism.
8
@bergfan TRUMP is NOT a WASP! His father was German and his mother, while Scots, was pretty much FOB. Not that that's anything against him (although its all pretty rich given his anti-immigrant mania). But the Trumps never belonged to the Eastern Establishment, not by a long shot...
1
Many characters in Chekhov's and Strindberg's and Shakespeare's plays are what is often referred to as aristocratic - landed gentry, moneyed power, possessed of a rich lineage which both helps and hinders them and on balance usually hinders them. Is their society one which we might care to go back to? And I think the dominant WASP society learned cultural norms and social values from Jews, Catholics and dare I say it, African-Americans and others as well. It works both ways, Ross!
2
I apologize for not having the time to read all 1,001 comments that precede mine, but isn't Trump a white Presbyterian from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, having spent time in his youth at a military school and the preppy Ivy League Wharton School of Business (albeit the undergrad program, which he forgets to mention) at UPenn?
8
Pull this. The "opinion" section is not an excuse to publish ahistorical fantasy in the paper of record.
10
Are we supposed to be grateful for the parenthetical afterthought "(and more women)"?
6
Because they used Willie Horton as a bogeyman to win the Presidency; because they put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and claimed the move "had nothing to do with race"; because they hadn't seen a supermarket aisle in half a century; because they waged covert and then overt wars in the service of the oil industry. I mean, need I go on about the legacy of this dying breed?
5
This strikes me as the most awful of Mr. Douthat's generally awful body of work. Equating WASPness with all that is righteous and good is a bizarre caricature, beyond offensive. And his blithe notion that "we" long for the good old days. My god.
9
The more I have thought about this column since reading it earlier today, the more disturbing I find it. It seems to long for the good old days when WASPs and no one else was in charge or had legal rights equal to theirs. Do we really want to go back to the days of Jim Crow and lynching? To return to times when women lacked any rights or the vote? Or when Jews were routinely excluded? All those things existed and were accepted on the watch of the WASP men who were in charge. The good old days were not good for many, if not most, of our fellow citizens.
Barack and Michelle Obama, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and a host of other non-WASP Americans exemplify the best in character, leadership, and patriotism. We are all the better for a diverse America and diverse leadership.
7
Ross Douthat must feel like his primary purpose as an opinion columnist is to be a piñata for the comments section. How much of this column does he have to spend qualifying the point he wants to make and still have room to make the point? It would be refreshing if more commenters admitted that they're no more capable of considering an alternative opinion than are Trump supporters in MAGA hats. Possibly a touch more articulate, but that's about it.
The elephant missing in this article is patriarchy - specifically white patriarchy. One can only look nostalgically at WASP “achievement” if you are a WASP and a male.
6
The Noblesse Oblige was really a way of self preservation.
Fresh air camps get the lower class idle kids out of the city so they do not explode on a hot summer days. Community chests, a way of doling out money to subdue a problem without having to get your shoes dirty. Nothing wrong with that. I take enlightened self interest over what we have no with our know nothing president and his ilk. Lets just be honest about it.
1
It's 2018, and I'm having a difficult time believing that The Times would even publish this pabulum.
Douthat quoting Beinart: "...the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes — before the age of presidential sex scandals, plurality-winning and popular-vote-losing chief executives, and white resentment of the first black president."
Presidents had sex outside of their marriages throughout our history. Plurality-winning and popular-vote-losing presidents has been a feature of Republican presidents, not Democrats.
Other challenges such as White resentment of Obama have not been a function of the lessened primacy of WASPs or their 'culture.' They have been a function of unresolved deficiencies in American community, civics, and culture - deficiencies that have largely been stoked, preserved, fomented, fermented, and exploited for the last 50 years by conservatives, including George H.W. Bush (see: Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas).
Most non-WASPs elevated to national leadership were acculturated within and/or with proficiency in the ways of WASP culture. Black folks for sure know that we have to maintain a bullet-proof (literally) patina of 'respectability' (see: Obama family), and I say all of that as a Saint Grottlesex and Ivy alumnus who got and excelled there through merit and took my mother's advice to "be the best token you can be and figure out how these people run the world; take what you need and leave the rest."
4
This is a least the third OpEd I've seen about GHWB and how great the WASPs are. Each one reads like it must be a prank. For a conservative establishment that complains so much about identity politics, it's so embarrassing that they have SO LITTLE self awareness as to praise a man's ethnicity and religion as the most important thing about him.
4
In paragraph 2, it is a little disturbing how casually Douthat acknowledges the fact that his party considered Obama illegitimate simply because he was black. So we are supposed to be nostalgic for H.W. Bush because racists were ok with WASPS?
4
Trump is WASP...
Oye Vey
I suggest reading "The Protestant Establishment : Aristocracy and Caste in America" by E. Digby Baltzell. This book was published 1964 so it just missed Vietnam which seemed to be the death knell for the old establishment. One of the major points of the book was anti-semitism, which seemed so common among them from the latter part of the 19th century until the post WWII period.
Baltzell viewed an aristocracy as good and necessary for society in that it would be the group that could point a society in constructive directions. In his formulation an aristocracy would be open and inclusive of those who rose through society by means of talent and accomplishments. A caste on the other hand builds walls around itself and is more interested in keeping people out.
4
Is this a joke?
WASP culture at its best, while relatively tolerant of women and other ethnicities, never really believed they were their equals. That alone is enough to be rid of them.
Judging by his personal life and choices, I still believe that when Thomas Jefferson wrote, "all men are created equal", what he really meant was all white male landowners were equal. It is past time to move on from this sentiment.
4
What Ross is saying is that there is no room for poor people in the "Establishment."
3
I don't buy the notion that WASPs are missed at all. Many of the trappings of their wealth and status still remain in full effect.
This article is absurd on it's face.
We can do much better than nostalgically look back to a time when this elitism was accepted. America belongs to ALL Americans. That includes power sharing and institution building.
3
Will conservatives ever get over their daddy complex?! Class confused dupes like Dhouhat swoon over do-nothing seat-warmer leadership so long as it’s male, lean, pasty-faced, decked out in musty tweeds and admonishes us to mind our manners. The starry-eyed neocon and the corporate media blissfully ignore wars and scandal alike when smitten by an authority figure bearing Nantucket Reds and boat shoes. For those of us not to the manor born, this form of leadership was far more insidious precisely because of its genteel facade. Amidst all the teary eyed media coverage of GHW Bush, nary a mention of war, scandal or the race- baiting destruction of a much finer man, Michael Dukakis who was dispatched by Bush’s henchmen for the audacity of a swarthy ethnic crashing the country club. Please note: Not a single mention of any Bush legislation designed to uplift the working class American. Alas, too great a fiction for even his most fawning fan. No punditry about Clarence Thomas as Bush’s Cavanaugh. Lest we recall the carnage wrought by the “Best and the Brightest “ Ivy finishing schools for the ruling class whose family fortunes were secured by earlier generations of impolite and unspoken dirty deeds and exploitation. The conservatives who pine for a Great White Father fail to understand that the difference between the Mandarins and Donald Trump is only a matter of presentation not product.
4
There is no fancy way to say this. However, absent mentioning the human flaws of Bush and his ilk, (and bestowed on us all in some measure) there is a distinct quality to Bush that is aptly deserving of nostalgia. The service, statesmanship and modesty with which he lived his life may have been an easier reach for him than for someone who didn't have all of his advantages. Yes his WASP lineage & wealth gave him a leg up. But I will say, for sure, that upbringing and instilling a deep sense of gratitude is KEY to who he was, both because of and in spite of his heritage . The lesson here for the rest of us? "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Sadly, too many of us fall into the former camp.
You think we're now living in a meritocracy, Ross? Funny, to many of us it still seems like really wealthy, white, pseudo-Christains hold nearly all the levels of power.
I'm not sure you can actually comprehend what that term is supposed to mean.
2
Mr. Douthat’s hostility to other religions than Catholic (meaning Roman Catholic and therefore not truly universal) is evidence of the ongoing problems that religions create. Unfortunately they do not seem to be going away and insofar as they undergird the thinking of theoretically intelligent columnists we continue to be bombarded with their inbred prejudices.
Surely the Times can find columnists free of such obvious prejudices and open up its site to more broadly considered analysis.
And as I continue to think about Mr Bush, it is hard to forget that he was the VP for the profoundly anti-intellectual Ronald Reagan- who began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And of course Poppy Bush had no true philosophical center of his own - certainly not the WASP wisdom mourned in the column - as his alliance with Lee Atwater demonstrates.
Presidents represent the nation of the moment not the projected and romanticized ideology of the past.
5
@George Thomas. I cannot think of anything that G HW Bush did as President, that would qualify as outstanding, exceeds expectations, etc. Really hope we don't see more Bushes achieving public office. GW was surely one of the worst (in the bottom half dozen) and I cannot think of Jeb without recalling the ghastly Terri Schiavo incident.
I do not care about "WASP" or "non-WASP." I want leaders who are honest, capable, decent human beings, committed to improving the welfare if our country, above everything else. And such leaders can arise anywhere. Pay attention to reality.
2
Without idealizing the former generations of America's ruling class, we would be foolish not to recognize the virtues of a culture that is increasingly lost to us. I miss their abhorrence of conspicuous consumption, their self discipline, stiff upper lip, lack of vulgarity, gracious manners, and unwillingness to break up their families for trophy wives. The New York Times front page is daily covered with the likes of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. I watched Rudolph Giuliani escort a woman swathed in gold lame to President Bush's service this morning. I miss them a great deal.
3
It's not so much that I miss the WASPs. I miss having a president with the fiber to put his life on the line for his country when he felt morally compelled to do so, and then not be so anxious to send others to possibly die for ulterior reasons. I miss having a president that would knowingly damage himself politically for what he considered the good of the country. I greatly admired President George H.W. Bush.
Then, there's George W. Bush. I still can't reconcile that fact. Maybe some things are beyond comprehension.
Why do we have to acquiesce to the existence of an ossified ruling class? I don't see how that benefits us in any way.
4
Though I often have issues with Mr. Douthat's opinions, I think this is a piece that should be considered.
After all, anyone familiar with American history ought to recognize what he is talking about in, say, the group of men that Walter Isaackson wrote about in The Wise Men " ...six close friends who shaped the role their country would play in the dangerous years following World War II. They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos ..."
And, imperfect as they were, the Founding Fathers as well.
3
Competency and a commitment to the idea and value of service, seem to be the missing elements.
Certainly the current incumbent is at least as white, anglo-saxon, protestant and at least as privileged as his predecessors.
1
"And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended...."
And yet, many millions died during this period in horrific, and sometimes needless, wars. That seems to be the one depressing constant, despite constant transformations in the ethnic and cultural makeup of America's leaders.
1
Don't hate the players hate the game. It isn't that the quality of leadership has changed, It is our political system that has been dramatically changed to be more partisan and divisive. The competition for funds and the closed two-party system rewards extremist politicians.
Until we get money out of politics, overturn citizens united and bring back bribery laws; and, unless we change our electoral process so that it isn't controlled by the two parties, we won't see great leadership, just more partisanship and gridlock.
2
Douthat here manages to assert a need for an elite and religious faith, against "the dubious ideal of “merit.”"
He does that even thought it was an elite that did not include him, and a religious faith that is not his.
He presumes he could have gotten bootstrapped in somehow, which seems to make it okay to him.
His main argument is that “merit” is a "dubious ideal" because it was not done well. In what way not well? It replicated an elite. But he likes elite.
It did not replicate religious faith. He notes that extensively. That is his real argument, stripped down.
Sorry, no, the problems we have today are not from lack of old time religion.
7
Who needs stand-up comedy when “thinkers” like Douthat do it while seated.
7
"...the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes..." Does the rise of the fiery right wing radio hosts in the early 90s and Fox in 96 have anything to do with that???
2
While he isn't a Protestant, Brett Kavanaugh is an excellent example of a WASP who rules according to tribalism and embraces establishment elitism. I would wonder where he falls in this analysis but then I know that for Ross attempted rape is ok as long as you want to use the law to stop any victim from getting an abortion.
5
@Greg Jones. Right - Kavanaugh has one rule for the people who are in, or conceivably could join, his 'network' and another for the rest of us.
Of course, who "we" is matters. I am not sure the poor who were ignored by the WASPs, or the people of color who were actively oppressed because of their color miss rule by WASPs all that much....
3
What if we don't want to be ruled?
9
I'm white, anglo-saxon ... and somewhere on the atheist/agnostic/buddhist spectrum.
I sure don't see GHWB as a proof of value in white-shoes "meritocracy," Yale and boola-boola. He came from privilege and used it, and he produced, and did not restrain, a horrible dim-bulb son who did far more damage to this country than the father did good.
All of the current gushy beatification of his old-school "decency" completely ignores the dirty bits, Willie Horton included, and his utter failure to protect America from his worst spawn: his son and the "B-treamers" Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
12
WASPs are called evangelicals now. They're not suddenly missed just because they changed their branding.
3
Barack Obama is the most decent, classiest and "WASP" president the US has had in a long time. But he is hated by 20-30% of the population for one reason only - the colour of his skin.
I agree with many of the other commenters. This piece is utter drivel.
14
I don’t miss the Wasps. They haven’t give us a chance to miss them. Wake me up when they aren’t in charge.
7
Omg i thought i was the only one. I wish the WASPs were never superseded.
1
Let’s face it : WASP’s took charge of the this country from the get go : they took the land from the natives and gave it out for nothing to the white settlers . Moreover , they built a slave economy where cotton was King and black slaves were good only for their Slave labor.
Yale, baseball and riches are still king and the Bush family had all of these . However , Things got so bad that the only way for George Bush to get into Yale was as a legacy. His doorbell never connected . The Rich are white and male are still are the keys to our kingdom
5
WASPs are alive and well but unfortunately they lost power and influence to the non-New England's WASEs (E for Evangelicals) in the 80s. Of course, the WASPs were never perfect (see Herbert Walker Bush, a good and decent man of public service) but they had many virtues which actually made America Great. The WASEs, on the other hand, is the group who is clueless on how to keep America great (I'm putting it as politely as I can; you all know their policies and intentions, which ultimately resulted in the election of Trump in the White House). The WASEs did not accomplished this alone, they used a fraction of New England's WASPs to promote their agenda (Hannity, O'Reilly, other FOX News' hosts and many others). There are many differences between the WASPs and the WASEs and remember that Herbert Walker Bush was not very liked by the WASEs!
3
George H W Bush was a great man and a good president. I voted for him. He was the last republican I voted for after Newt Gingrich came thundering in to Washington in 1994 to take back Congress. His ability to stoke anger and nurture wedge issues has continued to tear our country asunder to this day. We don’t need latter -day WASPS to lead, we need centrists to meet in the middle.
1
Why is it that none of these comments are calling out this op-ed explicitly for what it is: White supremacy.
The people he so nostalgically wants to run the country are the same people that thought Vietnam, ignoring climate science, and deregulating the financial system were all great ideas. They weren't any more competent than the people running the country now, they were just less honest about their intentions. The only thing that makes them different from the people running the country now is that they're White. How is that any different from what we have now anyway?
But this op-ed is clear. What they want is White supremacy, to maintain the White, wealthy aristocracy, and undo the hard-fought gains of the last 60 years in civil rights.
10
Ross's article is intriguing, with its circuitous arguments.
To simplify, I am NOT nostalgic for any of the elements of the WASP "establishment." I want those leading and managing our government to be ELITES. But ONLY in the sense that they are:
Highly knowledgeable and intelligent, so they can navigate the enormous complexities of our 21st century world--regardless of their race or religion or class background.
Self-disciplined and virtuous, able to serve the public good above their narrow self-interest--whether they got that way through a religion or just being a decent person.
Wise in the use of power, so they can successfully confront non-virtuous forces (called "evil" by most religions, such as corporate greed, willful destruction of the planet, destruction of standards of truthfulness, etc.). We need leaders who can reshape our institutions to work unambiguously for the greater good.
To culture this, we need top-quality education, protection of the environment, the elimination of poverty and its traumatic effects, education in the emotional intelligence needed to develop the virtues--for ALL of our citizens.
This is the exact opposite of today's Republican party--sneering at all forms of "elistism" and excellence; overlooking corruption, greed, entitled lust, and even murderous violence; inclusive only of WASP [or at least W] males; always shoveling more money and power to the already-wealthy, etc.
4
Ross - I read your articles regularly, but to be honest, I can never quite figure out what you are trying to say. Your writing is just not clear. Be more direct, more forthright, stop using vague terminology. I'm a well educated guy, analytical, CPA, well read in classics, history and theology - but for the life of me, I consistently struggle to understand your writing.
