[PLEASUREMAN]

Chef Boyhowdy linked this recent article from Paul Gottfried in Taki's Magazine:

Paul Gottfried:

A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we’re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser’s statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he’s saying. A journeyman author, long associated with NR, Brookhiser, to all appearances, is an upper-class WASP endowed with all the proper manners and tics. Nonetheless, for decades he’s been in the employ of the neocons, people who would hardly qualify as bon gratin.

Brookhiser wrote a book about WASPs that prompted Florence King to respond with a review titled, "WASP, where is thy sting?" Where is thy brains? is the more apposite question now. Brookhiser claimed, "The Protestants have vanished, but it doesn't matter, because we are all Protestants now," a thesis he explained with ludicrous flourish:

Richard Brookhiser:

As I wrote in my 1991 book, "The Way of the WASP," new religions in America tend to become "Protiform": They take on the manners and behavior of American Protestantism. Faiths assimilate, like immigrants.

Note that last sentence, because it was inserted at the behest of the multiculturalist anti-WASPs who have long used the fraudulent promise of assimilation to both flatter and delude the WASP as his dominant status was being reduced. (Flattery of course because it presumed that the all-powerful WASP could tacitly command assimilation; deluded because it requires a near-psychotic episode to believe that the America of today is assimilating to the WASP values of yesterday.) That last sentence is the signet of Brookhiser's contemptible servility to his neocon masters.

Gottfried properly speaks of these degraded WASPs in a contemptuous voice:

Paul Gottfried:

This subordinate position certainly does not demonstrate the assertion that “we’re all WASP patricians now.” The fact is members of our onetime dominant ethnicity and its onetime social elite are down on their luck. They’ve been reduced to menials serving at the beck and call of other groups, and in the journalistic and media world, this means working for Jewish liberals and Jewish neocons.

Gottfried illustrates this deplorable state with a scene in which Arnaud de Borchgrave was once obliged to entertain Norman Podhoretz's nose-picking idiot son. One can hardly imagine a more humiliating and degrading form of service (perhaps emptying the chamber pots of diarrhetic homosexuals).

The WASP had already lost his potency by the 1960s, as evidenced by the fact that Jews began to openly cavil against supposed WASP sins (including, of course, their oppressiveness). As Gottfried writes,

Paul Gottfried:

The WASP gentry were noticeable for their lack of élan and for their overpowering desire to be non-controversial. The Jews, by contrast, were conspicuously nasty. They had chips on their shoulders, and profoundly loathed the group they were destined to replace. Once they took over academic and journalistic posts these parvenus left no doubt who was in charge.

Today of course the WASP is reduced to hoping for a single spot on the Supreme Court (perhaps one day!) and reflecting nostalgically on his long lost past, perhaps during reruns for Mad Men (naturally it took a Jew, series creator Matthew Weiner, to evoke sympathy and affection for the WASP of old). Or, like Brookhiser, he writes fatuous columns claiming that Jews, Catholics, and Mexicans are really WASP in spirit--really. The only aliens Brookhiser can detect are Louis Farrakhan, Mel Gibson, and some Amish farmers. As a servile WASP, Brookhiser will hold the door for almost anyone, as long as they haven't put off his neocon bosses.

It is important to remember why and how the WASP became this insulted, degraded weakling, in order to do identify the enemies of WASP values. This is where the squeamishness of modern conservatives regarding Jewish culture becomes self-defeating--their mental blocks prevent them from noting the aggression and fervor with which WASP values were attacked in the 1960s, and why Jews were motivated to do so. Instead they flail ridiculously at "liberals" and "hippies" and "feminists", consider an endless list of crackpot politicians, and draw up plans for electoral victory that rely increasingly on debased endgame tactics.

[Chef Boyhowdy]

When one of my students, who himself is predictably WASP, noted in class that his ethnic group lost influence in the US “because they practiced discrimination against other people,” I asked somewhat impatiently: “How the hell did everyone else get into the country?”

Compare with the false bravura DeNiro imparts to Wilson in The Good Shepherd:

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?

Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

[PLEASUREMAN]

note in that exchange how brightly the hate still burns for WASPs and their supposed arrogance and oppression

Jews will hate WASPs forever

[Lookwell!]

How can anyone read this without longing for 1939 again only telling the Allies to just stay out of it

[Bonerjit]

PLEASUREMAN:

The WASP had already lost has potency by the 1960s, as evidenced by the fact that Jews began to openly cavil against supposed WASP sins (including, of course, their oppressiveness).

