The Top 40

Old WASPs a) recognized their own frailties and kept them private, and b) recognized one another's frailties and covered for each other. I know. I is one. The current crop, WASP or otherwise, doesn't seem to possess this power of recognition. They're the "wonder wha hoppened" crowd.

Gerard: Apologies in advance> This is one of those topics that just inflames my spleen.

We have developed the worst ruling class ever. It is so bad, that even a dull tool, like David Brooks knows something is seriously wrong in Eliteville.

Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment … dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service. Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. … [They aren't] doing a better job of running [those institutions] than the old boys’ … .

* * *

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. …

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. … they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). …

Brooks is not acute enough to name the disease whose symptoms he has well described. The disease is marxism. Milos Foreman to the contrary notwithstanding*, this is not old fashioned industrial grade stalinism, it is modern academic marxism learned by our academics from the incomprehensible ravings of demented French “philosophers” like Foucault and Derrida. Marxism has caused our elites to shun religion, the military, and American History.

Shallow, cheap, marxist, atheism has caused the mainstream Protestant denominations to go into a tailspin. It has also deprived the elite of a moral language and the moral training necessary to support an elite’s role in society. Further it has severed a very important connection between the elites and the low sloping foreheads in flyover country.

A further consequence is the collapse of sexual morality and the rise of the politics of the pudenda, which holds that sexual behavior is a mere question of taste, the most important thing about a persons identity is his taste in sexual partners, and that nothing can legitimately prevent sexual gratification like the fear of pregnancy or incurable STDs. Abortionism and gay marriage are political issues created by modern academic marxism, not by the low slopers who are appalled by them.

The hatred of the military by modern academic marxists has grown like a poison ivy patch for the last 50 years. Just re-opening a few ROTC programs will not wash the stain away. It is another theater of service and another connection to the low slopers that our elites have shunned. (Note: if we ever get back the reins, military service should be a precondition to any governmental payment for higher education)

And the anathema on American History has also poisoned the relationship between the elites and everybody else. America is not a nation of blood and soil. It is instead dedicated to the ideals of the liberal enlightenment, and there is nothing modern academic marxism hates more than the liberal enlightenment. The mystic chords of memory do not connect modern academic marxism to anything in American history or to the American people. The sweet sentiment of patriotism is mocked by modern academic marxism, which holds that America is not exceptional except in the enormity of its crimes, and that their patriotism is reserved for an imaginary communist America ruled by them.

*

The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

No Milos, we know that modern academic marxism is not good old soviet communism, or as I called it, industrial grade stalinism. But, modern academic marxism is marxism. Just like Unitarianism and Eastern Orthodoxy are both Christian. Further, Obama is just as socialist as the politicians of the leading socialist parties (French Socialist, British Labour, German Social Democrats) in Europe. So, there.

Well, I'm only the "W" myself, as a Catholic of Eastern European heritage, but I do agree that things tended to look less third-world when the WASPs were in charge. Now, corruption, incompetence, nepotism, and inefficiency are becoming the new normal.

GREAT response F/Man, Most excellent. Thy spleen may vent here at will.

Fat Man, that was a tremendous vent, sir.

Mind if I copy/paste it to a few friends? Not on my (inactive) blog, but just a small, private circulation.

Kudos, amigo!

Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX

Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren't, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life.

Absolutely: let’s have less of that noblesse oblige and more Obamacare.

(whoops! left this on the wrong WASP post originally. Can we have a new rule: only one WASP post per thread?)

Jim: Blow the horn. The guards are drunk and the hounds are asleep.

"But, modern academic marxism is marxism. Just like Unitarianism and Eastern Orthodoxy are both Christian."

I don't think Unitarianism is Christian. Current Unitarian thinking is that Jesus was a nice guy who would have voted for Obama. But the Son of God? Tell that to my Spaghetti Monster bumper sticker.

C'mon.

We do not have a Meritocracy or anything remotely resembling it today. We have crony capitalism, we have the smug snobbery of the so-called elite schools. We have a weaponized governmental bureaucracy that like a machine which has become sentient, looks after its own interests at he expense of yours. We have political correctness. We have a supine & corrupted media consisting of hacks and near do wells whose only other viable major option in college would have been education. But meritocracy please.

As for Wasps, well I won't argue they appear better than what has replaced them, but on the closer inspection of history we see they brought about their own destruction. Woodrow Wilson was a Wasp. Wilson ushered in the era of the FED, income tax, the Espionage & Sedition Acts of 1918, getting the US involved in WWI, then creating the League of Nations which his own Senate rejected.

Let's not forget Roosevelt the younger (FDR) who did more to usher in the era of the over bearing federal presence in everyone's life, and whose 'kinder gentler' version of socialism was a gong show of alphabet soup bureaucracies that came, failed, & went. Ending only with WWII.

The Wasps laid the foundation of the mess we have today.

Though prosperous and growing, the America of the 19th & early 20th centuries was built on the backs of the immigrants and poorer old whites, the swamp wasps if you will. I'll take the freemen and the settlers of the frontier. The farmers, workers, soldiers, explorers were the ones who made this land great. The east coast elite Wasps just sat back, skimmed their profits & enjoyed the dividends.

Our present genius Secretary of State, Mr. Kerry has Wasp lineage, enough said.

Screw the east coast elite. They were once the hard scrabble trash of Europe. That's why they wound up here. They came here & they succeeded.
Now debauched and corrupted by the wealth of their harder, hungrier ancestors, they patronize the very causes that will destroy them. Resembling doddering old institutions like the Church of England which has come out in support of Sharia law.

Yes the touch football & Ralph Lauren clothes lend a rosy glow to a faded age that only existed in our imagination. However, I'll take what lies ahead because I can perhaps have some small part in shaping it, not some Downton Abbey romanticized version what lies in the past.

(I say that a someone whose lineage in this country on one side stretches back to before the revolution and on whose other side experienced Ellis Island.)

The author seems to be confusing meritocracy with credentialism.

Today, there was someone who was would have been an excellent department supervisor in a factory, but didn't get the job because he didn't have a college degree. There was a bank branch manager who did have a college degree, but didn't get a regional management job because she didn't have an MBA. And there was someone who did have an MBA but didn't get the investment banking job he wanted because the MBA wasn't from an "elite" school.

The above examples are from the business world--the situation in government, academia, and the "nonprofit" world is much worse.

The author seems to be confusing meritocracy with credentialism.

Today, there was someone who was would have been an excellent department supervisor in a factory, but didn't get the job because he didn't have a college degree. There was a bank branch manager who did have a college degree, but didn't get a regional management job because she didn't have an MBA. And there was someone who did have an MBA but didn't get the investment banking job he wanted because the MBA wasn't from an "elite" school.

The above examples are from the business world--the situation in government, academia, and the "nonprofit" world is much worse.

Fat Man, you need to post that comment on the interminable comment thread at Mencius Moldbug's last post. The WASP talk there is tedious to the point of madness!
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned.html

Woodrow Wilson was not a WASP. Mr. Epstein is one of the few commentators who gets this right:

"The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people, including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton qualified."

Woodrow Wilson was a Southerner of Scots Irish descent whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland. He was president of Princeton University, but he wasn't connected to the East Coast Establishment. His wife was also from the South.

There are at least four varieties of Anglo Americans and the WASPs would be either the smallest or second smallest subgroup.

John Kerry is also not a WASP. He is a Catholic (at least he says he is) of Irish descent.

A true meritocracy promotes those who have a proven record of accomplishment in a given field. Credentials can be part of that, but results are what really count. The US military in WW2 is a good example.