3
The column in a nutshell - wasp men own 90% of the wealth, power and resources. The 10% we’ve shared with the rest of humanity has clearly caused a decline in our standards and caused all of our current problems.
5
A certain group of individuals had their time in the sun. They did more damage than good and now their time is over.
Anyone who sheds a tear for them doesn't have America's best interests at heart.
3
This 60-year-old lifelong liberal thinks this column should be required reading for all. I don't accept all of Mr. Douthat's statements - no, Mr. D., pressing for diversity is not a "fixation" - and have no illusions about the current GOP's depths of depravity, but this column lays bare a truth that should be thoughtfully considered by any thinking person. There was certainly a time when more of our leaders felt some compunction to answer a higher calling than personal gain, and the loss of that is unquestionably to our detriment.
3
As a WASP I am always slightly amused when others refer to themselves as "ethnic" as if I am not also. (!) I do value many of the WASP virtues I grew up with, especially kindness to others and good manners - which go together a lot. However I am under no illusions that all was perfect and that the exclusivity and sadly openly bigoted beliefs caused so much pain. On the other hand, times have changed, especially as people are not so segregated by class or background. I do often think that WASPS are the recipients of much projection by non-WASPS. ( that we are snooty, prejudiced, elitist, cold and aloof. )
I am proud of my WASP background & values but it doesn't make me smarter or better than anyone else.
I think the contrast between GHW Bush and Trump has made us nostalgic for a time when there was a gentleman in the White House who exhibited the best of WASP virtues.
1
@gf. Well, his son GW was also an Ivy League grad and a virtuous gentleman, no scandal etc but one of the absolute worst presidents. He had the form but lacked substance.
This is the dangerous nonsense that is at the core of all bigotry, that one group has a monopoly on integrity and character.
9
In wishing for a ruling class, a "power elite", Douthat reveals his conservative ideology to be essentially anti-democratic.
6
And what I miss the most is the WASP respect for common sense, logic and reality. A few days ago, Ms. Ocasio Cortiz, darling of the Progressive movement, announced that the Pentagon had "lost" 32 trillion dollars and, lo and behold, this was just the sum needed to supply Medicare for all. Now I think Medicare for All is worth considering, but a fast glance at Ms. Cortiz's anouncement reminded me that the entire annual federal budget is just under 4 trillion dollars. Does it seem likely that we can spend 16 times that amount annually for health care? Does it seem likely that the Pentagon made accounting errors involving more money than they've gotten since the American Revolution? Do you not know, or just not care, Ms. Ortiz, in the name of some vague wish to raise the entire world to American standards of living? It's the utter disrespect for accuracy and logic that gets to me, traits which the old WASP establishment respected even as, okay, they sure had their prejudices, just like the rest of us. But they also could run a country efficiently. Look around you: do you see an alternative ethos?
3
Any piece that begins with the premise of one group 'ruling' the other is fatally flawed. Period.
11
Good God. Really? This is perhaps one of the most disturbing articles I've read recently. I can track both sides of my parentage to the late 1600s in the 'colonies'. I come from slave traders and Quakers. Proud of some, deeply disturbed by others. Let's not guild what shouldn't glisten.
8
No, I don't.
Never shed a tear for the old white male Protestant elite. Competence and decency are lacking from current politics. Let's elect people who exemplify both. That is very different from wishing a return to an outmoded social order.
3
Bottom line, I want the product of the meritocracy operating on my heart, not of the artistocracy. I don't care what gender, race, religion or ethnic origin.
I trust them more than those who've inherited their place in society to know that we all succeed when everyone does.
4
George H.W. Bush was not a very good President. There, I said it. I honestly do not understand the hoopla over the last few days...he was a bad President, his campaign produced one of the most racist campaign advertisements in history, one that all other racist ads are measured against. He presided over an economic recession and accomplished little while in office. I don't wish we had more WASPs in office, and I do not belatedly appreciate bad Republicans, no matter how moderate. Eisenhower remains the last Republican President who has gained my respect. The press about G.H.W. Bush over the past week has just been a bunch of whitewashing. Read these articles today, and you'd think he stands among the greatest political figures in American history. He doesn't, and all the talk about how good a man he was...again...i point you to Willie Horton.
5
There is a strong but preposterous implication here that the only president in recent memory to win both the popular election and electoral college is 'illegitimate", simply because he is not white.
This race-baiting rhetoric is why our country is so divided. Obama won by any calculation of the votes, because he was popular enough that most people voted for him.
The GOP's base is a fringe party comprised primarily of white male boomers who will indubitably be outnumbered in the coming years. Farewell to this tired line of thinking - one can only hope Mr. Douthat can adapt better than his seniors to the new America.
3
I grew up next store to a WASP family in Bergen County, New Jersey in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. They were members of the Social Register and took this very seriously. They had maids and a lot of money. We were of Irish decent but our surname sounded more Protestant than Catholic. They wanted to know if we were related to those in the Social Register who were the Protestant branch of the clan. At first they were disappointed but they grew to like us in spite of this. They realized that we were decent people and behaved ourselves. We did not have wild parties or drink. We became very close and finally one day the father said we were nice for Irish people. My parents laughed and did not take it personally. They understood where they were coming from. They were lovely people really and grew up in a different world.
They trusted my family and we did fit in to their social circle even if we were not wealthy people. Their family members liked us and trusted us. They knew we were honest and even gave us a key to their home in an emergency. The more we got to know these people the more we understood where they came from. They never once looked down on us and they treated us like family. They were of the old school but the children did not care much for the WASPY ways. They were a bit more down to earth than the parents.
I must say that I would prefer these neighbors today more than those who are the newly rich. They are insincere.
2
Trump is the Uber-WASP .... (and so is Jared in style and substance)
i.e. what happened to the WASPs when confronted with diversity, meritocracy — they went full Alt-Right
The sad part is how the UberWASPs conned Kennedy Democrats (Catholics, Hispanics, Upper Midwest) out of their own interests because of abortion.
3
Ross, Ross.
It's not about White. It's not about Anglo-Saxon. It's not about Protestant.
It's about the set of rules we agree to live by here in this immigrant nation. It's about our shared Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and the checks and balances, and the three branches of mutually respectful government, and about the independent press-- and it's about the expanding (until Trump) desire for tolerance of people different from oneself.
It's about a way of life in which we reach beyond our individual experiences to enjoy the fruits of our shared labor.
We don't need a WASP governing class to get those things. But we do need respect for the concept of the public good, a sense of shared values, and a determination to make this country the best it can be for the greatest number.
8
Douthat, perhaps smitten by occasional forays into the world of the patrician elite, has invented complete fiction! Far from benevolent paternalism having been overtaken by self-serving meritocrats, the benevolent meritocrat Barack Obama was replaced by a self-serving scion of a family that with a bit of effort could have found a niche among the blue-bloods. (It was only because he was an ill-behaved idler that Trump was packed off to military school and not to Groton.)
It's preposterous to conclude from the contrast between Trump and Bush Sr. that the people of this country would be better off being governed by "our betters" in class. We need leaders of integrity and intelligence, regardless of their social origin. Cynics and cap-doffers alike might find the ancient Greek idea of rule by aristocracy appealing given our current situation, but what we should really be doing is investing in services such as public education in order to make meritocracy work.
9
Competence and civility. I miss these things.
7
Nonsense, from start to finish. First, the WASPs have not left the halls of economic and political power, and they still pull most of the strings.
Much more important, however, is that the Eden of WASP-y rule Mr. Douthat and those he cites celebrate was a symptom, not a cause.
The bipartisanship and relative decorum of a few decades ago reflected lessening income inequality from the Great Depression through the 1960s.
What we have now reflects the increasing income inequality we have had since.
Like all neoconservatives, Mr. Douthat likes to concentrate on the cultural screens that are used to advance exploitative economic agendas, rather than on the exploitation.
As two great WASP presidents, trust buster Teddy Roosevelt and New Dealer Franklin D. Roosevelt understood, the fundamental issues are, and will always remain, economic.
12
Douthat needs a dictionary, at the very least, if he believes that we are living in a "meritocracy". A meritocracy would be a good thing. Look it up, Ross. Always know the meanings of the words you use.
9
The male WASP ruling class had its virtues, its true. And it is unfair to them to deny them their just due. They did articulately ideals that we still honor, and designed, created, and built the country that has survived massive changes pretty well.
What Douthat seems to be saying is that the WASP should not have given up their elite status, they should have opened their ranks to women, people of color, and non-Protestants, and found a way in incorporate them into their class, integrate them into their institutions, without running away, or hunkering down behind the barricades until they were overwhelmed. Well, it didn't happen that way. They didn't invite the black family who bought the house next door to their barbecue, they just moved away.
Deep down, perhaps, they believed that their solidarity, their status, their dominance was built primarily and fundamentally on them being WHITE, MALE, ANGLO-SAXON, and PROTESTANT. Admit the Slavs and the Italians, the Jews and the Catholics, the Africans and the Asians, and the WASP ruling class would no longer be WASP. Their identity was built on the assumption that white, male, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant were BETTER than the alternatives.
What Douthat wishes had happened was never going to happen. Good if it had ... ? Well, if wishes were horses ...
7
No. The WASPs are who bamboozled and ushered the country to this boiling point of divisiveness today.
7
Our new concept of "merit" seems to be charisma. To become President it is best not to have a lot of experience as a Governor, Senator or Member of an Administration. I don't see SAT scores as deciding factors in government or business these days. It is not just that the old establishment seemed to have paid their dues, they had some experience and accomplishments. Presidents in this century seemed to be chosen by television Q scores. In the last century, when they got into office they seemed to know what to do and how to work with others.
7
Method of creation of a new ruling class for America (supposing of course power must always be held by an elite) to replace the decline of WASP establishment?
The only sensible method of creating such a class, a method which inspires respect in the population for the ruling class, is the method of devising strenuous mental, psychological, physical, creative tests for admittance into such a class. I am speaking of a testing of character, mettle, intelligence beyond mere education, I am speaking of tests which are so difficult that they inspire awe in the citizenry and force them to admit that some people indeed are deserving of having the final answer in all things political and economic in American life.
As things stand now, and as they of course have been in the human past, ruling power is rarely equivalent to actual and obvious merit for rule. For every Lincoln we get ten much lesser human beings. The production line of the elite in society must improve dramatically in quality, especially in an age in which most everybody receives an education and therefore begins to ask why exactly it is such and such a person deserves to rule, hold power over everybody else when everybody is essentially close to equivalent in education and ability. The answer can only be dramatically improved education and special testing set aside for the most likely prospects of success in this testing, again testing so strenuous that the public accepts its leaders, knows them to be the true elite.
1
Omg! we had wasps as leaders into the 1970s, and our memories of leaders is better than our current judgement so ipso facto we miss the wasps! there are many more likely attributable factors to our sense of decline. the change in society from industrial to informational. changes to our democratic senses caused by the end of the cold war. Were our leaders truly more valued in the 1840s, the 1900s the 1930s? give me a break. the problems with our culture are not problems with our elite but problems with changing values due to new technology and new freedoms for all! were the bush's not wasps? was obama different in some real way from the wasps? its just the blowhard now. And of course the ongoing greed of a 1% that has always been antidemocratic until they needed our sons to die in wars for them.
3
I for one never realized how popular H. W. was until his passing. Maybe his popularity would have been more helpful while he was alive. I think it speaks volumes to our current national "situation" & the outpouring of affection for a "coastal elite".
3
What are WASPs?
I. Colin Woodard's book, "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America," identifies 11 distinct cultures in the United States. Four of them could be referred to as settled by WASPs: Yankeedom; Tidewater; Greater Appalachia; and the Deep South. Yankeedom in the late 19th to the mid-Twentieth century gave us both the GOP's Eastern Establishment and the Progressive opposition to the power and policies of said Establishment. Tidewater and the Deep South gave us slavery and all that followed from that, up to and including Judge Roy Moore and Senator-elect Cindy Hyde-Smith. Greater Appalachia represents everything that Mr. Douthat rejects in in his idealized version of the Eastern Establishment.
II. Read the 5 Wikipedia entries for:
Samuel Prescott Bush (October 4, 1863 – February 8, 1948);
Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 – October 8, 1972);
George Herbert Walker Bush (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018); Buckeye Steel Castings; and the War Industries Board.
III. Mr. Douthat is actually not discussing WASPs at all (which, as Woodard has shown, is a truly bogus category). He is discussing a particular elite formation that played a major role in the shaping American politics. But then again, we are a nation unable to liberate ourselves from epistemological fantasy of race. Too bad for us.
2
As an African American woman, I am not nostalgic for WASPs or--in a related matter--Willie Horton.
15
Man, the author really tip-toes around the issues. It reads like oppression.
2
Mr Douthat writes: "I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today."
I sometimes wonder if Mr. Douthat really believes everything he says, or whether he comes up with something simply to write a column. So much of what he writes borders on nonsensical generalities.
1
Just so much over intellectualized filigree in the face of Terrible Trump, entrenched winner take all politics, and roaring economic disparity that benefits the most wealth in such awfully obscene ways.
4
https://spectator.us/mourn-bush-sr-celebrate-america/
This is what I remember about Bush.
What seemed to be Bush’s greatest triumph at the time has proved to be his ugliest legacy. The Persian Gulf War that Bush launched in 1991 to eject Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait was a splendid success at first. But its aftermath was nothing but bitter. Hussein did not fall from power, and those Iraqis who rose up against him in hopes of support from Washington were slaughtered. His administration had a way of sending mixed signals that got people killed: shortly before he invaded Kuwait, Hussein and his foreign minister met with Bush’s ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. She told him Arab conflicts like the Iraq-Kuwait border dispute were none of America’s business. A week later, Iraq seized Kuwait.
1
On the contrary, the modern GOP is the "WASP" party, since it's supporters are mostly descended from British stock, support wealth with gerrymandered tax cuts and are unsympathetic to the non-white poor.
The WASPs did not disappear they changed, as one can see in the difference between 41 and 43.
4
Douthat's tortured narrative, and the confused comments here, suggest to me that we can't even agree on what "WASP" means in the American context, let alone which virtues the WASPs were or were not unique in possessing. (The Roosevelts were WASPs? Their very non-English forebears would be startled to learn this. By those standards, I'd call Trump a WASP too -- at least one parent was born in Britain, he was born into wealth, attended an upper-crust Protestant church and the Ivy League, and so on etc.)
I suppose it depends on the circles you run in. Mine, we miss the black panthers.
7
Trained for service, or leadership? I would say trained to claim privilege & power with the presumption that they merit that right. Frankly, the popular caricature of the patrician WASP became as broad and ill-fitting as that of the pushy Jew, the bibulous Irishman or the libidinous Negro quite a while ago. The Establishment is certainly real, but it has always accommodated the powerful even if doing so grudging acceptance. Trump fits right in. Had it not been for his "personal" attacks on Brother Jeb Bush, that dynasty would have accepted him as readily as the rest of the Old Money GOP by now. Most of the tributes to the late George Herbert Walker Bush indulge not just in nostalgia but in the unsubtle cultural amnesia that Americans excel at. Our past cannot be candidly confronted without risking some embarrassing & destabilising disruption to the tacit illusions underlying the status quo, exactly what that Establishment relies on to perpetuate the succession of power without letting our putative dedication to democracy sway it. The difference now is that "elitism" is the secret & unspoken formula for both the defence & the dismantling of the Establishment, both sword & shield, so the old assumptions about who the elites are & what the Establishment is feel disused & incomplete. They mean as little or as much as the "Deep State" or any other tribal conspiracy theory. The very rhetoric & language of power has been corrupted, so that's where the battle has moved to.
With all this talk about decency, morality, and "doing the right thing"...
Isn't it time that the Equal Rights Amendment be ratified?
Think about it for a while, my friends, be you of the left or right. Isn't it time to "do the right thing"?
5
This is a good piece in the sense that it expresses something, that exists, existed, but never acknowledged. Douthat is wrong in ascribing WASP to some form of acknowledged dissolution starting at the New England Clinics of Harvard and Yale. The dissolution was initiated by Silicon Valley, from the electronics to the IT revolution that took away power from the closed-upper lip elites. Filling that vaccuum, unfortunately have been mediocres like Clinton, Bush II and others, esp. Trump. This is transition before a new order sets in.
2
My major qualm with Douthat's article focuses on the fact that our country itself was founded by men and women who were well aware of the dangers of basing the rule of a nation primarily on the self-serving needs of an entrenched elite (an aristocracy if you will) and they developed a system of government-Democracy- that these entrenchments would only last as long as they demonstrated a useful purpose to the majority of the people of the new nation.
