I have to wonder how much of this was pipeline construction - for the past 50 or so years, prestige institutions have consciously sought to reduce the number of WASPs in leadership positions, haltingly at first, and then rapidly after 9/11. E.g. as we saw in the SC case about admissions, elite colleges have been proactively working to accept more "non-wasps" (essentially non-whites because colleges don't care what kind of Christian you are unless you've loudly disowned your socially conservative pastor parent or something).
As an apostate WASP who was raised in southwestern CT and went to boarding school in the late 90s/early 2000s and a NESCAC college afterwards, this was pretty obvious from all the institutions I interacted with.
And to expand on the post-9/11 increase in velocity, I think that was the moment that elite academia really concretized the concept of "the other" as sacred - the outpouring of patriotism was just too much for them to deal with. E.g. at my high school I flew an American flag out my window after the attack, and was told to take it down because it was "jingoistic."
If not older! But I think there was a big shift in the 80s and 90s when the people Hayek would describe as professional second-hand dealers in ideas really embraced what was previously a vanguard set of ideas restricted to like "Studies" departments and sociology/anthropology suddenly ate the humanities.
And let’s see, how does this “elite” thing work? AOC. who after attending a non-Ivy, moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender/waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home, is definitely “coastal elite”. While Trump – who received millions from his landlord father, got into an Ivy League school based on connections, owns numerous mansions, country clubs and golf courses – definitely is “not elite”.
The record 13 billionaires in top posts of the current administration, with 7 cabinet picks having attended Harvard alone, definitely make it "non-elite"
Or in Orwellian-doublespeak: up is down, black is white, slavish adherence to woke-right dogma and whatever Big Brother says today, is "freedom"
@Randolph - The link below provides proof that students from the top 0.1%, the vast majority white, are accepted at elite colleges at a 7x greater rate than other students with the EXACT SAME TEST SCORES. Many elite colleges have more students from the top 1%, than from the bottom 60%. Thus while affirmative action for minorities has been abolished, and their acceptance has been falling, affirmative action for the uber-priviliged remains in place
Yes the 7x affirmative action boost is for the intersectional uber-privliged, i.e. those who belong to multiple privileged classes - alumni and top 1% earners. Children of alumni alone account for over 30% of Harvard classes. Since these privileged groups are getting affirmative-action admission boosts, one can look upon all students from these groups with suspicion of having benefited from such affirmative action, instead of having been admitted on merit. They're also taking the places of equally or even better qualified students, but who are not from privileged backgrounds
Also why wouldn't elite colleges have more students from the top 1%, they are best positioned to apply to elite colleges assuming that they have test scores and grades that meet the averages for those in the high SES bracket. This is like complaining that there are a lot of tall people in the NBA - the elite colleges recruit from the elite? Who could have guessed!
Elite colleges have all sorts of admission criteria that favor the privileged - legacies, children of donors, athletes in country club sports (at Harvard this includes polo, golf, skiing, squash, lacrosse, sailing, fencing, etc, etc). Students from these privileged groups account for some 40% of Harvard undergrads, although they make up a miniscule portion of the population. And as noted on top of all their privileges - having attended the best private and public schools, numerous enrichment experiences that money can buy, etc - they get additional affirmative action boosts by being accepted at elite universities at a 7X times greate rate than students with the exact EXACT SAME TEST SCORES.
If its all about meritocracy, why not abolish extra affirmative action for the rich and privileged, and just accept those with the highest test scores
Schools should be allowed to choose their own entrance criteria, and those choices will have major downstream effects. E.g. my high school had a requirement in its charter that half the students be on full scholarships and from backgrounds where a full scholarship was necessary. I think that was a good system - they worked hard to recruit from the outer boroughs and places in the south that other "elite schools" looked over, and it led to us having an actually diverse, incredibly gifted group of classmates. By the time I got to college it was much more "hi I'm from a minority group and I grew up in Greenwich CT." The problem is when schools do that but don't maintain the same academic standards across the board in their fervor for a student body that "looks like the country".
But this is about more than admissions, it's about the internal culture at those places and who they choose to celebrate and elevate to positions of leadership in departments, in social organizations on campus, etc., and there was a clear bias (at least at my elite small liberal arts college) to create a visible campus elite of people who fit that vision.
So schools can choose their own criteria to favor and provide affirmative action for the uber-privileged, and overwhelmingly white, but they can't choose their own criteria to provide for a diverse class. So if you are not from the uber-privileged classes you lose out. This is like a caste system
It's like you didn't read what I wrote - the most elite schools have their pick of the litter for admissions, they have high standards and maintain them. Their internal culture influenced who is selected by the various sub-institutions within those institutions for visible leadership positions and promotion as an exemplar of the institution's values, and since at least the 70s they have been working to showcase and promote people who are not WASPs, which is a marginal change that has had large downstream effects.
Schools that aren't in the very top tier want to copy those in the top tier, and due to the shortage of qualified non-white and non-asiam students who have developed the skills necessary to attain a high GPA and high scores on standardized tests, they necessarily lower their standards in their efforts to be like Harvard. All the most qualified people are already going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and Dartmouth, every other college in the country has to scrap for the people who don't end up at those schools.
These are two separate issues that, taken together, might explain some of the disappearance of WASPs in positions of institutional leadership.
But yes I just want rich kids to go to college, that is definitely what I've been arguing for.
Also re: admissions, as Glenn Loury has talked about repeatedly, the most elite schools have no real issues filling their classes with people who meet their admissions requirements, they are the cream of the crop and will attract applications from the most qualified students. Where it gets dicey is two or three tiers down in elite-ness, where everyone wants to be The Elite (think like... Dickinson and Gettysburg - not implying anything bad about them, but they are striving to be in the upper tiers of elite-ness) and tries to implement their policies without the same ability to draw qualified applicants.
Elite colleges fill their classes by giving the uber-privileged a 7x Affirmative Action acceptance boost compared to other students with the EXACT SAME TEST SCORES.
