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The Nation's Pulse
Missing the WASPs
Give me a Brahmin over a Quant any day.
In his classic study Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville described what he believed was a true meritocracy at work. Here was a country lacking a nobility and an aristocracy. The Adamses, the closest America had to an elite, recently had been voted out of office, usurped by that Tennessee ruffian Old Hickory. For years, Tocqueville’s analysis seemed prophetic. Seven U.S. presidents were hatched in log cabins before the New England Establishment re-established itself.
The reign of the WASPs lasted well into the 20th century. But by the 1960s, America had elected its first Irish Catholic president and its prestigious colleges and universities were (theoretically, at least) thrown open to all smart kids — as opposed to all privileged kids.
Of course, we all know what happened in the 1960s. Things fell apart. And things have been falling apart ever since.
The lesson here is that one needs more than brains to be an effective leader/manager. The old elite knew this instinctively. Math skills were not as valuable as traditional values, a sense of duty, ethics, judgment, empathy and, most important, good posture. What’s more, the old establishment had noblesse oblige drilled into them from birth, they were “bred to rule with grace and wisdom,” notes author Chris Hayes.
For all their faults, the Bluebloods took responsibility for their debacles, unlike today’s too-smart-to-fail Quants who think accountability is for the 99 percent. If your too-big-to-fail company loses billions you still deserve a giant bonus. If your crazy, risky, multi-billion-dollar bets on toxic securities nearly sinks the entire inter-connected global economy, well, to quote Rick Perry: “Oops.” That is how meritocracy works. Or doesn’t.
The WASPs were rooted, even if their home turf was the rarified soil of Boston or Connecticut. Today’s status-crazed meritocrats remind one of wealthy gypsies. They drift (first class, naturally) wherever money or power blows them. Jon Corzine may be the epitome of the new meritocratic elite. Corzine left his family farm outside Taylorville, Illinois, to become U.S. Senator, New Jersey governor, and CEO of Goldman Sachs. Along the way he helped destroy both New Jersey’s economy and his former Wall Street firm, MF Global. Had he stayed on the farm where he belonged he would have had a far less destructive impact.
DURING THE OLD WASP dynasty power and privilege were handed down from generation to generation. That’s not supposed to happen anymore. Meritocrats are supposed to have Horatio Alger story lines, though they seldom do. For every Farmer Jon Corzine there are a hundred morally challenged Boaz Weinsteins, Peter Orszags and Timothy Geithners from elite ethnic East Coast backgrounds. Today, an established Tiger Mom’s cubs have a far better chance of getting into an Ivy League school than a smart poor kid from the sticks, because a) her children will have inherited smart kid genes, and b) mom can afford to hire the best consultants, tutors and lawyers who know exactly what it takes to get into Princeton. Sorry, I mean Harvard.
Why anyone thought meritocracy was going to be a boon for the country is beyond me. Wasn’t it The Best and the Brightest that got us into the mess in Vietnam? And weren’t the Enron crooks the “smartest guys in the room”? Say what you will about the old establishment, but the WASPs did what was good for the country out of a sense of duty. The new elite do what is good for their pocketbooks and their children’s pocketbooks.
Where have you gone Teddy Roosevelt? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (44) | Leave a comment
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Jack in Wi| 8.23.12 @ 6:57AM
I seem to remember that most of the guys that got us stuck in a civil war, 2 world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and 2 wars in Iraq were old line wasps. That goes for a lot of the bankers that stuck us with the Federal Income tax, the Federal Reserve, and 2 depressions. I don't think they did such a great job. It is time to give someone else a chance.
canuckistani| 8.23.12 @ 10:03AM
The bottom line is that hubris is not the sole franchise of militarists and dynasts.
The crash of '29 was under a free marketeer pres, a few Jews around and maybe a couple of useful papists - zero women, but the machinery of commerce and politics was under the dominion of WASPS.
The flirtation by US WASP industrialists with Hitler and Mussolini was finally trumped by FDR's mobilization strategy. They came around when the pork started being doled out. Not before.
WASPs conjured up and implemented the global mobility that comes with trade deals and seamless trading processes. WASPs perfected the hiding of money from government oversight. We are not taliking about bags of cash buried in corn fields, but pallets of gold seconded out of the country for no other purpose but vain deception.
It was perhaps similar to the decline and fall of the Roman empire in which the genetic fortitude of ruling families became so decayed that their issue nolonger had that innate desire to lead - and insurgent tribes sensed this decay.
Doctor Right| 8.23.12 @ 3:20PM
If you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd still be a moron.
Quartermaster| 8.23.12 @ 8:07PM
And if you got your head out of your fourth point of contact, you might actually be able to see that he does, and you're just an ignorant troll.
Harry the Horrible| 8.23.12 @ 10:30AM
Can't say too much about the others, but it was an Irish Catholic that got us into Vietnam...
Appleby| 8.23.12 @ 7:11AM
God bless the Squire and his relations/and keep us all in our proper stations. (curtsey) amen.
What we need are educated men and women with a common background stretching back to Magna Carta and going forward through World War II. In the days when our mothers stayed home to bring us up, they may not have had even high school diplomas but they met every week for a Great Books discussion; we may have attended two-room country schools, but we all read literature, the same literature that our parents and grandparents had read in schools of the same type. When one of us said "He jests at scars who never felt a wound", people didn't say "did you make that up?" People knew that was said by Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, even if they were bus drivers whose education had taken a back seat to work on the farm. And maybe our fathers didn't finish high school, but the GI Bill gave them a common background and their prairie schools taught them to read and to not only recite the Declaration of Independence from memory, but to explain it and understand it.
When I was a kid there used to be posters of adult men sitting on the floor of libraries, surrounded by books and absorbed in same, and the posters said SEND ME A MAN WHO READS. Today those posters would show Pants on the Ground and Hat on Backwards and would probably say "Send me a dude who f***ing tweets."
That's what broke the wagon down. No more common background...and nobody who can read.
LindaF | 8.23.12 @ 7:54AM
That sense of obligation to act morally and responsibility wasn't just limited to the Brahmins. Except for the newly-arrived and, frankly, criminal classes, just about all Americans held to that same standard. Home, neighborhood, school, and local institutions (church, Boy Scouts, etc.) filled in with support for that standard.
Virtue was the norm in established communities. Women were the leaders in making sure that the standards were upheld. That's one of the main reasons that frontier towns settled down once "nice" women arrived. They ruthlessly weeded out the bad influences, using their power of social shaming and control. Harsh, but effective.
Then women decided that their freedom depended on their conforming to "going wild" - and the nation has never been the same.
JimH| 8.23.12 @ 8:21AM
You see much negative writing about honor based cultures. They often cite Muslim ‘honor’ killings as examples to show how primitive they are. The real problem is not an honor based culture per se. The issue is what principles should be used to define what is honorable. The State finds this attitude inconvenient because it means people are relying on tradition and their own conscience to determine what is right rather than the latest pronouncements of the Great Leader.
Stormzeye| 8.23.12 @ 8:42AM
Having grown up in Boston (and glad to be a Floridian) I was witness to the tremendous sense of civic duty displayed by the Brahmins. Even though they would have had nothing to do with me as an individual, given that neither of my parents ever graduated from high school, they poured great sums of money into the city's institutions. They created museums, Boston Symphony, Mass. General Hospital, the New England Aquarium, WGBH (Nova, This Old House, etc.) and countless other institutions that have served all the people of New England. They demonstrated a sense of civic virtue and charity unlike any other group except perhaps the Jews. By the way, WGBH stands for "God Bless Harvard"...you gotta love them.
Frank Drackman| 8.23.12 @ 9:41AM
Well maybe as a half Jew/ half" Hard Shell" Baptist(When Ordinary Baptist ain't enough for ya), with just a little Injun thrown in for good measure(Great Great Grand Chief Shemp Proudfoot Drackman) I'm a little Pre-Judiced at the John Kerrey's of the World...
Or that rediculous John Houseman...
And who was the most E-ville, De-spicable, D-Testable Villain in the history of literature?
SHYLOCK!
I mean, Thurston Howell III.
Sure, everyone remembers all of Gilligan's Screwups, but it was Mr. Howell who was so annoying, he made "Wrong-Way" Corrigan leave in the middle of the night, insuring that the Cast-a-ways would spend another season on the Island...
The Professor was the one I admired, building a Short Wave Radio from Coconuts, slipping home-brewed rufies into Ginger and MaryAnns drinks...
Frank "1/128th Chippewa" Drackman
Jacob McCandles| 8.23.12 @ 12:06PM
Wrong Way wasn't Irish - it was Wrong Way Feldman. Gillian was produced by Schwartz after all :)
Frank Drackman| 8.23.12 @ 12:24PM
Its so sad that you know that...