It seems obvious that what recent history seems to be telling us is is the turmoil ( and decay) we are experiencing in our society seems to be the result of the perversions of the self renewing system of governance that our Founders bequeathed us. Case in point is the current twisting of the will of the majority of people in Wisconsin to throw out the head of an entrenched political elite of that State (the Governor and his A/T) and switch course; primarily by the residual, seemingly wholly corrupted members of that Governor's political Party.
No, Mr Douthat I do not think the Democratic system is failing us and that we need to be thinking about instituting a some sort of 'Benign' Aristocracy, I think, instead, WE are failing Democracy in this country and have become too complacent and too lazy to join in the sometimes nasty, sometimes frustrating and often demanding processes of Democracy that it demands of it's citizens, in order to for it to succeed and control the baser instincts of it's elite.
4
Douthat fails to see the connection of the old ruling elite to the current administration. Eisenhower had operation wetback, Bush Sr. had Willie Horton. The only difference is these Presidents would distance themselves from and use code words to express their racism. Trump is the natural successor to WASPs rule. It just is less articulate, more in your face, and doesn't care about appearance. However, Trump and the current GOP are doing the same thing as their predecessors; shoring up their power at the expensive of people of color, preserving white rule. What Douthat misses is what is called civility. Bush and the old elite would speak in a way that would shield their supporters from calls of racism. Their supporters could always point to how they talked or dressed, their decency, to ensure themselves that it wasn't racism that they were voting for. The illusion has been broken. Now everyone can see them for what they are.
It should be clear that millions of American's don't miss WASPs rule. The people that died AIDS, a state sponsored genocide of gay men. The communities of color, especially black who were imprisoned. The efforts of the CIA to stop black liberation. The segregation of our schools and communities. There is nothing to miss. What Douthat misses is a shadow that would comfort him by hiding what was in plain slight. The racism he and others were happy to not acknowledge and instead focus on thank you cards and empty gestures.
3
sooo... What happened in wasp Vegas stayed in wasp Vegas? Seriously, man. I'll accept the chaos and the disgraceful present in hope for a better day over the white male patrician past that got us here. Barrack Obama and the peanut farmer and their families were by far the finest human beings to reside in the White House during my lifetime. The current aberration that Bush helped lay the racist groundwork for will pass if we have the will.
3
Wow! I bet the idea that it was WASP mimicry that allowed the Sulzbergers’ to provide this platform for Douthat’s Gaberdine racism causes a collective turning in the collective Sulzberger crypt. As for us Homies up here in the Hood ain’t not one whiff or whit of WASP hegemonic nostalgia here! Trust and believe!
As a matter of fact, we find the thought that as opposed to being a resurrecting force of originality Barack was merely an example of divirsified apism highly offensive!
1
Why We Miss the WASPs
Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
[ Frightening prejudice, frightening falseness. Imagine the disdain for a Barack Obama or a John Kennedy or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg or a Martin Luther King or the Catholic and Jewish and secular and Black and Latino and Asian leaders that have graced America.
What a shameful essay, an essay that betrays American idealism. ]
5
Yes, meritocracy has become a dirty word. Every child must get a prize, otherwise we'd have racism, sexism, ableism and support for evil plutocracy.
3
Slavery was pretty cool, too, if you were the WASP owner. See history books you missed in school. Thanks!
5
“... hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools...” Oh yeah, that rough boarding school upbringing. It’s a miracle those tough guys made it out alive. Additional text that the editors cut out included “...Vulcanized in the fiery crucible of limousine transportation.” and “imbued with the grit of self-reliance by their nannies.”
5
Nowadays, it's ok to be racist as long as it is against whites. I'm a liberal Democrat but I welcome objectivity in reporting to present different perspectives. The truth is Obama was raised by his white mother and he attended an elitist traditional white college. Also, those readers that blame colonialism are uninformed. For example, black slaves were sold to Europeans by other blacks involved in fights between tribes. They sold the captured into slavery. And slavery was not limited to Africans. And before Europeans arrived, Native Americans were engaged in cannibalism and ritual sacrifices of humans. Therefore, evil is not determined by race. And if whites are so horrible, then why is it the whole world is desperate to migrate to countries populated mostly by whites? Perhaps, it is because there is a contemporary ideal in these countries, particularly the UK, Canada, Australia, the USA, and Germany, for an ideal to attain the rule of law? We don't hear of anyone desperate to migrate to Africa, the Middle East or Asia.
5
"as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry)."
So, I see that the writer ranges one form of religious bigotry against another. To coin a phrase, don't get me started.
1
Thank goodness, another free federal holiday. See: Congress is (not) working hard this week. They can use more time off.
+++++
Updated 12/3/2018: Congress failed to meet two of its November 30 deadlines, with the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform failing to report its recommendations, while the pension committee did not even markup a proposal. --Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
This reminds me a bit of how Native Americans went from 'savages' to the 'Noble Red Man' once they were corralled in the late 1800's.
'Noble WASP?' Can't Douthat just say there are decent people among all of us and George H.W. Bush was one of them?
7
I am very curious about the remark don't get me started on their Masonry".
As a lifelong Freemason I can think of no other organization that centers on Friendship Morality and Brotherly love and is open to all. As the soon of middle class Jew I have been fully accepted as have all of my Brothers of different races and creeds. To associate Freemasonry with WASPS is frankly ignorant.
4
Perhaps in spreading this misguided, nostalgic manure, Mr. Douthat believes that he is hearkening back to a "kinder and gentler" era when everyone knew their, "place" and we were all better off. Thats's not only bull, it echoes the dog whistle of "MAGA" and all it entails.
The WASP's kept America to themselves for almost 200 years, with nary a woman, a Jew, a Catholic, a Muslim, or a person of color to be found or represented in their exclusive ruling club.
So feel free to lament the demise of the WASP's ruling our country and our lives. They had their good points, but like any elites, they were ultimately devoted to perpetuating their own rule, at the expense of the good of the rest of us. Farewell and good riddance to that.
6
No one is asking why the Reagan Bush Dynasty deserved a 4th term. Doughat was 13 in 1992, he does not understand how out of touch that WWII generation seemed to Gereration X. Bush was linked to a generation that would not speak of the AIDS epidemic in public. I remember celebrating the beginning of a New Era that That Tuesday in November. 12 Years of a GOP presidency was more than enough. Johnny Carson also retired in 1992, it was time for a change.
1
What we miss is civility. Even decency isn’t a WASP guarantee. No religion guarantees an open heart and an open mind. I honor those above all. We can dream, can’t we?
6
The Reagan Bush administration that funded the brutally oppressive policies in Central America (El Salvador/Nicaragua) and armed Hussein against Iran in the ‘80s has been expunged from the treacly eulogies. We are still paying the price for it.
And Bush’s administration that ignorantly stumbled into the first Gulf War when his ambassador basically indicated to Hussein that we had little interest in Iraq’s claims to Kuwait is not mentioned.
A legacy of violence and incompetence. And we are going to look at it with nostalgia?
1
@William Folchi
If this is the worst criticism of the Reagan/Bush years, then history will look upon their governance extremely kindly. As we've seen this week.
So the CIA was intervening in a couple of tiny Central American backwaters, while the Cold War was ending, the fear of MAD subsided, Germany was reunited and the U.S. got to show off it's modern military dominance in the Gulf War with Saudi Arabia and Japan writing the check?
What you miss is basic human decency, on which the WASPs do not have the market cornered. It's just because they cornered the market on many positions of power that you believe they were the only people who could offer it.
4
Rule?? God help us. United States presidents are not "rulers" they are "leaders." Rulers are monarchs exercising their control over subjects.
6
This is goofy and dates the author. I’m 40 years old and have no recollection of “WASP rule” beyond history lessons. The first President I can remember watching on TV was HW Bush...and that was only because the Gulf War started and it was all we watched all the time for weeks.
Times have changed for the better. The only was the US will become a country that benefits women equally to men is by having women in Congress and the Administration. To wish for the by-gone era of old men sipping mint juleps in seersucker suits and boat shoes is to wear rose-colored glasses and practice very selective memory...or perhaps Mr. Douhat is simply imagining how it was because he’s around 40 as well and has no real recollection of WASPy rule either.
3
Amazing that it's never considered to give non-wealthy/elite people the chances, great education and experiences that elites have in order to develop good leadership. I guess for the US to have leaders, some people must have lives of privilege, implying others will be deprived. Good leadership could NOT be brought about by a better educational system, support for families raising children (i.e. potential future leaders), emphasis on development and ethics for all. Nope, nope, nope. Just leave that to the rich people - who DESERVE their wealth and opportunities. Everyone else won't be given the time, opportunity or consideration. It's not for us to question why generally only rich white men get these opportunities. It's for us to follow them, basking in their amazing leadership, praising our luck as a nation for being blessed with these wonderful leaders, while knowing deep down, we don't have what it takes to be a leader. Because....WASP.
2
I'm looking forward to the death of another plutocrat. As a small businessman, I'm eager to have another day without pay. See: government closed; markets closed; civil servants on holiday.
1
This article is racist to the core. We do not need more WASP's. We need more people that represent the working class and that have worked real jobs and suffered the real lives of working class people. We do not need elite people that have spent their lives either at the top of corporate empires or in politics. We need people whose sons and daughters have died in America's useless wars. We need people that are dedicated to the people of the USA, not to dollars and power.
4
By WASPs, do you mean folks like Brett Kavanaugh? The outraged, unhinged Brett Kavanaugh who is the last of a dying breed of white men who feel so firmly ensconced in their privilege that they throw fits of rage at anyone who dare call them out on their misbehavior and privilege?
Kavanaugh's shameful SC hearing antics and, frankly, this column show us the true fears of the white elite. They don't want their privilege questioned, and they don't mind subjugating other people to perpetuate that privilege and keep what they feel is the natural order of things. That, Douthat, is called white supremacy.
The Roman empire eventually fell. A centuries old democracy built on the premise of white supremacy is bound to fall as well. Currently, the system only has chinks in its armor. But eventually, its soft underbelly will be fully exposed.
4
Wow. I'm done with Douthat. He's always come off weak in his dialogues with Bruni. I find myself frequently stopping to ask, "Really? Did you really just say that?" But this one's the topper:
"Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well."
What the what? He's told us more about himself than I wanted to know. This was the load of masonry blocks that broke the camel's back. I'm done.
5
Dear Ross,
If we are going to talk about meritocracy in our leaders and in our country, can we at least use quotation marks when we do so? See: "meritocracy." That's better.
1
Don’t forget certain very relevant parts of the GHWB resume to wit: the appeal to irrational racist fear a la Willie Horton in order to be elected, the Bush connection to Iran Contra and the only domestic issue which seemed to motivate George Herbert Walker Bush - a very generous reduction in the Capital Gains Tax the appeal for which GHWB repeated ad nauseam. A traitor to his class he was not.
2
Give me meritocracy over kleptocracy .
1
Douthat seems to miss the point that we no longer have a "ruling class."
Perhaps he would be happier if we still were ruled by a king.
4
This well known anecdote, possibly mythical, seems to cover things pretty well:
Reporter to Gandhi: what do you think of western civilization ?
Gandhi: it would be a good idea.
3
@ezra abrams
You couldn't practically list the contributions of Western Civilization to our modern world. It would take, well, an full K-12, college and graduate education in everything from Classics to Art to Physics to Chemistry.
So Gandhi sounds fairly glib there.
I am a mere peasant who needs to be held up by the scruff of the neck and have some God's honest truth knocked into me by my betters. Who better than the Bushes? Thank you, m'lord.
6
I’d like to as Douthat what is he nostalgic about. Is it leaders prior to, or post, Emancipation? Leaders that encouraged the Native American cultural and physical genocide? Leaders prior to, or post, women’s suffrage? How about prior to, or post, civil rights? Or prior to, or post, the women’s liberation movement. Clearly, he seems to have nostalgia for the days were White ruled, minorities and women knew their place, and he would be blissfully unbothered by their plight. That’s why you, and many White men, miss the WASPS, Mr. Douthat.
1
@A.L. Grossi Ross has published many columns in which he laments various effects of the sexual revolution - lower rates of marriage and birth, single and childfree people happy with their lives, greater use of contraception (some types of which he believes should be outlawed) and a decline of 'flirting' at work.
It should be noted that today's malfunction can be laid at the feet of a particular group of WASPS; the hardliners, uncompromising power hungry ideologues like Gingrich, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay and never been elected for anything Grover Norquist. They brought is the tea party who as a group are wealthy white businessmen who put profits above all else. The only institutions they respect are those that make money.
Bush 1 came just as that crowd was exercising their power. His raising taxes was a capital offence to this crowd.
1
The veil is off Mr. Douthat's white supremacist instincts. To suggest that we would be better off ruled by WHITE Anglo-Saxon Protestants is an affront to the fundamental meaning of America -- All are created equal. Ignoring the vile racism and disdain for LGBTQ people of George H.W. Bush upon his death is one thing, but preferring that society is inexcusable. You are reduced to David Brooks' level of wishing for the world of Family Circus. Try to get out more.
1
You write "Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well." Who are those meritocratic, diverse and secular successors? Not George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump those Republican WASPs who enriched the country with pointless, costly foreign adventures, vast increases in national debt, and a weakened safety net. You must mean Clinton who gave us prosperity and a large reduction in the national debt; and Obama who engineered a financial recovery, passed the ACA, strengthened environmental regulations.... Yes, I see: Trump, the WASP, is your hero.
1
I miss the imperfect men that had aspirations (ask not what your country can do for you... thousand points of light... when they go low, we go high). These men met or exceeded the standards of their time (God, family, country...If we are at war, I will serve - If I am married, I will not subject my spouse to repeated public humiliation). The tone is set at the top, which is getting lower by the minute.
President George H.W. Bush was the last Republican President before the creation of Fox News and the proliferation of "conservative media." In this pre-Fox News era is was common for both parties to work together to actually govern and create better policy as a result. Now we have an entire generation of "lawmakers" that grew up in the Fox News era, which means they are really good at spewing the prepared sound bytes in front of a camera or rally, however they have very little interest in actual governance or working with colleagues across the aisle. The definition of conservative has moved so far to the right that Mr. Bush would now be deemed a RINO.
2
Why We Miss the WASPs
Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
[ This is wildly, intolerably prejudiced. I am appalled. ]
7
@Nancy In bloodline there is madness.
1
What I miss about the passing generation of leaders GHWB represents is that they had the courage to lose. We can debate their policies, decisions and actions, but when they lost the argument, or the votes, they conceded. Today, the response seems to be perpetually aggrieved. Much has been written about the gracious letter GHWB left for Bill Clinton as the he left office. Here in Wisconsin, I suspect any letter Scott Walker would leave behind for new Governor Tony Evers would consist of two words, the first one beginning with the letter F.
6
Mr. Douthat's article is so loaded with words and terms ("elite", "WASP", "aristocratic" and so on) that are hot-button triggers to the rightfully disenchanted readers complaining here that the level-headed historical perspective he presents doesn't seem to be getting the consideration it deserves.
For every upperclass WASP's with notions that offend those outside that circle, there's a host of "salt-of-the-earth" folks whose attitudes toward race, education, women, immigrants and so on are, well, downright deplorable.
A lot of progressives come up from the streets, from hardship and deprivation, while a good many privileged people start near the top of the national pyramid of advantages. Both bring unique perspectives and understandings to the table. Our future will be vastly better if all who wish to lead us are open to listen and learn from everyone's experience and knowledge.
2
I am not surprised by the cries of racism regarding this column. Typical knee jerk response from my fellow liberals. I think the essay's theme is: absolute power corrupts absolutely. An example of the "progress" we seem to have made is that instead of, for example, Asians being persecuted by the white ruling class in the 19th century, we are now in the 21st century and all races and creeds are prejudiced against Asians. Again, just pulling this as an example from the piece to point out an inherent weakness in our current multicultural approach.
3
Good tribute to former president George
H W Bush but also to his class. They had
virtues, most important noblesse Oblige,
and some flaws. But their virtues outweighed the flaws and made the
world better place. His handling of
the collapse of Soviet Union and support
for unfication of Germany were the
product of noble thinking-magnanimity
in victory as Churchill put it. Generation
following him would have handled in a
spirit of triuphalism creating more
problems. No doubt today's leaders
have more flaws than virtues and no
noblesse oblige. We mourn not only
passing away of George HW Bush but
an era that was mostly good and a
beackon for the world. Now we use
American values more nostalgistically
and less realistically. Our leaders don't
emobdy those fine American values
any more. America was much more
respected than now.
