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Nostalgia for the day of the WASP — 52 Comments

  1. Saying Trump is not a gentleman is putting it mildly. As his latest tweet just reminded me:

    “The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!”

  2. You don’t mention that Douthat was vitriolically attacked for that column. Liberal discourse consists in our time of vicious and witless shticks. True critical engagement with them is impossible.

    Trump’s family is German / Scottish and of fairly recent vintage on these shores. His mother and his paternal grandparents were born abroad. Germans living in Wisconsin might be ‘ethnic’ in some measure, as might be Scots in the Canadian Maritimes. In New York, not so much. Trump is not ‘ethnic’. However, he isn’t old-stock-American the way the Bushes are.

    The George Bush, and his siblings went to school in New England and the family owned property in Maine, but they grew up in a town smack on the Connecticut border and their father commuted into Manhattan. (Barbara Bush grew up about 5 miles away in Rye, NY). George Bush’s parents and his in laws migrated to New York from Missouri and Ohio, though they had more distant ancestors from New England and Prescott Bush had enrolled in school there. Bush’s sister Nancy Ellis (who settled in Boston) spent her life in New England, but the others did not. One brother stayed in the New York commuter belt, another decamped to Texas, another decamped to St. Louis, and one has lived various places along the BosWash corridor.

  3. I think one big thing we are missing is “noblesse oblige.” There was a time when the rich seemed to feel an obligation to do something useful. Teddy Roosevelt was an example as was JP Morgan who single handedly stopped the Panic of 1903. When I was a medical student I spent six months at the Mass General where the chief of Thoracic Surgery, whose name I cannot recall, was the son of a large family that owned a large trucking company in New England.

    Today, too many of the rich spend their time in the “Conspicuous Consumption” of Thorsten Veblen. Enormous mansions and private jets crossing the globe so the owners can virtue signal about “Global Warming” or the plight of immigrants. At least Bloomberg was honest when he asked, if there were no illegal immigrants, who would rake the sand traps ?

  4. The Left has their world-view, their brand of “propaganda,” those on the Right, Conservatives, have theirs.

    It is just a matter of who has enough control to ensure that their version is the dominant one, taught in our schools, dominant, as well, and reflected in our culture.

    As I remarked on another thread here, the Old Order is vanishing, and with it a particular view of the world, and much that was and is good.

    One way to look at it is that, when they were in charge, conservative traditionalists had control over education and culture, which enabled them to gain control over almost all aspects of our society, and to shape a majority of our citizens into similarly conservative and patriotic traditionalists.

    But, these traditionalists—long used to having it their own way—grew lazy and complacent, thought their primacy was self-evident, permanent, and unassailable and, as such, did not need vigilance, and vigorous defense.

    Thus, asleep at the switch, they allowed anti-traditionalists, Leftists, to infiltrate, subvert and, eventually, to wrest control over education and culture—these key shapers of world-view, character, and behavior—from them.

    So, now it is Leftists who control education and culture—the key to controlling almost everything else (politics, among many other things, as they say, being “downstream from culture”)—which today enables them to shape an increasing percentage, and perhaps, now, a majority of our citizens—especially the young, naive, not very well educated (but very heavily propagandized) and inexperienced, into people who are largely ignorant of, have disdain for, and generally oppose “all that”; what was conservative, traditional, and patriotic.

    Bottom line, whoever controls education and culture can—if they are tough, persistent, and thorough—eventually control pretty much everything.

  5. neo points out, “He didn’t go to Yale or Princeton or Harvard.”

    He (Donald Trump) graduated (in 1968) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which is also Ivy League.

  6. P.S. I happen to think that the traditionalist, Conservative world-view is the right one, the one that most closely corresponds to human nature and to reality, and that it should prevail.

    But being “right,” doesn’t entitle that world-view and it’s associated set of values, behaviors, and goals to automatically come out on top in any competition with other world-views, and their associated sets of values, behaviors, and goals.

    Doesn’t entitle my selected ideology to triumph, and to stay dominant, without constant vigilance and stout defense of it’s dominance, world-view, and associated values, behaviors, and goals.

  7. Bottom line, whoever controls education and culture can—if they are tough, persistent, and thorough—eventually control pretty much everything.

