Astral Codex Ten

WASPs

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WASPs

Article

WASPs is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 01, 2022 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous”; “The WASPs weren’t prudish jocks just because of some accident of history”. It most often appears alongside Bobos, Brooks, David Brooks.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 01, 2022
  • Last seen: December 09, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment, Boston Brahmins. David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous. He doesn’t just mean Americans who happen to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant - there are tens of millions of those! He means old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.
The old-money WASPs were mostly descendants of people who made their fortunes in colonial times (or at worst the 1800s); they were a merchant aristocracy. As the descendants of merchants, they acted as standard-bearers for the bourgeois virtues: punctuality, hard work, self-sufficiency, rationality, pragmatism, conformity, ruthlessness, whatever made your factory out-earn its competitors.
The heart of the WASP aristocracy was the Ivy League. I don’t think there are good statistics, but until the early 1900s many (most?) Ivy League students were WASP aristocrats from a few well-known families. Around 1920 the Jews started doing really well on standardized tests, and the Ivies suspended standardized tests in favor of “holistic admissions” to keep them out and preserve the WASPishness of the elite. All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy.
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
-The general phenomenon of the power of the WASP aristocracy being displaced by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing--there are books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man* and Burnham's *Managerial Revolution* that were already observing the trend. The decades before the 50s saw WWII, the New Deal, and the general enrichment and empowerment of the various ethnic immigrant groups--all of these were vastly more convincing causal factors of the decline of the WASP aristocracy than one individual university president deciding to admit a moderately larger amount of non-WASPs. The dominant social orthodoxy that the bohemians were challenging was *this* orthodoxy, which had already displaced the WASP aristocracy by the time that they emerged--he postwar social order features as something of a glaring missing link for all of Brooks' analysis.
-The idea of a clean break between WASP culture and bohemianism, with the former being a separate, distinct group of people that overthrew the latter doesn't make a lot of sense. The WASPs were heavily associated with set of a few denominations--episcopalianism, congregationalism, and unitarianism--and today all of these are generally considered some of the most liberal, bohemian-ish religious groups in the country. It's probably more accurate to say that many young members of the WASP aristocracy simply adopted some bohemian values (at least superficially)
The WASPs weren't prudish jocks just because of some accident of history. They were a self-conscious elite who deliberately cultivated in themselves those traits which were conducive to leading the lower classes.