I'm still not clear on who the "we" is that misses a more pure White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy. I know I don't - or at least I wouldn't if it ever, in fact, went anywhere.
If I could identify one bit of personal anecdotal evidence in rebuttal to this horribly over-romanticized op-ed, it would be my time recently of tutoring very non-WASP low-income kids preparing for their Regents Exams. By Mr Douthat's old rules, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that any of them would be encouraged, let alone accepted, to pursue leadership positions in society. At best they might gain access only as tokens to provide entertainment for their pious benefactors. Most likely, their lives would be buried in the caste system perpetuated by these old-school elites.
But I saw hope. I saw potential in many of these kids who looked for opportunities to break through what were previously impermeable barriers. And if they merit inclusion in elite groups and leadership roles in society, then I will fight for that inclusion instead of mocking it, as conservatives such as Mr Douthat love doing.
This absurdly romantic notion of American aristocracy is totally antithetical to our ideal of liberty and opportunity for all Americans, not just wealthy WASPs. I look forward to the day when we can honestly say "good riddance", but we're not there yet.
9
There will always be privilege. All we can do is provide a relatively level playing field with rules that enable the hard working smart to rise high, and the hard working less smart to live decently. What to do with those who won't work hard, or can't has always been the question.
5
Ross Douthat has unintentionally revealed his guiding philosophy behind all his drivel - a need to maintain white Anglo-Saxon superiority above all else. Yes, he converted to Catholicism in an attempt to legitimize his rants against the Church and claim difference. But at base he like most latter-day Republicans maintain a singular philosophy, men like me should be on top.
17
@ACR
Really? If meritocracy equals white Anglo-Saxon superiority this 'd spell doom for the future. luckily this is not the case. The Anglo-Saxon ideals of prudence, hard work, integrity and dedication to the public good have percolated across the spectrum of ethnicities that constitute the body politic. Which is a good thing.
Articles like this, promoting racism and nationalism, are a disgrace to this once fine newspaper.
The New York Times was once considered to be the epitome of journalistic integrity and the benchmark of honest reporting, that other media could only aspire to.
The brilliant publishers, editors and writers who once walked the halls of the NYT, must now be shaking their heads to see that this once-fine institution has now become the print version of Fox News.
6
What the heck did I just read? Dude, take off your rose-colored glasses. It's breathtaking how you gloss over the abject corruption within your WASP-world. Did you hear about Teapot-Dome, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the Sandinista's and dead nuns, Iraq, and recently Bears Ears and Russian sympathizers for personal profit?
I'm a WASP and even I see it.
19
Actually, the president that most people are currently nostalgic for may have been Protestant, but he certainly wasn’t white or Anglo-Saxon.
18
Dubya was a WASP, and he was terrible. Obama was not a WASP, and he was great. And poof! There goes your whole, rambling essay in two short sentences.
21
I hardly know where to start with this—all right, I’ll start with that “we.” As a non-WASP I’ve known and loved and missed many WASPs including my grandmother but I’ve never admired and will not miss the WASP ascendancy (if, indeed, it ever goes away). Thank-you letters and boat shoes, okay, I’ll keep those. But privilege mixed with the abuse of power and topped off with noblesse oblige and quiet racism (didn’t HW refer to his Mexican-American grandchildren as the “little brown ones”?)—you, Mr. Douthat, can keep it all.
8
Douthat blithely accepts the exclusion of Barak Obama as a "legitimate" president, on the grounds that white people "resented" Obama because he was black. Apparently, hatred of black and brown people (and women) does not operate as a moral stain on the haters but, rather, operates as a barrier to the candidate's legitimacy. Winning the the electoral college and the popular vote is not enough; racists and misogynists have a veto over legitimacy. Douthat's support for white oligarchy has never been more transparent. NYT, why do you subject us to this smooth-sounding moral poison?
20
Even the migrant caravan misses the WASPs. They certainly prefer them to the Mexicans. Same goes for almost everyone in China and India - they're not flocking to Africa or Japan.
1
An elegy for whiteness? Disgusting. Further evidence of the decline of the American Republic. I didn't realize some of Harvard's alumni are white nationalists.
8
Proof the real 'elitists' are conservatives.
4
"that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly"
So who, exactly, should self-identify as our new "ruling class"?
The Kardashians? hopeless!
The Koch brothers? ditto
The tech oligarchs? ditto
Witless, soulless trustafarians like the Trump spawn? worse than hopeless!
Expecting anything but national decline with any of that lot at the helm is pure fantasy.
4
The Jews and the Catholics just can’t seem to get over being excluded from certain country clubs and secret societies in the 50’s and 60’s. You’d think it was the greatest injustice since Aushwitz.
1
Austerity? Just because old money likes to hang onto old furniture (that is not classic nor chic but just shabby), or dress like they have no money, does not mean that they live austere lives. Give me a break. You don't live an austere life if you have servants floating around in your multiple homes. The WASPs noblesse oblige didn't go very far. Their policies were anything but benevolent, at times, towards those of an inferior class. If they wanted to do the noble thing, we would talk about the wonderful things he did for American society...think Roosevelt and his Social Security.
360
@Evie Thank you. I do not miss the WASPS at all - except FDR who was denigrated by them because he helped the people, e.g., Social Security. And surely Barbara Bush was no Eleanor Roosevelt, who really empathized and sympathized with humanity. Barbara was arrogant and supercilious and I certainly do not miss her.
31
@Evie Austerity is not simply not spending...it is spending well below one’s capacity to spend. It is running companies in a manner that concerns itself as much with the welfare of the workers as with the wealth accumulated by the founder or owner or CEO. Nineteenth century wealth, pre-income tax, was certainly not austere; yet “Protestant thrift” has always been a strain in American culture. I grew up a poor Yankee who did not know she was poor in comparison to my small New England town’s more affluent neighbors, thanks to Protestant thrift. It was an equalizer 50 years ago in a way that today’s wealth never is.
27
@Evie Good point. I think that "austerity" means different things to different people. For some, it means "other people's austerity." It's easy to like other people's austerity.
14
Mr. G.H.W. Bush was lucky he wasn't indicted along with Mr. R.W. Reagan for Iran-Contra shenanigans. If that's Noblesse oblige, you can stuff it in a jar and bury it with Geronimo.
+++++
Mr. Reagan's father was, however, just a common household drunkard. See: The Irish are here, thank goodness.
1
How many WASPs does it take to change a light bulb? Ans. Two. One to send for the electrician; one to mix the martinis. See: Make mine very dry and be sure to STIR it gently; shaking is for the Scottish working class.
3
I don’t think you can fully understand the decline of the WASP ascendancy without taking the sexual revolution into account. WASP culture was exclusionist and repressive in equal measure. The diversification of American elite culture that began in the late 1960s went hand in hand with the loosening of sexual mores. A Harvard dean of students in 1964 was quoted as saying that he would as soon condone fornication on college property as he would theft or plagiarism. Today’s college dorms are coed, and administrators could care less about students’ sexual conduct, except where failure to punish misconduct, as we now understand it, might put federal funding in jeopardy.
The noblesse oblige of the WASP ascendency was real and admirable, but Douthat’s “piety and discipline” was always (at least since Cotton Mather preached at Harvard) largely a façade. Along with the self-abnegation there was plenty of furtive self-indulgence; part of elite respectability was knowing when to look the other way. Today the buttoned-up culture, for better or worse, has gone the way of the buttoned-down shirt.
5
@Fidelio. Ross does not cotton to the sexual revolution, lower birth rate, lower marriage rate, or the childfree.
I am neither an aristocrat nor a WASP. Yet I was proud when my daughter decided to take her university degrees from Oxford and Yale, the old bastions of the aristocrats, because I thought she may find out what kind of hubris allowed WASPS to construct the nonsense of “white man’s burden” and why they always focus on ruling humanity while pretending to serve it. (Noblesse Oblige is just a ruse to make palatable unfair and ruthless privilege. Lot of ordinary soldiers served as gallantly as Bush in WWII – all they get anonymously is a poppy on lapels.). I am glad my daughter is too busy serving humanity in the international field and has never yet had enough leisure to discuss with me what she found out through her formal education.
2
Any piece that talks about group behavior in terms of “we” is nonsensical. While I share some features of, say, middle class white women who grew up during the Cold War, I don’t share many. Also, it is annoying and ignorant when any journalist talks about a new societal order as if this one is going to last forever.
Nothing lasts forever. There are rises and falls of political philosophies, types of government, and who the precious group of the moment is.
When I think of WASPS, I think of some heady days in the 70’s, when, at least from my POV, WASPs were a group of privileged white men who ran the world in a greedy, self-centered manner, excluding women and everyone else from the halls of power, and often a decent standard of living. “They” sent numerous young boys to die in Vietnam for Standard Oil’s War. I’m happy that they are dying out.
Because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and excesses seem normal when one has the power to pull them off, outrage and dissension among the out groups rises and leaders must be overthrown. The new leaders quickly lose sight of their principles, if they had any, and by the end of their run are awfully similar to those they overthrew. The new group coming in will quickly realize that injustice looks different when you are on the inside looking out as opposed to being on the outside looking in, and may try to profit.
There is no “we.” There is only you and me, trying to live, & struggling w/ urgent issues that need fixing now.
4
I am an immigrant from India. I have lived here for almost five decades, and I miss the WASP values. Nothing is perfect in life, but the values that made America great are disappearing fast under the culture that values relativism and narrow social goals while ignoring human nature. Trump and Republicans are just a set of symptoms of what is wrong about America today. We also have angry liberals who have lost appreciation for moderation and common sense.
I have faith in America. This too shall pass.
7
What we miss is a time when truth was valued and most people more or less agreed on what it was. The problem with our country isn’t a lack of WASP leadership, it’s a large and well funded conservative media which has been peddling nonsense so long that we can no longer agree on which directions up and down are. If Bush was the last president widely considered legitimate it’s because RW media declares all Democrats illegitimate and Republican presidents can’t win the popular vote.
3
What do “Bush mourners” mourn this week? Not only or mostly a system that “pretty much worked” for many (but not all), but, actually, the end of the era in which they, too, had privilege. It be done. Over. The issue: How to get through this train wreck we call DJTrump and on to a new “system” that is truly open to all and respects and accepts the fact that it’s not a white man’s world anymore.
3
Wait a minute,Trump is a WASP. Private schools,inherited wealth and golf,all the credentials of a true WASP.The problem is this Wasp-emperor has no clothes.He is too close to the founding principles of the cult.
4
Sounds like a dinosaur staring a meteor in the eyes writing about the merits of the old Jurassic period over the soon to be ended Cretaceous period.
1
Eight-year-olds dream of being princesses. They don't dream of being scullions. Similarly, nostalgia for the 1950's is based on imagining oneself as part of the elite, not black or Jewish or gay.
This is why John Rawls developed his idea of a "veil of ignorance," where one must design a society without knowing what place one will have in it.
If you find yourself nostalgic for an earlier era, try imagining yourself as a scullion there, and see if that helps with a more realistic interpretation. It's appropriate for small children to neglect to consider what life might be like for non-elites, but as adults we should do better.
2
Ross, you never would have gotten into Bush's country club nor would the vast majority of Americans. One, because they aren't WASPs; two, because they aren't wealthy WASPs.
And if anything weakens your argument, the fact that America is becoming more secular is something to rejoice, not despair.
1
We don't need WASPs, but we can learn something very important from the contrasts between their era and our own:
The worship of money and celebrity makes for a rotten society and leads to rotten rulers.
I use the word "worship" deliberately for its association with blind and uncritical devotion. Our worship landed us with Trump and it looks likely that we will exchange him for a Trump 2 whom we will choose because of his\her wealth and celebrity.
It has become a mass delusion that being rich and famous, especially first-generation rich and famous, is the acid test for civic leadership and that achieving a modest, rounded life is the mark of failure. Wisdom is now defined as the smarts to work the system and extract the maximum from it.
Nostalgia for the WASPs is a recognition of just how misguided this is, but it's the completely wrong prescription for the ailment.
3
I’ll bet Douthat and David Brooks sit around in their smoking jackets and ascots with a pipe in one hand and dirty martini in the other, waxing nostalgic about the good old days and singing “Give me that old time religion.”
Ross you are so Catholic. No one misses the WASPS, except maybe disgruntled Catholics who have been brain-washed to worship social hierarchy as a natural phenomenon sanctioned by the divine – which BTW is the WASP version of meritocracy.
Douthat offers us a heaping-helping of arrogance, romanticized history, and WASP myth. “Noblesse oblige”? He doesn’t provide a single specific example. He does mention Viet Nam but fails to acknowledge it as a brutal consequence of the aristocratic WASP mindset.
Douthat brushes aside the elephant in the room: that the cultural cohesion - claimed to be achieved via the noble characteristics of aristocratic WASPs - was reserved for their tribe, ethnicity and religion. If anything what was construed as noblesse oblige was merely patriarchy, if not a naked strategy to keep those outside the tribe from revolting.
Conservatives hate to hear that the world has changed; that we can’t return to the mythic Camelot of WASP aristocracy. What has gotten us into our present predicament is precisely the conservative WASP insistence on unfettered capitalism that produces vastly inequitable social outcomes.
Let’s rein in capitalism, and require mandatory national service for everyone. No one said it would be easy.
8
Incredible how an op ed piece like this can be written and never once mention the word patriarchy. This is how far we are from having a truthful conversation about our government, either in today's terms or historically.
6
I think the Bushes provide an interesting example of how the old social order collapsed. Just as the German hereditary nobility during the World Wars served in the armed forces and died in numbers out of proportion to their share in the general population, the American WASP aristocracy took up arms in the world wars because it was their obligation as leaders in the society. George HW Bush became the youngest naval aviator in WW II. I suspect that his father''s position as a member of Congress had something to do with his selection for a coveted training position and assignment. On the other hand, George W Bush, with help from an influential father, obtained a slot in the Texas Air National Guard during the Viet Nam war, effectively excusing him from being deployed in an unpopular war. There were waiting lists for applicants for positions in the National Guard around this time since it was common knowledge that the Guard would stay at home. There are other examples of this. My father's college fraternity house had a plaque listing the names of all the fraternity brothers who died during World War II. This was in the age of no college exemptions for college students (my father was drafted while still a student). There were no casualties from that fraternity during the Viet Nam war. So much for noblesse oblige.
3
I am not nostalgic for a WASP president. I am nostalgic for a decent, moral, dignified leader such as was embodied in President Barack Obama and George H.W. Bush (although I disagreed with many of Bush's policies, I never doubted his basic human decency, nor was I ever unmindful of his service to our country). I am not nostalgic for the Establishment ruling class. I am nostalgic for a president who actually read and understood the Constitution of our country and the Bill of Rights before becoming president, and understood what taking the Oath of Office really meant.
What the death of former President George H.S. Bush did was remind us of how far we have fallen in less than two years. We were also reminded that all the other Presidents (including Nixon) even with all their faults and flaws, stand and stood head and shoulders above the man currently occupying the White House. I would take any of them, again, including Nixon over the man we now call president. That is what has given me pause in my reflections upon what the death of former President George H.W. Bush has meant to this country. Trump has managed the unimaginable, he has made even Nixon and George W. Bush look good.
Today is a day to honor a true statesman of courage in his service to this country. May George H.W. Bush rest in peace.
575
@Diana Human decency doesn't describe sending missiles to Iran in exchange for off the books funds to aid insurgents in Central America. That's something Kissinger would've conspired to achieve.
19
@HLB Engineering
Yes. Respecting the best of George HW Bush means coming to terms with the rest of George HW Bush. There are good reasons why many of us have, at best, complicated feelings about him.
35
@HLB Engineering
Just to be clear, I am an old liberal. I worked as a volunteer in President Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign. I am very proud of that. What I admire about both former President Obama and George H.W. Bush has nothing to do what either did in office, but in their basic dignity and respect for the office of the Presidency. All presidents, including the one whom I most admire, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, are flawed humans (like all of us) and have made decisions that I still do not agree with. Some decisions have had tragic consequences, I am not denying that, nor brushing it aside. However, today I am honoring George H.W. Bush for his service to this country and for being a dignified statesman who did not desecrate the office of the Presidency. His legacy as President will be debated by historical presidential scholars.
63
WASPism isn't dead. It morphed into a pseudo-meritocracy that continues to reward social, cultural and economic capital, aka, privilege, and effectively punishes those without it, irrespective of merit. Don't tell me that feeder schools, kindergartens, etc. to America's elite institutions don't continue to play an outsized role in admissions to Skull & Bones et al. Don't tell me that geographic "diversity" among elites does not continue to be concentrated in wealthy enclaves in or near major coastal cities. Don't tell me that top legal, financial, and management firms have ceased to draw new employees from a very narrow set of acceptable law schools and MBA programs. If you long for the days of WASPism, have no fear. It's alive and well in America.