    My principle objection to the ruling class is that they, as described by Angelo Codevilla, are incompetent. I would not mind so much if they ran the country efficiently and with the same sort of concern for the citizens (the owners) as a competent CEO of a company would do.

    The fact is that they have become faithless agents, running things for their own welfare and ignoring their job. Finally, we had to take desperate measures and try to throw them out. It’s not easy and we may fail.

    The left is best confining itself to the arts and idle conversation. They have yet to successfully run anything larger than a monastery,.

  8. The fact is that they have become faithless agents, running things for their own welfare and ignoring their job. Finally, we had to take desperate measures and try to throw them out. It’s not easy and we may fail.

    That describes the academy, the courts, Capitol Hill, many state capitols and core city governments., and much of the legal profession. It’s now invaded the boardroom. What’s distressing is that street-level Democrats are quite satisfied with the detritus of this.

  9. Douthat appears to me to be a fake “conservative voice” at the NYT, which wouldn’t have a real conservative within 50 miles of it.

  10. I have to wonder if I am a WASP. I’m certainly white but I’m mostly of Scots-Irish descent (I think) and my predecessors did things like mine coal. My family has moved up in the world, but I don’t really come from the elite background that one thinks of when they say WASP.

  11. I think Trump has to be considered a WASP – though his father’s family was of German origin, he mother was Scots and Donald was raised as a Presbyterian, which is a very mainstream Eastern WASP denomination.

    Some midwestern Germans, many of whose forbears were refugees from the Revolutions of 1848, were traditionally considered ethnics because they maintained their German culture and language, and especially the German language Lutheran churches. Those Germans are the ones who dominated the XI Corps in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, and their descendants weren’t really assimilated until the patriotic frenzy of the First World War.

    What Trump is not is a member of the WASP elite, the old “Eastern Establishment”.

    He is, in New York terms, “bridge and tunnel” – from the boroughs, not from the world of society in Manhattan.

    As someone said, he is not a gentleman.

    Much of the nostalgia for the WASP establishment is, IMHO, a subconscious recognition by those epigoni who have gutted the establishment and wonder why they get no respect, that the values of a quiet patriotism (of the sort that saw many upper class men officer the nation’s militia regiments before the First World War) and which had relatively distinct notions of integrity and service. It was an ethos undergirded by mainline Protestantism: Episcopalianism, Congregationalism (in New England and the Far West), and Presbyterianism (in the the middle Atlantic states and parts of the South and West).

    The topic of the WASP establishment and its values and demise is fascinating and far too much for this space…

  12. It seems to me that, in the strict sense, and in past generations, if your were White, a case could be made that you could be considered some sort of Anglo-Saxon, and you were a Protestant, you fit the bill.

    But it seems to me that, today, the term “WASP” has really been broadened out, and essentially equates to being White.

  13. First, speaking as a WASP, I always thought it was a stupid acronym. Whoever heard of an Anglo-Saxon who wasn’t “white?”

    What we seem to be missing are what other commentators have called “bourgeois values.” Get an education, get married, have children in that order. Take care of your own family, and be generous with those unable to care for themselves. And yes, from the wealthier families, a tradition of public service which was actually service, not making money off the public trough.

  14. Whoever heard of an Anglo-Saxon who wasn’t “white?”

    The Romans said the Picts were black.

    What we seem to be missing are what other commentators have called “bourgeois values.”

    Yes and we are loosing civilization, as a result.

    It helps to read Gramsci about that.

    The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order.

    The universities, in particular, are destroying those Bourgeois values. It’s a plan.

  15. I must remind you that the gentleman’s code of conduct always was applicable to gentlemen only. When most of your adversaries definitely are not gentlemen, there is no reason to treat them as if they were. Romney was given this lesson a hard way, and Trump simply could not avoid learning this, so he made a right decision to behave like a gentlemen only if he sees some advantage in it. If not, he behaves like a bully and scores many wins from this.

  16. Being a gentleman and being a WASP certainly is not the same. This is the difference between aristocracy and a member of bourgeois class, much more numerous and democratic. While some remnants of an aristocratic culture persisted in such democratic, classless society as USA embodies, they are somewhat atavistic there, and it is only matter of time when they will became only marginal. Protestant culture in itself is democratic and treats aristocracy with a contempt and disdain, at the same time with a note of an envy and nostalgia, just as they are ambivalent toward splendid riches of a Catholic culture. True gentlemen in USA today are more often than not are Catholics of a very traditionalist type.