Quite a lot was pipeline construction, and it was getting going in the 1930s, particularly with James Bryant Conant at Harvard, FDR's New Deal bureaucracy, and the rise of standardized testing. Lemann's book The Big Test does a good job on the several stops and starts of the trends in different domains, always centered on standardized testing but with some other good broader context as well.
"The world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved."
This is true. But neither the woke left nor the Charlottesville torch right wants to admit that in the US at least the assimilation machine still works great. A big majority of people have varying degrees of residual ethnic heritage from their ancestors, while still essentially belonging to mainstream America. When you can discuss the same ballgame or movie with your Sikh friend in the same language with the same accent, in a very meaningful way you belong to the same ethnic group.
Talking about sports and movies in English with no accent is the bar for what is an ethnicity?
I got slapped in the face with how this system *doesnt* assimilate people was years ago in a conversation with several friends, all from immigrant families but born and raised here where they were in their 20s, all chimed in on how they would never consider themselves American. One said he was always Mexican, the other Pakistani, the other Ukrainian. Really shocked me on how it didn’t matter if we had the same consumer hobbies or went to school. It was deeper than that.
The best we have to show for assimilation is that we have the same sportsball, cheap fast food, and garbage films to talk about in a bar somewhere.
If your only culinary experience of America is "cheap fast food" (and if your cinematic repertoire regarding America is limited to "garbage films"), YOU have a very serious problem (and evidently, a closed mind)!
Those are the things that everyone can connect on. The shit parts of American consumer culture are the parts designed for everyone; anything more challenging in either art or culinary pursuits does not sell well.
America is filled with cool shit and culture. You just have to dig through the garbage that “connects us all”
You're the one maintaining those boundaries (along with a ham-handed definition of "American consumer culture"). There are lots of great mom-and-pop eateries in those strip malls so reviled by "urbane" sophisticates -- and the owners will offer you a warm welcome.
All that cool shit is part of the connective tissue -- if only you were willing to see it that way!
(Fortunately, the really good mom-and-pops don't need your business -- and you should never wait until such a place spirals into oblivion [or starts to franchise] after it's "discovered" by the NY Times!)
Then again, if those friends of yours are still talking to you (and to each other), perhaps you're not a lost cause. ;-)
I agree with some of the other comments - we have exchanged one elite for another and there has been a great deal of work over the past 70-80 years to secure the future for the current elites and their offspring. Steven Brill writes about this in his book Tailspin.
One thing worth mentioning about the previous WASP elite, by and large they had a real sense of noblesse oblige which guided a lot of their work and service in support of our institutions. It may have been self-serving to some degree but it’s hard to deny the results given the rise in the US’s global status and its steady rise in general prosperity when they occupied the heights of our society and institutions.
What might work? A new elite would need to blend real competence—fixing infrastructure, tackling inequality, navigating global competition—with a story that resonates across red and blue America. Maybe it leans on decentralized power (less coastal, more regional) or a revived civic identity that’s neither woke nor nostalgic. But you’re right: it’s not easy. History shows elites don’t just emerge—they’re forged through crisis, conflict, or deliberate effort. And right now, we’re stuck in the messy middle.
I think the concerns about a transition to a "majority minority" country are very overblown, for a very simple reason.
We are mixing, and the racial categories that our politics currently divide us into are incredibly artificial. I'm white. My wife is Thai. My son and soon to be daughter are halvsies. We differ from a normal American millennial interracial couple only that we speak Thai instead of English in the home. But "white", "hispanic", "black" or "Asian" were already artificial categories that become less relevant by the day in this America. Soon, probably a few decades at most, they will no more matter to us than "Irish," Italian or Polish ancestry does to white people now, and for the same reason.
The challenge will be in adjusting the political system (and the entrenched interests in it that are very vested in outdated conceptions of race and belonging) to account for the attitudes that are already evident from Americans.
Every society has an elite class. Ideally, they resemble Plato's' "Philosopher Kings" and are well educated deep thinkers who also have humility. Ideally, the young men from this group are willing to serve their country in war and work long hours in ethical business or education settings, mentoring others who are not as financially fortunate as they.
The New England Wasps of the 1950s were the most benevolent and generous and inclusive ruling elite in human history. Seriously, they were! Who was better? The Han Chinese? The Romans, drowning baby boys too small to be useful in battle? The Jews in Ancient Israel or in Poland who would not even speak to someone who wasn't Jewish let alone invite them into their country if they eventually got one (look at Israel now)? The Sheikhs and royal families throughout the Muslim world? laughable. The wasps often donated huge amounts of money to libraries or churches which provided beauty, access to transcendent works of literature, etc. to the common man and woman. Nobody was better.
Because the baby boomers were the most diverse group in American history to that point and because they were given free or cheap college, a lot of the ethnic whites, African-Americans, Asian-Americans went into college with a chip on their shoulder. They imagined some elite white guy in The UES of Manhattan named "Van Deusenville" or some water baron in California or some old Colonial family in Massachusetts named "Entwhistle" was the reason the country was not perfectly just. And so began the leftist crusade for abolishing standards, deconstructing ideals, problematizing traditions. "Representation" and diversity became foremost goals. The society we now have is much poorer because of it.
A related point I'm fond of making is that the US is one of the most benevolent superpowers in history, at least from 1950 to 2016 or so. Not because the US was perfect -- far from it. Simply because there's so little competition. Who else would you pick? Imperial Japan? Imperial France? The USSR? Prussia? The Spanish Empire?
When Britain dominated the globe, it controlled 25% of the world's territory. The US's territory barely grew in the wake of WW2 when it emerged as the planet's most dominant power. The US has military bases scattered around the globe -- but almost all (except Gitmo) are there with the consent of the host nation, and when the government asks us to leave, we leave. It's only with Trump 2 that we're reverting to type and focused on territorial gain again, as superpowers typically do.
Cynical internet commenters always want to claim that "the US only ever acts in its self-interest". But this is a hypothesis that can explain any data. I think you need some serious mental gymnastics to claim that Carter was acting in America's interest by giving up the Panama Canal in 1977, and Trump is *also* acting in America's interest by trying to get it back in 2025.