Yes. Even the mainstream press took notice at the time of WASP retreat and decline.

Time Magazine, Friday, Jan. 17, 1969

"Essay: ARE THE WASPS COMING BACK? HAVE THEY EVER BEEN AWAY?"

Quote

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost." Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp's traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.

Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels—the big cities—were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos—schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies."

Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and "swarthy" persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation's intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O'Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students."

Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will—and money—can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd.

[PLEASUREMAN]

You can see the writing of the wall in that passage. WASPs still filled the highest positions in society, but they had no way to rejuvenate their ranks--all the institutions for inculcating WASP values were either in a state of seige or had already fallen to swarms of Jew, Catholic, etc. (As someone who was raised German Catholic, it took me years to appreciate that much of the "prejudice" against Catholics of old was directed at the degenerate Irish and Italian varieties, and who can blame them.)

[miles]

I read that article just last night at Takimag. I thought one of Gottfried's last points was most telling:


As a great Italian thinker Pareto pointed out about a hundred years ago, ruling classes fall not so much because of opposition from below as they do from disintegration from above.


Of the weaknesses WASP America has, is the de facto situation by which the upper classes of yesteryear are able to impart profound advantage to their own offspring, and able to (through government, zoning, etc.) exert profound disadvantage to lower and middle-class offspring. John Podhoretz is a Jewish example of this himself. He is probably not nearly as talented as Midge Dector or Norman Podhoretz, but since he is their son, he's in like Flynn. Our entire system of stock ownership as both a store of wealth and source (dividends) of income, allows for the really wealthy to bequeath trust funds on their scions that underwrite their failures. They also (that Harvard number Steve Sailer has written about) are able to get their kids into the best schools from birth. But what about their natural talent? The people who get to the heights of the WASP ladder aren't the most talented WASPs out there, and they know it, and are (of course) secretely a little guilty about it. This can be exploited by those who set their minds to do so and develop memes dedicated to that purpose pretty easily. The WASP's have abandoned that "natural aristocracy of men" for inherited priveledge, but have done something worse.....they have actively tried to suppress the most naturally talented.

Genetics are a motherfucker. I think all of us have met doctors, engineers, developers, and contractors who were much much smarter than the anyone in the (example) Bush dynasty. It makes the mind swim to think that the Hilton hotel chain will probably someday be in the hands of a one Paris Hilton. Im guessing the leading hotel chains will be Indian-owned not long after that happens. If we'd test kids for high IQ's early in life (about the third grade, and then again in the seventh) and identify the talented and get them into advanced classes in private schools (funded by the taxpayer if necessary as an investment in our collective future) early on, we'd probably see some energetic geniuses at the mouseclicks of power. Im not one of these folks, but I can recognize the fact that these people are the mental equivalents of a Chris Johnson, the Titans running back who runs a 4.21-second 40 yard dash-and was able to rush for over 2,000 yards last year. They are unusually gifted mentally and able to, like Johnson carried the Titans last year, carry our civilization with their better ideas. Instead we are getting a hereditary elite that is more interested in paryting during their youth, sustaining hegemony, are intellectually incurious, not inventive, and dont stand a chance against someone who is all of those things, but isn't allegiant toward the United States, like Rahm Emmanuel for instance.

When I think about what our "eite" are doing, sitting around fretting about the goddamned NASDAQ, the DOW, Wilshire, and S&P, who is not allowing their currency to float against the dollar, whether or not their is a tax advantage to gripe at the next shareholder meeting about moving headquarters to fucking Dubai, where to summer this year, what internship would be good for their kid to pursue, or what private school to send the kids to..............and contrast that with what other elites are probably doing with their time (like the Chinese elite for example), its hard for me to think we will be the world's leader for several more decades. If it weren't for that big military, and those two oceans, we'd already be fucked. Im hoping those to things can buy us enough time to start making the right choices again and rebound.

[PRCalDude]

Pareto's observation is probably a huge part of it.

