Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Bemoans The End Of White Rule In The United States
By Adam Peck
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In Saturday’s paper and online, author Joseph Epstein mourns the collapse of what he describes as the “genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment,” (WASP, the commonly-held acronym for White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Instead, he argues, we are living in a meritocracy, governed not by an elite subset of the uppermost crust of society but rather by a group of people who overcame some kind of adversity and achieved success thanks to their own merits, not based on what family they were born into. This, according to Epstein, is a tragedy.
Epstein’s embrace of white privilege (or is it power?) is almost too transparent, resembling something closer to satire than to outright racism. And yet he gives no reason to believe that he isn’t completely serious when he argues that modern day “corruption, scandal and incompetence” are hallmarks exclusive to this new era of non-white rule. Or when he memorializes the virtues of keeping those not born into the “WASPocracy” away from the halls of power. Or when he faults the leadership of the country’s top colleges for its role in ending white rule by “lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks.”
Instead, Epstein argues, we should return to an era of WASP rule. Why? Because rich, white men born into rich, white christian families would never lead the country astray:
A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than “greedy pigs” (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master’s degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.
Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above all) getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.
Epstein’s contempt for minorities — namely, that they don’t belong anywhere near positions of authority — isn’t reserved simply for race. Back in the 1970s, Epstein penned a story for Harper’s Magazine in which he expressed his desire to “wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” He added, of his four sons, “nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.” Those comments led to sit-ins and protests outside of Harper’s offices, and Epstein has never apologized (and in fact dismissed his critics, some 30 years later, as simply incapable of understanding his own “textured thought”).
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http://thinkprogress.org/home/2013/12/21/3098361/wall-street-journal-bemoans-end-white-rule-united-states/
= new reply since forum marked as read
[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Of, by, and for the 1%, fully deserving of a succinct response. 
Not often that happens. 
Last edited Mon Dec 23, 2013, 02:30 PM - Edit history (1)
White rulers.
The ruled class have finally figured out that the ruling class is a defective product which they no longer want to buy. Let's hear it for free market enterprise.
rocktivity
be ruled by a race of police-robots from Michael Rennie's planet,
than be ruled by Greedhead Wall Street Oligarchs.
...basically the rich upperclass stealing all the land in England, attacking and destroying the notion of "the commons," throwing the MANY small, subsistence farmers OFF the land, creating vagrancy and other laws in order to throw the poor OUT OF THE COUNTRY as "indentured" slaves--using also "impressment" of the poor as slave sailors (however skilled they may have been, they were still slaves on shipboard, often for life) or throwing the poor into the ugliest urban squalor ever seen, or into factory slavery.
There's your WASP class, for you--whether Protestant or Church of England, or, in the case of 'white' Spanish rulers in Latin America, Catholic. England wrote the book on creating WASPS: Highly privileged education; taught ethics and social responsibility; imbued with Christian ceremony and theology; born with "silver spoons" in their mouths--wealth based on the land that they or their forefathers stole and "enclosed," at home AND abroad; "born to rule"; automatic power, as a class, over the Law, the Economy and the Empire; allegedly SELF-REGULATING (that is, behavior modified by the "boys club" that you belonged to, amidst the bigger "boys' club" that was England).
Stole. All. The. Land.
This is not to say they didn't create an interesting culture. They did. It is a culture, for instance, that ended the British slave trade on moral grounds, and instituted many progressive reforms in the early 20th century--and a culture, too, with great scientific and other achievements. And the English-Welsh-Scots-Irish gift for language underpinned that culture in beautiful ways (think of Shakespeare or James Joyce or Jane Austen, et al) and in MASKING (cover-up) ways that disguised the naked greed of the English upper class ("Upstairs/Downstairs" civilization at home; naked greed abroad).
I was kind of besotted with the English upper class until I learned of the "enclosure" movement, late in life. Its REAL impacts--in death, disease and enslavement of the British poor--are not well-known here. It's not part of our education. (We inherited "enclosure" with no democratic choice in the matter--no discussion--and zero knowledge of what it MEANS to society that there are no common lands on which a poor family can grow food. Though there was lots and lots of land to be stolen from the Indians--thus masking the issue of "enclosure"--what occurred was eventual "enclosure" of the west--dramatically illustrated by the Railroad Barons and other Robber Barons of the late 19th century, and, today, by huge, multinational corporate landowners.)
