The WASPs Are Gone
And barely anybody noticed.
For much of its history, the United States was ruled by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
As recently as 50 years ago, the president and vice president, most members of the Cabinet and virtually all justices on the Supreme Court, the great majority of Fortune 500 CEOs and Ivy League presidents fit that bill. Even if you applied the restrictive definition for who qualifies as a WASP that would then have been widely assumed, a large share of the most prominent Americans would have hailed from that group: They were born into long-established American families that could trace their ancestry to the continent’s earliest settlers, lived in strongholds of the traditional elite such as Boston’s Beacon Hill, the affluent parts of Connecticut or the “Main Line” suburbs of Philadelphia, and sent their children to storied preparatory schools such as Groton, Andover or St. Paul’s.
When I first arrived in the United States, less than two decades ago, the assumption that WASPs were the true rulers of America remained widespread, and there was still some real grounding for it. In politics, their ranks comprised the president, the vice president, the treasury secretary, the secretary of the Interior, both the Senate majority and minority leaders, and at least a good dozen senators. Three out of nine Supreme Court justices were WASPs, as were three out of five CEOs of the largest publicly traded companies.
Since then, the influence of WASPs in American life has—largely unremarked by the general public—cratered. White Protestants are a big part of the population, and probably remain somewhat overrepresented among the millions of Americans who earn a generous paycheck and enjoy high status in their local communities. But the roughly ten million Americans who qualify as WASPs in the narrower sense of belonging to historically elite families that can trace their ancestry back to colonial America have virtually disappeared from public life. They are now barely represented in the Cabinet or on the Supreme Court, among the CEOs of America’s biggest corporations or the presidents of the country’s most prestigious universities, among recent winners of the Oscars or the National Book Award.
At first glance, it might seem that the new administration has turned back the clock on this remarkable development; after all, both Donald Trump and many of his key allies are white Protestants. But on closer inspection, the opposite comes closer to the truth. Neither Trump nor any member of his inner circle are WASPs in the sense in which Americans would have understood that term until very recently; in fact, the recognition that they represent a conscious rebellion against the traditional WASP elite and everything it stood for helps to make sense of key aspects of this administration.
Edward Digby Baltzell was born into America’s traditional elite. Raised in Chestnut Hill, a wealthy neighborhood in Philadelphia, he was a white Episcopalian from an old-money family, and got his secondary education at St Paul’s, one of the country’s leading boarding schools.
But the circumstances of Baltzell’s early life also gave him a sense of what it means to be left on the outside looking in. His father lost his job due to alcoholism, and was later arrested for insurance fraud. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Baltzell was temporarily forced to drop out for financial reasons.
Baltzell became interested in how the American elite worked. Who was in and who was out? Who held influence without merit and who had merit but was not allowed to gain influence? He pursued a PhD in Sociology at Columbia University, returned to his alma mater as a professor, and became one of the country’s foremost experts on the American upper class.
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The United States, Baltzell argued in his most influential book, The Protestant Establishment, published in 1964, has long been ruled by a hereditary elite. It is not just that virtually every president, most CEOs of major companies, and many leaders of prestigious cultural institutions happened to be White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; it’s that they were descended from families that could trace their ancestry back to pilgrims who had arrived in the country in the 17th or 18th centuries. It was to refer to this narrow group that Baltzell coined an acronym that has since come into common usage: America, he claimed, is ruled by “WASPs.”
But as other groups sought a share of the pie, the dominance of the WASPs was throwing America into crisis. A genuine aristocracy, Baltzell argued, made space for the most talented, allowing people without the right connections to rise to the highest positions in society. WASPs, by contrast, had become a hereditary caste, one that discriminated against and excluded talented minorities, from Jews to Irish-Americans and African-Americans, at every step: “A crisis of moral authority has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant establishment’s unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks.”
Like France’s ruling elite in the 18th century, America’s upper crust faced a consequential choice according to Baltzell. It could either open itself up to new members or perpetuate itself as a restrictive caste ruling over an increasingly dysfunctional country. Baltzell seemed to believe that the WASP elite would prove incapable of reforming itself: “the vast majority of old-stock patricians, following the caste ideals of the Old Regime in France concentrated on … the protection of their privileges,” he warned.
But with the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that Baltzell was overly pessimistic. Just as he was describing how impenetrable the WASP caste had become, its hold over American society started to give way.
In one of Shirley Jackson’s celebrated short stories, two women meet because of the friendship of their sons, American soldiers who are fighting side-by-side in World War II. Mrs. Friedman, the mother of one of the soldiers, pays a surprise visit to Mrs. Concord, the mother of the other soldier.
Both women bond over their sons’ exploits. But the story gradually reveals that Mrs. Concord is unwilling to accept Mrs. Friedman as her social equal. When the visitor suggests that her host’s son, an aspiring lawyer, might one day go into practice with her husband, a partner at Grunewald, Friedman & White, Mrs. Concord gives her the cold shoulder.