The reality is that Protestantism declined severely in the years following the 1920s when Protestant liberalism (higher criticism) migrated over from continental Europe. Though North American English Protestantism (Episcopalianism) had been nothing more than a WASP east-coast business network for 100 years, Presbyterianism and Lutheranism began to regard the Bible as nothing more than a series of moral stories that had to be sub-ordinated to modern philosophy, biology, and archaeology rather than sticking to the confessional and Biblical rule of "Scripture interprets Scripture) (WCF 1.9).

http://www.albertmoh...t-does-it-mean/

[Pangur]

PRCalDude, 22 June 2010 - 05:48 PM:

Though North American English Protestantism (Episcopalianism) had been nothing more than a WASP east-coast business network for 100 years

Throw in the fact that protestantism is essentially a "religion" for people who want to say they're religious, but who don't really believe (or want to believe) in any of it, and you're on the right track. Protestants are the Jews for Jesus of the Christian world.

[ash]

Quote

(As someone who was raised German Catholic, it took me years to appreciate that much of the "prejudice" against Catholics of old was directed at the degenerate Irish and Italian varieties, and who can blame them.)

What does this mean?

[PLEASUREMAN]

ash, 23 June 2010 - 08:35 PM:

Quote

(As someone who was raised German Catholic, it took me years to appreciate that much of the "prejudice" against Catholics of old was directed at the degenerate Irish and Italian varieties, and who can blame them.)

What does this mean?

It means German Catholics were culturally distinct from Irish and Italian Catholics, due to not being drunks and guidos.

[Pangur]

PLEASUREMAN, 23 June 2010 - 06:53 PM:

It means German Catholics were culturally distinct from Irish and Italian Catholics, due to not being drunks and guidos.

This is interesting. I'd say off the top of my head (in addition to the obvious cultural differences between these groups) that the German catholic church was probably more influenced by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation than the Irish and Italian churches.

I imagine the Irish church was sufficiently geographically isolated from the Reformation that it was less influenced by it than, say, Germany or France. Plus the Brits were Protestant and -- if there's a recurring theme in Irish history besides starvation, drunkenness and great literature -- we know the Irish love to do the opposite of anything the Brits do (e.g., Irish neutrality in WW II). I think that staying on the Catholic plantation is just what the Irish did, in part because they had less choice.

Not sure about the Italian Church, but I'd (again) guess that chauvinism and loyalty to the papal regime played a pretty big role in Italian resistance to the Reformation. That, and being guidos.

[Legs McDuck]

Pangur,

I don't think he's not talking about respective liturgical forms. He's talking about the behavior of the ethnic groups. The Famine Irish were predominantly Catholic and, let's put this politely, from a lower socio-economic class. And like others similarly situated, they liked to get their drink on. Not exactly the types elite Wasps would have over for dinner. The later wave of Southern and SouthEast European immigrants --also kinda poor, had their own set of jarring to the Wasp elite behaviors.

Let me translate: P-man's saying that because he was raised as a German Catholic, he'd heard of the Wasps as anti-Catholic and figured the Wasps didn't like the Irish and the Italians mostly because the Irish and the Italians were Catholic. Then, later, after he got out in the world, he discovered that the Wasps hadn't been so upset with the Irish and Italian immigrant waves because of their respective Catholic-ness (whose liturgical, Christological, hymnal differences the average Prod probably couldn't give a shit about) as about their respective out-of-church in the street behaviors, such as getting publicly drunk (Irish), being so ... actually, I don't really know what pissed the Wasps off about the Italians --corruption? language barrier?

[PLEASUREMAN]

Yes, I think that the anti-Catholicism was more a reaction to cultural/ethnic/class differences that happened to line up with religious practice (although these would also probably demonstrate themselves in manner of religious expression). Plus the Irish and Italians were known for clinging to their ethnic identities whereas I think the Germans, having greater affinity with the dominant culture of the time, assimilated more completely.

I'm sure with Italians it was that they (as least the Southern Italians) were culturally incompatible. There's not a strong democratic or republican tradition there and the Italians are stereotypically lower class (loud, flamboyant, aggressive), much unlike the reserved and industrious Germans. It's easy to see which group would create more problems.

But look at how Italian and Irish ethnic cohesion has served them. The second most dominant group in the media (behind the Jews of course) is Irish Catholics. Italians also seem quite common in media and politics. I think Jews feel more comfortable around other aggressive, ethnically cohesive groups (except the ones they clash with, like non-Jewish Semites). It's like they were programmed to destroy WASP culture...with the help of WASP apathy of course.

[Pangur]

Legs McDuck, 24 June 2010 - 12:56 PM:

Pangur,

I don't think he's not talking about respective liturgical forms. He's talking about the behavior of the ethnic groups.