The simplest explanation is just that Carter and Trump are very different presidents. Carter cared about doing the right thing, but Trump doesn't. And it's the nihilism that claims "the US never cares about doing the right thing" which helps prevent us from getting another Carter. It's hard to run on doing the right thing, when everyone on the internet responds with: "yeah yeah, you care about doing the right thing... where else have I heard that before?"
Another way to think: instead of thinking in terms of good vs evil, think in terms of "enlightened self-interest" vs "destructive narcissism". Destructive narcissists like Trump want their relative share of the pie to increase, regardless if the pie shrinks in the process. Enlightened self-interest means realizing that helping other people is a surprisingly good way to prosper yourself.
Within the parallel society set up in Warsaw, Jews were the religious elites over their own. Within the country as whole, the Slavic Catholic Poles were the elites.
Incoming groups had to be assimilated into the liberalism that the WASP culture in New England created. No other elite group would have managed it better (maybe the tolerant Dutch, but that's part of the ingredient in old American culture as well).
The funny thing is, that the other incoming groups show much less ownership of liberal tradition and more ethnocentrism (understandable, as those are the norms the world over).
The rest of the new elites are vulgar oligarchs who don't care long term for our country or its people.
Regardless of waspy or not - the stand out lines for me were about a unifying “culture code”. We’ve got to find the unlock of being unified around our code and also being pluralistic without negative groupishness. We should be a nation that constantly keeps the rights and responsibilities elevated and in balance for our people and as an experiment and role model. We are high-rights, low-responsibility and that’s a bad recipe. The real rights are held by wealthy while the rest of us fight amongst ourselves for what’s left or what we perceive.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is a very misleading term, given that for hundreds of years a large majority of Americans fit that literal description. Most of them hillbillies, rednecks, and crackers. And Baltzell was only talking about Northeast Old Money.
There is another useful specific term, "the Episcopate," for this WASP Northeast Old Money. I picked it up from Lemann's book The Big Test on the rise of standardized testing in America, a good history of one of the main dynamics of the transition to non-hereditary meritocracy in the US.
And let’s see, how exactly does this “elite” thing work? AOC who after attending a non-Ivy. moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender/waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home, is definitely “coastal elite”. While Trump – who received millions from his New York landlord father, got into an Ivy League school based on connections, owns East Coast mansions, country clubs and golf courses – definitely is “not elite”
I was amused to read this piece. YM has been here -- by his own admission -- just a couple of decades and yet his mind turns to genealogy and elitism.
And why is it mostly Jews (Mounk, Brooks,) and Catholics (Douthat) who find this subject so tempting? Is there a a yearning for stability through some sort of noblesse oblige?
Those writers and public intellectuals who belonged to the true WASP elite (i.e., descended from the ruling elite that ran the show for the first 40 years of the Republic and then the first 40 years of the 20th century), people like Lewis Lapham, George Plimpton and Louis Auchincloss, did not even hint of a born-to-rule mentality. They did not seem embarrassed by their high social status because they knew it was temporary and contingent.
To begin with, America's founders reflected the divisions of the English Civil War. The Cavaliers ended up in Virginia, the Roundheads in New England. The Puritans, affiliated with the latter, turned to education and founded the great universities. They emphasized merit and came out ahead. The former became landholders and enslavers and eventually disappeared.
The two shared power for a mere half century before the Scots-Irish yeoman farmers and other Low Church believers took over. If not for the Roosevelts and the Bush's we would not even be talking about the WASP elite. Outside of politics -- finance, media, higher learning, culture in both the elevated and popular sense and not just in the artistic but also commercial sense -- America has been dominated largely by Jews, ever since the US entered the global bloodstream.
The more interesting question is that we are living in another hinge period and so what happens next. All this talk of a "Judeo-Christian" civilization is really a conjoining of rich Jews and evangelical (low Church) white Christian. They are in power now. The composition of this nation (racial, educational) and the economy (fully global) has changed beyond recognition. And this is where the focus needs to be now, not on nostalgic marinating in a bygone era of a WASP elite.
Look at FDR. He did a lot to bring non-WASP groups into the mainstream and into the government, but he always assumed that the country was a WASP one and would remain so. Maybe it wouldn't always be run by Hudson River patricians, but for him it was a white, Protestant and largely Anglo-Saxon country.
As for Lapham and Plimpton and Auchincloss, in their heyday the country was already slipping out of WASP hands. At 20 or at 30, I doubt Auchincloss saw his position as temporary or contingent. A commoner might be president, but the Establishment went on. Families might rise and fall, but the Establishment persisted and people knew who was on top.
Gore Vidal is a good counterexample. In some ways he did think he was born to rule, and there was a bit of Vidal in not a few of the WASPs of his era. Feelings of superiority could be sublimated, though, to the point where Baltzell and others assumed that John Kennedy was a fitting representative of enlightened Establishment government.
It is true that Baltzell's version of America was unrepresentative. Patrician rule only characterizes short periods in our history.
Without naming it, the article is an excellent critique of the concept of “white privilege.” It shows that whites are a very diverse group with respect to social class origin and ethnicity, and the great majority experience prejudice in one form or other.
It is my impression that we have not created a “ meritocratic elite” but rather an elite basedon one criteria, “ money.” In addition, there is a strongly held belief afoot that lots of money means you std intelligent. an obvious error in reasoning. We owe our leadership to a corrupt supreme court decision that equated “ money is speech” followed by the complete dismantling of fair dlrcgionsbinnCitizens United.
No, ethical norms collapsed with these rulings from the court and there is no way to recover our democratic norms until they are repealed.
Ah me. What a wonderful cornucopia of being 'damned with faint praise'.
I don’t know whether I completely qualify as a member of this vanishing breed, but I was raised a Protestant at the base of the Main Line, which, for those who are unaware of it, is named for the fact that it’s succession of towns lies along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line coming out of Philadelphia, headed for Pittsburgh, Chicago and points west.
