The Late, Great American WASP

"The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano Roosevelt"

Yeah, a shameless person who refused to meet black athletes, including Jesse Owens after the '36 Olympics (even Mr. Godwin's Law is rumoured to have shaken hands with Owens), and was responsible for the Sith-sounding Executive Order for internment of Japanese Americans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066).

We're much better off without this sort of rubbish in power. Good riddance.

"Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school—and most of the good schools, we are coming to learn, are good chiefly in reputation—is no indication of one's quality or promise as a leader. A good student might even be more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be so that one can proceed to the next good school, taking another step up the ladder of meritocracy."

I don't think it's necessary to wax nostalgic about the heyday of WASPism to recognize this, though.

This is nothing more than moaning that the modern predominantly-white, predominantly-male, virtually entirely rich elite are too "new money" for the old predominantly-white, predominantly-male, virtually entirely rich elite.

I honestly cannot believe this is being published in the WSJ, an article wanting for a return to hereditary rule (not that it's gone far from that, but still). Awful, awful things.

I, for one , look forward to the last time that people try to use a "standards" argument in deciding things.

An interview with the Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2NKlMW0vc#t=1059

"All that we say is lets have some standards, in decency , in behavior , and in civilisation" , this is the argument to justify not giving 95% of the population franchise in elections.

The more I hear people talk, the more I feel that "moral standards" and "decency" are arguments that are only used to enforce some existing (usually racist) plutocracy.

I think a big difference in the perspective of today's elite is due to globalization and technological advances. The population of the US was valuable in the past because outsourcing wasn't feasible and war was less mechanized. Now the population, judging by the federal government's development of counter-insurgence measures over the past decade, seems to be regarded more as a threat than an asset.

What a load of garbage!

    http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v21/merit.htm

    "According to the ideology of the American Dream, America is the land of limitless opportunity in which individuals can go as far as their own merit takes them. According to this ideology, you get out of the system what you put into it. Getting ahead is ostensibly based on individual merit, which is generally viewed as a combination of factors including innate abilities, working hard, having the right attitude, and having high moral character and integrity. Americans not only tend to think that is how the system should work, but most Americans also think that is how the system does work (Huber and Form 1973, Kluegel and Smith 1986, Ladd 1994).

    In our book The Meritocracy Myth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), we challenge the validity of these commonly held assertions, by arguing that there is a gap between how people think the system works and how the system actually does work. We refer to this gap as “the meritocracy myth,” or the myth that the system distributes resources—especially wealth and income—according to the merit of individuals. We challenge this assertion in two ways. First, we suggest that while merit does indeed affect who ends up with what, the impact of merit on economic outcomes is vastly overestimated by the ideology of the American Dream. Second, we identify a variety of nonmerit factors that suppress, neutralize, or even negate the effects of merit and create barriers to individual mobility. We summarize these arguments below. First, however, we take a brief look at what is at stake. That is, what is up for grabs in the race to get ahead?"

Being vague is sorta almost as fun as doing this other thing.

I think social criticism today relies too much on arguments made between lines to be effective.

Wow. Obama has been disappointing but he hasn't come close to the damage Dubya did. Dubya really was a drunk dimbulb, and his name got him into Harvard Business School. Heck of a dividend we got from that anti-meritocratic inbred WASP-favoring move there. Let's try a really meritorious president next time.

And just above the words "Trust, honor, and character" I see John and Allen Dulles. Seriously? I wish I could call the author of this piece uninformed but I think it's worse than that.

I find it odd that it was posted here though.

I mean, let's look back at the era in which WASPs ruled American political life. They heyday of the WASP was basically from the end of reconstruction through the beginning of the Great Depression. These were great years... if you were a WASP. If you weren't, they were years of rising income inequality, rising racism, rising anti-immigrant sentiment and rising corporate power. Sure, TR, and later, FDR, went some way in ameliorating the worst excesses of WASP power, but they were viewed as class traitors by their fellow WASPs. These were years where, like today, the rich got richer, and everybody else got screwed. As a proud member of Everybody Else, I'm glad that WASP power has been irrevocably broken. I do not want to go back to an era in which I am excluded from the most desirable positions in society simply because I am of the wrong race, religion or gender.

http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Execution-Memoir-Stewart-Alsop/dp...