6
@Peter Sacks It's an arms race to see who gets more kids into the Ivies. Legacy Plutocrats or the Chinese? See: One's much better at developing U.S. secrets; one's much better at stealing them.
1
Too many readers seem to be missing the point. Douthat is arguing for simple honesty. Today we still have a ruling class, but it refuses to identify itself. That ruling class is made up of wealthy, educated elites many of whom went to the same Ivy League schools that the old ruling class attended. It just got there because of merit or diversity initiatives instead of legacy admissions. It's a ruling class that is more diverse in every way (a good thing), but it's still a ruling class. Douthat's point is that a self-concious ruling class would develop a set of standards, practices and values that would cause it to serve the broader public good and not just its own interests. He's making a subtle and important case.
1
Barack Obama probably comes closest to the WASP ideal that Douthat portrays here.
14
All of Douthat’s bloviation notwithstanding ( I assume most of his college professors got a headache reading his sententious papers), it must be argued that many of the truly transformative American Presidents- Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, even Reagan in an obverse way, were the byproduct of abandoning allegiance to their patrician class and creating a new synthesis or political order to counter the failures of the existing order.
This notion that we need the patrician class to keep us from getting too far off track is not as relevant as the political stagnation which results from relying on them to guide us through complex times.
5
@Phaedrus Lincoln and Reagan were not patricians.
So, it's secularism that's the problem and not Evangelical fundamentalism?
It's the latter that leads to the former.
3
This column is ridiculous. Trump is a Wasp. Pence is a wannabe Wasp. McConnell is a Wasp. Every president save Obama was a Wasp except Kennedy who was more of a Wasp than most Wasps despite being Roman catholic. The real thrust of this article is a sneer at people who are Ross's social betters despite his imagined credentials. Ross can't stand Harvard although he chose to go there. Ross can't stand the moral rigor of the social gospel of mainline protestantism as he veers from outside tub thumping evangelicalism to the leeches from Rome. But railing and sneering don't make it so-- any more than saying George Bush was a good guy despite opposition to the civil rights act of 1964 and the Willie Horton campaign. Nope. It just ain't so.
4
All that catholic studying has warped poor Ross' brain. The idea of rulers coming from the masses, instead of from god, (the catholic paramount belief), is clearly embedded in Ross' philosophy. It is quite telling of his attitude, unfortunate Ross, a pity.
5
right. that wasp elite who established and maintained exclusionary institutions and clubs; set racial and religious quotas at universities; established redlines beyond which their banks wouldn't provide mortgages. Ross douthat doesn't know it but he has embraced a total myth about the Wasps.
7
Now we miss the days or rule by white men from elite backgrounds? Who debated pseudoscientific theories of racial IQ to explain social inequity, much as their grandfathers clung to eugenics to explain away the legacy of the slave trade that many New England "shipping" families made fortunes from. These patricians also condemned women to unsafe back alley abortions, and defended pernicious social pecking orders that undermined the democratic aspirations of the constitution. There are many things to blame for the woes of today, but the ongoing democratization of the social order is not the source of today's problems.
8
I am certain that Douthat is going to get all kinds negative comments about this column. But, keep in mind this; in WWII the demographic that volunteered in the greatest number (relative to size) was the old, style WASPs.
1
@sjs
First, it’s well documented that Native Americans actually had the highest proportion of WWII volunteers.
Second, I’ve never seen any statistics about the proportion of WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who enlisted. Statistics about white WWII soldiers, yes. Those white soldiers included Catholics, Jews, Latinos, Arab Americans, and non-Anglo European-descended people from Slavs to Italians--not just WASPS.
Meanwhile, Japanese Americans were in internment camps.
African Americans were living under Jim Crow in the South, and disillusioned all across the country that their participation in the First World War hadn’t led to more equality at home. Black WWII soldiers were put in segregated units and relegated to support roles like cooking and grave digging.
John James Jr., who completed officer training but was denied a commission because the Army didn’t allow black officers to supervise white soldiers, only became a second lieutenant this year at 98. He spent the war as a typist.
P.S.--During WWII, “WASP” stood for Women Airforce Service Pilots.
2
The “we” who want WASPs are all white and all men. GHW Bush was a rare case.His glaring slip was using the “Willie Horton” propaganda to gather enough racist votes to beat Dukakis. Other than that his “patrician” noblesse oblige was beneficent.
What is evident is Douthat prefers white patriarchy. Today, how does that happen? Apartheid? Voter oppression? Dictatorship?
Demographics have overwhelmed the chance of white democratic rule. The 14th and 19th Amendments changed white male voter majority. Noblesse oblige handed the future to women and non whites to join. Only suppression can restore WASP male majority.
6
A racist by any other name... Both HW and now revealed RD. Both attempting to cloak their bigotry in showers of words, and failing. Somebody please explain HW's presidential embracing of the Willie Horton "fear the blacks" message and his turning his back on the AIDS epidemic, in context of RD's trope of "noblesse oblige". With the exception of his WWII service (which he knew was mandatory to have any follow-on political career), HW was just another .01% opportunist; gracious when it served his purposes.
Appreciation to the Democratic Congress of those years for driving through the ADA legislation.
6
Shorter Douthat : “ I miss white Male supremacy “.
Seriously.
18
Meritocratic GWH Bush, as VP during the eighties, oversaw the killing of seventy thousand people in EL Salvador civil war, teeming with death squads.
How come the eulogies do not mention that?
7
Here is a "Not so Implicit Bias Test for WASPs"
1. Who were the vast majority of slave owners in the U.S.?
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims
2. Which country addicted the Chinese to Opium, so it could sell it to them?
a. Spain, b. Britain, c. the U.S., d. France
3. Which group did Andrew Jackson identify with:
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims
4. Which group was most involved in the displacement of Native Americans in the U.S.?
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims?
5. Which group discriminated against Jews who applied to Ivy League schools in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries?
a. Catholics, b. WASPs, c. Muslims?
6. Which group owned most of the tenements in the Northeast that was responsible for despicable living conditions for immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the early twentieth century?
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims
7. Who are the majority of people who write the textbooks that are used in primary and secondary schools in the U.S. that gloss over the information present in Items 1. to 6. above?
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims.
8. Who published the New York Times for most of its glorious history?
a. Catholics, b. Jews, c. WASPs, d. Muslims.
9. Why didn't Ross Douthat mention the fact that Donald Trump is a WASP?
10. Why did Stanford University, a bastion of WASP interests in the U.S., model its campus off of Spanish (Catholic) Architecture?
______________________
5
Lets analyze the acronym WASP.
The W in "Wasp" stands for "white;" - those are the folks who Ross reveres and misses so, so much.
Let's take a look at the rest.
AS stand for "AngloSaxon - this eliminates much of the white races considered "inferior:" Eastern and Southern whites, such as Italians,Greeks, Poles, and of course Jews, Native Americans, Asians, Africans, etc, etc.
P stands for Protestant - so wasps also eliminate Catholics, which means historically, no Irish need apply. It also eliminates all other religions, in case the W for White wasn't clear enough.
It also eliminates women from power, because religion and the Bible make that so obvious that it doesn't have to be even mentioned, does it ladies?
By WASP, Ross means WASP Males, of course, since religion mandates women's submission.
7
Ross, you need to read up on the Dulles brothers (two WASPs whom, no doubt, you lump together with your vaguely defined WASP heroes). Look at what they and their similarly arrogant and sanctimonious brethren did to South Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Grenada, and a number of other places that were not so powerful as the US and not so blessed with our self-evidently superior culture, greed, and "religion." I find it hard to join you in your WASP admiration.
6
"We", whom did you include in "We", Sir?
3
“Racism! Racism! Racism everywhere!”
That’s what everyone will be screaming at each other as America burns. The day will come when we miss the WASPs even more.
Before the NYT Editorial Board sung the praises of GHW Bush, they should have looked at the record.
Particularly their own fact check record.
Particularly the final Independent Counsel's Report on how Bush Buried the Iran-Contra scandal: https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_28.htm (take the up arrow, upper left-hand of your screen, if you wish to read the whole report.
In brief, Bush's pardons prevented the IC from completing its duties. Why is a mystery too.
A pardoned defendant/felon gives up all 5th Amendment rights, and CANNOT refuse to answer any questions out of fears of self-incrimination - since s/he' can not be indicted or tried under said blanket pardons.
The Independent Counsel failed us by NOT using his opportunity to dig deeper into the truth about the acts of George Herbert Walker Bush's involvement in acts involving Presidents Bush's and Reagan's involvement in the illegal acts which kept US Embassy staff in Tehran held hostage until the very day the "Grade B Movie Star" took office as president.
Quite simply, during the campaign against the re-election of Jimmy Carter, the Reagan Bush team conspired with the government of Iraq, and a bunch of Latin American rebels against an almost Democratically-elected government to a) keep US diplomats and aides held hostage throughout the campaign, blocking Carter's attempts at a diplomatic solution, and b) used an illegal transfer of funds to displace yet again an elected Latin American government.
Hero? CRIMINAL!
5
Absolutely no one cares about the Iran-contra scandal. Reagan and Bush won the Cold War. That’s the only thing history will remember about them.
Douthat has my head spinning. A couple days ago, he wrote about the necessity to develop a small sect of reform-conservatives. The next day he was railing against elites. Today he is nostalgic for a WASP aristocracy. We all need to adapt our ideas to changing circumstances, but this is ridiculous.
4
Mr. Douthat, respectfully, no, "we" don't. We don't miss WASPS. In fact, I'm pretty sick of entitled, straight, white, old men running the world into the ground--and apologies to enlightened straight white guys out there--presumably, they too are sick of having their names besmirched by this old guard as well. They still run nearly all corporations, most religious organizations, most Western governments, at the international, federal, state and local level. They were and still are frequently unable to avoid harassing women; unable to stop selling or buying lethal weapons, unable to avoid or end wars, unable to be responsible fiscal leaders, unable to stem the flood of crimes against women and children world over. They seem unable to pay teachers and nurses and childcare workers what is really owed them (all predominantly female dominated professions), and yet quite a few of them would like to tell women what they can and cannot do with our bodies. They cannot seem to recognize that women would like to serve in the religious organizations of the world. Additionally, the same old, white, straight men you refer to as WASPS, who throughout time have told us to trust them, have further systematically destroyed the earth's environment and now want to continue to rape, loot and pillage their way through the world's remaining resources and lands. Yeah, I'm NOT going to miss them. Read history and you won't either.
16
You are confusing our ability to be civil to each other with the partial decline of the male WASP hegemony. This incivility is not the result of new faces in our leadership positions. It is a result of the rise in the 90's of the talking heads - Limbaugh & FOX news, followed by the reactions on the left in 2000's - The Daily Show & MSNBC, and now in the 2010's with the specialized tribal sound boards on the internet.
Civility is people sharing ideas and talking about them. Incivility is sitting alone with a talking head filling your mind with arguments in case you ever dare to converse with others who don't follow the same shows as you.
Leadership is not something lost with this bygone era. Non male WASP leaders are looking out for people's best interest and the interest of America. Some people just need to get used to the fact that they are sitting at the table now. At a time when people need to talk more with each other, we are doing the exact opposite.
5
Not I, Ross.
The always-male White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in power in the last century bear a strong resemblance to the supremacist patriarchy many of us are trying to dismantle today.
To think that we miss white gentility is to enshrine a culturally homogenous, east-coast intelligentsia that was only an ideal in thought, not in deed. And it's racist, to boot. No, let's not go back to those days....they were a whitewashed masquerade, and not a reflection of what's best about America and its leaders.
4
Douthat seems innocent of WASP history. During the worst days of racial segregation there were BASPs (Black Anglo Saxon Protestants), as colleagues and neighbors of WASP elites. And they had all the same public piety, discipline and aristocratic values of WASPs, even so far as to imitate their WASP contemporaries in attempts to establish elite ruling classes among the well-educated African American, elites in black cotillions, finishing schools, debutante coming out affairs, and social registers.
A “separate (BASP) society,” as the 1967 Kerner Commission Report on Race Riots feared, was taking root in America as reaction to WASP administered racism. The black elites were once considered an existential threat to our so-called “American” (WASP) values, because our Constitution could not tolerate two kinds of racially opposed ruling classes. But in either one there was all the human comedy of mankind.
Douthat is impressed by the persona and manners of George H.W. Bush, in contrast to the contentious “arriviste” bossiness of Donald Trump. But for all the Bush Family qualities of public piety and discipline, as supposedly “aristocratic” facades of the Bush family, there were also cloaked from public view all their lesser attractive qualities associated with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Paul Manafort and other Trump associates, i.e., drunkenness, adultery, and corruption. Both Bush Presidents had to live through scandals Douthat associates with “arrivistes.”
3
@Bayou Houma. George W and Jeb Bush, like their father, displayed tact and good manners. However W was without a doubt one of the very worst presidents. And I think Jeb would have had us in a (shooting) Middle East war by now.
This is a completely circular argument. For one thing, those "old China hands" were very likely to be white men at a time in history when there were far fewer Asian Americans in the foreign service than there are now. It's like pining for a time in history when the best-regarded gynecologists were all men, not considering the confounding effect of far fewer women having gone to medical school.
5
The premise here is that JHWB was a good president. The historical record doesn’t support this. An incomplete list of the failures of his presidency include:
1. The benign neglect shown towards Russia following the collapse of CP rule, which led to chaos, then kleptocracy and Putin.
2. The letter, drafted in Washington and delivered by ambassador Glaspie, assuring Hussein that any action by Iraq against Kuwait would be regarded by the US as the internal affair of Iraq. The futile slaughter of the Iraqi army and the subsequent betrayal of the Shia uprising marked the beginning of a self-inflicted foreign policy and humanitarian disaster that continues to this day.
3. After initially acknowledging the importance of addressing the challenge of climate change, Bush followed Sununu’s advice to turn away from policies that might have prevented the calamities that bear down on us now.
Further, any nostalgia for WASP enlightened leadership that invokes JHWB can’t conveniently forget the feckless calamity of the JWB presidency, which expanded on the errors of JHWB (see 2 &3 above).
It is perhaps inevitable that a conservative columnist has a harder and harder time writing coherent editorials in the time of trump ( who, though he is a fat-fingered vulgarian, fits better in the WASP column than anywhere else). Douthat might consider doing his readers and what’s left of his intellectual and personal integrity, and take a vow of silence until he has something sensible to say.
3
You lost me in the subtitle at "meritocratic." Our troubles snowballed when HW got his legacy kid into Harvard.
3
@Don Had G.H.W. Bush been just anyone, his kid would've ended up pumping gas at the Sinclair station.. in Midland, Texas. See: Dino (Sinclair) is a fitting emblem for the family.
2
I miss the optimism and the courage of JFK that symbolized an American era. Noblesse oblige personified. Irish, Roman Catholic btw, Mr. Douthat. Your column strikes me as remarkably silly at best.
1
I don't miss my WASPs at all.
If there is anything positive to be said about them it is simply that their depredations were 'self-limited' by their supposed moral code.
Unlike the current beast in the White House who knows neither limitations to his depredacious behavior nor any moral code.
2
Nostalgia for the gentlemen of the Porcellian Club, birthplace of the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s? A world of reduced social anxiety because everyone knew their place? Reverance for the theocratic foundation of market fundamentalism?
What nonsense.
2
An exercise in failed apologetics, because the columnist's condemnation of the old WASP elite unconsciously and unintentionally outweighs his idealization of it. It would be better if he were straightforward about his ambivalence. In any event, E. Digby Baltzell covered this topic much better and more comprehensively years ago. Baltzell even cited data, instead of just sloganeering, which is what we have here, and what we usually get from this apologist for inequality.
1
As a WASP whose grandfather twice declined a gubernatorial nomination in the 1940s and 1950s, I kindly suggest that Mr. Douthat take as many hycolonics as needed to clear his head.
1
All you are describing is an America before FOX news and the elimination of the fairness doctrine in broadcast news.
You know, when the two sides talked and both sides were required to be at the table during any public discussion.
5
Having learned a very, well, creative history of the Civil War as a child in South Carolina, I can imagine what sort of history of American governance one learns at Yale.
