Table of Contents
You know who I mean: George Herbert Walker Bush is the type specimen. These were men (because it was a specifically 20th-century institution) generally of independment means who pursued political power under the guise of noblesse obligee, and who were pious by the conventional forms of the mainline Protestant denomination, whether Presbyterian, Epispocal (nèe Anglican, itself a sort of Catholicism lite) and Methodist and they were monogamous as a matter of form, if not substance. They generally had educational backgrounds of elite preparatory schools and attended Ivy League colleges. If they became lawyers they gravitated to white shoe firms like Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Sullivan & Cromwell; and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy that operated on the club model of "like begets like." They were the successors of the propertied class of colonials who cobbled together the original union and the inheritors of the muscular Christianity white man's burden version of the Victorian/Edwardian celebration of the unique virtue of ancient Germanic and Nordic tribes and petty kings who subjugated the Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scots, in that order. Sartorially, they presented as preppy, custom-made well-tailored or shabby old-money.
The term White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) entered the political lexicon first in 1957 and by 1964 became widespread. That was just in time for the Class of 1968, the first of the baby boomers. We used the term as a compound with Establishment, the evil them who were responsible for most institutional ills, beginning with the Vietnam War. Until after mid-century, Jews, Negros (as they were then known), Irish, Hispanics, Italians and eastern Europeans were not embraced. People of Dutch, German, Scandanavian origin were deemed acceptable but Catholics required JFK's success to be admitted. Jews were late to the party, a handful of exceptional Blacks were admitted (think Vernon Jordan and Barrack Obama) and a few Hispanics and other ethnic minorities made the cut. The biggest accession, since around 1970 has been women, following legalization of contraception.
Today, these are the Meritocrats, who are well credentialed (if not always well-educated in the process), well connnected and primarily denizens of Blue states. They are, for all their diversity, no more lovable than the WASPs from which they spung. The thing is merit is that for the meritorious to exist, there must be the non-meritorius, the run of common humanity. And it is naturally the meritorious who get to define merit.
Pogo knows.