Frank
mike 3/505| 8.23.12 @ 6:27PM
If the professor was so freaking brilliant, how come he couldn't fix the boat?
scotchieguy| 8.23.12 @ 8:12PM
You are like Obama talking about "Education" today when anyone with any sense is talking about the economy. Who gives a sh-t about Gilligan's Island? I always thought people who came home from school and watched that nonsense or Gomer Pyle were total morons. And this was in the third grade. Grow up.
Bill8472| 8.23.12 @ 9:42AM
Uh, Christopher, Teddy Roosevelt was the foremost President pushing for the meritocracy in government. He may have been a WASP like his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but both of them favored the meritocracy over the spoils system.
Americans once unabashedly believed in the rule of the wealthy because they believed that the wealthy were indeed, as you said, trained to administer the government with grace and wisdom, and wealthy enough (so my mom held) that they weren't motivated by greed, lust for power, or selfishness. But that was the bourgeois mentality, when we had a comprehensible bourgeois mentality in our fair nation.
Bill8472| 8.23.12 @ 9:45AM
Actually, the Roosevelts weren't WASPs, they were largely of Dutch, not Anglo-Saxon, ancestry.
But they surely had incorporated the WASP values of the wealthy of the U.S.
Bill8472| 8.23.12 @ 9:51AM
Scratch the above: evidently the Roosevelts had Mayflower ancestors, Richard Warren and Francis Cook. That's about as Anglo-Saxon as an American gets. My error.
Jack in Wi| 8.23.12 @ 9:52AM
The Roosevelts were White Anglo Saxon Protestants. They also were mostly of old line English ancestry.
Doctor Right| 8.23.12 @ 3:21PM
Roosevelt is a Dutch name.
Occam's Tool| 8.23.12 @ 6:09PM
FDR did his best to block Jews from getting into Harvard. He blocked meritocracy whenever he could find it. A typical Lefty.
RAM| 8.23.12 @ 10:00AM
During the "old WASP dynasty" the other ethnic groups in America also subscribed to traditional values. Merit is not a dirty word in itself, but it can't be divorced from morality. It's the recent separation that caused grave problems.
Seek| 8.23.12 @ 10:54AM
Oh, did they? A lot of what we call traditional America, upon close inspection, was far more untamed than even today's allegedly "coarsened" culture. WASPS, for better or for worse, did the refining -- and they themselves had their oddballs.
Don't even get me started on Murder, Inc., the Purple Gang, La Cosa Nostra, the Five Pointers and other ethnic associations with, ah, unorthodox approaches to solving financial problems.
Bill8472| 8.23.12 @ 12:44PM
What we don't appreciate in these days of tens of millions of illegal aliens in America, here only for the work, and the legal aliens who, along with the illegals, stick to their old cultural ways, is that once upon a time immigration was under control and American values among the wealthy and the bourgeois were imposed on the lumpenproletariat. The working poor saw themselves and bourgeois, and were more bourgeois in their values than the bourgeoisie.
For some insight on that state of affairs, take a look at Jacob Riis's book How the Other Half Lives. It will be an enlightening experience, I assure you. And it has lots of photographs.
Seek| 8.23.12 @ 1:02PM
I read Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" way back in graduate school. Yes, it was enlightening. But the notion that the working poor back then saw themselves as "bourgeois" is highly debatable, and in any event, even if true, all too often was out of whack with the reality. Alcoholism among the lower classes, for example, was a good deal more commonplace than it is today; much as Prohibition obviously didn't work, there were at least understandable reasons why it gathered support (and almost exclusively from WASPs!).
fmm| 8.23.12 @ 11:21AM
Meritocracy is appropriate only when coupled with a sound moral fiber. The latter is what is lacking today and is the root of the major problems.
Who Knows?| 8.23.12 @ 11:49AM
The law of the excluded middle strikes again.
“The law of Excluded Middle assumes a sort of omniscience and makes capital of our ignorance. That any two alternatives exhaust the universe of discourse and that no third is possible cannot be known from the alternatives themselves…. We can, even on the strength of immediate experience, say that both the contradictories cannot be true.”
The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T.R.V. Murti, page 147
Either a Brahmin OR a Quant?
I think not.
In the empirical realm of phenomena, it is definitely pro-life and pro-creation to be politically conservative, and pro-death and pro-destruction to be a liberal-IMHO.
But, there is the Absolute or noumenal realm, of which the phenomenal one is but a modification. True philosophy is pure criticism---exemplified by the Hindu admonition, “netti, netti” (not this, not this.)
