Michael Harriot reviews the musings of Hermann Goering Ross Douthat for The Root:
While life and familiarity have, for the most part, left me unfazed by the audacity of whiteness, there are times when I am still awestruck by its reckless cockiness. How it can feel nostalgic about slavery and wax poetic over wickedness. How it dances in the middle of the ballroom floor, twirling on top of recently-stomped shards of skulls, yelling to the astonished onlookers: “Look at my death dance! Why aren’t you clapping?”
Or, as my uncle told me last week while puffing on a Newport 100 (I can’t verify the Newport part, as it was over the phone but still, I’m positive it was menthol-flavored): “A white man will slit your throat and blame you for bloodying his knife.”…
… when I read the headline for Wednesday’s opinion article in the New York Times, I figured it was probably a bad pun or something. Sure, it was titled: “Why We Miss the WASPs,” but even after the Twitter backlash, I figured it was all a misunderstanding. In my mind, there was no way the Times was referring to White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
No misunderstanding here, Herr Goer… Mr. Douthat really was speaking of the master ra.. the artistoc… our natural leaders:
The article can be basically summarized as such: The death of George H. W. Bush has caused many people not named Ross Douthat, but who also just happen to be white and firmly entrenched in the upper echelon of “the American caste system”—which he refers to as “the Establishment”—to mourn the time when the country was ruled by white men or, WASPs.
Just so we’re all clear, you muddled, unwashed, likely bedbug infested masses, what we’re talking about, the D-Man leaves no doubt:
“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.” (emphasis added)
Diversity, secularism and… merit… are all problematic. They’re slurs even, or so it seems.
Leaders are not to be selected by the entire population the leaders serve, because of ability, a record of achievement, or demonstrated competence (how quaint, how democratic); no, Rulers Rule because they are Born To Rule.
Harriot cuts through the bullshite:
When Douthat describes “a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country,” he manages to make colonization and a quest for world domination sound almost aspirational.
Even when Douthat reaches a murky conclusion that the nostalgia is (maybe) misguided or misplaced, he fails to call it what it is:
White supremacy.
This ‘movement conservative’ (or is it ‘intellectual conservative’, hard to say, if he is what passes for an intellectual among conservatives) given column space by the paper of record is allowed to concoct the Hallmark Movie Channel version of the entrenched rule of white supremacy:
...while Douthat’s conveniently-summoned reminiscers notably ignored how the legitimate class of blue-bloods contributed to mass incarceration; a still-separate and not equal education system; wage disparity; a corporate oligarchy and everything that warranted even white people to declare that their country needed to be made “great again,” perhaps the most egregious willful ignorance embedded in his piece is one fact:
What the hell is there to miss?
Aside from a few IQ points, a hairline and a willingness to eschew dog whistles for simpler, more obvious rhetoric, how is Donald Trump any different from Ronald Reagan and George Bush? They are all white, Anglo Saxon and protestant.
Harriot helpfully uncovers and decodes the festering rot behind the lace curtains:
The only logical conclusion one can make is that, while white people are still in the driver’s seat, they don’t want anyone else in the car. It’s not just regurgitating that time you scored four touchdowns your senior year in high school. It’s more than recency bias or sentimentality.
It is a more erudite version of associating the Confederate flag with “southern culture.” It is wanting to “make America great again,” while being too genteel to wear a red baseball cap emblazoned with Times New Roman “MAGA.” The longing for WASP rule is latent bigotry masquerading as nostalgia.
In case there are still those uncertain on this point:
Call the GOP what they are: fascists. (Nov. 27, 2018)
‘Friendly Fascism’: The Core of American Conservatism. (Sept. 3, 2017)
White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy, whether we recognize it or not. (Aug. 20, 2017)
‘Racism without Racists’: Pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help. (Nov. 29, 2016)