I like to collect examples of liberal western regimes that have been brought down by great errors. For instance, the third French republic, intimately tied into the Catholic church, collapsed after the Dreyfus case, in part because of the antisemitic accusation. And the blueblood WASP ruling class dissolved in our country in the 1970s, in part because it had made such a terrible mistake with Vietnam. An order of birth came to an end.
Of course I am building a case that the order that followed, the meritocracy–the neoliberal/neoconservative regime of globalist Rhodes scholars and testtakers–is going to implode because of Iraq. That’s why they’re hanging on to the war ideology so. That’s why the Washington Post publishes neocons and the Times publishes Zionist warrior Efraim Karsh; because even the liberals are implicated in the disaster and are trying to preserve their place.
Another example. John Pemble writing about the English ruling class in the London Review of Books, and how it lasted for over a century before the meritocrats came in. Note that Pemble associates its rise with the decline of the oligarchy in the 1850s due to another great error. Emphasis mine:
In Britain privilege still means power, but power no longer means class. The British ruling class is long since dead. Its day was over when neoliberal think tanks dethroned liberal-humanist intellectuals and nobody was any longer interested in how to combine Adam Smith with the Bible, or the rule of the many with the wisdom of the few. Yet literature gives back what history has erased. In fact literature – Galsworthy, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ‘ruling class’, so familiar that we forget how brief its existence was. A cross between a gentrified bourgeoisie and a professionalised aristocracy, it ranked as ‘upper-middle’ in the hierarchy of class. Mismanagement of the Crimean War in the 1850s provoked a crisis of confidence in the nation’s leadership, compelling the landed oligarchs to improve their performance and share their power. Politics were gradually democratised; civil service appointments and – eventually – army commissions reserved to merit; the ancient universities opened up to Nonconformists and agnostics. The bourgeoisie took advantage of the opportunities thus created and became a pillar of the establishment. They switched to careers in government service and education; sent their sons to public schools and Oxbridge; patronised the arts and the London Season; and propounded traditional Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt.
Obama had his chance, and preffered to leave Bush’s military alone to run itself and US foreign policy. Too late now!
“WASP ruling class dissolved in our country in the 1970s, in part because it had made such a terrible mistake with Vietnam.”
Oh really? You wish.
Agreed. Obama ran on a platform of change, and more things have stayed exactly the same under him, and under the Democrats, than under Bush. Republicans might have steered us toward the cliff, but Democrats prove themselves unwilling to turn the wheel or push the brakes.
And that comments about the dissolution of the WASP ruling class is a bit naive. If that were true, Iraq (aka Vietnam, part II) would never have been possible in the first place. Just because the WASPs have more friends and flunkies who are different colors or different religions (but never both at the same time, of course) doesn’t mean they lost their stranglehold on power.
Just ask the Black Caucus in Congress. Were they able to address caging list fraud in Florida in 2000? Who did the Supreme Court back?
I’m not so sure that there has been such radical change in the power structure in my dear country since mid-Victorian times. Are the neo-liberals of today really so different, in economic convictions or educational background from Victorian free-market conservatives?
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Here’s a note about WASP social clubs in NYV that seems to me to suggest the WASPS decline as a designation of upper power or class declined in proportion to the rise of PC culture and–most importantly, the decline in WASP moneybags. I think Truman’s racial integration of the US military, a de facto support of the Civil Rights movement, and the US military’s own leadership transition to a meritocracy standard
started the ball rolling in the first place.
link to vanityfair.com
Citizen, from the Vanity Fair article: “Wasp culture is obsessed with exclusivity and defining distinctions in order to support a sense of superiority.” Ditto Israeli and right-wing American Zionists.
What really started the ball rolling was the decline of Britain as the world’s superpower, finally accomplished by the end of WWII. Elite U.S. WASPs were a subset of British aristocracy in their own eyes, without the need for a title, but with some affected speech patterns. They wouldn’t have had their standing without the Brits, and that goes back to the middle of the 19th C. A WASP is, after all, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
The decline of the WASP revisited, or what does it mean to be a “real American” (cf: Palin) in the “proposition nation,” and is this good or bad? Interesting article:
link to 97.74.65.51
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One interesting featuer of the British meritocracy was that the brightest and the best did not end up running Britain. They were recruited into the Indian Civil Service or other bits of the machinery of Empire, and spent the best parts of their lives mastering the languages (no promotion unless you can speak the local language like a native) and customs (you have to know why Sanjit is going to totally ignore regulations and pay a visit to his family) of the area they were working in. And then do it all over again in another district.
Running Britain was left to the B team. They weren’t up to the task.