NB for relevance: In the late 60s, Alsop (the brother of Joseph in the article) would use his Newsweek column to rant about the lack of WASPs in the CIA and State Dept. making us lose the Vietnam War.

With regards to the older WASP generation, I would like some independent verification of their character and ability.

It seems the author, Joseph Epstein, picked up on the idea that using privileged education as a proxy for merit is probably a bad idea, yet why he feels that this vindicates WASPishness is beyond me. It wasn't even particularly clear why WASPishness was included in the article at all, since it seemed only to serve as a mildly interesting biographical backdrop on an argument that centered around evaluating the worth of university.

Frankly, the article seemed like it had no clear direction. It banged on about meritocracy throughout, and used ivy-league universities as some sort of prima facie proxy for merit, yet it seemed to tiptoe around the crux of the argument: ivy-league universities are the new WASP. Yet rather than make this point outright, and show that attending an ivy-league school is no more an indicator for merit than was WASP birthright, the writer spent the majority of the article romantically eulogizing the old-school WASP. Frankly it all seemed a little tenuously connected.

That said, its strongest point -- on which it spent the least time -- was the argument that privileged education does not prove anything of one's abilities. This is certainly true in my experience, yet this undermines the article's claim that a meritocracy would choose someone with a privileged education. If a meritocracy is marking irrelevant traits as indicators of merit, then all that shows is that the meritocracy is incorrectly assigning merit, rather than showing that the concept of meritocracies themselves are flawed.

Maybe it's only in the tech community that quality of output is seen as a better proxy for merit than educational background, but here at least I don't believe I've seen much weight attributed to education. When given the choice between two candidates, one of whom having attended MIT and the other of whom having written some fantastic systems, it's been my experience that it is the latter candidate who would be more desired by tech companies. In a meritocracy where one's output alone is judged, that seems to me to be a fair system, because -- unless the output is intrinsically tied to some unfair advantage -- it seems that it cannot be gamed through class, gender or race. I felt that the author failed to consider such a meritocracy, and instead -- to his discredit -- just assumed 'merit' and 'ivy-league' are synonymous without arguing to prove such a point.

Why any of you should care what I thought of this essay is another point entirely...

I wish the author provided some examples or evidence to support his rather outrageous claims.

And (as that proto-wasp Henry Adams pointed out) some things can be more harmful than simple corruption. It would be hard to find anyone now who thinks that John Foster Dulles's influence was anything but harmful. And how about Robert McNamara (whose name looks might Irish, by the way)?

the arguments for, and against, are practically identical.

God I love these fucking piles of cash

-- James Chalmers Lang III

p.s. name made up, I have 4 20s on my desk.

So, in the middle of the 20th century, they did an unusually decent (and unusual) thing. They accepted their own decline. For one example, they invented the SAT, whose initial result was to increase the number of Jewish students admitted to Ivy League universities by about an order of magnitude. (Then there was a racist backlash, which is where we get all that extracurricular bullshit in US college admissions. Elites are not monolithic.) Why'd they accept their own decline? I think they were self-aware enough (again, as a group) to recognize that there was no choice. Without letting FDR save capitalism via the New Deal, the U.S. would have fallen into economic collapse and political chaos, and not been able to fight the two-front (cultural, and then actual) wars against fascism and communism. The stakes were existential. When facing a choice between the risk of obliteration (but also the assurance that, if there was a country left, they'd rule it) and gentle decline (to merely quite rich, but not a ruling class) they took the right path. Very few elites do. Most let their countries burn.

What happened next is not a meritocratic invasion. The global elite (which is much more anti-democratic) stepped in. That's been bad for all of us. The WASPs care enough about the country not to destroy it. The global elite is not tied to any one nation, and doesn't care.

Upper-middle-class "meritocrats" are not the ruling class, and the people in charge have more in common with Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheikhs than with either (a) the somewhat callous but stately and pro-democratic (or at least republican, with no reference to the political party/megachurch) WASPs or (b) the well-educated technology adepts who top out in the upper-middle-class. In the US, the current elite tend to look like WASPs because, in fact, many are ethnically WASPs, but their ideology comes from a dirtier source: a global elite whose values come mostly from places where political corruption is just another perk of being rich, where democracy is ridiculed, and where the poor are held in open contempt (and exploited, and often shut down violently) by the rich.