WASPocracy: sorely missed?
- By Zhao Jinglun
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 4, 2014
Do you know what ails Washington today? Author Joseph Epstein has an answer: WASPocracy has faded, lost its confidence and with it, the power and interest to lead. Taking its place is meritocracy. The old WASP generation "prided itself on character and the ability to put the well-being of the nation before their own." Whereas, "most of our meritocrats, by contrast, seem to be in business for themselves."
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Overdrive [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn] |
Epstein made these claims in his "Saturday Essay" in the Wall Street Journal, updated December 23, 2013.
The acronym WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. But, according to Epstein, lots of people who have been white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, were far from being WASP. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton qualified.
WASPs were a caste, closed off to all not born within it, WASP life was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. George H.W. Bush was the last WASP president, because he was born in Massachusetts and went to Yale. Even though his son George W. Bush can claim impeccable WASP lineage and went to the right schools, he chose to shed all WASPish coloration to become a Texan.
Epstein's embrace of elitist white privilege and contempt for minorities is nothing new. Founding father George Washington wrote in 1783 that "the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire, both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
"Thomas Jefferson predicted that the "backward" tribes at the borders "will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains. Once we don't need slavery anymore, we'll send the slaves back to Africa. And get rid of the Latins because they are an inferior race. We're the superior race of Anglo-Saxons. It's only to the benefit of everyone if we people the entire hemisphere." (See Noam Chomsky, Power Systems, 2013, Metropolitan Books, p.3)
