President Theodore Roosevelt and family, August 24, 1907
“We have no room,” declared Roosevelt, “for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans.” Newcomers who had become “completely Americanized,” he added, “stand on exactly the same plane as the descendants of any Puritan, Cavalier, or Knickerbocker…. But where immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, do not heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the Old World which they have left, they thereby harm both themselves and us.” America would not tolerate, said Roosevelt, newcomers inclined to “confuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old-World quarrels and prejudices.”
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The Death of the First Elite and the Rise of the New
Today we look back on that old elite, if we look back on it at all, as a relic of the distant past. But this development—the old elite’s slow loss of self-confidence after World War II and then its obliteration as a cultural force—represents a profound transformation in America’s social history. What emerged was a new country with a new elite.
In place of the old-school folkways and legends and values of the Anglo-Saxons, we have what is known as a meritocratic system dominated by a class of strivers who have managed to scope out the new system and rise to the top. It was captured in a recent Atlantic article by Matthew Stewart, an avowed member of the new elite but a critic of it. “The meritocratic class,” he writes, “has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”
Further, as far back as 1995, social commentator Christopher Lasch, in a book entitled The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (published posthumously), excoriated what he called America’s “new aristocracy of brains.” He wrote: “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.” He foresaw an emerging chasm between the country’s new upper class and its great mass of citizens. “The new elites,” he wrote, “are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.”
Lasch’s characterization of the elite’s low regard for the masses calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s put-down of Donald Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential race. Her famous “deplorables” insult reflected the cultural chasm foretold by Lasch. This mutual animus between the elites and the people they purport to govern is an ominous development in America and thus merits an exploration. Our starting point will be that old WASP establishment that dominated America for nearly three centuries before expiring with hardly a cri de coeur. It should be noted that this article represents no call for any kind of restoration. History moves forward with a crushing force and doesn’t pause for nostalgia. But to understand where we are, we must understand where we came from. And the old WASP establishment represents a large part of where we came from.
and something I realized in my travels in Mexico and Latin America,
Indeed, the point can be crystallized by a look at the different approaches of the British and the Spanish in North America. The British ventured to the New World largely as families to create communities, commerce, and wealth born of toil. Bent on perpetuating the folkways and mores of the Old Country, the menfolk brought their own women and generally refused to mix with the Native Americans. The Spanish of Mexico, by contrast, came as conquerors and plunderers. They mixed freely with indigenous women—beginning with Hernan Cortes, who, upon arriving, promptly took as his mistress the lovely and intellectually vibrant Princess Malintzin. The result was that, within a few generations, ethnicity became a particularly vexing issue in the lands of New Spain. Eventually, a new class system based on blood lines emerged, with the increasingly numerous mixed-blood mestizos harboring political and social resentment born of mistreatment and prejudice from both Indians and Spaniards. One result was that the kind of civic solidarity seen in Anglo-Saxon America couldn’t take root in Mexico.
it’s not all economics,
The result of all this, as Stewart sees it, is growing political resentment, as reflected in the 2016 election returns. In the Trump vote, Stewart saw “a large number of 90 percenters who stand for pretty much everything the 9.9 percent are not.” The economic cleavage was unmistakable. The counties carried by Hillary Clinton represented fully 64 percent of GDP, while Trump counties accounted for only 36 percent. One study found that Clinton counties had a median home value of $250,000; for Trump counties the figure was $154,000. Clinton counties saw their real estate values shoot up by 27 percent from January 2000 to October 2016 (adjusted for inflation); for Trump counties it was 6 percent. Similar cleavages could be seen in educational levels, with the country’s 50 most educated counties surging to Clinton and the 50 least educated moving markedly to Trump.
Robert W. Merry has written a sweeping, insightful and highly informative essay on American history from a sociopolitical perspective. Merry is a little hard on Trump the man, but gives him his full due as President.
Do RTWDT.