We have educated a generation of the best and the brightest to be bad leaders.

Ross Douthat had a column this past weekend, Why We Miss the WASPs. He used the passing of George Herbert Walker Bush to propose that part of our nostalgia and mourning is that with Bush 41's departure, the curtain has been rung down on a till-recently vibrant aspect of American culture - the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.)

Douthat is a talented writer and I enjoy his perspectives though frequently disagree with his hypothesized causal mechanisms. It is really hard to discuss, much less compare, cultures. It is too easy to romanticize some trivial aspects of a culture while overlooking more protean characteristics. And in this instance, he is comparing the best of WASP culture (servant leadership, humility, noblesse oblige, and sense of duty) with the deracinated and often vapid moral preening of the subsequent leaders of the baby boomer Me generation.

There is no doubt that there were great blessings to the WASP culture but there were great blemishes as well. But that tends to be true to an extent for any culture. But you shouldn't compare the best of one system to the average of the other - you have to compare best to best or average to average.

I disagree with a fair amount in these passages but I also think he is raising important issues that warrant thinking about.

I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Foer suggests this nostalgia is mostly bunk, since the WASPs were so often bigots (he quotes Henry Adams’s fears of a “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto”), since their cultivation of noblesse oblige was really all about “preserving [a] place at the high table of American life,” and since so many of their virtues were superficial, a matter of dressing nicely while practicing imperialism, or writing lovely thank-you notes while they outsourced the dirty work of politics to race-baiting operatives.

“Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty, and as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry).

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and privilege SATs over recommendations from the rector of Justin and the headmaster of Saint Grottlesex ... and you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.

Not only that, but you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating.

Douthat has a new column out as a follow-up - The Case Against Meritocracy: An aristocracy that can’t admit it.
I am deeply committed to a meritocracy but am also quite alert to its many failings as well and Douthat gets to those more deeply in this column.

But then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned.

Here is the important part with which I strongly agree.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

With the development of IQ tests, and their colloquial equivalent of ACT and SAT, we have gotten very good at sorting people based on smarts. But IQ is only one part, and not even always a necessary part, of a good person and a good leader. But that is what we are good at measuring and therefore that is what we use.

Once we made it illegal to use IQ tests in recruiting, we created a tremendous demand for an alternative means of ranking candidates. Hence the ever increasingly selective university system. As an employer, I may not be allowed to ask a candidate their IQ. However, I don't need to. I can go to one of the elite universities which are already selecting based on IQ. While there might be a bell-curve among Harvard students, as there always is for any population, I know what the Harvard mean is and therefore I have a pretty good idea of the IQ of a person who attended Harvard.

As a consequence, we have become exceptionally good at identifying and pulling all the highest IQs from around the country and funneling them into a handful of universities from whence they flow, in general, into a handful of professions in a handful of cities, marry one another, and start the cycle again.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy, because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.

But even as it restratifies society, the meritocratic order also insists that everything its high-achievers have is justly earned. “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple,” Ann Richards famously quipped of George H.W. Bush; well, the typical meritocrat is born on third base, hustles home, and gets praised as if he just hit a grand slam.

This spirit discourages inherited responsibility and cultural stewardship; it brushes away the disciplines of duty; it makes the past seem irrelevant, because everyone is supposed to come from the same nowhere and rule based on technique alone.

As a consequence, meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice. The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley.

All good points but also a lot of nuance, things to debate, and things to dispute.

I think whether WASP culture was truly powered by a sense of duty is a red herring. That is not the relevant argument. The relevant argument, I think, is whether there has been a decline in servant leadership, sense of duty and commitment to equality before the law and respect for the consent of the governed.

I think there has been such a decline. It is tremendously alarming to me that figures like Obama, Clinton, Reid all start poor and end rich. I love rags-to-riches stories. But these men did not go rags to riches by better providing customers what they want. They went rags to riches entirely through "public" service. That much money and that much power in politics is an explosive mix and not a healthy sign.

Perhaps polarization among the Mandarin Class has become so extreme because it has become so profitable. But under such a system, no one is watching out for the well-being of the 95% of the population who are not of the Mandarin Class. Servant leadership of the kind we had with Harry Truman has been muscled off the stage. Duty is a stranger at the table of the Mandarin Class.

I cannot finish without reference to two of the principal anthropological textbooks on WASP culture, both by Florence King; Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, and WASP, Where is Thy Sting?.