There is a three-step process---dogmatism, its criticism, and transcendental intuition. The Copernican revolution for physics needs to be Absolutely applied, and, girls and boys, what we are witnessing these days of the billions of acts and words of humans certainly proves that point!
All people should AT LEAST try to be a lover, like the happy Dali Lama.
THKrupp| 8.23.12 @ 11:55AM
LOL maybe we would be better off having a monarchy? Having a lot of money regardless of how you got it doesnt make a person inherently good or bad. You will get bad apples no matter what system you have. Just because we are a meritocracy doesnt mean its going to be fair. Life isnt fair...never has been never will be.
Joe D.| 8.23.12 @ 12:29PM
Come on Chris, we don't need another progressive in the White House.
BackToBasics| 8.23.12 @ 12:38PM
One main problem with current Bluebloods is they are too quick with the smile and the handshake in their inclinations to "reach across the aisle" first and foremost to democrats.
They don't much "reach across and shake hands," policy-wise, with the more conservative people who elected them. That quality is not something to be admired in them to say the least. It is a large and fatal flaw. A lot of this rapproachment with the left comes because the bluebloods are VERY concerned about their own status, as gentlemen, because they also want positive press.
It will take a scrapper with the left, blueblood or not, to begin changing our direction back to a Constitutional Republic. He will have to fall back on being viewed favorably by the Right rather than by the press. He can have success this way too and actually have great status with a majority of the people even if the press will never like him.
Petronius| 8.23.12 @ 12:58PM
The only time merit means anything is when unknown upstarts break the barriers erected by the Brahmins. Microshaft was made by Bill Gate's old man playing golf with the Chairman of IBM. And the the powers of State guard their interests. The upper echelons of society have been a CLUB. Who is allowed to join is now contingent on the size of one's pressure group and where its attorneys went to law school.
The only reward for working hard is more hard work. Honesty gains a man nothing since authority commands he be an agreeable duplicitous doormat. Erudite knowledge does not register with cover models interested in his line of credit and looks. And nobody sees any connection between defending Traditional American Culture and having a Corvette in the garage hot women want to ride in. History and culture don't satisfy desire, so they must be discarded, derided, and lived down. When the Chicago Bulls won their last NBA title, their fans smashed and trashed Stuart Brent's book store on Michigan Ave. but didn't take anything. Mr. Brent hand picked those books for a Fathers Day window display. If America wonders why we are in this mess, turning against Our Fathers who attempted to preserve the good in what we were given bears proof.
The Masons who composed our political architecture are remembered with the same slight regard. Today our polity reflects all the tropes of Rome in decline. And the First Rapist, Bill Clinton is adored while Todd Akin is despised.
Frank Drackman| 8.23.12 @ 1:12PM
Article would have been better with a pic of my favorite WASP(are there any Non-White Anglo Saxons?), Judge Elihu Smails...
Frank
nathan| 8.23.12 @ 1:32PM
Where have you gone Teddy Roosevelt? Please. Confronted with rampant and I mean rampant human rights violations by our troops during the Philippine Insurrection, he was anything but enthusiastic about seeing justice done. (There's a marvelous new book on this subject the title of which escapes me.) What happened of course is that some of the people fighting us engaged in some asymmetrical approaches to dealing with us. American troops, many of them with minimal training got frustrated and torture and other abuses became somewhat common place. A great way to win hearts and minds by the way. Waterboarding was widespread.
Finally the outcry against the abuse got too much even for the "Rough Rider". Several of the offenders were courtmartialed including at least one or two for waterboarding and convicted. (So folks yes we have over a hundred history of condemning the practice going back to the Philippines and then later at Tokyo.)
But TR like Nixon later when confronted with Mai Lai was anything but enthusiastic about dealing with the problem. A lot of innocent Filipinos were abused for no really good reason and we would see this carried forward into Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. So no I'm not a huge fan of TR because of this, sorry.
Nick| 8.23.12 @ 3:20PM
More bogus clap-trap from the lefty Nathan.
There was no water-boarding, as we use the term TODAY, during the occupation of the Philippines.
Water-boarding is NOT torture.
Doctor Right| 8.23.12 @ 3:27PM
Most of the cesspool called the "Third World," including the Philippines, was far better off under the rule of the European powers.
Since gaining their "independence," most of these nations have become dysfunctional, poverty-stricken banana republics, Communist hell-holes, Muslim hell-holes, or Kleptocracies run by thugs like Mugabi.
Had the US and the European powers avoided the urge to fight each other and focused instead on strengthening their imperial holdings, the peoples of those regions would have a far higher standard-of-living today.