“That’s awfully kind of you,” Mrs. Concord said. “Charles will be so sorry when I tell him. You see, it’s always been sort of arranged that he’d go in with Charles Satterthwaite, my husband’s oldest friend. Satterthwaite & Ferguson.”
“I believe Mr. Friedman knows the firm,” Mrs. Friedman said.
“A fine old firm,” Mrs. Concord said. “Mr. Concord’s grandfather used to be a partner.”
When Baltzell was writing his book on the Protestant Elite in America two decades after this short story was first published, this kind of fictional exchange still represented a seemingly ironclad social reality. WASPs like Mrs. Concord did not want to admit Jews like Mrs. Friedman as their social equals. They may even have hesitated to offer them employment at a “fine old firm” like Satterthwaite & Ferguson. (Nor, for that matter, did they hold Catholics or Protestants from working-class backgrounds—not to speak of Latinos or African-Americans—in equal regard.)
But as World War II drew to a close, and those boys returned from the war, this state of affairs started to change. Slowly but inexorably, the doors to opportunity in America opened. Ivy League universities abolished their Jewish quotas. A Catholic became president of the United States, followed by a succession of Protestants whose humble roots would have appalled Mrs. Concord. Eventually, even ethnic minorities won a seat at the table, with the upper echelons of America slowly diversifying.
By the late 20th century, the kind of subtle prejudice portrayed in Jackson’s story had mostly vanished. The social divide between members of America’s traditional social elite and everybody else attenuated with every passing year. And then an even more fundamental transformation took place. The striking thing about America in 2025 is not just that the descendants of Mrs. Concord would no longer regard the descendants of Mrs. Friedman as their social inferiors; it’s that the old WASP elite has been dethroned to such an extent that such social acceptance is no longer its gift to bestow.
The demise of WASP dominance has been so gradual that its full force, though occasionally remarked upon by sociologists or newspaper columnists, has hardly entered mainstream consciousness. But a look at the upper echelons of American society suggests a veritable decimation of WASP influence; it is hard to think of any other traditionally dominant social group that has lost influence under peaceful circumstances to a comparable extent.
Take the Supreme Court, long a bastion of the old elite. Of the nine current Supreme Court justices, two are black (Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson), one is Hispanic (Sonia Sotomayor), and one is Jewish (Elena Kagan). Of the other five justices, four are Catholic (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). The remaining justice, Neil Gorsuch, is the only member of the court to have predominantly Anglo-Saxon roots; on his mother’s side, he can trace his ancestry back to early settlers. But even Gorsuch is not a straightforward member of the old WASP elite. Far from being a Protestant from Connecticut, he grew up Catholic in a family with deep Colorado roots; he only became an Episcopalian later in life.
The business world has undergone a similar transformation. Of the 10 American corporations with the biggest market capitalization, four have Asian-American CEOs (Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and Hock E. Tan); two have Jewish CEOs (Andy Jassy and Mark Zuckerberg); and one has a CEO who was born and raised in South Africa (Elon Musk). Of the remaining three CEOs, one has Irish roots and was raised as a Southern Baptist in Mobile, Alabama (Tim Cook); and the other two (Warren Buffett and David Ricks) were raised in mixed-ancestry Midwestern families that, though Protestant, are geographically and socio-economically a far cry from the elite families that were the focus of Baltzell’s studies.
Even the world of elected politics has seen a remarkable decline in the number of WASPs. Take the current United States Congress. Neither John Thune, the current Senate Majority Leader, who has predominantly Norwegian and German roots, nor Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, qualifies as a WASP. The same absence is notable in the House of Representatives. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Leader, is Catholic while Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, is African-American. This leaves Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House: Though a white Protestant with partially English ancestry, his roots in Louisiana, his upbringing as a Southern Baptist, and his parents’ modest socio-economic status make any ascription of WASP status to him a bit of a stretch; a George Herbert Walker Bush he surely is not.
At the presidential level, the decline of WASPs was most obvious during the presidency of Joe Biden (a Catholic). Among his fifteen cabinet secretaries and four cabinet-level appointments, five were black (Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin, Marcia Fudge, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Michael Regan), three were Latino (Xavier Becerra, Miguel Cardona, Alejandro Mayorkas), three were Jewish (Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen, Merrick Garland),1 two were Asian-American (Julie Su, Katherine Tai), and one was Native-American (Deb Haaland). Of the remaining five, four were Catholic (Tom Vilsack, Gina Raimondo, Jennifer Granholm and Denis McDonough). The only white Protestant in the entire Cabinet, Pete Buttigieg, grew up in the Midwest as the son of a Catholic professor at Notre Dame, and converted to Episcopalianism as an adult.