I’m not sure if my American ancestry goes all the way back to the colonial era, although I did have relatives on both sides of the Civil War. My biological ancestry, at least as far as I know it is a combination of English, Scottish, Irish, and German, (and, as I’m prone to noting, we all know how well they got along!)
I did go to what was certainly an ‘elite’ private school (although it wasn’t boarding and is no longer located on the ground on which I attended it), actually living on the grounds as my father was for half my time there Headmaster (forgive the archaic usage) and my maternal grandfather an Assistant Headmaster before him, one of the InterAc league of similar schools extending along the Main Line out toward Paoli (scene of that infamous Revolutionary war massacre).
And, I suppose, to complete the picture embodied in this piece, I worked at the summer camp David Brooks attended as a boy, being one of his counselors.
All that aside, now having just turned 80, and having taught American history at the elementary level for over 40 years at three other Independent schools in Philadelphia and New York as well as spending time as a merchant seaman, construction worker, soldier, (and yes, paper boy!), I spend a good deal of time reading Substacks like this one and commenting as I can.
I’m not, however, so concerned to identify as a WASP as I am to identify as an American. And by that I mean one who through study and experience has what I believe to be a pretty fair understanding of the extraordinary nature of the nation we were designed to be.
Was that design flawed? Certainly; most disastrously in its acceptance of slavery, a lack of foresight for which we paid a terrible price between 1861 and 1865, and for which Black Americans have paid an equally terrible price both before, during, and after. We also denied another of the basic tenants of that design in refusing the franchise to most American women until the 19th Amendment was ratified. And there were others as well.
But none of that alters the fact that our Constitution represents the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. And I continue to believe it to be, as our greatest American noted, "the last, best hope of Earth”.
So if there is an ‘elite’ on the American scene, IM (not so humble) O, it must be those who understand the nature of Novus Ordo Seclorum and are determined that it continue as far as possible into the unknown future. And it is an elite which could encompass us all, no matter our individual origins.
And it is on that basis that I judge my countrymen and our elected leaders and legislators. And it is that judgement which causes me to despise Donald Tump, his myrmidons, almost all he stands for - precisely because he has absolutely no such understanding, and clearly revels in that lack - and those others who through their equal lack of such understanding thoughout our history have led us to this point.
The historian Jon Meacham recently noted in an interview with Jon Stewart that he felt the Founders would have been surprised that their design lasted as long as it has. Perhaps, but there was nothing inevitable about our increasingly dismal trajectory. And nearly half our nation’s voters still retain enough of that understanding to have rejected Trump’s badly distorted version of it. So, WASP’s aside, there are still plenty of ’the elite’ out there.
your point well-taken; nevertheless, "Raised in Chestnut Hill, a wealthy Main Line suburb of Philadelphia . . . " Chestnut Hill is in Philadelphia County, isn't a suburb of that fine city but in its northwest region. The Main Line is a suburb, which is west of the city.
The Main Line isn’t really “a suburb” though, is it? More like “a group of suburbs” that grew up around the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, hence the name. That would be like saying the north shore of Long Island is “a suburb”. But I guess this maybe counts as nitpicking on my part.
It basically was a Main Line suburb originally - the city has grown around it even if it never legally was a separate city. A lot of old-line streetcar suburbs and rail suburbs have been integrated (legally or no) into the city themselves.
Your essay assumes that the United States was always ruled by an elite, but that’s a misreading of history. The U.S. never had a true ruling class in the way you describe. For most of its existence, power was decentralized, and governance was accessible through mass-member political parties that, while imperfect, were genuinely democratic and republican in structure. The Democratic Party functioned as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party as a small "r" republican institution. They weren’t mere instruments of an entrenched caste but vehicles for broad political participation.
The idea that WASPs constituted a ruling class from the nation’s founding through the mid-20th century is simply false. And it is verifiably false.. Yes, many prominent figures were White Protestants, but thats just because the country was almost entirely white and and almost entirely and then mostly protestant, but that certainly doesnt mean the were a centralized and cohered elite, it was just the general population. The U.S. political and economic landscape was always fragmented and diffused, power wasn’t locked into a single group but contested between a variety of interests who themselves not cohered.
Baltzell’s idea of a WASP aristocracy ignores that decentralized democratic structures persisted well into the mid 20th century. The real shift wasn’t from "WASP rule" to a so-called "meritocracy," but from a system where ordinary people had pathways to power to one dominated by a centralized, exclusionary managerial elite; which is actually diametric to that statement of yours that I just quoted because we became far les truly meritocratic after it happened. Post-World War II centralization, the decline of public access to party structures, the dismantling of local banking and economic autonomy, corporate consolidation, the consolidation and centralization of the American Academe, and the rise of technocracy... in short the advent of the Neoliberal Era::: intensely de-democratized and then shut the public out
It's the 1950s. We have just won the second World War thanks in part to the efforts of scientists who were refugees of other countries, the president is a West Point graduate from Kansas, the Chief Justice is from Bakersfield, the Senate majority is a yellow dog Democrat from Texas, etc. The admissions committees at Harvard and Princeton look at this state of affairs and they ask themselves why they continue to yoke the fate of their institutions to mediocrities from old-money New England and New York families who can afford to send their kids to Groton. And so the SAT is born, and those schools start imposing upper limit quotas on how many kids they take from those schools. The rest is history. The first rule of institutions is to perpetuate themselves and protect and extend their own influence. Harvard and Princeton did very well dumping the WASPs.
And the cycle begins anew as those storied institutions collectively said "I just don't know about these Asians unless they're foreign students paying full price."
I have to wonder how much of this was pipeline construction - for the past 50 or so years, prestige institutions have consciously sought to reduce the number of WASPs in leadership positions, haltingly at first, and then rapidly after 9/11. E.g. as we saw in the SC case about admissions, elite colleges have been proactively working to accept more "non-wasps" (essentially non-whites because colleges don't care what kind of Christian you are unless you've loudly disowned your socially conservative pastor parent or something).
As an apostate WASP who was raised in southwestern CT and went to boarding school in the late 90s/early 2000s and a NESCAC college afterwards, this was pretty obvious from all the institutions I interacted with.