This same class--here and there--the WASP class here, the WASCE class there (white anglo-saxon Church of England) ALSO precipitated the vast, senseless carnage of WWI, and the Great Depression of the 1930s; committed all of the mistakes throughout that era that led to WWII; precipitated the vast, senseless carnage of the Vietnam War, the Savings & Loan lootings of the 1980s (comparable to the "enclosure" movement--looting of small savers' money), and other such horrors (deregulation, unfair tax laws, union busting, et al); the CIA destructions of democracy around the world throughout the 20th century (including, notably, Iran's first democracy in the 1950s) (on-going policy throughout the world today), the Great Depression of 2008, the horrors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the horror of the U.S. "war on drugs," and the increasing militarization and belligerence of WASP/WASCE culture in service to the 1% that we have seen in the first decade of the 21st century.
Not to mention tolerance of segregation, lynchings and vast injustice in the U.S. south, and racial prejudice and exclusion throughout the country, with some of the worst instances of racism occurring well into the second half of the 20th century, and with racism rearing its head (visible) again now. I also include in my indictment of the ruling elite that this fascist writer pines for: the probable CIA assassinations of JFK (case proven*), RFK and MLK--all of whom were trying to CURTAIL the murderous, thieving waywardness of the ruling class.
You can appreciate an imperial culture--British, American, Roman, ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Persian--with your EYES OPEN. That is how I read English literature now, with eyes open. The "enclosure" movement enriches my understanding of British culture. It is WHY Charles Dickens wrote the books that he did, about poverty and urban squalor. It is why D.H. Lawrence rebelled against industrialization and lauded nature and love. It is where Wordsworth was coming from and the other great Romantics (nostalgia for PRE-"enclosure" England and its functioning rural communities based on "the commons"
. Patrick O'Brian discusses it in the Aubrey-Maturin novels (great sea novels!) (Captain Aubrey opposes enclosure of his and other lands in his district). You can see it (the "enclosure" issue) underpinning Tolkien's fantasy novels.
Numerous English writers deal with "enclosure" issues, in one way or another, either directly or indirectly, including stories about great fortunes being made and the social impacts on the ruling class itself. Most of those fortunes began with enclosure (robbing the peasants and yeomen of "the commons", then investing in robbing other peoples, as the Empire grew). We can appreciate the travails of a Victorian heroine involved in love and marriage matters but we should know that, often, the great land or monetary fortunes involved (who marries whom, and who gets what fortune) were based on deliberate, well-planned, heartless, massive, ruling class robbery.**
George Orwell wrote in 1944
Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.
—George Orwell, As I Please, Tribune, 18 August 1944
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ***
(my emphasis)
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One thing to admire in the English ruling class is its production of thinkers like Orwell, and Bertrand Russell, and so many others. The English ruling class generates self-criticism, sometimes institutes reforms as a consequence, but, on the whole--as here--this has NOT moderated the overwhelming rapaciousness of the main thrust of the WASP and WASP-like classes. The WASPs here were the "robber barons" of the late 19th and early 20th century who brought on horrible wars and depressions, often in collusion with the "barons," there (in England). There is NOTHING inherently moral or ethical or honorable about this class. There is, however, an abiding hypocrisy on both sides of "the pond" that hides greed with all manner of lies, propaganda, cover-ups and political/religious piety.
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*(Recommended: "JFK and the Unspeakable: How He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass. Case closed, including why. it. STILL. matters.)
**(For great info on the impacts of "enclosure": The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic [Paperback]
Peter Linebaugh (Author), Marcus Rediker (Author)
***(Wiki's article on enclosure is okay for some basic facts but not very good on the human and humane issues around enclosure. It pretty much omits the blood and anguish of the many anti-enclosure struggles over the centuries, and the ultimate impacts: decimation of rural communities and peoples. The article does, however, link to many CURRENT "enclosure" struggles, many in Latin America.)The wiki article points out that the early English kings fought enclosure, against the Whigs, Puritans, etc., who have been called a "parliament of landlords." The king in old times had sacred duties to the land and the people. The king was even magically associated with the fertility of the land, and thus defended the land, and the peasants, yeomen and villagers, against the original "robber barons"--the Enclosers.)
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The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from off the goose
—Anon, wealthandwant.com[28]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
Yeah, hedge funds happened because of people who were not WASPs. WASPs were far too classy to have done things like owned and trafficked in slaves, established the Ku Klux Klan, brought about the crash of 1929, fought the end of Jim Crow, interned the Japanese, etc.
If one can judge by surnames, WASPs seem to be well represented on this list of successful 2011 hedge fund managers, especially considering they are probably now themselves a minority in the US.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2012/hedge-fund-managers-12_land.html
Another ass:
David Brooks writes that WASPs took pride in "good posture, genteel manners, personal hygiene, pointless discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods of time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant
Yeah, because the rest of America is slouching, ill-mannered, dirty, undisciplined and unable to sit still.
Then there's Bill O'Reilly, who couldn't get over how well-behaved people in a soul food restaurant were.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/09/21/oreilly-surprised-there-was-no-difference-betwe/139893
Why can't we label this as bigotry?