But they wanted to govern themselves....even though their cultures will not allow it.
Oh well...c'est la vie.
nathan| 8.24.12 @ 7:43AM
@Nick: The problem I face here and it is troublesome is dealing with people who really don't know nearly as much as I do about most subjects I care to comment on. This is one of them.
I refer you and anyone else to the recent book "Honor in the Dust". It documents in considerable detail the torture and abuse inflicted on mostly innocent Filipinos by those "noble" American soldiers who served as their occupiers. Now as to "waterboarding" a method of interrogation used by the Inquisition, what we are talking about is inducing a feeling of drowning on the part of the victim. It's often called the "water cure" and various other things. Now if you've ever had the sensation of drowning and don't consider the infliction of that on you against your will over and over again to be torture, fine. Those who have been subject to it by THE ENEMY not by their own people beg to disagree with you. That's why it was named in the bill of indictment at the far east war crime trials. You knew that right? And again if it's not torture why did those paragons of moderation the Inquisition used it? Now I urge people like you in dealing with people like ME to do your home work. (Oh by the way at least a few soldiers in Vietnam got lit up for doing it too.)
And again go back and look at the record. There was at least one or two soldiers courtmartialed for "water curing" Filipinos during the insurrection. Questions?
Nick| 8.24.12 @ 1:49PM
Before you attempt to berate someone for not doing their homework, you really should do your own. Lest you end up looking like a fool, as you are about to, Nathan.
Because, I have done my homework, having argued against people with B.D.S. (Bush Derangement Syndrome) about Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, & waterborarding, for YEARS now. And, that is all you are doing, regurgitating lefty talking-points.
The water cure is the act of forcing the victim to consume large amounts of water, which can be fatal. The Japs, during WWII, would jump on the victims stomach, and start all over again. Obviously, this is torture.
The act of water-boarding, on the other hand, only involves putting a cloth over the subjects mouth & nose, and then pouring water over their head. The subject is monitored carefully & no permanent harm is done. Obviously, this is NOT torture.
Even wiki, from where I'm sure you get ALL of your history, is fairly accurate on the description of the two techniques:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture
Sorry to have to embarrass you, yet again, Nathan. But, you should know better by now, since I have exposed your liberal lies soooo many other times, in the past.
Occam's Tool| 8.23.12 @ 6:11PM
Yes, we got tough with the Moros because they were primitive child rapists, etc. They were members of the Religion of Peace. But we greatly helped the Phillipines.
Derek Leaberry| 8.23.12 @ 3:54PM
The man on the right in the picture looks like Ronald Reagan's best man.
topcat52| 8.23.12 @ 6:42PM
The man on the right is Paul Henreid, the man on the left is Humphrey Bogart and the picture is from the classic movie Casablanca.
Derek Leaberry| 8.24.12 @ 8:54AM
I believe you are wrong. The man on the right is Bill Holden. The movie is "Sabrina" in which Holden and Humphrey Bogart play brothers of an old-line New York industrial family. Bogart runs the family business while Holden is the family playboy.
JeMeRappelle| 8.23.12 @ 4:23PM
Teddy Roosevelt was not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant ("WASP"). He was of Dutch descent from Holland's New Netherlands colony (now the state of New York).
Occam's Tool| 8.23.12 @ 6:03PM
"The Best and the Brightest" were members of the old Harvard Aristocracy.
The problem is the loss of morals and integrity---this is not a matter of birth and breeding---FDR was as blue blood as they come, and as Leftist as could be.
topcat52| 8.23.12 @ 6:38PM
" Boaz Weinsteins, Peter Orszags and Timothy Geithners from elite ethnic East Coast backgrounds" I wonder what is meant here. Mr. Geithner's mother is a Mayflower descendant. His paternal grandfather immigrated from Germany in 1908. I can't help thinking that you mistook Mr. Geithner for Jewish, as are the other two men. I wonder why you would do that?
JD| 8.23.12 @ 8:01PM
Liberals should be beaten over the head with this article, for two reasons.
First, most of them would be shocked to see a conservative saying bad things about today's rich, given how the MSM trains them to think we're greedy evil rich-lovers.
Second, it bears remembering that our economic decline and our social decline are connected. Those "economic conservative, social liberal" types fail to appreciate the impact of bad policy on culture, and the feedback effect of bad culture on the economy and in voting for more bad policy.
We don't need government to enforce good culture, but we can't "tolerate" bad culture either. It makes economic liberalism inevitable.