  17. Sergey wrote: I must remind you that the gentleman’s code of conduct always was applicable to gentlemen only. When most of your adversaries definitely are not gentlemen, there is no reason to treat them as if they were.

    That’s not exactly correct, as I understand it. It’s probably correct in the context of dealing with what were known as the “lesser breeds” of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (especially for Englishmen and Americans), but definitely not what I was taught as a child by my very 19th century European educated gentleman grandfather: that you should treat everyone you encounter with courtesy and respect, without being familiar. However exclusive one might be in ones family pride, or in one’s choice of friends of one’s own niveau, no one with whom one deals in daily life should have any cause to feel they have been slighted or condescended to. When as a small child visiting him in the San Francisco of the 1950s, I often accompanied him on his daily ’rounds’ and saw him live what he taught.

    For Americans, perhaps the very best guide to that sort of a code of behavior is found — of all places — in Chapters XXIX through XXXVIII of the original 1922 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette. Some of the particulars are very much outmoded, but the spirit, and the emphasis on setting the appropriate example, are spot on.

  18. Douthat appears to me to be a fake “conservative voice” at the NYT, which wouldn’t have a real conservative within 50 miles of it.

    You’ve confused him with David Brooks. Douthat’s no fake. His problem is that he’s quite innocent of any inclination to be pugnacious. In his younger years (as an independent blogger and then at The Atlantic), he seemed to almost apologize for what he advocated. He got better as the years went on, but he backslides some.

    There are number of poseurs with gigs at liberal outlets: David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, David Weigel, Conor Friedersdorf, David Frum, &c. Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle cannot be fairly described that way.

  19. Protestant culture in itself is democratic and treats aristocracy with a contempt and disdain, at the same time with a note of an envy and nostalgia, just as they are ambivalent toward splendid riches of a Catholic culture. True gentlemen in USA today are more often than not are Catholics of a very traditionalist type.

    Rubbish. You’re not going to find a protestant of any stripe in North America who gives any thought to ‘aristocracy’. As for Catholics of a traditionalist type, you’d be hard put to find anyone visibly patrician in any congregation I’ve been associated with. You find Americans of the middling sort, commonly the grandchildren of Ukrainian or Syro-Lebanese immigrants in an Eastern-rite parish, more likely of Slavic or Italian ancestry at an Traditional Latin Mass. You find a few professional people among them. Often they make it a point to self-educate on matters religious.

    In my grandparents’ generation, a ‘gentleman’ was understood as someone who exemplified good breeding, who worked in business or the professions, and who may or may not have had significant assets. For some, Jews would have been ruled out a priori, for others, people with foreign-sounding names, for others, people in certain occupations. Manners were the cardinal criterion.

  20. @Sergey:I must remind you that the gentleman’s code of conduct always was applicable to gentlemen only. When most of your adversaries definitely are not gentlemen, there is no reason to treat them as if they were.

    In the days of actual gentlemen this was true. In Nicholas Nickleby Sir Mulberry Hawk ignores Nickelby’s demand for satisfaction on the ground that he does not consider Nickleby a gentleman. If Nickelby really were not a gentleman, Sir Mulberry could have him beaten up in the street by underlings and socially that would have been justifiable. It would not have been legal, but Sir Mulberry would have seen no consequences.

    `Will you make yourself known to me?’ asked Nicholas in a suppressed voice.

    `No,’ replied the other fiercely, and confirming the refusal with an oath. `No.’

    `If you trust to your horse’s speed, you will find yourself mistaken,’ said Nicholas. `I will accompany you. By Heaven I will, if I hang on to the foot-board.’

    `You shall be horsewhipped if you do,’ returned Sir Mulberry.

    `You are a villain,’ said Nicholas.

    `You are an errand-boy for aught I know,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.

    `I am the son of a country gentleman,’ returned Nicholas, `your equal in birth and education, and your superior I trust in everything besides. I tell you again, Miss Nickleby is my sister. Will you or will you not answer for your unmanly and brutal conduct?’

