Back in 2011 I wrote a piece entitled If You Believe That Everything in Life That Goes Wrong is Someone Else’s Fault, You’re a Failure, which started with this:
A few years back I was involved in an extraordinarily complex business transaction. It was complex not only because our legal system makes even the simplest transaction a mess, but also due to the nature of both sides of the transaction. On my side, I was set as the chief negotiator of a group of peoples whose perceived best interests neither coincided with mine nor with each other, but who expected their respective laundry lists to be fulfilled. On the other was a group of people who I suspect had the same problem, but from my standpoint their modus operandi was, in a word, bizarre.
The whole process took far too long and had far too many “bumps in the road,” to use their terminology. My counterpart on the other side was what I would describe as a huffy, moralistic social liberal whose favourite habit when I hung tough on certain points was to browbeat me with the accusation that everything that was going wrong was my fault and that I should just capitulate on that account. His ostensible goal was cooperation, but that was belied by his methodology. In the end, however, we finally got the deal done.
It wasn’t an accident that the main person I negotiated with was a Northeastern Gentile, which will become relevant shortly.
I’d like to think it’s hard to shock me, but the antisemitism that has become routine these days does. Unfortunately I’ve been around in circles most people haven’t long enough to know that it never really died, just went underground. Until World War I, on an elite level WASP and Jew lived together in reasonable harmony. After that conflagration, things changed, and one of the first institutions this change affected were the Ivy League schools. Terrified by the thought that the hard working, ambitious Jews would take over the student bodies of these august institutions, they changed the admissions process to de-emphasise strictly academic achievement as a criterion of admission and put more emphasis on the applicant being a “well-rounded” person. It did the trick: Jewish admissions dropped in the 1920’s, and that admissions process was repeated on the Asians in more recent times, only to be knocked down by the courts.
In some ways that change was one of the most important moments in American history, especially as where you went to school became more important. It signalled the end of real academic merit as central for success in an academic institution, which in turn undermined the whole concept of meritocracy. It has led to many of the things we see today such as DEI and people putting their children into bad schools thinking it made no difference, they could end up in the right place no matter how unprepared they were to be there.
But I digress…the Holocaust drove antisemitism out of plain sight, and led to the creation of the State of Israel. In some ways Israel is the antisemites dream come true: get the Jews out of our hair and let the Arabs deal with them! The first part worked in places like Central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and later with the Soviet Union. But the Arabs were more successful expelling them from their own countries than putting paid to the State of Israel, and some have come to worry more about the IRGC people in Tehran rather than the IDF people in Jerusalem, which led to the Abraham Accords.
Back on these shores the WASPS still worried about Jewish ascendancy. Rather than jack their own people up to do better, they started by admitting people previously beyond the pale (yes, I know the origin of that term) into the “club,” specifically the Roman Catholics. But time was running out: the combination of World War II, with its militarisation and forcing (for the last time) the old aristocrats to rub shoulders with the rest of the population, and the upheavals of the 1960’s, broke the hegemony of the Old Guard and its ability to arbitrate how one “moved up” in this country, our leitmotif.
The scions of our WASP and WASP-adjacent elite never struck me as people who were really prepared to assume the leadership of the United States. Many had been infected with the laid, drunk or high mentality that came to dominate the scene in the 1960’s; their interest in the world around them was limited to a good holiday without considering that they might learn something. That’s what has made me so pessimistic about the long term (and I know that’s an un-American concept) future of this country, starting then and feeling it coming back after 9/11.
And that brings me to my last act with our elites before I departed: my graduation from the St. Andrew’s School. St. Andrew’s, following their beloved Ivy League lead on admissions, made the graduation rank less than transparent. We ended up with two Jewish girls as valedictorian and salutatorian, something my mother found hard to take. She thought I should be up there, but I knew better: I had a decidedly uneven record. As for whether anyone else should have been up there, I can share what my Maniac Physics teacher observed: “Girls and smarter than boys,” and, in the tradition, both of these winners were smart.
Which leads me to someone else whose academic record is uneven to say the least: Tucker Carlson, the current poster boy of preppy antisemites. What would he have done to bracket our class? More relevant, what would his father-in-law, the Rev. George Andrews II, who was headmaster at St. Andrew’s in the following decade, have done? These are questions that championship Gentile (now that Catholics are admitted, WASP doesn’t fit) antisemites would do well to answer. What we have here is a school which started by following the Ivy League lead on non-transparent evaluation of students and ended up picking the same group the system was originally designed to exclude!
There’s a lot of support on places like X for the “original stock Americans” to take their place again as leaders of the country, with the idea that all will be right when this happens. I doubt this seriously; the scions of Colonial times (we’ll leave the Scots-Irish out of this discussion, their idea is different) strike me as a group of people who are no longer able to run the “family business” of the United States, either by temperament or expertise. By contrast, when its own “original stock” hit bad times, the Empire turned first to the North Africans and later the Illyrians for leadership; it wasn’t an easy time but the alternative was the collapse of the Empire, something that we should think about.
And our own “best and brightest” are not united. Many of the harpies who scream “From the river to the sea…” come from this same class of people, opposed by others who want to retain the founding principles of the country. The 1960’s broke the old order, and the pieces from that breakage went in different directions, to the detriment of their long-term chances of regaining dominance.
Here I end with the point I started with: If You Believe That Everything in Life That Goes Wrong is Someone Else’s Fault, You’re a Failure. That’s especially true for a group like the elite WASPS; in the driver’s seat for a long time, now not so much and divided on how to fix the problem but united as to whose fault it is that it happened. Antisemitism is inexcusable; for the Old Guard, it’s ridiculous.
