Steve Sailer has been rereading Professor Samuel Eliot Morison’s three-volume Oxford History of the American People and thinking about America’s displaced Protestant Establishment:
Morison (1887-1976) was himself a leading member of the Protestant Establishment (liberal Boston Brahmin wing). His extraordinary career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian (for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, for which he had organized a research expedition by sailing ship from Spain to the New World) turned middle-aged fighting naval officer exemplifies how an old-fashioned Establishment that self-confidently viewed itself as holding its country in trust for its posterity felt it ought to behave.Of course, you aren’t supposed to think like that anymore. Hence, the top people now treat America like a short-term transaction rather than a long-term investment.
I was reminded of Morison when I read neoconservative David Brooks’s thoughtful February 18th New York Times column, The Power Elite, about the historic shift in clout from what he calls the “inbred” Protestant Establishment to what he somewhat deceptively designates as the new “meritocratic” elite:
“Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. … Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups.”(As I wrote at the time, what Brooks is really talking about is the rise of the Jews. For example, Jews make up a mere 2% of the population, but 35% of the 2009 Forbes 400 and half of the 2009 Atlantic 50 ranking of the most influential pundits. That’s a lot more “inbred” that the Protestant Establishment — perhaps 60% of Americans were white Protestants in 1910. Indeed, even as late as the 2008 Presidential election, white Protestants cast some 42% of the votes. They went overwhelmingly for McCain.)
And, according to Brooks, it’s not even clear that this more “smart and hard-working” new elite is actually providing us with better leadership:
“Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. … Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?”According to Brooks, one reason is that
“[T]ime horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking. Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria — daily stock prices or tracking polls.”Of course, the old blue bloods weren’t thinking just of handing down their companies, but also of handing down their country.
This now obsolescent multigenerational perspective inspired the central scene in the 2006 period movie about an uber-WASP CIA agent played by Matt Damon, The Good Shepherd, which was directed by Robert De Niro and scripted by Eric Roth. In a 1961 conversation between with a mafia don (played by De Niro’s old buddy Joe Pesci), Roth’s dialogue spelled out even more graphically than Brooks’ column the new elites’ combination of resentment toward and grudging respect for the past’s Protestant Establishment:
Joseph Palmi: “You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition … What do you guys have?”Edward Wilson: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”
Morison, the last Harvard professor to ride his horse to work, embodied that sense of long-term responsibility.
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To Morison, American liberalism was invented by his ancestors, the descendants of the Puritans. As he made clear in his Oxford History, rudimentary versions of most American progressive movements, including civil rights for blacks, feminism, and the rudiments of the ideology of environmentalism (Thoreau’s Walden), were up and running in the greater Boston area by the 1840s.In other words, American liberalism was invented by the oldest and most socially respectable hereditary elite in the country’s least ethnically diverse region, and imposed from the top down.