    `To a proper champion — yes. To you — no,’ returned Sir Mulberry, taking the reins in his hand. `Stand out of the way, dog. William, let go her head.’

  21. The Prince of Wales had his mother’s lover, “Mr Brown” beaten by thugs.

    “Satisfaction” was a feature of the American West as it was definitely an “Honor Society.” The pre-Civil War Confederacy was similar and some of the tradition may have gone west after the war.

    The role of manners could be seen at one time by the real contrast between “Shanty Irish” and “Lace Curtain Irish.”

  22. The phony tears shed by the MSM over GHW Bush at his death are just as phony as those they shed when Reagan died.

    WASPishness is an aristocratic hierarchy. Kindly remember that Poppy Bush’s father was a US Senator. Based in New England, the WASPs gradually dispensed with the characteristic local self-sufficiency and with their wimpiness allowed Leftism to infiltrate the region.

    So we got “compassionate conservatism”, and the removal of W’s shoes on entering a DC mosque, the Bush who said Islam is a religion of peace.

    As an example, Kingman Brewster (his real name, no joke!), the president of Yale and a Boston Brahmin, said of the New Haven murdering Black Panthers in 1969, in effect, “A black revolutionary cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the USA”. The WASPs subsequently caved in to agitators who “occupied” universities’ administrative offices. They facilitated by cowardice!

  23. @Frederick: as they say of many things, it’s complicated. Not everyone with pretensions to the style of a gentleman, of course, is (or was) a gentleman. It was not uncommon for those of wealth and position to be “cads” in the outmoded term. Sir Mulberry is clearly not a gentleman, regardless of his title or wealth.

    The cleanest and simplest code of the gentleman is embodied in the honor codes of various military academies: A gentleman does not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.

    The question of standing to give satisfaction, is much more a question of the code duello than of status as a gentleman. There is too much involved in this for casual discussion. Only a gentleman (and more or less an equal) could be expected to give, or to demand, satisfaction in the form of a duel. As an interesting aside, as late as the mid-18th century, it was considered quite proper for a Milanese Patrician (the ancient families who eschewed titles as a matter of pride) to refuse the challenge of a mere marquis as beneath his dignity.

    There was something remotely gentlemany, though, even in the notion that only a gentleman could give or demand satisfaction: only gentlemen owned, and were trained in the use of, weapons, especially the edged weapons of early dueling. It would be the height of unfairness for a man born and bred to the use of weapons to expect one unfamiliar with weapons to fight him with them.

  24. As I think further on it, WASPs are Protestant; you know, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, etc. All of these establishment denominations are self-immolating by their embrace of the new “social values” such as gays and gay marriages, transgenders. The Presbyterian Church USA will not invest in anything Israeli.
    They have become hollow shells of Christianity.
    Their congregations are evaporating, while the Evangelical non-denominational, often feel-good churches are growing by leaps and bounds.
    So WASPs have a long history of decline caused by themselves.
    RIP.

  25. As I think further on it, WASPs are Protestant; you know, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, etc. All of these establishment denominations are self-immolating by their embrace of the new “social values” such as gays and gay marriages, transgenders.

    They were the first out of the gate. The Catholic Church is run by a not-so-secret cabal of its enemies and has a clergy shot through with sexual deviants. As for evangelical bodies, see Mr. Dalrock on the inanities of contemporary para-church evangelicalism. I think some of the anabaptist bodies are in passable shape, and some of the rigorist presbyterian and Lutheran bodies (LCMS, WELS). Here Mr. Dalrock flays the clown who currently runs the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

    https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/russell-moore-we-lost-the-culture-war-now-prepare-to-welcome-the-refugees/

  26. The cleanest and simplest code of the gentleman is embodied in the honor codes of various military academies: A gentleman does not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.

    Which they no longer observe.

    First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other. The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline. The end result is a sort of malaise that pervades the entire institution. Nothing matters anymore. Cadets know this, and it has given rise to a level of cadet arrogance and entitlement the likes of which West Point has never seen in its history.

    It makes interesting reading. It is pretty obvious who the arrogant cadets are.

    At the honor hearing the next day, I ended up being the one on trial as my character and reputation were dragged through the mud by the cadet and her civilian attorney while I sat on the witness stand without any assistance. In the end, of course, the cadet was not found (despite having at first admitted that she lied), and she eventually graduated.

