From Noah Feldman’s “The Triumphant Decline of the WASP” in today’s New York Times:
But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.
To illustrate this, I include a picture of that “Protestant elite” ceding their socioeconomic power:
It’s an odd op-ed all around, writing out all the people and groups who forced open the door of opportunity, often at risk of their own lives. Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, and a host of others simply evaporate from the record, leaving behind only the wise white (male) Protestants sagely extending privilege to all: the Founding Fathers of myth writ large over the entirety of the American experience. It’s a version of history to which no Irish (or Jewish or African-American or women or so on) need apply. They are, in Feldman’s formulation, eternally the beneficiaries of wisdom, but never its holders.
The Edge of the American West 
18 comments
June 28, 2010 at 12:54 pm
jim
I think he has in mind the Ivy league colleges converting themselves from WASP finishing schools admitting a few smart non-WASPs to fundamentally meritocratic institutions with legacy WASP loopholes.
June 28, 2010 at 1:11 pm
silbey
jim; that’s how I started to read it, but when he mentions “our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court” he’s going much further.
June 28, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Doctor Science
Wow, he says:
He really needs to read The Chosen.
What Feldman is really overlooking is that the loss of WASPs on the Supreme Court is due to a specific political/religious factor: Republican, conservative Presidents have been nominating Catholics *exclusively* (at least, if you don’t count poor Harriet Miers, and even she apparently considered herself Catholic when she was young). It’s not that the WASPs have gracefully ceded power, it’s that the Republican Party has turned away from the kind of WASPs who make Supreme Court justices.
June 28, 2010 at 2:53 pm
macon d
Companion piece?
from the WSJ, “That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP“
June 28, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Adam Arenson
Yet then he ends the piece by appealing to fashion and Ralph Lauren preppiness. That seems like evidence of reaching.
Would his (Korean) wife and his Jewish day school agree to disagree with Prof. Feldman’s view of who brought about this change?
June 29, 2010 at 3:30 am
Ben Alpers
Wow….just wow.
Feldman was, incidentally, the guy that the Coalition Provisional Authority tapped to write the Iraqi Constitution in 2003, despite the fact that he apparently knew next to nothing about Iraq. He left abruptly though, according to Wikipedia, it’s unclear if he was fired or he quit.
June 29, 2010 at 4:03 am
Jen
Let’s celebrate the increasingly anti-white USA!
Third world here we come!
June 29, 2010 at 4:45 am
kevin
I never would have guessed Pat Buchanan’s nom-de-blog was “Jen.”
June 29, 2010 at 6:28 am
TF Smith
The definitions of WASP, mainline Protestant, and “Establishment” get pretty blurred in these articles, I think…these terms, if they are to have any historical meaning, have to be differentiated; there are and were very deep differences – Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge were both WASP men, but that was about all one could say they had in common, as one example.
I think Feldman’s column is cock-eyed on a number of levels, but it is also worth making the point that whatever the city fathers of Birmingham, Alabama (much less the Birmingham PD) were in the 1950s, they were not the WASP Establishment. Far from it…Baptists were only slightly more likely to be among the Washington-New York-Boston elite as Parsis.
If Feldman et al are talking, about the “Cabots talk only to Lowells, and Lowells talk only to God” caste, realistically, those people have been out of American public life for decades, with the (partial) exception of people like the Bushes, who are an interesting example of defiantly northeastern establishment (Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, etc) purposefully moving into the Sun Belt and re-packaging themselves…
If they are talkjing about Justice Stevens, who went to Chicago and then Northwestern on the GI Bill, it sort of re-sets the bar for WASP-dom…his family was wealthy (Chicago hotel owner wealthy, not NY law firm or trust fund wealthy) but they lost it in the Depression. His mother was a high school teacher, I believe.
More interestingly, Stevens is the final example of the GI Generation on the Court, which I would argue is a more significant demographic bloc than (non-generational) WASP-dom. The passing from the national scene of those born in the 1920s, whether good (Stevens) or bad (Rehnquist) who lived through the Depression, WW II, and pre-Civil Rights Era America, is of real significance, historically, politically, and socially, to the U.S.
June 29, 2010 at 6:32 am
TF Smith
And yes, “good” and “bad” are loaded, but it is early…good and bad on civil rights issues, generally.
June 29, 2010 at 6:36 am
silbey
I think Feldman’s column is cock-eyed on a number of levels, but it is also worth making the point that whatever the city fathers of Birmingham, Alabama (much less the Birmingham PD) were in the 1950s, they were not the WASP Establishment. Far from it…Baptists were only slightly more likely to be among the Washington-New York-Boston elite as Parsis.
“The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” –William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957
June 29, 2010 at 8:42 am
Ralph Hitchens
Certainly an editorial that misses the point by miles. I think it’s not so much a case of “white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion” as the white Protestant ruling class being squeezed between its own sense of entitlement and its reluctant, hesitant, belated commitment to the rule of law and the lofty principles espoused by the founding fathers. They were pushed, step by step, toward inclusion of previously-unentitled minorities in political life, where numbers quickly told.
June 29, 2010 at 11:01 am
Ben Alpers
Buckley’s “White community in the South,” of which Buckley’s Texas oil baron father was once a member, was not the same thing as the WASPs. Buckley, Sr., was neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. And neither was his wife (and Bill Buckley, Jr.,’s mother) who was a Swiss-German New Orleanian, i.e. another non-WASP member of the “White community in the South.”
June 29, 2010 at 1:54 pm
silbey
Buckley’s “White community in the South,” of which Buckley’s Texas oil baron father was once a member, was not the same thing as the WASPs. Buckley, Sr., was neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. And neither was his wife (and Bill Buckley, Jr.,’s mother) who was a Swiss-German New Orleanian, i.e. another non-WASP member of the “White community in the South.”
It was Buckley’s preppy fashion sense that confused me.
June 29, 2010 at 2:28 pm
jim
Yeah, Buckley aped some WASP mannerisms.
It’s important to recognize that to be a WASP, it is not enough to be white, anglo-saxon and protestant. These are necessary, but not sufficient. One needs also to be (or to aspire to be) upper class. It’s difficult to define this, since class indicators are not, by their nature, dispositive. But fortunately we have a Platonic Ideal of the WASP: Morgan partners in the 1920s. People recognizably similar can be called WASPs; people distinctly different, aren’t.
June 29, 2010 at 8:04 pm
TF Smith
A taste of proper WASP-dom:
http://www.fdrsuite.org/avery.html
June 30, 2010 at 6:50 am
Dave
A guy called Noah Feldman wrote this? Oy gevalt…
June 30, 2010 at 7:42 am
chris
@Dave: Isn’t that the point? Not just Irish and Italians, but even Jews count as white these days.