Sublime parody or tone-deaf defense of lost privilege?

When I picked up the Wall Street Journal’s Review section this morning, I was greated with a story titled, “The Last Great American Wasp.” At first, I was thinking it might be a piece about colony collapse among bees and wasps and the larger environmental impact that will have.

Much to my chagrin, however, the piece — an essay by social critic Joseph Epstein — had nothing to do with bees. Instead, it is an assault (warranted) on today’s meritocratic culture, predicated on the notion that the old elites, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants, offered a more stable and less corrupt mode of leadership.

Trust, honor, character: The elements that have departed U.S. public life with the departure from prominence of WASP culture have not been taken up by the meritocrats. Many meritocrats who enter politics, when retired by the electorate from public life, proceed to careers in lobbying or other special-interest advocacy. University presidents no longer speak to the great issues in education but instead devote themselves to fundraising and public relations, and look to move on to the next, more prestigious university presidency.

My first reaction was: “This must be a Colbert-ian send-up, a sublime parody of the kinds of bogus defenses of the past that we get periodically.” No one, after all, could seriously believe that our former WASP leaders were such benevolent stewards of American government and the economy that we were able to avoid financial meltdowns and federal scandals.

As Kevin Phillips documents in American Dynasty, the Bush financial empire was no less built on unsavory business practices than the Kennedy empire and the notion that it is the meritocrats that are particularly susceptible to scandal is absurd.

The seamy subtext of Epstein’s piece, of course, has nothing to do with meritocracy and everything to do with what the very groups who now have access to power. It is backward looking, elitist (which he would admit) and racist (these earlier elites, by his definition, were white Protestants).

And he is right. “The WASPs’ day is done.” But his tone-deaf and historically erroneous notion that WASP leadership was responsible for all of the great in our past and that we have lost something with its demise is not. Meritocracy may be badly flawed and, as Chris Hayes argues in his book Twilight of the Elites, a poor model on which to build an egalitarian society, but arguing that a system that relied on privilege and birth-right was better is downright absurd.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet