I always enjoy Ross Douthat’s columns, and this one is especially on point, although Douthat writes as if the WASPs were some alien group, even though (coughing discreetly) Douthat’s great-grandfather was governor of Connecticut, and he himself graduated from Harvard. His mother’s maiden name was Snow, possibly descended from Nicholas Snow of the Plymouth Colony.
But this is America, and we’re all free to re-invent ourselves, right? I would insert a smiley face here, if my dignity encompassed emoticons.
I agree with much of what Douthat has to say, particularly about the need for an elite that keenly feels its responsibilities to the rest of us, but his assumption that the ruling class of America is just his Harvard graduating class writ large is naïve. For the most part, even if particular billionaires went to Harvard, the billionaire class as a whole was not educated anywhere—in the sense that no education could possibly guide their actions or restrain their appetites. Their primary socialization is too strong for that.
But my main point is that we miss Poppy Bush because he represented a moneyed class that was mostly concerned with protecting its own wealth and privileges, and not with concentrating immense wealth in the hands of the very few, as we see with today’s billionaire class.
Because protecting wealth implies an interest in social stability, and that meant that the old WASPs could govern, most of the time. They had no interest in destroying the middle class—quite the contrary in fact. And although some WASPs could act against the interests of the middle class and the poor, particularly the rural poor, there were counter-examples.
Douthat tells a nice story about the role and culture of the WASP aristocracy, but he is forgetting to test his story against these counter-examples. The most successful and transformative WASP politician in America history was not Poppy Bush, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you think about Franklin Roosevelt as the most influential and powerful WASP politician in our history—which he was—then the rest of Douthat’s argument starts to look a little shabby. When you omit the most dramatic chapter in WASP political history, then the rest of your narrative looks weak.
Is Poppy Bush really the right president to use as an example of WASP political heft? Or to put it another way, is it possible that the WASP aristocracy always contained within itself the seeds of radical transformation?
Tolstoy wrote that Russian histories of the 1812 campaign were mostly incomprehensible. They were, he said, like a story told by a duelist who had killed his opponent by clubbing him with a piece of firewood, after accidentally dropping his pistol on the ground. The truth was so bizarre that it couldn’t survive the story-telling process. Putting aside the embarrassment at violating the code of honor, how does a man with a piece of firewood kill a skilled duelist armed with a pistol?
And so it is with the WASP aristocracy and Ross Douthat. In his story the WASPs lost control through a lack of confidence—or something, he’s not quite sure what. He asks whether they should have maintained their system but made it more inclusive? He doesn’t realize that key WASPs themselves were far more daring and visionary than that and had embraced radical change, long before Douthat himself was born.
Once you understand history, it’s like geology—everywhere you look you see evidence of immense and unexpected change, both in the past and in the future.
The Socialist Investor 