Superficially, the Trump administration might look like a return to a world in which WASPs played a larger role. And it is certainly true that, beginning with the president himself, white Protestants hold vastly greater power in the current administration than they did under Biden. Depending on how you count, up to ten out of nineteen current cabinet-level officials are white Protestants. But that makes it all the more striking that WASPs in the traditional sense are effectively absent from this list. Most are clearly excluded by their ancestry (Hegseth has Norwegian and Bondi Italian roots, for example), by their upbringing in Appalachia (J. D. Vance)2 or the Mountain West (Doug Burgum), or by the low socio-economic status of their parents (Linda McMahon). It is unclear that a single member of Trump’s cabinet would neatly fit Baltzell’s conception of the WASP elite.3
To be sure, some WASPs retain positions of influence or prominence in contemporary America. Anderson Cooper is one of the country’s most prominent news anchors and Sheldon Whitehouse is a current senator. Given that this social group ruled the country for most of its existence, and millions of Americans remain a part of it, it would be remarkable if such examples did not exist. But what is striking is not how many examples of WASPs in positions of prominence there are; it’s how hard it is to find them.
The demise of WASP predominance is, in the main, a positive development. Batzell worried that America would be rent asunder as an old hereditary caste closed itself off from talented individuals who lacked the right background. Instead, we have witnessed the remarkable rise of a meritocratic ethos, one which has effectively replaced the longstanding denizens of the American establishment. His wish that the upper echelons of American society would come to “discriminate on the basis of the distinguished accomplishments of individuals rather than classifying men categorically on the basis of their ethnic and racial origins” has been realized to a greater extent than Baltzell could have imagined.
WASPs’ astonishing disappearance from leadership positions in American public life may also be a positive augury in a second sense. Over the past decade, a number of political theorists and social scientists have started to worry that there is little precedent for a democracy in which a ruling ethnic caste gracefully steps aside once its predominance is challenged by a coalition of hitherto marginalized groups. This suggested that America may run into serious trouble as the white majority shrinks as a proportion of the population, giving rise to a country that is “majority minority.” As Danielle Allen warned after the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, “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.”
The state of American democracy looks more imperiled today than it did when Allen first expressed these worries. There is also good reason to suspect that it will prove easier for a traditional elite with somewhat porous boundaries, like the WASPs, to disappear than it is for an ethnic group whose boundaries have traditionally been violently policed, like whites in America, to give up its dominance. And yet, the comparatively smooth manner in which WASPs gave up their traditional role in American life is at least some reason to hope that dominant elites can, under the right circumstances, relinquish their privileges more peacefully than has widely been assumed.
But for all of the undoubted benefits of a more meritocratic America, it is impossible not to worry that the demise of the old WASP elite has also left America deeply disoriented, a point that David Brooks has repeatedly made over the last years. As he wrote in 2018,
We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.
You’d think all this would have made the U.S. the best governed nation in history. Instead, inequality rose. Faith in institutions plummeted. Social trust declined. The federal government became dysfunctional and society bitterly divided.
The older establishment won World War II and built the American Century. We, on the other hand, led to Donald Trump. The chief accomplishment of the current educated elite is that it has produced a bipartisan revolt against itself.
Brooks’s point is deliberately provocative, and he has received his fair share of pushback for it. (Was World War II won by the WASP elite or by Navajo code talkers and Jewish astrophysicists and most of all by courageous GI’s drawn from every ethnic and religious group?) But as the new administration, led by Protestants who feel no sense of belonging in the traditional American elite, sets out to take an axe to every norm, rule and institutions on which the old order was built, it is hard not to think that he may be expressing something important.
As Brooks himself emphasizes, there is no way back to an America run by WASPs, nor should we want there to be. But at its best, the WASP establishment gave us some things that every society needs, including leaders with a sense of ownership over the long-term success of their country and a sense that their privileges go hand-in-hand with a responsibility for those born less lucky.
One way to interpret the chaos into which the country is currently descending is to see it as the result of the void left by the disappearance of that old WASP code. And one way to interpret the culture war that seems to be consuming our politics is to think of it as a battle over what set of norms and customs should be put in the place of the ones that have recently vanished.
It would be naive and ahistorical to wish for an America in which the WASPs are still in charge. But their disappearance is one of the reasons for the chaos in which we now find ourselves. Constructing a meritocratic elite that is better than its WASP predecessors at ruling the country—one that actually manages to earn the assent of most Americans, unlike its more recent incarnations—will by no means be easy.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly describes Chestnut Hill as a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. Though the neighborhood is affluent and retains a suburban character, it was incorporated into Philadelphia’s city limits in 1854 and lies north of the Main Line.
Mayorkas, who has Cuban ancestry, is also Jewish; I did not include him in this list of Jews to avoid double-counting.
Vance, while raised a Protestant, has also since converted to Catholicism.
Scott Bessent probably comes closest.
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.
"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.