    I doubt we could win a war with this officer corps.

  27. To Art Deco: I was writing not about today USA, about which I know next to nothing, but about Victorian England and American colonies before revolution, as described in classic literature of these periods, or about Southern States before Civil War.

  28. Art Deco: You exaggerate. The Catholic Church is not “run” by anyone, not even the Pope. Not even as wonderful a man as Pope John Paul II, who led by persuasion and example.
    There has been a decades-long decay in the Church episcopate, due primarily to leftists (liberation theology) and misinterpretation of Vatican II, which some priests saw as license to do their own things despite Papal authority (teaching); authority differs greatly from authoritarianism.
    The Church is not a military equivalent. Orders do not come down from the Vatican as they do from the Pentagon.
    The Church in America did indeed become homosexual-friendly at many of its seminaries.
    But actual pedophilia was RARE. Most of the sexual predation was upon young seminarians (older than 16!) by their homosexual teachers. It was individual US bishops who kicked their cans down the road, and better individuals who stepped up when facts in their diocese were revealed to them, and defrocked their guilty priests.

  29. To Art Deco: I was writing not about today USA, about which I know next to nothing, but about Victorian England and American colonies before revolution, as described in classic literature of these periods, or about Southern States before Civil War.

    You said,

    Protestant culture in itself is democratic and treats aristocracy with a contempt and disdain, at the same time with a note of an envy and nostalgia, just as they are ambivalent toward splendid riches of a Catholic culture. True gentlemen in USA today are more often than not are Catholics of a very traditionalist type.

    My head is spinning.

  30. Art Deco: You exaggerate. The Catholic Church is not “run” by anyone, not even the Pope. Not even as wonderful a man as Pope John Paul II, who led by persuasion and example.

    The Holy See is certainly run by the Pope. It is true individual dioceses are fiefdoms. And a great many have a malodorous staff. What differs today is that the malodorous qualities are encouraged and promoted by the Holy See.

  31. But actual pedophilia was RARE.

    People definitely make inflammatory remarks about ‘priests raping children’ and what not. The evidence against many and perhaps most accused priests doesn’t extend beyond an uncorroborated accusation and what’s generally alleged is fondling, not sodomy, much less forcible sodomy. If I’m not mistaken, over 1/3 of those supposedly molested were under the age of 14, so I wouldn’t say paedophilia was a ‘rare’ accusation with reference to the body of accusers.

  32. @Mike K: You are correct that the federal academies no longer observe their traditional honor codes. They only work if students/cadets take the nontoleration clause seriously. As far as I know, only The Virginia Military Institute and, I’m told The Citadel, still adhere to the codes rigorously (including drumming offenders out of the corps).

    sigh.

  33. @Cicero, @Art Deco – It seems curious to me in response to an article about “Nostalgia for the WASP” to see such back and forth about the Roman Catholic Church, an institution which is probably about as “not-WASP” as a European institution can be. I would note, as a matter of the historical record and without substantive comment, that with certain exceptions*, the rise to social and political prominence of Roman Catholics, and their broader assimilation generally into American society, is primarily a post-WWII phenomenon, one which has coincided with the decline of the WASP establishment. *The exceptions are mostly (1) in cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago and, to a lesser exent San Francisco, which came to be dominated in the 19th century by immigrant Catholic political machines, (2) in Maryland where the great Catholic families were the Establishment, and (3) in parts of the Southwest where certain Spanish families remained socially and economically prominent.

  34. (1) The immigrant machines controlled the political architecture. That’s only a portion of what constitutes the Establishment in any given locality

    (2) Prior to about 1830, the Catholic population of Maryland labored under a menu of legal disabilities. Some of them had handsome estates, but they weren’t the Establishment. (IIRC, the Catholic population averaged 10% of the total during the colonial period).

    (3) I think Texas had a hispanophone population of around 3,000 at the time local residents rebelled against the Mexican government and set up the Texas Republic. The non-aboriginal population in the rest of what is now the southwest was in five digits.