1
while I too miss the Bush-style "aristocracy", they had more W's than L's (Vietnam being the first and the Iraq disaster just a lame attempt at a re-do) -and were certainly more pleasant to deal with and be around. they lent a sense that basic rules did matter and that problems could be be solved without acting like a whiny 8 y/o pouty orange brat. can you imagine today some child of a billionaire itching to sign up for military service today? no, that kind of commonality and shared sacrifice has been left to pat tillman's of the world.
and to be sure, the left wannabe elites today think *their* key to the executive bathroom, their "entitlement", comes not from some sort of sense of duty, education, experience or abject patriotism but from the same things they pillory the old boy network for thinking was theirs; ethnicity, their given set of reproductive organs, claimed sexuality (or lack of any normal desires). its that theirs is the "right" set.
the mistake of the right (non-alt type) wannabes is they'll take their money and go home. money will insulate em from the hordes, the ruckus and global warming.
and this is where the HW Bush class went off the rails; they allowed a disease of greed to be their defining characteristic. there's no compromise, going to war or serving the country, they'll corrupt economics of the system and never have to interact with the unwashed masses again again, creating an even more unequal society. and real americns lose again.
Oh no no no NYT, not today. I am a 22-year-old white woman who bought myself a subscription so I could have a quality news app to read every morning. So far I really appreciate your journalistic content as well the comment section. But this piece made me mad & so for the first time I am sharing my thoughts here:
It’s massively disappointing to read the article attached to this disturbing headline—a piece which amounts to a myopic fellation of the white supremacy of my grandparent’s generation. Right now I’m reading “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein & learning about the legacy of a WASP-led government which brutally & wholeheartedly created residential segregation across the US. Segregation & it’s consequences were no accident. It was legally mandated by the very people that this article says we should “miss”, because that’s just how much they hated Black people. (My interest is in affordable housing so it’s only one example, but I could write an essay about the legacy of Mr. Douthat’s idolized Mayflower descendants towards Native Americans, the Africans they enslaved, & immigrants from Asia).
Take the rose-colored glasses OFF & please understand that you can hate the racist hypocrisy of this ruling class just as much as you can hate the overt racism of the previous generations of elite. In fact, one was not possible without the other. & here’s an idea: let’s condemn white supremacy in all forms.
7
The problem with meritocracy is not the concept, but that the country has never dealt with the sizable inequities of opportunity that still exist for minorities, women, and the poor which prevent us from having a true meritocracy. Millions of Americans are still prevented from competing in a meritocracy because their schools are woeful, their living environments are oppressive, and their opportunities limited by a society that is still rife with racism, sexism, and systemic poverty. That and the fact many who deservedly rise to the top are often intent on keeping it that way for themselves and their tribe through means that do not have to do with merit. Meritocracy may not create a utopia, but you'll never answer the question under current conditions.
3
Seems the ruling class of the WASPs of the past acknowledged their social responsibility. Today's ruling class, especially in Washington, seem only to believe in their own entitlement to power and riches.
1
I wonder that is the definition of "corrupt" for Douthat.
A politician is for a woman freedom to have an abortion. He would not hesitate to have his wife or daughter have one. This politician turns on a dime against abortion rights in order to get elected. He govern violating the US constitution that protects religious freedom by restricting women's rights religious freedom to follow the teaching of their religion in terms of abortion. In father Douthat's book this man is good WASP, not corrupt.
Worse this politician with deep ties to the oil industry goes to an International Summit on Global Climate Change in Rio and goes to the mat to scuttle the agreement to combat the greatest threat facing humanity. When the politician refused to sign the accord that all other nations had agreed to, was the man defending the interests of oil and coal or was he simply ignorant? Was this man simply wrong or corrupt?
Yet seven years earlier Republican Senator from RI Chafee had testified "There is a very real possibility, that man--through ignorance or indifference, or both--is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to perform basic life support functions for the planet.” Is it possible that the oilman turned politician (who had graduated from an elite university) was ignorant? or corruption is a more parsimonious explanations? Yet father Douthat's concluded this politician is good WASP, not corrupt.
One has to wonder that is the definition of corrupt for Douthat.
3
Would the WASP Republicans of 1960 have attempted what the current Wisconsin Republicans are doing, that is changing the rules after the Democrats won the governorship? They would not because it would be both "poor sportsmanship" and bad manners. The political amorality that Neut Gingrich brought to his party has had a long run but is, I hope, beginning to work against them.
1
Although somewhat WASPish myself, I feel little nostalgia for WASP rule. It was WASP leaders who brought us the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Further back in time, WASP leaders kept African Americans in slavery for 350 years, slaughtered most of North America's native population, and denied women the right to vote for 400 years. Wise and competent? I don't think so.
2
What meritocracy? The admission rate for legacies at Harvard is FIVE TIMES the acceptance rate of other applicants. The aristocracy is alive and well and inherited political position is as prevalent as ever. Witness the CEOs of fortune 500 companies - what percentage are white male educated by the ivy league? Sure, there are more Catholics and Jews than there used to be, but given the watering down of religion in these parts of society, the 'diversity' is negligible.
What's been lost is a system of values that goes beyond Capitalism and "me and mine". Let's figure out how to replace that, without fighting a great depression or a world war to gain some perspective.
5
The Old Guard might save us yet: Robert Mueller.
1
"we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well."
Is this your argument for a benign dictatorship, Ross?
Lots of people don't miss the WASPS. How about the women who were assaulted at those ivy league schools you cite, with nothing done about it?
What about the gay people who were discriminated against and whose suffering was mocked and ignored during the AIDS crisis?
What about the racism?
The idea that there was some "golden age" where everyone was happy under WASP rule is a myth.
1
Here's the thing, though: those WASP establishment leaders depended on, and even quietly encouraged, the support of the racists and xenophobes. Almost always. From the British empire ruling India to the Bushes in America.
What we are seeing now with trumpism is the overripe fruition of that in a way the establishment never dreamed of, because for all their smarts they could never imagine a word in which they lost power to the basest elements they quietly fostered. But that's what happens when you don't stomp out the toxicity in your own house.
Sure, Bush was orders of magnitude better than Trump. But that is not saying very much.
I'd much rather have the America that seemed ascendent under Obama: diverse, honorable, well-respected, compassionate, resolute, strong, pragmatic without yielding to amorality.
3
For Americans so loved and admired President 41 that they denied him a second term in office. See: No greater honor than to be disregarded then later, rediscovered.
3
The last generation of WASP rulers discussed here were far from responsible and competent leaders. They turned to fleecing the country once the post-WWII situation was sufficiently stable and prosperous. They turned on trade unions, the regulatory state and the broad middle class to stuff themselves silly with insane levels of wealth comparable to the Gilded Age. That project continues to this day and is destroying the basis of our Republic.
2
"Personal austerity"? That's a weird way of describing robber barons like Bush, who made sure his Carlyle Group got paid coming and going from the coffers of the U.S. Treasury.
3
This is wrong on so many levels. First, looked at pedantically, Trump is a WASP. Second, many of his supporters are in essence lamenting the fact that they too are WASPS but have lost their social position to other groups. Third, wouldn't we all rather have a meritocratic class system rather than a caste-based one? Finally, what we really miss is maturity, consideration for others and thoughtfulness which have been replaced by an "it's all about me" culture with pride in ignorance, the continuous need for instant gratification, a focus on blame, lack of personal accountability and nonsense like 'age is just a number".Our cultural realities alone would have made adaptive evolution of the "Establishment" impossible.
I lived on Main Line Philadelphia for 30 years and saw first have the impact of social transformation. As the new money moved in, we had to purchase more and more Haloween candy since children from the Patrician set only took a few items but the newcomer's kids loaded up. A microcosm of cultural change and class.
2
Push away from Wikipedia and come to Minnesota, Ross. We are highest in voter participation (my congressional district was highest of 435) and volunteerism; we are highly educated and prosperous. We are the westernmost point of "Yankeedom", which my ancestors helped found starting in 1620 and which spread westward over many decades of internal migration. Yet we just sent the first of two Muslim women to Congress - an articulate, highly intelligent young woman (that district was also in the top 10 for participation). We have fortunately pushed back the Wisconsin Red creep which is destroying my home state. Yes, we have high taxes - but high services as well. We consider this our civic "tithe", just like my peeps the Puritans had their own tithes and rules and, well, non-cosmopolitism (they left England to escape it). It's what you choose to promote and celebrate, and what makes the society you want to live in.
1
I have no nostalgia for the Wasp elite of yesteryear. It was genteel, but exclusionary. And the Poppy Bush's of the world never hesitated to employ amoral attack dogs like Lee Atwater to do the dirty work they were too refined for.
I suspect the fond remembrance of H.W. Bush is the natural affection for a President who actually cared about his country and its citizens. Wanted to see us succeed as a whole.
As opposed to the White House's current occupant, who is interested in about 8 or 9 Americans and could care less what happens to the other 325 million.
6
I guess when others sent their sons to Viet Nam, Bush wasn't so keen on that for George jr. So much for service.
The failures of our society now, may not be the failure of the meritocracy, but the failure of the elite's. To raise up a manlike George W Bush, who until Trump was our worst president in modern time. George Jr. only cleared the ground for someone even less capable to rise to the presidency. Many of the old line WASP's my wring their hands, but they still voted for him and stand with him. In America it's still a lot better to be born on third base than not.
2
Protestantism has run amok (evangelical fanatics) and the result is the trump white house. It is time once and for all to actually separate the church from the state. I would prefer that my leaders not identify with any particular denomination, sect or cult and not bow down to any particular denomination, sect or cult. The era of the WASP may be over, that's well and good but let's not replace it with something even more perverse. And no more tax exempt status for certain politically active "churches."
2
Our elected leaders don't rule. I know many Catholics have trouble with that, having been born into Catholicism, but repeat after me (and follow along with your beads, if it helps you to remember): Our elected leaders lead. They do not rule. Our elected leaders lead. They do not rule. Our elected leaders lead. They do not rule.
1
WASP's were able to be polite because they were financially secure based on great-great-grandaddy's wealth, control of status conferring institutions ( universities, clubs, political parties, banks, law firms, corporate boards coop apartments) through contractual and social means that did not necessitate the airing of racism, anti-semitism, and religious intolerance in public, and a sense of providential favor as evidenced by their financial and social status. At some point the money ran out, America grew too large for it to solely source leadership talent from an ingrown group that was barely replacing itself and the objects that defined success were not in many cases those traditionally part of WASP culture. American society has been able to take into its DNA pieces of what every group has brought to this land, be they the slaves from Africa, the Jews from the shtetl and the WASPS from Puritan England. The domination of any one of these culture over the others is sub-optimal and at some point self-limiting.
1
"And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence." What a string of stuffy hogwash. I will remember the entire Reagan-Bush experience as a fantastic period of debt, over-militarization, entitlements for the rich, environmentally harmful deregulation, and the rise of NIMBYs, the locally active environmentalists that sprang up in reaction to them all. To quote the late great Hunter Thompson: "The entire Bush family from Texas should be boiled in poison oil."
It is telling that 2018 was the year Harvard both eliminated the line in its graduation song that envisioned Harvard enlightening the world "/'til the stock of the Puritans die/" and fought tooth and nail in Federal court to exclude Asian Americans for a perceived lack of soft skills.
(Why the stock of the Puritans (including their Catholic-Puritan, and Jewish-Puritan descendants) couldn't simply marry future Tiger Moms and Tiger Dads and toughen up is beyond me.)
If the United States of America is to survive even another 50 years in an ever-rougher world, it will need to rediscover asceticism somewhere (mass conversion to Islam?), and a sense of personal responsibility, caginess and patriotic duty among its intellectual and political elite (Confucianism?).
More likely, China triumphs economically and militarily, Europe and Japan as we know them die out as powers because they cannot bear to have and raise children, and the US of A splits up into half a dozen weak countries to be exploited by others.
Ah, let's roll back the 20th century and return to the era of looting and exploiting the world, destroying everyone and everything obstructing white dreams of domination and fake superiority.
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” (Carl Sandburg)*
Ross Douthat, more Catholic than the Pope. Please read the Gospels. Jesus was not for property or domination or exclusion, and he wasn't "white". How can people can call themselves Christians and embrace the dead sins of pride and avarice and ignore their hypocrisy? It's all about money for pulpit evangelicals: trickle-up.
Wisconsin shows the way: you are only entitled to a vote and an opinion if you are white and a Republican.
Never mind global warming, perpetrated by the haves on the have nots. The earth is real; the truth is real; lies and evasions and repression are not the solution.
Never mind extreme income inequality: greed is good.
Never mind cheating: WASPs deserve to win by foul means if they can't win by fair means.
GWHB was more civilized and kind than most Republicans, and he did some good things, but mostly he helped establish dirtier politics as the norm, and Republican radical theft as the one true way.
* https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/garry-kasparov-says-we-are-living-in-chaos-but-remains-an-incorrigible-optimist
2
All so very true. The WASP elite taught America--and the world--that it was possible to have a political and economic elite, only partially hereditary, that could build and govern a functioning republic. That isn't a skill that elites typically possess. The current crowd--and I am a part of them--is not showing it is up to the task. The article makes the key point: to sustain a republic, the elite must show that it isn't just about success; to lead, you have to give service.
1
Beyond railing at Douhat’s generalizing—WASPs are good, meritocrats are bad—I was stopped cold by his assessment that the ideals of meritocracy are “dubious” and by the implication of his piece that we are now ruled by one.
Help me understand why the values of education, ability and skill are “dubious,” why would we not seek those of the highest competence, skill and knowledge to run our government. And surely Douthat jests when he implies we are currently ruled by those who have such traits or even hold them in regard.
No, Ross, we are not ruled by meritocrats any more than we are ruled by the WASP aristocrats you lionize. We are ruled, as another commenter so astutely observed, by rural and Tidewater WASPs (and those of similar ilk)—who not only share none of the ideals of service-to-country and noblesse oblige of their aristocratic brethren but who are deeply suspicious of anyone who values education and skill or brings even the most basic knowledge to the table. Indeed, the President of the United States lacks even a rudimentary command of grade school American civics—and could no doubt rally his base against such an “elite” notion if it served his purposes.
Like Douthat I desperately miss the the civility, dedication-to-country and nobless oblige of our former aristocratic leaders. But I am terrified by the lack of knowledge and skill of our current leadership—and by their electorate’s belief that lacking both merit AND aristocratic ideals is a good thing.
11
Interesting article, but the use of a Francophile’s most pretentious expression “noblesse obligé” not once, not twice but three times is a little much.
2
Mr. Douhat is confusing a theoretical WASP elite with the old Eastern Establishment, which was a very real thing. If he had wrote about the Eastern Establishment and not WASPS, this article might have made some sense. That Eastern Establishment was never as monolithic as he portrays it and at least somewhat more meritocratic, but it was indeed based in the Northeast and had a more cosmopolitan perspective and a communal orientation and sense of responsibility that served the nation extremely well as it moved in the 19th century from a regional power to a global hegemon in the mid-20th. The changes he bemoans began in the 1960s with the political shift of the nation's political and demographic center of gravity to the sunbelt with LBJ and Nixon, both of whom were WASPs- their example demonstrate the issue is not ethnic or religious. That process was completed by Reagan, who, George H.W. Bush notwithstanding, finally blew that world up for good. In the sunbelt ethos, the sense of a larger communal perspective, both domestic and international, gave way to a far narrower and more isolationist perspective that we see so abundantly in Trump.
8
shouldn't we most fairly judge the leaders of the past by the consequences of their actions rather than the narrative they thought they were following?
4
Mr. Douthart - here is where the United States was in 1985 in terms of its trade DEFICIT with the totalitarian Communist regime in China: $6 million deficit. By the end of former President Reagan's term, it was $3.4 Billion. By the end of former President George H.W. Bush's term it was at: $18.3 Billion. By the end of former President Clinton's term it was at: $83.8 Billion. By the end of former President Bush (2nd)'s term it was at: $268 Billion. By the end of former President Obama's term it was at: $347 Billion.
This path is where the so-called "establishment" has very politely taken the U.S.A. It has literally allowed the U.S. to surrender and be defeated in decades of destructive trade war, which has hollowed out the U.S. economy, while at the same time empowering a regime with the greatest contempt to human rights and freedom in the world.
Please tell our impoverished and hopeless how civil this was. Please tell the children whose parents have been killed by the Communist regime how civil they were.
