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A wasp is an insect of the order Hymenoptera. A WASP, on the other hand, is an American term that stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. However, it’s not just anyone who ticks those particular boxes who qualifies for membership. In a column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat explains the specifics:
“The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like F.D.R.), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.”
So, what we’re talking about is a ‘born-to-rule’ social elite – not so much the wasps of the American hive as the queen bees (only male, of course).
Arguably the late George HW Bush was the last WASP President (his son, George W Bush, being too Texan to qualify). In a previous column, Douthat not only mourned the passing of Bush Senior, but also expressed a degree of regret for the decline of the WASP establishment. This being the social media age, his intent was interpreted in the worst possible way – “as a paean to white privilege, even a brief for white supremacy”.
That’s not what he meant at all. In fact, he says that the diversification of America’s elites is both “good and necessary”. However, in his view, that does not mean that the same applies to meritocracy:
“…ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other… And I would separate them. “
He goes on to argue that the newly diversified upper class was “unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one”.
I don’t think he gives a convincing account of how diversity – or just plain old-fashioned fairness – can advance without what he calls a “meritocratic organising theory”. Is he really suggesting that the hopes and ambitions of the outsider should depend on the special favour of the insider? After all, we can’t all be Meghan Markle.
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