    About 1/4 of the population is nominally Catholic in this country, and it’s not a notably upmarket affiliation and never has been. I think if you were to investigate matters with what data is available, you’d find the confessional composition of the patriciate changed pari passu with that of the population at large (lagged by perhaps 40 or 50 years). My Catholic great-great granddaddies were each prominent enough in their respective places of employment and residence that one merited a squib in a local history volume and the other got a full dress obituary in a metropolitan newspaper (though if you read through it you notice he did not belong to any clubs). That wasn’t in 1948. It was fifty years earlier.

    The displacement of sacerdotal protestants in the Establishment by Catholics was less pronounced (at least in the BosWash corridor and in Los Angeles) than was their (partial) displacement by Jews. The Jewish population in this country has terrible demographics, so that won’t last. What will succeed that situation is anyone’s guess.

  35. Beware of what you read in the anti-clerical media.

    I read the Catholic media. Which is suitably cautious, but does not generally carry water for the bishops.

  36. I once saw this characterization:
    a gentleman is one who never unwittingly gives offense.

    After I thought about it, I saw what they did there.

  37. The comment about “plurality vote winning/popular vote losing” Presidents happening in the distant past before Bush II and Trump deserves a caveat. Kennedy’s vote total is usually given as about 100,000 great than Nixon’s. However, in Alabama, there were separate elections for each of the state’s electors. In the Dem primary, five were pledged to the national ticket (later Kennedy) and six to Harry Bryd. All eleven Dem electors won with about 310,000. However, in the vote totals giving Kennedy the popular vote win, he is credited with all the Dem votes and Harry Byrd none. (So Byrd wins six electors with no votes?) At best, Kennedy should be credited with 5/11 of 310,000 votes, which reduces his popular total by over 150,000; Nixon therefore wins the popular vote. Which is what “Congressional Quarterly” initially reported after the election. But such history doesn’t advance the left’s narrative, does it.

  38. The 1960 election is an example of a real stolen election. Rogers, who was Eisenhower’s AG, told Nixon he had enough evidence to overturn the election because of fraud in Illinois and Texas. Nixon declined because the country could not stand the controversy in the middle of the Cold War. Teddy White, in his book on the 1960 election, says he believed that Nixon thought he deserved some forbearance for that decision but he was sadly mistaken.

  39. Kennedy’s margin in Texas was large enough that it’s quite doubtful it could be attributed to fraud. They’d have had to stuff 46,000 ballots in the boxes.

  40. With interesting talk of WASPs, who are by definition both Christian and NOT Catholic, plus the Bushes, plus nostalgia for the good points, there is something hugely not yet mentioned.

    The US gov’t was much, much smaller, and much less important. Individual people had more real freedom — to move around, to braid hair (without a license), to use their money how they wanted. Tho with less money (and thru all of history, more money does mean more freedom).

    Certainly there was more freedom to laugh, especially to laugh at others. Who were never so very different than oneself, yet at the same time, they were.

    Free speech humor, like in Blazing Saddles, is part of what once was possible and accepted in the US, but is not today.

    The PC-despots have become too strong, too dominant. What is very much not yet clear is whether the USA will avoid the Venezuela style rich into socialist into poor meltdown, or will somehow avoid it.

    I claim a good part of the nostalgia is missing freedom, but since you’re no longer even allowed to think about it, you can’t quite think of what you’re missing.

  41. “a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system.”

    Actually, Ivy League attendance (with or without Skull & Bones membership) has become *more* important in the US, not less. Peter Drucker, writing in 1969 and contrasting the American university system with that of Europe, said:

    “The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…”

    Today, we as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above.

    Harry Truman attended Spalding’s Commerical College. Lyndon Johnson attended Texas State (plus Georgetown Law for “several months”). GM CEO “Engine Charlie” Wilson went to Carnegie Tech, while “Electric Charlie” Wilson of GE didn’t go to college at all.

    The idea that the boarding-school and Ivy League WASPs were America’s traditional leadership class seems greatly overstated.

  42. I grew up with WASPs on the Main Line. (See The Philadelphia Story if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Generally speaking, they’re nice people, but not very fast-thinking or entreprenurial. They don’t have to be, they made money the old-fashioned way — they inherited it. They were the classic country club Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, George Romney, all cut from the same cloth. (Probably the same tailor, too!) They were very loyal and patriotic — the Union League, a bastion of country club Republicans on the East Coast, was formed by pro-union Republicans and Union soldiers during the Civil War. The patriotic content of my township’s public schools when I went there would get the school board arrested today. If you go to the campuses of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other Ivy League schools, you will find monuments to alumni who died in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II — not many monuments, if any, after that.

