In Defense of Diversity

Noble elitism is excellent, but it's easy to slide into depraved elitism without any friction whatsoever, and that's exactly what happened in the United States:

I was primed, after reading the George Bush-inspired Ross Douthat celebration of the days of elite WASP rule, to immediately pipe up with the same dunkings that echoed around the rest of the internet. Upon reflection, though, that seemed both rude and juvenile. Douthat's nostalgic premise of an elite upper-crust that ruled us kindly and competently before their successors botched things up does not deserve such knee-jerk mockery. It deserves worse. It deserves worse, and ought to get it good and hard.

...The problem with the overarching theme of Douthat's piece is that it is wrong. It is not just a little wrong, but confidently and arrogantly and self-assuredly wrong.

...There was a sense of public duty, Douthat suggests, back when women were at home, white protestant men were in power, and individuals sporting z's somewhere in their names were few and far between in the top schools. The downfall of that sense must therefore have been, purely as coincidence, due to the same people that make New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat upset in every other setting, the (ticks down the list) Meritocrats, and the Diverse, and the Secularists.

Nonsense. It was the WASPs that killed those things. It was the WASPs of conservative monument-building that killed those things dead, without any help from the common rabble, and that is even if you accept the premise that any of it was "better" in the before times, rather than just "better" because those that objected would get their comeuppance at the business end of a water cannon. It was George Herbert Walker Bush, the last American aristocrat, who helped the upper caste discard unpleasantries like noblesse oblige in favor of a new, more brutish era of I've got mine, and you've got nothing. It did not happen because we began letting the Ethnic People into our Harvards.

If America rebelled against sending its sons and daughters to war, a generation after George Bush had willingly volunteered himself, it was because America was infinitely more skeptical of the WASP-promoted, WASP-planned Vietnam conflict as worthy of bloodshed than they were of the battles against Nazis or those that killed Americans at Pearl Harbor. And it was the WASPs of America who were both granted sweeping exemptions from bearing the cost of the new wars and who eagerly, and frantically, sought them.

If America began to lose faith in government as force for good, or as guardian of top knowledge, and top architect of our grandest national plans, it was because Ronald Reagan and his then-sidekick, in an obsessive effort to relieve the true American aristocracy of tax burdens that their parents could pay willingly, but they themselves chafed bitterly at, stood on public stages and insisted that government was not good, and government was not competent, and government could not be the force behind moon landings and megaprojects, both civic and scientific, or pave the roads or deliver the mail or do the slightest bit of anything else.

It was George Bush, patriot, who went from objecting to notions of unshackling the rich from their obligations as nonsensical voodoo economics to championing the same, even as the sweeping negative effects became apparent.

It was Bill Clinton who attempted to return the federal budget to something resembling competence again; it was the WASPs, and in particular George, son of George, and the same conservative aristocracy that met those attempts with tantrumming outrage. It is not the government's money, the younger Bush and his aristocratic underlings bellowed in response to the dangers of a plan to whittle away at deficits. It is your money! And with that, they cut taxes on the WASP aristocracy still more steeply.

It was Nixon who demonstrated that our elites were self-obsessed and corrupt. It was Reagan and his allies who made it clear that the laws the little people might live by, the laws the little people assumed to be sacrosanct, were little more than passing irritants to the governing upper class. And it was Ford and Bush who made clear that consequences for criminality among the upper class were a wound that, according to the upper class, could not be suffered lest it bring all of America down around us. It was the would-be aristocrats that sang the praises of imperialism and interventionism, and would-be aristocrats that botched each such attempt at the expense of other people's children. It was the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Arabists and China hands and their self-self-evident expertise who wrote white papers and appeared on television shows to explain the Diverse portions of the world to us all, and how the natives would, in the end, celebrate our carpet-bombings and greet us as their white Protestant liberators.

The Diverse and the Secular were not prominent in those decisions. The Diverse and the Secular were not invited onto those television shows. Presuming that faith in government eroded because the Diverse showed up, uninvited and with too many consonants, or that governmental competence dwindled not because of white Protestant demands to sever the federal arteries and let each program bleed out in agonizing public fashion, but instead because the public sphere began to see churchgoers and non-churchgoers intermingle in an unhealthy manner, is not an argument. It is not sincere.