1
I certainly can see in retrospect how some six or more decades of an emphasis on free trade can be seen as a long-term mistake. Americans would never fall in love with the tiny and noisy VW Beetle. Which was then replaced by tiny Hondas and then bigger Hondas and then Acura and Lexus cars (and trucks) eventually built here, mostly in southern states that take pride in their hostility to unions. This oversimplified history illustrates the error in free trade. Yes, the foreign-made products in a free trade environment are usually much cheaper for us consumers. But that usually means hollowing out American industry or outsourcing it. Of course, there’s no guarantee that US manufacturers will act smartly. Do you imagine Toyota, Honda and all the Asian car makers will follow the lead of GM and Ford to end the production of sedans? I don’t think so. Our big three imagine they can divvy the market, keeping the high-profit segments like pickup trucks and SUVs while leaving the sedans to those loser Asians. Meanwhile those “losers” haven’t kept themselves to the segments Americans supposedly don’t want:
•The top-selling vehicle was Ford's F-Series pickups. But...
•The best-selling SUV was the Toyota Rav 4.
•And the most popular sedan was the Toyota Camry,
But I have trouble following your lurch into anti-communism. In the case of cars it was democratic societies, such as Germany, Japan and South Korea that ate our lunch (and jobs), long before communist China awoke.
@Joe McGuire Thank you for your reply Mr. McGuire. Yesterday, I sat in the Rayburn House Office Building as a child who escaped from China cried as she described how the Chinese Communist Party tortured her father until he looked like a photograph from something out of the Holocaust. I regularly have seen those in other parts of the U.S. who have suffered, lost their homes, due to the economic surrender of the U.S. to the Communist regime. I am sorry that the concept of $347,000,000,000 as a trade deficit to the U.S. - just in 2016 - in funding a totalitarian Communist regime that seeks to rival 1940s Germany. But while the "cruel" may believe they can "win," the reality is that the only hope for our society is a respect for Mercy.
Whenever I hear "conservative" voices--whatever that means nowadays--bash liberals and blame them for everything wrong with society (Get over it--prayer should have never been allowed in the public school classroom in the first place)--I think about the names of the two factions: "Conservatives": what is it that they want to conserve? Easy--their power (it certainly isn't the environment, lately)at the expense of the marginalized (like a woman like me who graduated from high school before all the Ivy League schools were open to females and Title 9 had not yet been invented). "Liberal"--sounds to me like liberty, freedom, openness to other people and ideas. Yes, I wish we had grown-ups in leadership positions in this country, but as long as institutions are led dominantly by white men (think Catholic Church, industry) that ain't going to happen. Nice try, Ross.
4
When will SOMEONE, ANYONE point out that the extremely courteous, civil, wonderful, darling GHWB nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall at the extreme insistence/pressure of the most vile creatures in the land, inspired by the Lee Atwater, who apologized on his premature deathbed for his despicable actions? Also to please the right, GHWB gave up his lifetime support of Planned Parenthood, and let his lovely wife Barbara titter delightedly as she refused to say how SHE felt about women's rights and women's health. The deification of the Father and now the "son who loved him but it was complicated" is beyond nauseating. Watching and listening to reporter after reporter gush about the Bushes, because they don't happen to be mobsters like the Trumps, is indecent.
12
"... (and women)... ." Thanks for the parenthetical after thought. The downfall of any ruling class is predictably followed by chaos--that doesn't mean they didn't deserve their downfall. A class that wrote racism in their founding document was predictably going to lose their grasp on power. No tears here.
3
While Ross' call for piousness grates for many of us, there is a problem that he points out that we need to address. What I would call the secular majority in this country has embraced no real morality other than materialism and utilitarianism. Should the brightest and best educated among us be the only ones to be granted power? Should their earnings be an order of magnitude higher than those with somewhat lower IQ or a less impressive education? Is it important for people to be good as well as smart? It is our secular utilitarianism that allows many Americans to say that Trump is capable of leadership because he is rich (so he must have some brains, right?), and went to good schools. In a non-pious secular world, how do we judge a person's character? There are many foul-mouthed entertainers, and if we don't have any universal moral standards who is to say that a little racism and sexism is a bad thing? After all, hasn't morality become a relative quantity, a function of one's identity?
.
Bush Sr.'s world would never elect a Trump because there were rules to exclude bad people. That world also excluded based on race, sex, and religion. We tore down those walls, but have yet to agree on how to replace them with better walls. Trump represents one of the dangers of a refusal to discriminate and exclude on any basis, and a refusal to acknowledge the need for universal values, even in the absence of religious dogma.
2
Iran Contra Check it out We forget what we want to forget and remember what we want to remember.
3
Kinda thought that one was on Reagan's watch.
Wasn't America founded to rid ourselves of White Anglo Saxon Protestant rule? I have some vague memory about a Revolutionary War. Something about tyranny. Or was America really just about WASPs avoiding taxes? The more things change the more they stay the same.
If Mitt Romney is the poster child for the modern WASP, count me out. The selective religiosity is enough to set one off. However, the unbridled corporatism dedicated to a set of principles decided by a foreign religion's quorum of seventy white male "protestants" is down right nauseous.
I'll take secularism along with all its faults. By the way, I don't see how Obama was a failure of the paradigm. The old guard simply prevented him for rising to his full potential. Sounds familiar. Another argument against the cracked pages of the faded aristocracy's worn out book.
All we really need is simply greater wealth equality. The nation will correct itself in short order, secular or no.
4
Secular successors? Our government has NEVER been this religious. You can't find a period in U.S. history where our government actors were more overtly and shamelessly pious. The Founders were trying to throw of the traditional power institutions like institutionalized religion, and now it runs the country. Proof? Alt-facts, fake news, climate denial. Ignorance and religious nationalism go hand-in-hand.
5
Missing from Ross Douthat's meditation on the Decline of the Wasp is the crucial concept of "gentleman." At the core of the old WASP code was the precept that one's general behavior be informed by a sense of good will, propriety and self-control. These qualities were embodied by the 41st president and they are altogether absent from the current president's behavior, not to mention the post-Eisenhower GOP. For the true gentleman, the most abhorrent act was to bully someone weaker. (Not to intercede in a display of bullying was almost as abhorrent.) The revulsion felt by many of us toward Trump comes down to the simple fact that he's a bully, through and through - and not, in any sense, a gentleman.
4
"Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well."
If Ross had any 1) stones, 2) actual sense of America, he'd have used "I" instead of "Americans" and "we" in that sentence.
4
Well, the basis of your argument is that when white supremacy was the nation's "legitimate and respected establishment," we were all better off. Now that white supremacy is in an irreversible decline, we are not an easy bunch to rule anymore. I think France before the French Revolution was like that: they were, culturally and politically, the most illustrious nation in Europe, ruled by a despotic monarchy. Then, after the monarchy had been removed, it started to decline and periodically beset by turmoils. The question is, however, whether France has become a better nation, through jettisoning its "ancien regime"? I think it has.
2
As a nation, we need to inculcate meritocracy and reiterate its meaning in all walks of life. Too bad the US based elite WASPs have excluded meritorious South/East Asian Americans from the inner sanctums of power, be it in public/private sector. Excellence is universal. The elite WASPs need to be inclusive of high potential, exemplary people of all ethnicity.
Like so many peddlers of identity politics, Ross Douthat fetishizes differences that we should try to look past, at least in our politics. He’s far weirder, though, because he dredges up these distinctions that few people care about anymore. Ask five millennials what a WASP is, and I bet four say “an insect.” He does the same thing with the Catholic Church, parsing differences in doctrine and identity that most of us, even Catholics, have forgotten. The 1950s are calling, and they want their columnist back.
3
Americans don't miss WASPs, they miss good jobs. They have been left behind by the new global elite, who care only for money and have moved nearly all manufacturing offshore. As an aside, Bush's infamous "Willie Horton" ad cemented the republican alliance with the racist vote.
1
Ross started out as a WASP.
W = White (sorry 'people of color' need not apply)
AS = Anglo Saxon (Northern European ONLY)
P = Protestant (read Episcopalian, Baptists need not apply)
But he converted to Catholicism and so left the fold, so to speak.
What balderdash (probably a great word used by Poppy)!
And the comment pointing out that Barack Obama exemplified everything ideal in a President is completely accurate.
Yes, Trump makes GHWBush look like a statesman, but it's really BHObama who looks the best ever in comparison.
3
Did I miss something? Is this satire? Are you really claiming that the American imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Western expansion, the Philippines, Vietnam), which was the project of WASP power players, soldiers and missionaries, was an example of the moral high ground? Are you praising as fair-minded and rational the same Ivy League patricians who fought so passionately against women’s right to vote? Are you setting aside the robber barons whose greedy excesses ushered in the Depression? Are you pining for that level of arrogance that saw most of humanity as nothing more than fodder for factories, farm labor, and the front lines? Are you forgetting about the current WASP in the White House, who has spent his entire political career (all three years) promulgating hatred and mistrust? Do you really believe that money and merit are synonymous?
4
You have to be really white to think this makes sense. I am looking forward to your next nostalgia piece on the Divine Right of Kings.
6
I just wrapped up teaching an undergraduate political philosophy course and am not surprised that, Catholicism aside, Douthat's argument is identical to that made more than 200 years ago by Edmund Burke in "Reflections on the Revolution in France." Burke railed against a new revolutionary elite whom he claimed had replaced the grace and grandeur of noblesse oblige with the cold, rational abstractions of the Enlightenment. Like Douthat, he argued that the new bourgeois elite were just like the old, landed gentry, albeit lacking their savoir-faire, piety, and statesmanship. But where Douthat merely apologizes for WASP antisemitism, Burke was explicit about accusing a cabal of Jews, intellectuals, and global merchants of poisoning the minds of the masses in an argument that is eerily similar to what we hear so often from the right today.
I'd encourage Douthat to follow my students' syllabus and read Mary Wollstonecraft's responses to Burke's tirade, the "Vindications of the Rights of Men and Women." Wollstonecraft was the godmother of the liberal progressive meritocracy. She understood that inequality and all its trappings are inimical to personal and public virtue, and that God did not create us to lord our privileges over one another.
4
What we might be nostalgic for is the approximately 200 years during which democracy flourished in the US.
Democracy was tried in Athens during the Age of Pericles but it didn't last. The Roman Republic was replaced by an autocracy. Most countries have been ruled by autocracies for most of their history. China was ruled by a series of emperors starting with Qin Shi Huangdi in 220-210 BC and the various dynasties lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia was ruled by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, all autocrats, and then Stalin. The EU has several nations which have followed the US to experiment with forms of democracy. But there is no guarantee that any of these democracies will last.
The reason they may self-destruct is that they are built on concepts which the people don't really believe in, like freedom of speech.
Let me give an example. As a democracy we need to discuss population growth. We need to develop policies which encourage or discourage having large numbers of children. But it is liberals, not just conservatives, who squelch freedom of speech, and with a vengeance.
Thus we fired Roseanne Barr because she said something once which was politically incorrect. We characterize those who oppose illegal immigration as bigots and racists. Instead of rational discussion, we tear down monuments to Robert E Lee.
The majority is often wrong. Without freedom of speech we cannot find out that we are wrong.
Great article, but it does not make the case that civic responsibility and duty in the age of the WASPs was in any way tied to the WASPiness of the elites.
Catholics excelled in that age in public service, Jews in journalism and innovation, Blacks in maintaining family values, and everyone in being an American. The Greatest Generation is so named because of their wartime service and resulting accomplishment, not their preference for boarding schools.
The prior age of obligation and community may well have been in spite of the WASPs. George H. W. Bush - veteran, Texas wildcatter, public servant - was anything but a typical WASP in those regards.
OK, FDR ruled wisely and well, but he was a Democrat!
Hmmm .... isn't Trump a privileged WASP? Somehow, I'm missing his noblesse oblige.
You are nostalgic for that WASP caste system perhaps and maybe that is because you idolize what you are too young to remember. I grew up in that era and as an atheist by choice but originally WASP by birth, those days weren’t all that great.
2
I don't miss the old WASP elite. I went to school with some of their smug, entitled, racist children. Their "cosmopolitanism" was the cosmopolitanism of the wealthy who knew where to buy the right suits, and how to order expensive wines. Their "public service" was too often "what's good for us is therefore good for America". Then they declared themselves the Greatest Generation.
Douthat forgets that being an "Arabist" meant that you were labelled a renegade who had "gone native", and that if you were a "China hand", you were labelled a "commie sympathizer". In both cases, you were effectively sidelined by the dogmatic cold warriors.
2
As to the war in Vietnam President Johnson was not a member of the New England elite and Kennedy was no WASP.
1
I grew uup in New England (and once cycled past the summer home of G H W Bush). Although I recognize the human deficiencies of the WASP, as pointed out by Mr. Douthat, I much admire the New England Yankee. For all his faults, he had some supreme virtues: belief in education, respect for Democratic values, personal integrity, disdain for showy display of wealth, and an acknowledgement of the worth of 'lesser breeds' (e.g. Jews), as long as they did not challenge the establishment.
These values spring from the nature of the earliest settlers in New England, who founded Harvard College 16 years after their arrival in 1620, in the fact of hunger, hostile Native Americans, and a bewildering new environment. These people were educated and victims themselves of religious prejudice in England. At the risk of being called a snob (ok, I admit it), settlers elsewhere in this country lacked the virtues of these Yankees. Although I am not a real Yankee, their values rubbed off on me and I still value them.
1
Let's see, Bush gave us Willie Horton, empowered Rumsfeld and Cheney, kowtowed to Saudi Arabia and went to war to defend them from Hussain, while the elite of the region partied in London nightclubs and American servicemen died and American servicewomen had to wear head shawls. That wonderful Protestant ethic, as espoused by Billy Graham on the Nixon tapes where (paraphrasing) if the Jews knew how much I hate them..., not to mention his wonderful son Franklin. You can be polite, witness his letters to Maureen Dowd, a war hero (albeit apparently a grabby one according to women from about 2006 or so on) and still be a reprehensible human being.
3
Who is this "WE" you speak of so authoritatively? Black, Brown and other POC certainly don't miss "When WASPs Ruled the World!"
Why do you always talk like you know what we're thinking or feeling? You are no authority on the American consciousness, especially when you don't even notice the thoughts and feelings of more than half of us!
5
Trust the WASP ruling elite? Ludicrous premise.
2
Barack Obama was a miles better President than GHW Bush. I don't miss the WASP elite at all.
3
@jaltman81 One notable difference: taxes were on the lips of Mr. Obama. Constantly.
@HLB Engineering We needed to raise taxes on the rich. Still do.
It's telling that Douthat's vision of an "adaptive" WASP elite includes women only parenthetically and Asians not at all. I guess adaptation only goes so far.
5
George HW Bush made one of the biggest blunders in the Middle East when he launched Desert Storm. There are lots of nonWASP people capable of leading us, but first the nation needs to take control from racist right.
@Gerard Iannelli The Kurds and the marsh Arabs will not be attending today's service at the "Why do we have a" National Cathedral, "again?" The surviving tribes send their heartfelt regrets.
"We," Douthat? By "we" you must mean that Buckleyesque strain of conservatism that desperately wishes for a New American Aristocracy, or as I like to call it, The Lucky Sperm Club.
These same Ivy-League S&B boys of privilege had as many vices, and committed as many (if not more) crimes as the meritocracy you whine about in this piece. What is almost amusing about conservatives is that they bray on and on about "pluck" and "hard work" and all that bootstrap nonsense that has always been the exception and not the rule---thanks in part to this sainted WASP elite---and then grovel at the Brahmins/Yalies/Hasty-Pudding Wunderkinder, and pray mightily that the Lodges still speak only to God.
You cannot have it both ways.
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@Richard Steele Sorry, it was the Lowells who spake only to the Cabots, and the Cabots who spake only to God. No Lodges involved.
14
Without belief in God and fear of hell, the poor have no hope and the rich have no fear.
If there is no final judgment: how do we define virtue?
Yet organized religion has often been the handmaiden of the powerful rather than servant of the downtrodden.
The left thinks it has virtue and the right hopes to cling to power.
But the RING OF POWER corrupts everyone: see Frodo at Mount Doom.
The old elite WASPs knew they were entitled but they could be ruthless if anyone or anything threatened their entitlements.
America's founding fathers were definitely elite: and they believed in their own virtue. But they still lived in an age of faith.
What is the ultimate good today? Outside a self-important church fighting for power?
Closest I can come is the devotion of loving parents for their children, or perhaps the devotion of a dog for his/her human. It may be no accident that dogs have become more and more important in America and now the love of a dog has become a psychiatric treatment for mental illness and social dysfunction.
Read an Article by Stephen W. Porgas, Ph.D., "Making the World Safe for our Children:......." Heavy read, but it will change your understanding of humans.