And to expand on the post-9/11 increase in velocity, I think that was the moment that elite academia really concretized the concept of "the other" as sacred - the outpouring of patriotism was just too much for them to deal with. E.g. at my high school I flew an American flag out my window after the attack, and was told to take it down because it was "jingoistic."
The fetishization of Appropriately Oppressed Minorities is as old as the late 1960s.
If not older! But I think there was a big shift in the 80s and 90s when the people Hayek would describe as professional second-hand dealers in ideas really embraced what was previously a vanguard set of ideas restricted to like "Studies" departments and sociology/anthropology suddenly ate the humanities.
Not unfair.
And let’s see, how does this “elite” thing work? AOC. who after attending a non-Ivy, moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender/waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home, is definitely “coastal elite”. While Trump – who received millions from his landlord father, got into an Ivy League school based on connections, owns numerous mansions, country clubs and golf courses – definitely is “not elite”.
The record 13 billionaires in top posts of the current administration, with 7 cabinet picks having attended Harvard alone, definitely make it "non-elite"
Or in Orwellian-doublespeak: up is down, black is white, slavish adherence to woke-right dogma and whatever Big Brother says today, is "freedom"
@Randolph - The link below provides proof that students from the top 0.1%, the vast majority white, are accepted at elite colleges at a 7x greater rate than other students with the EXACT SAME TEST SCORES. Many elite colleges have more students from the top 1%, than from the bottom 60%. Thus while affirmative action for minorities has been abolished, and their acceptance has been falling, affirmative action for the uber-priviliged remains in place
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/upshot/ivy-league-legacy-admissions.html
That article is about the small subset of legacy admissions, not general admission policies - you're making a general point based on very narrow data.
Yes the 7x affirmative action boost is for the intersectional uber-privliged, i.e. those who belong to multiple privileged classes - alumni and top 1% earners. Children of alumni alone account for over 30% of Harvard classes. Since these privileged groups are getting affirmative-action admission boosts, one can look upon all students from these groups with suspicion of having benefited from such affirmative action, instead of having been admitted on merit. They're also taking the places of equally or even better qualified students, but who are not from privileged backgrounds
Also why wouldn't elite colleges have more students from the top 1%, they are best positioned to apply to elite colleges assuming that they have test scores and grades that meet the averages for those in the high SES bracket. This is like complaining that there are a lot of tall people in the NBA - the elite colleges recruit from the elite? Who could have guessed!
Elite colleges have all sorts of admission criteria that favor the privileged - legacies, children of donors, athletes in country club sports (at Harvard this includes polo, golf, skiing, squash, lacrosse, sailing, fencing, etc, etc). Students from these privileged groups account for some 40% of Harvard undergrads, although they make up a miniscule portion of the population. And as noted on top of all their privileges - having attended the best private and public schools, numerous enrichment experiences that money can buy, etc - they get additional affirmative action boosts by being accepted at elite universities at a 7X times greate rate than students with the exact EXACT SAME TEST SCORES.
If its all about meritocracy, why not abolish extra affirmative action for the rich and privileged, and just accept those with the highest test scores
Schools should be allowed to choose their own entrance criteria, and those choices will have major downstream effects. E.g. my high school had a requirement in its charter that half the students be on full scholarships and from backgrounds where a full scholarship was necessary. I think that was a good system - they worked hard to recruit from the outer boroughs and places in the south that other "elite schools" looked over, and it led to us having an actually diverse, incredibly gifted group of classmates. By the time I got to college it was much more "hi I'm from a minority group and I grew up in Greenwich CT." The problem is when schools do that but don't maintain the same academic standards across the board in their fervor for a student body that "looks like the country".
But this is about more than admissions, it's about the internal culture at those places and who they choose to celebrate and elevate to positions of leadership in departments, in social organizations on campus, etc., and there was a clear bias (at least at my elite small liberal arts college) to create a visible campus elite of people who fit that vision.
So schools can choose their own criteria to favor and provide affirmative action for the uber-privileged, and overwhelmingly white, but they can't choose their own criteria to provide for a diverse class. So if you are not from the uber-privileged classes you lose out. This is like a caste system
It's like you didn't read what I wrote - the most elite schools have their pick of the litter for admissions, they have high standards and maintain them. Their internal culture influenced who is selected by the various sub-institutions within those institutions for visible leadership positions and promotion as an exemplar of the institution's values, and since at least the 70s they have been working to showcase and promote people who are not WASPs, which is a marginal change that has had large downstream effects.
Schools that aren't in the very top tier want to copy those in the top tier, and due to the shortage of qualified non-white and non-asiam students who have developed the skills necessary to attain a high GPA and high scores on standardized tests, they necessarily lower their standards in their efforts to be like Harvard. All the most qualified people are already going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and Dartmouth, every other college in the country has to scrap for the people who don't end up at those schools.
These are two separate issues that, taken together, might explain some of the disappearance of WASPs in positions of institutional leadership.
But yes I just want rich kids to go to college, that is definitely what I've been arguing for.
Also re: admissions, as Glenn Loury has talked about repeatedly, the most elite schools have no real issues filling their classes with people who meet their admissions requirements, they are the cream of the crop and will attract applications from the most qualified students. Where it gets dicey is two or three tiers down in elite-ness, where everyone wants to be The Elite (think like... Dickinson and Gettysburg - not implying anything bad about them, but they are striving to be in the upper tiers of elite-ness) and tries to implement their policies without the same ability to draw qualified applicants.
Elite colleges fill their classes by giving the uber-privileged a 7x Affirmative Action acceptance boost compared to other students with the EXACT SAME TEST SCORES.
“Uber privileged” does not necessarily mean WASP. Also, “white” does not necessarily mean WASP.
Quite a lot was pipeline construction, and it was getting going in the 1930s, particularly with James Bryant Conant at Harvard, FDR's New Deal bureaucracy, and the rise of standardized testing. Lemann's book The Big Test does a good job on the several stops and starts of the trends in different domains, always centered on standardized testing but with some other good broader context as well.
Bingo
"The world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved."