    Those are their good qualities. Their bad qualities are that they are very snobby and disdainful of anyone not from the “right” background. My parents’ house, bought in Ardmore in 1949 or 50, still had restrictive covenants in the deed. They weren’t enforceable by then, but they were still on the record. When I left for college in the ’60s, the Merion Cricket Club and the Merion Golf Club still banned Jews, and they probably did for years after that. One summer when I was in college, a friend of mine and I drove down to visit some girls he knew at Sweetbriar. He (his mother was in the Social Register) was allowed to stay at the college guesthouse. I wasn’t. How did they know I was Jewish? They knew.

    The best short description of WASPiness I ever saw was in a lousy movie starring Matt Damon about the OSS (when it was referred to as meaning “Oh, so social!”) and the beginning of the CIA. I don’t remember the name of the movie or much about it, but there was one memorable moment: the OSS is trying to get Lucky Luciano, who had been deported to Italy, to help them organize anti-German resistance (which actually happened). So Matt Damon and another guy go to visit a Mafioso, played by Joe Pesci. The two of them, dressed in grey-flannel suits and hats, are as stolid as rocks as they make their pitch. Finally, Joe Pesci, who is very animated, says, IIRC, “I don’t understand you people. We Italians got our families. The Jews got their traditions. Even the n….rs got their music. What have you got?” And the OSS guy answers, “We’re the real Americans. You people are just visitors.” That’s a WASP, all right.

  43. but not very fast-thinking or entreprenurial. They don’t have to be, they made money the old-fashioned way — they inherited it. They were the classic country club Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, George Romney, all cut from the same cloth.

    1. George H.W. Bush founded his own business, which he sold for a handsome sum in 1963. It’s a reasonable inference from his 1984 financial disclosure forms that he had not inherited money from his father in 1972 nor been allocated any in an estate planning scheme prior to that. (Even if he had inherited money from Prescott Bush, he was nearly 50 at the time of his father’s death; all of the Bush brothers had built handsome careers in business before their father died).

    2. George Romney was not born into money. He was born into a Mormon colony in Mexico, not the Philadelphia Main Line or anything similar. He had a successful corporate career which concluded with a stint as President of American Motors.

    3. Nelson Rockefeller was born into a family which was not only Big Rich, but held as of 1937 a larger share of the country’s assets than does Bill Gates today.
    Local patricians in Philadelphia aren’t ever going to be 1/10th as free from practical considerations as he was.

  44. David Foster on December 17, 2018 at 5:34 pm at 5:34 pm said:
    “…For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system.”

    Actually, Ivy League attendance (with or without Skull & Bones membership) has become *more* important in the US, not less.
    * * *
    Germane to this post for several reasons, but specifically in re your comment:
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/student_says_he_loves_white_people_columbia_university_explodes.html

    “Consider this. The framers of the Constitution studied the great works of antiquity, such as Plato’s Republic. They feared the rise of timocracies (Plato’s term). Hence, in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, they noted that the United States could not give titles of nobility at any level.

    They knew that a society that falls too much into the veneration of titles and honors quickly finds the pursuit of prestige more important than the pursuit of what is good for citizens.

    The rule against noble titles becomes complicated in ways few have noticed. The United States government does not grant people honors that border on nobility. Yet many institutions do. Universities give degrees unrelated to an immediate trade or profession.

    Indirectly, the government acts as accomplice in the very timocracy the Constitution sought to thwart. Commissions such as WASC grant a limited monopoly to established schools by accrediting them while they block competitors from jumping into the game. (It is not uncommon for administrators active in running colleges to serve as commissioners despite a serious potential for graft.)

    Complex tax laws and agency regulations exist as a supposed safeguard against entities like Columbia skirting the “no titles of nobility” clause and creating an unconstitutional aristocracy. …

    If civic institutions stray from their mission and fall away from objective standards of truth and the common good, they become foolish timocracies. The framers knew this. In a progression described in Book VIII of Republic, timocracies collapse into oligarchies, then ochlocracies, then ultimately tyranny.