Fair enough Legs. I was riffing on different aspects of PMAN's comment, i.e., some perhaps ancillary reasons for these distinctions.

I agree with you that it seems that the cultural differences were the driving factor, but there might be more to it than that.

[Pangur]

PLEASUREMAN, 24 June 2010 - 01:17 PM:

Yes, I think that the anti-Catholicism was more a reaction to cultural/ethnic/class differences that happened to line up with religious practice (although these would also probably demonstrate themselves in manner of religious expression). Plus the Irish and Italians were known for clinging to their ethnic identities whereas I think the Germans, having greater affinity with the dominant culture of the time, assimilated more completely.

I believe there were some external factors as well. I certainly wouldn't rule out German affinity with WASP culture. Germans tend to be conformist, as well as possessing other positive qualities as you note. However, there was also tremendous anti-German sentiment in this country during WWI, in the interwar years, and of course after WW2. I suspect that at least some Germans had reasons to conform -- or at least not stand out -- related to this.

[MWethman]

PLEASUREMAN, 24 June 2010 - 03:17 PM:

Yes, I think that the anti-Catholicism was more a reaction to cultural/ethnic/class differences that happened to line up with religious practice (although these would also probably demonstrate themselves in manner of religious expression). Plus the Irish and Italians were known for clinging to their ethnic identities whereas I think the Germans, having greater affinity with the dominant culture of the time, assimilated more completely.

Also, I think the fact that we fought Germany in World War I significantly motivated Germans to discard, or at least play down, their ethnic identity.

While there are similarities between Italians and Jews, I don't think Italians generally share the animosity toward Wasps that you ascribe to Jews. At least, I never detected any and I was raised in a "very Italian" environment in New Jersey, by Italians who had no compunctions about airing their thoughts about other groups.

[PRCalDude]

Pangur, 23 June 2010 - 07:56 AM:

PRCalDude, 22 June 2010 - 05:48 PM:

Though North American English Protestantism (Episcopalianism) had been nothing more than a WASP east-coast business network for 100 years

Throw in the fact that protestantism is essentially a "religion" for people who want to say they're religious, but who don't really believe (or want to believe) in any of it, and you're on the right track. Protestants are the Jews for Jesus of the Christian world.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Protestants used to take religion very seriously. They were murdered by the hundreds of thousands by the Roman Catholics in Europe during the Reformation for their beliefs. When they stopped taking their beliefs seriously, they declined precipitously in numbers here and in Europe.

This post has been edited by PRCalDude: 25 June 2010 - 10:28 AM

[Pangur]

PRCalDude, 25 June 2010 - 08:25 AM:

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Protestants used to take religion very seriously. They were murdered by the hundreds of thousands by the Roman Catholics in Europe during the Reformation for their beliefs. When they stopped taking their beliefs seriously, they declined precipitously in numbers here and in Europe.

I was being glib, so don't take it too seriously. But in a way, I think you answered your own question. Protestants in this country (I wasn't talking about Europe, but latter-day American Protestantism) stopped taking their religion seriously, as well as the mores that went with it. Protestantism subsequently devolved from being a religious experience to being something similar to country club membership; something pro forma rather than culturally significant. This is where I suspect it stands today.

This devolution has reached its natural conclusion in Britain, where the rot is worse, and you have people like the Archbishop of Canterbury plumping for sharia law in that country.

This post has been edited by Pangur: 25 June 2010 - 11:32 AM

[PRCalDude]

Pangur, 25 June 2010 - 09:28 AM:

PRCalDude, 25 June 2010 - 08:25 AM:

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Protestants used to take religion very seriously. They were murdered by the hundreds of thousands by the Roman Catholics in Europe during the Reformation for their beliefs. When they stopped taking their beliefs seriously, they declined precipitously in numbers here and in Europe.

I was being glib, so don't take it too seriously. But in a way, I think you answered your own question. Protestants in this country (I wasn't talking about Europe, but latter-day American Protestantism) stopped taking their religion seriously, as well as the mores that went with it. Protestantism subsequently devolved from being a religious experience to being something similar to country club membership; something pro forma rather than culturally significant. This is where I suspect it stands today.

This devolution has reached its natural conclusion in Britain, where the rot it worse, and you have people like the Archbishop of Canterbury plumping for sharia law in that country.

If the CoE had any sense Rowan Williams would be ridden out of Britain on a rail and Nazir Ali would be promoted to Canterbury.

http://iowahawk.type...-bigynneth.html