This is true. But neither the woke left nor the Charlottesville torch right wants to admit that in the US at least the assimilation machine still works great. A big majority of people have varying degrees of residual ethnic heritage from their ancestors, while still essentially belonging to mainstream America. When you can discuss the same ballgame or movie with your Sikh friend in the same language with the same accent, in a very meaningful way you belong to the same ethnic group.
Unfortunately, the woke left views assimilation as synonymous with the construction of "whiteness."
Talking about sports and movies in English with no accent is the bar for what is an ethnicity?
I got slapped in the face with how this system *doesnt* assimilate people was years ago in a conversation with several friends, all from immigrant families but born and raised here where they were in their 20s, all chimed in on how they would never consider themselves American. One said he was always Mexican, the other Pakistani, the other Ukrainian. Really shocked me on how it didn’t matter if we had the same consumer hobbies or went to school. It was deeper than that.
The best we have to show for assimilation is that we have the same sportsball, cheap fast food, and garbage films to talk about in a bar somewhere.
If your only culinary experience of America is "cheap fast food" (and if your cinematic repertoire regarding America is limited to "garbage films"), YOU have a very serious problem (and evidently, a closed mind)!
Those are the things that everyone can connect on. The shit parts of American consumer culture are the parts designed for everyone; anything more challenging in either art or culinary pursuits does not sell well.
America is filled with cool shit and culture. You just have to dig through the garbage that “connects us all”
You're the one maintaining those boundaries (along with a ham-handed definition of "American consumer culture"). There are lots of great mom-and-pop eateries in those strip malls so reviled by "urbane" sophisticates -- and the owners will offer you a warm welcome.
All that cool shit is part of the connective tissue -- if only you were willing to see it that way!
(Fortunately, the really good mom-and-pops don't need your business -- and you should never wait until such a place spirals into oblivion [or starts to franchise] after it's "discovered" by the NY Times!)
Then again, if those friends of yours are still talking to you (and to each other), perhaps you're not a lost cause. ;-)
You are rambling into boomer nonsense at this rate
I agree with some of the other comments - we have exchanged one elite for another and there has been a great deal of work over the past 70-80 years to secure the future for the current elites and their offspring. Steven Brill writes about this in his book Tailspin.
One thing worth mentioning about the previous WASP elite, by and large they had a real sense of noblesse oblige which guided a lot of their work and service in support of our institutions. It may have been self-serving to some degree but it’s hard to deny the results given the rise in the US’s global status and its steady rise in general prosperity when they occupied the heights of our society and institutions.
What might work? A new elite would need to blend real competence—fixing infrastructure, tackling inequality, navigating global competition—with a story that resonates across red and blue America. Maybe it leans on decentralized power (less coastal, more regional) or a revived civic identity that’s neither woke nor nostalgic. But you’re right: it’s not easy. History shows elites don’t just emerge—they’re forged through crisis, conflict, or deliberate effort. And right now, we’re stuck in the messy middle.
I think the concerns about a transition to a "majority minority" country are very overblown, for a very simple reason.
We are mixing, and the racial categories that our politics currently divide us into are incredibly artificial. I'm white. My wife is Thai. My son and soon to be daughter are halvsies. We differ from a normal American millennial interracial couple only that we speak Thai instead of English in the home. But "white", "hispanic", "black" or "Asian" were already artificial categories that become less relevant by the day in this America. Soon, probably a few decades at most, they will no more matter to us than "Irish," Italian or Polish ancestry does to white people now, and for the same reason.
The challenge will be in adjusting the political system (and the entrenched interests in it that are very vested in outdated conceptions of race and belonging) to account for the attitudes that are already evident from Americans.
Every society has an elite class. Ideally, they resemble Plato's' "Philosopher Kings" and are well educated deep thinkers who also have humility. Ideally, the young men from this group are willing to serve their country in war and work long hours in ethical business or education settings, mentoring others who are not as financially fortunate as they.
The New England Wasps of the 1950s were the most benevolent and generous and inclusive ruling elite in human history. Seriously, they were! Who was better? The Han Chinese? The Romans, drowning baby boys too small to be useful in battle? The Jews in Ancient Israel or in Poland who would not even speak to someone who wasn't Jewish let alone invite them into their country if they eventually got one (look at Israel now)? The Sheikhs and royal families throughout the Muslim world? laughable. The wasps often donated huge amounts of money to libraries or churches which provided beauty, access to transcendent works of literature, etc. to the common man and woman. Nobody was better.
Because the baby boomers were the most diverse group in American history to that point and because they were given free or cheap college, a lot of the ethnic whites, African-Americans, Asian-Americans went into college with a chip on their shoulder. They imagined some elite white guy in The UES of Manhattan named "Van Deusenville" or some water baron in California or some old Colonial family in Massachusetts named "Entwhistle" was the reason the country was not perfectly just. And so began the leftist crusade for abolishing standards, deconstructing ideals, problematizing traditions. "Representation" and diversity became foremost goals. The society we now have is much poorer because of it.
>Seriously, they were! Who was better?
A related point I'm fond of making is that the US is one of the most benevolent superpowers in history, at least from 1950 to 2016 or so. Not because the US was perfect -- far from it. Simply because there's so little competition. Who else would you pick? Imperial Japan? Imperial France? The USSR? Prussia? The Spanish Empire?
When Britain dominated the globe, it controlled 25% of the world's territory. The US's territory barely grew in the wake of WW2 when it emerged as the planet's most dominant power. The US has military bases scattered around the globe -- but almost all (except Gitmo) are there with the consent of the host nation, and when the government asks us to leave, we leave. It's only with Trump 2 that we're reverting to type and focused on territorial gain again, as superpowers typically do.
Cynical internet commenters always want to claim that "the US only ever acts in its self-interest". But this is a hypothesis that can explain any data. I think you need some serious mental gymnastics to claim that Carter was acting in America's interest by giving up the Panama Canal in 1977, and Trump is *also* acting in America's interest by trying to get it back in 2025.