1
This Op-Ed is a bizarrely superficial, dangerous attack on the Enlightenment culture of reason and individual rights which created America. The appeal to religion and ethnicity is one more pseudo-educated, Leftist encouragement of the Right. The NYT is indirectly leading America into religious dictatorship. You had better read _Atlas Shrugged_ before its too late.
Ugh, what a nauseating column. Read Ariel Dorfman in the Guardian for a more clear-eyed view of the aristocracy that Douthat seems to long for:
"George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/george-hw-bush-family
8
Well..... I miss decent people raised and educated well and "sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige". For the rest of WASP culture, good riddance.
5
Ross,
I too grew up in Connecticut and I easily recognize you for who you really are - a WASP wanna be. Pentacostal then - OMG - a Roman Catholic?!?!? No possible entry to the W Protetant SP society.
Finally only wanna bes keep their prep school ( not a top tier one at that ) in an adult resume.
2
What an elitist, racist column. Unbelievable. And if the GOP did not consider Obama legitimate then that shows how low they have sunk. True majorities in both election. Oh but I forgot, he was born in Kenya, so he is not legit (Of course I am being sarcastic). I guess only white men of a certain class are allowed to be President according to the author - but those days are over.
10
Obama was a better man -- more honest, more compassionate toward ALL Americans -- than either Bush. He didn't use false pretexts to get American soldiers killed in Iraq. He didn't let fellow Americans die in New Orleans. He didn't wreck the economy or use a race-baiting ad to get elected. This column raises more questions about the mindset of Douthat that anything else. To wit: Are these sycophantic conservative columnists like him all deliberately dishonest, or has the Heritage Foundation brainwashed them?
14
This article is one of the stupidest, most racist diatribes I have ever seen published in the NYT. I would expect garbage like this to be in Brietbart News, ghostwritten by David Duke. Explain how George H. W. Bush is a WASP, but W is not? W went to the same elite boarding schools and was a member of Skull and Bones at Yale, but that did nothing to bring competency to his Presidency. A more accurate story might be why was H. W. our last competent Republican president, because since him Democratic Presidents have held a monopoly on that trait. You only make passing reference to President Obama, criticizing him for the white resentment he elicited, and which you yourself hold in spades, but you conveniently ignore how his Presidency resulted in: 1) the greatest economic expansion in modern history, saving America from the recession that W.’s reckless policies drove us into; 2) the expansion of access to health care for millions of Americans; 3) the beginning of end of the wars that W. got us into under false pretenses while killing Bin Laden; 4) being relatively scandal free apart from the manufactured scandals Republicans created to delegitimize him, i.e. Fast and Furious (a program that began under W.), Benghazi-gate (an attack of foreign soil, which has happened in every Presidency); and 5) being well respected around the globe except by autocratics. I would prefer a Pres. who relates to everyday Americans and works in their interest, regardless of background, any day.
13
Well, that was interesting, Mr. Douthat. Some thoughts:
We're people, right? And as people, do we not catch ourselves pining for a Golden Age? Maybe (bearing in mind, sir, that you are Catholic--just as I am Presbyterian)--maybe what we see here is our dim, cloudy memory of the Garden of Eden. A rich and fruitful Paradise our distant forebears were kicked out of--and we've been longing to sneak back in ever since.
I mean--well, take WASP''s. I guess I'm a WASP. Sort of. Was government by the WASP's wise--just--beneficial? Maybe. Sometimes.
Or maybe not. I'm thinking here of a prominent WASP (no names please) who parked himself in the State Department during World War II--
--and carefully, patiently, assiduously saw to it--
--that only the bare minimum of Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi genocide--
--got into the USA.
The bare minimum? No. Not even that.
"Make difficulties," he instructed consuls in different cities and countries. "Throw up obstacles. Require more and more paperwork--more and more documentation. Keep 'em out! For God's sake--keep 'em out!"
Not a verbatim quote. But that (so help me God) was the purport.
Despicable. Utterly despicable.
But this man was a WASP.
No, it must run deeper than just a pining for our vanished WASP's. There must be lodged in the human heart an intuition--
--that SOMEWHERE decent governments exist, Run by decent people.
--and we want it.
Badly.
All the time.
4
Ah, no one as wise and good as a white fella, eh? You really should add "male" to your list of superior qualities--and we know that you would add Catholic were that not just a little too obvious in your intent, which comes through loud and clear. The people oppressed so your favorite race and religion could stomp around on top are many, and you express nothing of their misery and losses here. When we have had a society with other people running it--and we still haven't--then make your comparisons, if you want. But make them fairer than this one, or they will still be worth nothing.
5
Astonishingly wrong headed. The notion that the WASP aristocracy had some kind of noble and humble impulse that is now lacking is utterly laughable to the black people those WASPs manage to savagely beat down or to the gay community who those WASP leaders callously simply stood by and watched die with cruel indifference. Bush was a man who oversaw the brutal suppression and torture of dissidents in Latin America and when the U.S. murdered 298 people by shooting down an airliner refused to apologize. Consider that. Your organization just murdered hundreds like any savage terrorist and you refuse to apologize.
Clearly Douthat is part of the in group with these WASP folks, because if he weren't, we wouldn't be laboring under such breathtaking delusions.
4
How off base can Douthat possibly get? Not only do I no longer read Trump Twitter comments, but will no longer read Douthat's opinion pieces. Time for the Times to get a more competent commentator.
7
China has proven that authoritarianism, of the communist sort, and capitalism can serve each other well. So well that 'W', son of 'HW', expressed his admiration. Now Douthat pines for the lost white shoe generation of The Great Gatsby. You know, the America First boys and girls, the admirers of Der Fuhrer (and some of his biggest investors) and the despisers of labor. Yeah, here's to the Skull and Bones crowd.
2
As a Jew, I find Douthat's whole premise offensive especially as it was the WASPs who prevented the admission of Jews to the US during the Nazi era.
8
From the headline: 'Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors RULE US neither as wisely nor as well.'
Two words defining the problem, the submissive acceptance of so called leaders and rulers. See, the one who pays the salary is the boss, the one who collects the salary is the employee. Politicians are neither leaders nor rulers, they are our employees.
1
"...the compromises that a moderate northeastern WASP like George H.W. Bush made with Sunbelt populism. "
Oh - you mean the first openly racist campaign with Willie Horton featured. Is that what you mean by Southern populism? Is that it Ross?
Don't worry - I see that in Texas there is a move by some in the Texas GOP to get a Muslim doctor out of his leadership role because he is a Muslim. Southern populism is alive and well.
2
WASPs sting! Ask Anita Hill. Ask Michael Dukakis. Ask AIDs victims. Ask African-Americans. All were stung by WASP George H.W. Bush who used racism to win the presidency, pushed an unqualified man onto the Supreme Court whose votes still sting. Destroyed a young African-American woman who dared to come forward and tell the truth. Who ignored providing a helping hand to victims of the AIDS epidemic. WASP America was a land of privilege for powerful white men with the proper religion and background. Everyone else was second-class--African-Americans,Catholics, gays, Jews, Latinos, union members, and women. This is the ugly America that Donald Trump is trying to bring back with his blatant bigotry and misogyny. Americans voted overwhelmingly in the recent midterms to reject that return to the patriarchy of white privilege and to include everyone in their governance. To argue otherwise is to return to government of the WASP, by the WASP and for the WASP.
3
"... but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy..."
To do this, the elite would have had to admit publicly that it existed, and that it was designing itself to continue ruling. While we all knew these things were true, to admit them publicly would have put the lie to the myth that America is an egalitarian society.
The current multicultural meritocracy doesn't seem to rank honesty very highly on its list of merits, at least in the higher ranks. Maybe the WASPs didn't either, but they hid it better. Perhaps when you start out wealthy, you have family experience and legions of lawyers to hide your machinations.
As for G.H.W Bush, he was born wealthy and connected, and like most of his generation of leaders, he never had to claw his way from obscurity into a position of comfort from which to launch a career of service. To his credit, he could have lived a life of genteel comfort, but he chose duty instead. But then again, it never put his economic future at risk. The money that he earned during his life of service was probably less than a rounding error in his personal fortune.
1
Oh joy and golly!
Here’s a man pining for the bigotry of the past. Just a few bad apples, he says.
Just the sort of white, WASP privileged column I needed to spice — nay, bland — my morning up.
The WASP ruling GOP class will do anything to hold on to their misbegotten, malcontent, ill-deserved place in society.
Everyone should merit from the confidence and entitlement of a mediocre white person. Especially the people who you built your wealth on.
What good can you see of your people, Douthat, now that you have the benefit of hindsight?
3
Apparently Ross's hazy glow of nostalgia does not have any room for the multiple war crimes committed by this WASPy guy.
1
Wow. How can we miss a government run by Whites? How can we lament diversity for those in charge of a democracy? How can Ross Douthat think what he has written be considered anything but racist?
2
WASP did you say? You mean all those prep-school, Ivy-League elites whose drunken, misogynistic antics put robber barons at the echelons of Fortune 500 companies and our latest Supreme Court justice on the bench (oh right, he’s Catholic)?
Bush 41 was honed by WWII, witnessing unspeakable atrocities and suffering, not by main line Protestantism.
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@EAK
No, he was by both. The old style WASP truly believed in Duty, Honor, and Service. They did indeed believe it.
28
@EAK. Bush was a pilot who flew over, and therefore did not see, any atrocities or suffering. That is why the attrocities committed in his name and the suffering his wag the dog wars caused didn't bother him.
13
@Renee Margolin Read a history book. We should have let the Germany and Japan go on their merry way with their atrocities in WWII? He saw his fellow servicemen die. And how do any of us know whether or what he, or any other person in the same position, thought of the people he fought against?
3
No data, none whatsoever, supports Douthat's thesis that WASPs -- and particularly those who prepared at New England boarding schools and graduated from the Ivy League -- used to run this country, or did it better than the sorry lot in power now. The American elite has always been, to a certain extent, porous (for white, Christian men), and much of the country's leadership in former days rose to power on their own merits from family farms or small-town businesses. Among twentieth century presidents of this sort, one thinks instantly of Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Carter. It could be argued that the values instilled in these places regarding the importance of protecting one's reputation, working hard, pursuing an education, and treating ordinary people with respect had as much to do with American success as anything learned at St. Paul's or Harvard. And, by the way, Robert Mueller is a product of St. Paul's.
I like what Ms. Andrew's quote said about aristocracy [or any leader]: "But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside." We have this notion that we "need a woman" to represent us, or we need "a person who looks like us" to rule us; maybe we need to remember what competency looked like?
1
It might be useful to recall that our current crisis of leadership has its precedent in the early republic. The generation that won the Revolution and created a constitutional republic enjoyed the leadership of a remarkable group of men, but these "founding fathers" subscribed to a set of elite values which clashed with the democratic ethos popular with the rest of the citizenry.
Washington, Adams, even Jefferson, found themselves living among people who respected, even revered them, but who demanded a larger role in running the country than these natural aristocrats considered wise. This determination led to the rise of a new class of politicians, exemplified by Andrew Jackson, as shocking to he elite of his day as Trump is to many Americans today.
For the rest of the century, with the remarkable exception of Abraham Lincoln, one mediocre president followed another, as the emerging WASP elite scorned politics as an occupation unworthy of a gentleman. It required the crisis triggered by the excesses of capitalism at the end of the century, coupled with the rise of a generation of upper middle-class WASPS who envisioned politics as a means of correcting the ills of society, to usher in the era described by Douthat. From Teddy Roosevelt to HW Bush.
The WASPS differed from their distant ancestors by openly embracing democracy, even as they exercised a level of power greater than that of any 19th century politician. Elites dressed in democratic clothing.
1
WASPs have a history of avoiding compulsory service. The Greatest Generation was more the exception than the rule. Substitution and commutation during the Civil War is an obvious example. Vietnam draft deferrals are another one. H.W.'s son is a prime example of WASP privilege and avoidance.
W technically was in the military but even his commanders were confused when asked to write an evaluation report. How do you evaluate someone who is never on base?
Bill Clinton is another example. He used family connections to get a highly desired Navy billet only to renege on the commitment. He would call in favors to join the ROTC to avoid the draft as well. He reneged on that commitment too. Draft dodger through and through.
We have Captain Bones Spurs now. Enough said.
1
Where have I been? We live in a meritocracy? Meritocracy has replaced privilege? That's news to me. Meritocracy, I thought was a government system that only honors ability and is uninfluenced by consideration of wealth, race, sex, religious association, educational achievement, background, ideology, temperament, character, pulchritude. There is not a position in government, the arts, media, ----anywhere in America-- where merit or ability are the standard requisite for success or power. There are many paths to power but merit or ability are not among them, unless we confine and define merit and ability to mean the ability to achieve power.
3
Good ideas. The aristocracy should meets its obligations. And the rest of us should get to work. Long ago, Walter Bagehot explained how it worked in Britain, where the aristocracy is defined by a more explicit set of rules. They form the Dignified faction of government. The ceremonies, the pomp, the glitter, and the showing up for all the occasions. The work gets done by the Efficient sector of society. There are numerous problems with this scheme. However, it does keep those dignified folks very busy.
@What WouldOmarDO The debates in the Commons yesterday was anything but dignified. Even.. if the members were using their finest Oxbridge accents and witticisms. See: Balliol is pronounced Bailey.
When meritocracy is dependent on "liking the cut of your jib" as in the early George H.W. Bush era we exclude men like Barack Obama and open ourselves up to a (pretend) WASP like Donald Trump. We need to celebrate George H.W. Bush who in one lifetime progressed from racist, misogynist good old boy to a man of the 21st century extolling diversity and the rights of the disabled.
1
@Steven Blader Not to worry, old fellow. God has a special section in heaven for the blue bloods. After all, can you imagine them sitting and celebrating Jesus with the rest of us?
Ross you seem to think that an entrenched upper class is inevitable: "you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions" and you quote Helen Andrews as saying "The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it." Most people don't have a problem with inequality, it's the inequality of opportunity that is the problem. "Land of opportunity" and "equality of opportunity" used to be conservative mantras. No longer, because the elites have realized that to provide true equality of opportunity, they will have to give up the automatic place for their kids in the ruling elite. It is my belief that this is an area where gov't has a role.
People object to the lottery of birth being the largest single factor in determining their lot in life (still). Now obviously its still possible to move up or down the wealth ladder, but it has become and continues to become much harder to do so. In my opinion, this is what has led us to our current impasse in our political system and to the current "deaths of despair". People have realized that they'll have to work really hard their whole life to end up . . . exactly where they are now. And our elites aren't addressing it in any meaningful way, because it doesn't really affect them. That can depress anyone.
3
What predictable nonsense. Comparing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? Why, because one was the son of a former presidential candidate, cabinet member and CEO as opposed to one with an absent Kenyan father who was raised by his white grandparents? One who made it on his own versus the one who talked about getting his start with a “small, million dollar loan” from daddy?
Look, Mittens Romney obviously has far more in common with Donald Trump than he does with Obama.
And what Father Doubt That column would be complete without the ever present lament about American loss of faith?
9
This is a strained, convoluted article that verges on parody. Perhaps it is parody? In praise of WASP leadership? This is the liberal version of MAGA while we all know the truth about the history of the American ruling class, its war mongering, its racism, its imperialism.For the sake of wealth accumulation.
7
Ross Donut wishing for the days when white men ruled america; did I miss something? They still do, these WASP's are just less patrician and nice. As a white man, I look forward to the days when rich, white, religious men lose their stranglehold on the united states.
7
Been a while since I’d seen this happen, Ross...NYT columnist taking three big swings and a miss – on one pitch...
HW may have been a bigoted WASP – though I couldn’t tell from Dowd’s Sunday column whether their lifetime of mutual open-mike crude-mick moments was being excoriated or adulated by her...When he was running the CIA – seriously doubt he spoke in singsong half-sentences to the senior staff...But he was also a genuine war hero with the same sense of duty that Teddy Roosevelt’s and Joe Kennedy’s sons brought to WW I and WW II...Further, he was ambassador to the UN, and a solid vice-president – and innately understood that the primary purpose of any war is to bring about its end as quickly as possible...
1.His legitimate heirs are not Dubya or Obama, or Warren or Harris...They are Moore and Noyce, Jobs and Musk, Brin and Page, and Gates and Bezos, and (all of the) Jacobs – With Zuckerberg as sort of the younger Prince Harry of the family...Take away the roles of these people and their companies – and the high point of US technology would be GM’s hydrogen-powered Electrovan from a half-century ago
2.I don’t miss him – or what he, in part, stood for – any more than I wax nostalgic for a front-row seat at a public hanging
3. As far as this obtuse observation...
> Q: “...what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable...
> A: One that has put some care into making itself tax-exempt...
1