    The framers had this in mind, but Columbia University, which produces much of America’s ruling class, has other ideas entirely. Its elite status has only accelerated…”

  45. On Bushes and elites.
    https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/17/death-of-the-weekly-standard-signals-rebirth-of-the-right/

    “If the National Review of the 1970s and ’80s was the journal of Reaganism, The Weekly Standard carried the banner of Bushism. But the Bushes never carried the Reagan mantle and were never conservatives. They were always blithely unconstrained by any identifiable political philosophy other than the unwavering belief that they should run the country. They represented nothing so much as the mid-20th-century country club set that was content to see the size and scope of government expand as long as they got a piece of the action. And The Weekly Standard was there every step of the way, advocating so-called big-government conservatism at home and moral imperialism abroad. …

    As with other more virulent forms of Left-liberal politics, the neoconservatives maintain a sense of aristocratic entitlement to rule despite having killed almost everything they touched. It is their combination of titanic hubris and priggish moralism that is behind their aggressive advocacy of endless foreign wars and meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. For The Weekly Standard, it made sense to send thousands of Americans to their deaths defending Iraq’s borders, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect our own. As the real world results of their misadventures came home to roost, conservatives realized that The Weekly Standard didn’t represent them.”

    RTWT

  46. And on international global elites (not all of whom are W or AS or P, but they have the same mind-set):

    https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/16/the-globalist-mindset-they-hate-you/

    “The globalist elite is certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos, and Wall Street.

    Globalism ultimately is an offspring of elite progressive universities, think tanks, foundations, government institutions, and borderless corporatism. All the old progressive boilerplate—anti-trust legislation, prohibitions on monopolies, product liability—ceases when vast multibillion-dollar tech fortunes put their money into progressive causes, and thereby remind us that sometimes noble ends justify unethical means of obtaining them.”

  47. As with other more virulent forms of Left-liberal politics, the neoconservatives maintain a sense of aristocratic entitlement to rule despite having killed almost everything they touched.

    This is a nonsense statement. ‘The Neoconservatives’ were a collection of academics and opinion journalists associated with a menu of small circulation publications and a menu of letterhead organizations. The vast majority of those associated with these organizations and publications are now quite old or dead. They haven’t represented a distinct tendency of thought in the Republican Party for more than 25 years.

  48. The actual original neoconservatives may be dead, but that’s true of the progenitors of every ideology or political faction. The writer of that statement, I think, is addressing their spiritual descendants, who may not advocate exactly the same policies (but there are some who still do, whether it is a distinct tendency of thought (meaning, I suppose, a reasonably large identifiable faction in the GOP), but who have inherited the sense of aristocratic entitlement to rule.
    Whether or not they killed everything they touched is still being debated.

    FWIW, I don’t necessarily agree with every sentence in every excerpt I bring out for examination; sometimes, it’s just a key thought or two that resonates with me.
    I usually bold portions that I think express the author’s core opinion as it relates to the topic of Neo’s post.
    However, if we all agreed on everything here, what’s the fun of having a comments section?

  49. The writer of that statement, I think, is addressing their spiritual descendants, who may not advocate exactly the same policies (but there are some who still do, whether it is a distinct tendency of thought (meaning, I suppose, a reasonably large identifiable faction in the GOP), but who have inherited the sense of aristocratic entitlement to rule.

    1. There are no ‘spiritual descendants’. From 1992 to 2015 Wm. Kristol was a perfectly mainstream Republican who was not a notable dissident in any area of policy. It was always a journalistic-academic tendency without any kind of popular analogue. The NeverTrump current isn’t their creature. Prominent among the residue of NeverTrumpers are people out of the religious right (David French, Jeff Flake), ordinary business Republicans (Sen. Corker, Gov. Katsh!t), and blockhead libertarians (Patrick Frey).

    2. There was never a sense of ‘aristocratic entitlement to rule’. Wm. Kristol has never held a position in public life more august than ‘campaign manager’ and ‘speechwriter’. John Podhoretz has been an opinion journalist his entire adult life. He doesn’t rule anything but his small staff. Elliot Abrams and Jeane Kirkpatrick were among the few who held public office consequent to their association with that circle. Kirkpatrick returned to academe in 1985 and died in 2006. Abrams did spend 16 years in public official, all of them as a 2d or 3d echelon official.

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