The simplest explanation is just that Carter and Trump are very different presidents. Carter cared about doing the right thing, but Trump doesn't. And it's the nihilism that claims "the US never cares about doing the right thing" which helps prevent us from getting another Carter. It's hard to run on doing the right thing, when everyone on the internet responds with: "yeah yeah, you care about doing the right thing... where else have I heard that before?"
Another way to think: instead of thinking in terms of good vs evil, think in terms of "enlightened self-interest" vs "destructive narcissism". Destructive narcissists like Trump want their relative share of the pie to increase, regardless if the pie shrinks in the process. Enlightened self-interest means realizing that helping other people is a surprisingly good way to prosper yourself.
Jews in Poland were ruling elites?!
Within the parallel society set up in Warsaw, Jews were the religious elites over their own. Within the country as whole, the Slavic Catholic Poles were the elites.
Overseas Chinese in many southeast Asian countries right now?
This.
Incoming groups had to be assimilated into the liberalism that the WASP culture in New England created. No other elite group would have managed it better (maybe the tolerant Dutch, but that's part of the ingredient in old American culture as well).
The funny thing is, that the other incoming groups show much less ownership of liberal tradition and more ethnocentrism (understandable, as those are the norms the world over).
The rest of the new elites are vulgar oligarchs who don't care long term for our country or its people.
The old elites were preferable to the new.
Regardless of waspy or not - the stand out lines for me were about a unifying “culture code”. We’ve got to find the unlock of being unified around our code and also being pluralistic without negative groupishness. We should be a nation that constantly keeps the rights and responsibilities elevated and in balance for our people and as an experiment and role model. We are high-rights, low-responsibility and that’s a bad recipe. The real rights are held by wealthy while the rest of us fight amongst ourselves for what’s left or what we perceive.
“We’ve got to find the unlock of being unified around our code and also being pluralistic without negative groupishness.”
This is a wish to change human nature. Good luck with that.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is a very misleading term, given that for hundreds of years a large majority of Americans fit that literal description. Most of them hillbillies, rednecks, and crackers. And Baltzell was only talking about Northeast Old Money.
There is another useful specific term, "the Episcopate," for this WASP Northeast Old Money. I picked it up from Lemann's book The Big Test on the rise of standardized testing in America, a good history of one of the main dynamics of the transition to non-hereditary meritocracy in the US.
Never heard this before, but it's quite apt and far more useful than "WASP."
Do the Scots Irish fall under the WASP category?
Not really.
Trump has tapped 13 billionaires for his cabinet, plus he is a billionaire himself. A government by elites for elites
And let’s see, how exactly does this “elite” thing work? AOC who after attending a non-Ivy. moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender/waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home, is definitely “coastal elite”. While Trump – who received millions from his New York landlord father, got into an Ivy League school based on connections, owns East Coast mansions, country clubs and golf courses – definitely is “not elite”
Or in Orwellian-speak: up is down, black is white
I was amused to read this piece. YM has been here -- by his own admission -- just a couple of decades and yet his mind turns to genealogy and elitism.
And why is it mostly Jews (Mounk, Brooks,) and Catholics (Douthat) who find this subject so tempting? Is there a a yearning for stability through some sort of noblesse oblige?
Those writers and public intellectuals who belonged to the true WASP elite (i.e., descended from the ruling elite that ran the show for the first 40 years of the Republic and then the first 40 years of the 20th century), people like Lewis Lapham, George Plimpton and Louis Auchincloss, did not even hint of a born-to-rule mentality. They did not seem embarrassed by their high social status because they knew it was temporary and contingent.
To begin with, America's founders reflected the divisions of the English Civil War. The Cavaliers ended up in Virginia, the Roundheads in New England. The Puritans, affiliated with the latter, turned to education and founded the great universities. They emphasized merit and came out ahead. The former became landholders and enslavers and eventually disappeared.
The two shared power for a mere half century before the Scots-Irish yeoman farmers and other Low Church believers took over. If not for the Roosevelts and the Bush's we would not even be talking about the WASP elite. Outside of politics -- finance, media, higher learning, culture in both the elevated and popular sense and not just in the artistic but also commercial sense -- America has been dominated largely by Jews, ever since the US entered the global bloodstream.
The more interesting question is that we are living in another hinge period and so what happens next. All this talk of a "Judeo-Christian" civilization is really a conjoining of rich Jews and evangelical (low Church) white Christian. They are in power now. The composition of this nation (racial, educational) and the economy (fully global) has changed beyond recognition. And this is where the focus needs to be now, not on nostalgic marinating in a bygone era of a WASP elite.
Look at FDR. He did a lot to bring non-WASP groups into the mainstream and into the government, but he always assumed that the country was a WASP one and would remain so. Maybe it wouldn't always be run by Hudson River patricians, but for him it was a white, Protestant and largely Anglo-Saxon country.
As for Lapham and Plimpton and Auchincloss, in their heyday the country was already slipping out of WASP hands. At 20 or at 30, I doubt Auchincloss saw his position as temporary or contingent. A commoner might be president, but the Establishment went on. Families might rise and fall, but the Establishment persisted and people knew who was on top.
Gore Vidal is a good counterexample. In some ways he did think he was born to rule, and there was a bit of Vidal in not a few of the WASPs of his era. Feelings of superiority could be sublimated, though, to the point where Baltzell and others assumed that John Kennedy was a fitting representative of enlightened Establishment government.
It is true that Baltzell's version of America was unrepresentative. Patrician rule only characterizes short periods in our history.
Without naming it, the article is an excellent critique of the concept of “white privilege.” It shows that whites are a very diverse group with respect to social class origin and ethnicity, and the great majority experience prejudice in one form or other.
It is my impression that we have not created a “ meritocratic elite” but rather an elite basedon one criteria, “ money.” In addition, there is a strongly held belief afoot that lots of money means you std intelligent. an obvious error in reasoning. We owe our leadership to a corrupt supreme court decision that equated “ money is speech” followed by the complete dismantling of fair dlrcgionsbinnCitizens United.
No, ethical norms collapsed with these rulings from the court and there is no way to recover our democratic norms until they are repealed.
