When you pick up the New York Times, you’re probably expecting a healthy dose of leftist ideology with plenty of politically correct scolding and perhaps a bit of fake news. You definitely wouldn’t think there’d been an article proclaiming white men as the best leaders, but that’s exactly what they published yesterday. In an opinion piece a NYT columnist said that white protestant men make better leaders than more “diverse” people, which would be very racist if it was said on Fox News or came out of the mouth of President Trump. Somehow in the pages of the NYT however, this is perfectly acceptable.
In a piece that was supposed to celebrate the life of late president George H.W. Bush, columnist Ross Douthat lamented Why We Miss the WASPs
WASP is an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and is a social group of rich connected white people with British and Protestant ancestry. These are the people who are often referred to as the wealthy elite ruling class. George Bush Sr. was defiantly a WASP.
And of the WASPs, Douthat did this:
I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.
Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
In his own pompous and wordy way, Douthat is saying that white people make better leaders than non-white people. That rich Protestant men rule better than Catholics and Jews. He also added that, “WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.”
He argues that the WASP “distinctive competence and effectiveness…was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended, and that certainly hasn’t been matched by our feckless leaders in the years since George H.W. Bush.”
Douthat then suggests that allowing non-whites into the ruling class has dragged our country down:
However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms.
Then there is the accusation that certain blacks and mormons are trying to appropriate WASP culture:
The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes, Jews and Catholics imitated WASP habits in the 1940s and 1950s, and in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
Let’s be honest here, if Def-Con News posted a similar piece to this it would earn the site a suspension or maybe even a ban from Facebook for hate speech/fake news/violating community standards. If President Trump were to tweet a similar message the entire left side of the country would melt down over his blatant racism. You guys however can f*cking go off in the comments section, no problem.
Amazingly enough this pro-rich white establishment piece appeared in the the pages of the leftist NYT. The only thing that makes any sense is that Douthat’s writing so dense, verbose, and pretentious that the NYT editors had no idea what message he was trying to convey and this one kind of slipped by.
