The Meritocrat and the Aristocrat
24th February 2022
All of which naturally puts one in the mind of Ross Douthat. The thoughtful columnist and last person on earth able to regularly smuggle conservative opinions past the New York Times admittedly isn’t a natural fit for the Epstein fiasco. But Douthat a few years ago wrote an essay that seems worth revisiting today.
The piece, “Why We Miss the WASPs,” is an attack on the modern American conception of meritocracy. Far from being democratic, Douthat argues, the meritocrats have become their own kind of aristocracy, except lacking in the virtues that formed the bedrock of the old WASP aristocrats: piety, service, noblesse oblige. America’s reverence for eminences like George HW Bush is thus more than just gauzy nostalgia; it’s a yearning for the better moral stewardship of an elite gone by.
The left considered Douthat’s point. They stroked their chins. And then they came to a carefully reasoned and penetrating conclusion: Douthat was a racist. For even entertaining the idea of the virtuous WASP, Douthat was said to have convicted himself of the same prejudices held by those WASPs. In a follow-up column, Douthat tried to make clear that he was aware the old elite could be bigoted, that this wasn’t what he was advocating for. “If I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite,” he quipped, “it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile.” (He’ll first have to get past my ideal elite of a global governing network of Episcopalian folk choirs.)