Ah me. What a wonderful cornucopia of being 'damned with faint praise'.
I don’t know whether I completely qualify as a member of this vanishing breed, but I was raised a Protestant at the base of the Main Line, which, for those who are unaware of it, is named for the fact that it’s succession of towns lies along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line coming out of Philadelphia, headed for Pittsburgh, Chicago and points west.
I’m not sure if my American ancestry goes all the way back to the colonial era, although I did have relatives on both sides of the Civil War. My biological ancestry, at least as far as I know it is a combination of English, Scottish, Irish, and German, (and, as I’m prone to noting, we all know how well they got along!)
I did go to what was certainly an ‘elite’ private school (although it wasn’t boarding and is no longer located on the ground on which I attended it), actually living on the grounds as my father was for half my time there Headmaster (forgive the archaic usage) and my maternal grandfather an Assistant Headmaster before him, one of the InterAc league of similar schools extending along the Main Line out toward Paoli (scene of that infamous Revolutionary war massacre).
And, I suppose, to complete the picture embodied in this piece, I worked at the summer camp David Brooks attended as a boy, being one of his counselors.
All that aside, now having just turned 80, and having taught American history at the elementary level for over 40 years at three other Independent schools in Philadelphia and New York as well as spending time as a merchant seaman, construction worker, soldier, (and yes, paper boy!), I spend a good deal of time reading Substacks like this one and commenting as I can.
I’m not, however, so concerned to identify as a WASP as I am to identify as an American. And by that I mean one who through study and experience has what I believe to be a pretty fair understanding of the extraordinary nature of the nation we were designed to be.
Was that design flawed? Certainly; most disastrously in its acceptance of slavery, a lack of foresight for which we paid a terrible price between 1861 and 1865, and for which Black Americans have paid an equally terrible price both before, during, and after. We also denied another of the basic tenants of that design in refusing the franchise to most American women until the 19th Amendment was ratified. And there were others as well.
But none of that alters the fact that our Constitution represents the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. And I continue to believe it to be, as our greatest American noted, "the last, best hope of Earth”.
So if there is an ‘elite’ on the American scene, IM (not so humble) O, it must be those who understand the nature of Novus Ordo Seclorum and are determined that it continue as far as possible into the unknown future. And it is an elite which could encompass us all, no matter our individual origins.
And it is on that basis that I judge my countrymen and our elected leaders and legislators. And it is that judgement which causes me to despise Donald Tump, his myrmidons, almost all he stands for - precisely because he has absolutely no such understanding, and clearly revels in that lack - and those others who through their equal lack of such understanding thoughout our history have led us to this point.
The historian Jon Meacham recently noted in an interview with Jon Stewart that he felt the Founders would have been surprised that their design lasted as long as it has. Perhaps, but there was nothing inevitable about our increasingly dismal trajectory. And nearly half our nation’s voters still retain enough of that understanding to have rejected Trump’s badly distorted version of it. So, WASP’s aside, there are still plenty of ’the elite’ out there.
Excellent post, agreed 100%!
your point well-taken; nevertheless, "Raised in Chestnut Hill, a wealthy Main Line suburb of Philadelphia . . . " Chestnut Hill is in Philadelphia County, isn't a suburb of that fine city but in its northwest region. The Main Line is a suburb, which is west of the city.
Thanks to you (and like a dozen people who emailed me about this.) Have changed the description in the article and appended a correction!
The Main Line isn’t really “a suburb” though, is it? More like “a group of suburbs” that grew up around the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, hence the name. That would be like saying the north shore of Long Island is “a suburb”. But I guess this maybe counts as nitpicking on my part.
It basically was a Main Line suburb originally - the city has grown around it even if it never legally was a separate city. A lot of old-line streetcar suburbs and rail suburbs have been integrated (legally or no) into the city themselves.
Your essay assumes that the United States was always ruled by an elite, but that’s a misreading of history. The U.S. never had a true ruling class in the way you describe. For most of its existence, power was decentralized, and governance was accessible through mass-member political parties that, while imperfect, were genuinely democratic and republican in structure. The Democratic Party functioned as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party as a small "r" republican institution. They weren’t mere instruments of an entrenched caste but vehicles for broad political participation.
The idea that WASPs constituted a ruling class from the nation’s founding through the mid-20th century is simply false. And it is verifiably false.. Yes, many prominent figures were White Protestants, but thats just because the country was almost entirely white and and almost entirely and then mostly protestant, but that certainly doesnt mean the were a centralized and cohered elite, it was just the general population. The U.S. political and economic landscape was always fragmented and diffused, power wasn’t locked into a single group but contested between a variety of interests who themselves not cohered.
Baltzell’s idea of a WASP aristocracy ignores that decentralized democratic structures persisted well into the mid 20th century. The real shift wasn’t from "WASP rule" to a so-called "meritocracy," but from a system where ordinary people had pathways to power to one dominated by a centralized, exclusionary managerial elite; which is actually diametric to that statement of yours that I just quoted because we became far les truly meritocratic after it happened. Post-World War II centralization, the decline of public access to party structures, the dismantling of local banking and economic autonomy, corporate consolidation, the consolidation and centralization of the American Academe, and the rise of technocracy... in short the advent of the Neoliberal Era::: intensely de-democratized and then shut the public out
It's the 1950s. We have just won the second World War thanks in part to the efforts of scientists who were refugees of other countries, the president is a West Point graduate from Kansas, the Chief Justice is from Bakersfield, the Senate majority is a yellow dog Democrat from Texas, etc. The admissions committees at Harvard and Princeton look at this state of affairs and they ask themselves why they continue to yoke the fate of their institutions to mediocrities from old-money New England and New York families who can afford to send their kids to Groton. And so the SAT is born, and those schools start imposing upper limit quotas on how many kids they take from those schools. The rest is history. The first rule of institutions is to perpetuate themselves and protect and extend their own influence. Harvard and Princeton did very well dumping the WASPs.
And the cycle begins anew as those storied institutions collectively said "I just don't know about these Asians unless they're foreign students paying full price."